Purgatory and Prison: Punitive Spaces in Old and Middle

PURGATORY AND PRISON: PUNITIVE SPACES IN OLD AND MIDDLE

ENGLISH LITERATURE

A Dissertation

KATAYOUN TORABI

Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Chair of Committee, Britt Mize Co-Chair of Committee, Nancy Warren Committee Members, Laura Mandell Justin Lake Head of Department, Maura Ives

August 2018

Major Subject: English

ABSTRACT

This dissertation investigates the connection between incarceration and purgative penance as it developed in medieval Christian tradition, with a particular focus on the ways in which that connection is represented in Old and Middle English literature. Both earthly and otherworldly prisons, I argue, were closely linked through their purpose of reform and rehabilitation. Prisons were seen as transformative spaces and punitive measures were a means of correcting and reintegrating transgressive members of the community. Medieval communities felt compelled to assist prisoners with alms, clothing, food, and spiritual guidance. In order to facilitate this aid, prisons were centrally located, punitive sentences were short, and prison boundaries were permeable, allowing inmates easy access to the outside world. Likewise, the community felt an obligation to care for and rehabilitate the transgressive dead in Purgatory through intercessory prayer, alms, and masses until the deceased received absolution and were released into Heaven. Because prisons were seen as morally and spiritually transformative spaces, a similar rhetoric emerged around earthly and otherworldly carceral spaces. Purgatory and—to a certain extent—Limbo were imagined as G-d’s divine prison in Old and Middle English literature; and prisons were often described by medieval writers as a kind of earthly Purgatory. Over time, however, as both religious and secular penal practices evolved, the connection between prison and Purgatory which found such ubiquitous expression in religious as well as medieval literary texts became more attenuated until it was eventually lost.

DEDICATION

For Hooshang and Karen Torabi and Thomas Phelps

In Memory of Walter Grey Phelps and Irma Moodenbaugh Phelps

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Britt

Mize, for his time, guidance, and valuable feedback during the writing of this dissertation. His kindness, unwavering support, and encouragement since I entered the graduate program has helped make my time at Texas A&M productive and enjoyable. I also wish to thank Dr. Warren, my committee co-chair, Dr. Mandell, and Dr. Lake for for their advice, insightful comments, helpful suggestions, and support while I planned, wrote, and revised my dissertation.

I wish to acknowledge the Department of English for the generous Dissertation

Enhancement Fellowship that funded my research at the British Library for this project. I am also grateful to the faculty and staff at Texas A&M for making my time as a graduate student in the Deparment of English a wonderful experience.

Thank you to Thadeus Bowerman for reading through my rough drafts, giving me excellent feedback, encouraging my ideas, and always making room for me at the

UWC Writing Retreats. I am also grateful to Reverend Perry, whose excellent guidance helped reorient me whenever I was feeling lost.

Finally, I wish to thank my husband and my parents for their love, encouragement, and patience.

CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES

This work was supervised and supported by a dissertation committee consisting of Professor Britt Mize, advisor of the Department of English; Professor Nancy Warren, co-advisor of the Department of English; Professor Laura Mandell of the Department of

English; and Professor Justin Lake of the Department of International Studies.

The information collected for the maps in Chapter V was obtained, in part, from the British Library in June 2016. Archival research conducted at the British Library in

June 2016 was funded by the Texas A&M University English Department Dissertation

Enhancement Award. Graduate study at Texas A&M was supported by a Diversity

Fellowship 2012-2015 and a Summer Dissertation Fellowship 2016 from the

Department of English.

All other work conducted for the dissertation was completed by the student independently.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT ...... ii

DEDICATION ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iv

CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES ...... v

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... vi

LIST OF FIGURES ...... viii

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ...... 1

References ...... 12

CHAPTER II PURGATORY, LIMBO, AND THE RISE OF THE MEDIEVAL PRISON SYSTEM IN ENGLAND ...... 13

The Marginal Dead: Space, Time, and Agency in Purgatory and Limbo ...... 19 The Liminal Body: Excommunication, Exclusion, and (In)Visbility in the Middle Ages ...... 49 Excommunication: Forms and Practices ...... 51 Excommunication: Legal, Economic, and Social Exclusions ...... 56 Carceral Spaces (Un)Bound: Space, Place, and Mobility in Medieval English Prisons ...... 62 References ...... 85

CHAPTER III OTHERWORLDY PRISONERS: VISIONS, GHOSTS, REVENTANTS, AND LIMBO BABIES ...... 92

Ghosts and Purgatory in the pre-Conquest Period ...... 98 Ghosts and Purgatory in the post-Conquest Period ...... 117 Visions of the Otherworld in post-Conquest England ...... 147 References ...... 182

CHAPTER IV EARTHLY PRISONERS: WRITING BY AND ABOUT PRISONERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES ...... 187

From Red to White Martyrdom: Prison as a Spiritual Crucible ...... 191 Prisoners and Prison Spaces in the Middle Ages ...... 223 References ...... 252

CHAPTER V FROM RECOVERY TO EXILE: EARTHLY AND OTHERWORLDLY CARCERAL SPACES IN OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE ...... 256

Burial Practices in the Pre-Conquest Era ...... 259 Burial Practices and Imprisonment in the Post-Conquest Era ...... 276 References ...... 310

CHAPTER VI CONCLUSIONS ...... 316

References ...... 330

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LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1 Network Graph Generated for the Latin ‘Passio S. Margaretae’ (c. 900) Using Gephi ...... 205

Figure 2 Tiberius A. iii MS, c. 1050 (Gephi) ...... 207

Figure 3 Cambridge Corpus Christi College 303 MS, C. 1150 (Gephi) ...... 209

Figure 4 The Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte Margarete (c. 1225) (Gephi) ...... 211

Figure 5 John Lydgate’s Lyfe of Seynt Margarete, c. 1415-1426 (Gephi) ...... 212

Figure 6 John Mirk’s Sermon on St. Margarete MS, 1403 (Gephi) ...... 213

Figure 7 Major Romano-Briton Cemeteries in London, post 400 AD (Visualeyes) ..... 261

Figure 8 Jewish Burial in the Middle Ages from 1070 – 1290 (VisualEyes) ...... 264

Figure 9 Early Anglo-Saxon Burial in London 5th Century (VisualEyes) ...... 266

Figure 10 Major London Cemeteries in the Middle Ages (1386) (VisualEyes) ...... 294

Figure 11 Crossbones cemetery in a very isolated location across the River Thames (VisualEyes) ...... 295

Figure 12 London Prisons in the Middle Ages (VisualEyes) ...... 297

Figure 13 London Prisons after 1800 (VisualEyes) ...... 300

Figure 14 London’s first commercially-run cemeteries (VisualEyes) ...... 302

Figure 15 Network Graph Generated for Hamlet Using Gephi ...... 318

Figure 16 The Ghost’s Network in Hamlet Generated Using Gephi ...... 320

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Old and Middle English narratives are populated with otherworldly figures who disturb, challenge, and violate the conventions of time and space. Devils move freely between worlds in order to torment the holy; corpses are reanimated and carry on conversations with the living; and souls rise from Purgatory and Limbo to confess their sins, perform penance, and receive absolution. Although such violations of time and space may seem alien to more skeptical modern readers, medieval audiences accepted that devils, who were bound in Hell, could occasionally move freely in the world; and that a human soul, trapped in Purgatory or Limbo, could at the same time appear in a church in front of a human audience in order to petition a priest for absolution. This acceptance stemmed from an understanding that much like earthly carceral spaces, spiritual places of punishment, such as Purgatory and Limbo, were temporary and had permeable boundaries that enabled transgressors to maintain contact with their communities who helped bring them to repentance.

Prisons as spaces of purification and spiritual transformation emerged as an important concept in the early Christian tradition in response to Roman persecution.1

Whereas prison spaces in saints’ narratives of Late Antiquity were sites of encounter,

1 Guy Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 83- 84. 1

violent conflict, and spiritual transformation for holy men and women,2 early Christian theologians, such as Tertullian, refashioned that concept, associating prisons with

Christian asceticism, penitence, and reflection. This gave rise to a new strand of

“carceral language in monastic literature.”3 In early Christian literature, therefore, prisons became places of spiritual transformation through penitence and purgation, rather than through violent conflict. As the concept of Purgatory developed and became more defined in the thirteenth century, it served as a “vehicle for the transmission of carceral language from the monastic to the secular world.”4 The concept of Purgatory as a spiritual prison was shaped by the ecclesiastical prison system; and the secular prison system, that developed later, attempted to fashion itself as an earthly Purgatory.5 The strong association between prison and purgation reinforced the concept of Purgatory as a divine prison and played an important role in the economy of salvation.6 An inmate’s survival and eventual release from this divine prison depended upon external assistance, in the form of prayers, donations, and masses for the dead. Medieval prisons were marginal spaces with permeable boundaries, where inmates were allowed to leave their cells occasionally and receive visitors regularly. Permeable boundaries between prison spaces and the outside world informed representations of Purgatory, Limbo, and even

Hell in medieval literature.

2 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 82. 3 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 85. 4 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 88. 5 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 90. 6 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 88. 2

This dissertation investigates the connection between purgation and incarceration as it developed in the early Christian tradition and looks at how that connection is expressed in certain works of Old and Middle English literature. Specifically, I examine how Purgatory, Limbo, and Hell are represented in Old and Middle English literature, what those penal spaces share in common with earthly carceral spaces, and the ways in which marginal figures in medieval narratives, such as dead pagans, excommunicants, restless ghosts, and even devils engage with those punitive spaces. By understanding the permeable nature of medieval prisons and the strong connection between the medieval prison and Purgatory—as those concepts evolved with one another—then we may be able to perform new readings of texts that engage pre- and post-mortem carceral spaces.

Currently, the majority of scholarship surrounding medieval prison studies has been produced by historians, rather than literary critics. Responding to Michel

Foucault’s groundbreaking Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), new prison studies have emerged in the twenty-first century—mainly in Asia, Africa, the

Mediterranean, and Latin America—that have complicated the paradigm set forth by

Foucault.7 Most recently, Guy Geltner challenged Foucault’s assertion that prisons as punitive organizations emerged in the eighteenth century, arguing instead that prisons began to function as punitive institutions on a regular basis as early as the thirteenth century.8 Geltner, who mainly focuses on the history of medieval prisons in Italy, builds

7 Mary Gibson, “Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison,” The American Historical Review 116 (2011): 1040. 8 Guy Geltner, “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory,” History Compass 10 (2006): 274. 3

on the seminal scholarship of Ralph Pugh and Jean Dunbabin in the field of prison studies.9 Pugh found evidence of punitive incarceration in English law codes as early as c. 890, under the rule of King Alfred. The earliest code dealing with punitive imprisonment states that if a man fails to perform according to a pledge, he will be imprisoned for no fewer than forty days for the offence.10 Pugh cites other codes that prove the existence of early forms of punitive imprisonment in Anglo-Saxon England, but argues that custodial imprisonment was far more common and that punitive measures often took the form of “death, outlawry, mutilation, or cash compensation.”11

Although Pugh and Geltner provide a wealth of information about medieval prisons, that information comes from a historical, rather than a literary perspective.

This also seems to be true about the topic of Purgatory. Whereas there is a great deal of historical scholarship surrounding the Doctrine of Purgatory—most notably The

Birth of Purgatory, written by Jacques Le Goff in 1984—few literary critics focus specifically on Purgatory or purgatorial apparitions in the Middle Ages. Existing literary scholarship tends to engage the topic of post-mortem spaces more generally by focusing on the “invasion of ghosts” narratives, such as the Trajan / St. Gregory tale, or otherworld visions that feature Heaven and Hell, rather than Purgatory and Limbo. This project focuses on how post-mortem punitive spaces are defined in medieval literature

9 Ralph Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Jean Dunbabin, Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Richard Ireland, “Theory and practice with the medieval prison,” American Journal of Legal History, 31 (1987): 56–67. 10 Ralph Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 1-2. 11 Ralph Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 2-3. 4

and what those spaces share in common with earthly carceral spaces. My intervention in the field makes a connection between medieval prisons and post-mortem punitive spaces as they are represented in Old and Middle English literature by arguing that earthly prisons and the purgatorial afterlife were closely linked through their purpose of correction and rehabilitation. Punitive measures were a means of reform and prison inmates were allowed to rejoin their communities after relatively short sentences.

Likewise, the community cared for and worked to “rehabilitate” their marginal dead through intercessory prayer, donations to the church, and chantry masses until the deceased received absolution and were allowed to ascend to Heaven. Because incarceration was meant to enable reconciliation and reunion, both prison and Purgatory played a pivotal role in shaping medieval communities. Prison inmates and the restless dead resided within permeable confines that occupied the center of each medieval community’s social, economic, and spiritual landscape, and reminded the sacred community of its obligation to assist those in need.

The relationship between prisoners and their communities found representation in the literature of the period and is explored in this dissertation. The first body chapter

(chapter two) contextualizes the arguments I make later in the dissertation by providing a history of the concepts of Purgatory and Limbo in the Latin Catholic Church and by detailing the rise of the medieval secular prison system in the pre- and post-Conquest era. The chapter is divided into three sections and begins with a discussion of the historical, scriptural, and theological justifications for both Purgatory and Limbo in the

Middle Ages. Although these two spaces were often confused with one another in the

literature of the period, they were shaped by different theological questions concerning the liminal dead and were, therefore, entirely distinct in both purpose and function.

Purgatory was a temporary space that emphasized contrition, penance, and rehabilitation; while Limbo was a permanent place that underscored the importance of the sacrament of baptism. This section discusses how the works of Tertullian, Origen,

Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great, and Thomas Aquinas helped shape Christian ideas about Purgatory and Limbo and how both places reinforced the idea that the

Church was the primary mediating authority in the process of salvation during the

Middle Ages. The second section traces the development of the process of excommunication in the Latin Church from its earliest beginnings as a simple curse to what it became in the High Middle Ages—a complex system of rules and laws that had far-reaching social, economic, political, and legal consequences for excommunicants and their families. This section discusses the different forms of excommunication and the social and legal consequences of religious exclusion. The third section of the chapter examines the rise of the prison system in medieval England, beginning with the earliest forms of punitive imprisonment in Anglo-Saxon England. The section continues with a discussion of how the secular prison system grew and became more regulated after new debt laws were implemented in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This resulted in both the specialization of prisons, so that different institutions served different criminal populations, and in the stratification of space within individual prisons according to gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status.

The second body chapter (chapter three) explores stories about the dead in

Purgatory and Limbo that fall into two broad categories. The first involves the dead travelling out of their spaces of otherworldly punishment in order to visit the living. The second category includes visions of the otherworld, where a person enters a dream- or death-like state in order to visit the dead in their spaces of reward or punishment. Before

Purgatory became official doctrine in 1215, it was imagined as a vague state between death and Judgment for souls who were neither fit for Heaven nor Hell. Although both

Augustine of Hippo and Gregory I wrote about Purgatory as a space for the purification of sins where the dead benefitted from intercessory prayers and alms, Augustine was vague about how those efforts actually helped the dead. He also dismissed the existence of purgatorial apparitions, stating that the souls of the dead did not interact with the living, but remained in their spaces of punishment or reward until Doomsday. Gregory I, on the other hand, not only argued that the souls of the dead visited the living regularly, but that it was the responsibility of the living to help ease their suffering in Purgatory with prayers, masses, and alms. Under Gregory I’s considerable influence, stories about the dead in Purgatory flourished. This chapter explores how Purgatory became an important part of the Christian belief system in the Middle Ages and discusses the ways in which stories about Purgatory and purgatorial apparitions reflected ideas the Church wished to promote about the afterlife. The chapter is divided into three sections, beginning with ghost stories and dream visions written in Anglo-Saxon England, including Soul and Body I and II and an early ghost story in Bede’s Historia

Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. This section also includes two early dream visions

adapted first by Bede and then by Ælfric of Eynsham, titled, Vision of Furseus and The

Vision of Drihthelm. These narratives reflect an early understanding of Purgatory as a vaguely-defined liminal space between Heaven and Hell. This conception of Purgatory changed over time and became more detailed and prison-like during the High and Late

Middle Ages. The second and third sections focus on ghost stories and otherworld visions that were written in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. The texts include two ghost stories, titled, The Life of St. Erkenwald (ca.1386) and John Lydgate’s St.

Austin at Compton (ca.1420-1440), and two otherworld visions, titled, The Vision of

Tundale (c. 1149) and A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century

Woman Visionary (1422). These narratives are far more detailed in their description of

Purgatory than earlier narratives and begin to resemble the emerging system of punitive incarceration both in structure and function. The emphasis in both earthly and otherworldly carceral spaces is on correction and rehabilitation so that the inmates may be released from their spaces of punishment and integrate with their communities.

The third body chapter (chapter four) examines writing by and about prisoners in the Middle Ages. Concepts surrounding prison and Purgatory developed together through the Middle Ages and became deeply entwined, giving rise to a new economy that encouraged the living—who believed themselves bound for Purgatory—to help earthly and otherworldly prisoners in order to mitigate their own future suffering in the afterlife. The Church promised those who helped care for the sick, the poor, and those in earthly and otherworldly prisons that their own time in Purgatory would be shortened by their charitable deeds. The concept of Purgatory developed in tandem with the emerging

secular system of incarceration, and both were modeled on the earlier monastic system of detention and confinement. In literature, Purgatory was often referred to as G-d’s prison and secular prisons were seen as an earthly Purgatory. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section discusses how the lives of two popular incarcerated saints—Juliana of Nicomedia and Margaret of Antioch— represent both public and private forms of penance and illuminate the shift toward ascetic confinement, introspection, and self-denial as the preferred method of achieving spiritual perfection.12

The later versions of St. Margaret’s vita especially emphasize prayer, fasting, and contemplation in solitary prisons spaces as an effective means of purgation. The texts in this first section include Juliana of Nicomedia’s life in the Exeter Book (c. 970-990 AD);

The Latin ‘Passio S. Margaretae,’ (c.900); the Old English life of St. Margaret in the

Cotton Tiberius A. iii manuscript, (c. 1050); the Old English life of St. Margaret in the

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303 manuscript, (c. 1150); The Liflade ant te

Passium of Seinte Margarete (c. 1225) in the Katherine Group, MS Bodley 34; John

Mirk’s fifteenth-century Sermon on St. Margarete in the Festial, (c. 1403); and John

Lydgate’s Lyfe of Seynt Margarete, (c. 1415-1426). The second section examines the treatment of prisoners as sympathetic figures worthy of care and attention in John Mirk’s

Festial (c. 1403) and Instructions for Parish Priests (c. 1403); John the Blind Audelay’s

The Counsel of Conscience (c. 1426); and in selected late medieval Doomsday plays.

The third section discusses the late medieval genre of prison writing, focusing on writing

12 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 82, 89. 9

by prisoners who underwent punitive incarceration, including George Ashby’s the

Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463 and the anonymous Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune (c. 1461).

The fourth body chapter (chapter five) examines the physical spaces that prisoners—earthly and otherworldly—occupied in the medieval community. The chapter opens with a brief overview of non-Christian burial practices in the pre- and post-

Conquest period in England. Whereas certain cultures prohibited close burial due to ritual purity laws or fear of the dead, intramural burials were an integral part of the

Christian belief system. At the heart of this practice was the idea that the dead remained connected to their bodies and to their communities for a few months to a few years after death and required assistance from the living in the form of alms and intercessory prayer in order to move on from their liminal state in Purgatory. As such, their placement in the center of living communities was absolutely essential as it reminded the living of their duty to help the recently deceased. The Church encouraged such aid by promising those who relieved the suffering of the dead and aided the poor, the sick, and those languishing in earthly prisons that their own time in Purgatory would be shortened. For this reason, prisons, almshouses, and in certain cases, hospitals were placed at or near the town or village center. This proximity not only served as a visual reminder to the community to perform good works, but facilitated contact between the givers and receivers of aid. The second section of this chapter examines Anglo-Saxon homilies, wills, and law codes which reflect an increasing concern with sacred burial. After the Conversion, where someone was buried became more important than what they were buried with. People

went to great lengths to make sure that their bodies were interred in hallowed ground, in a supine position, and oriented in a west-east direction to ensure that the body would rise facing Paradise when it was resurrected. The third section of this chapter discusses burial practices in the post-Conquest time period and its relationship with an emerging secular prison system focused on punitive incarceration. Wills and homilies of the period not only reflect a continuing concern with proper burial for the dead, but stress the importance of “paying it forward” by helping those in need—both living and dead—in order to shorten or avoid a post-mortem sentence altogether. As the Middle Ages came to a close and as the whole religious, economic, and social system fueled by Purgatory was dismantled by the Reformed Church in England, the connection between earthly and otherworldly prisons was lost and the spaces that both earthly prisoners and purgatorial apparitions inhabited in the world moved from center to margin. The final section of the chapter ends with a concluding visual argument in the form of a time-lapse infographic that maps the locations of gaols, prisons, churches, and graveyards in medieval communities. The infographic helps demonstrate that in the early Middle Ages prison inmates and the restless dead occupied the center of each medieval community. As the

Middle Ages came to a close, prisons and graveyards, which were central to the geography of each community, began to shift to the margins; and as time progressed, the strong association between prison and Purgatory was eventually lost.

References

Ferster, Bill. “VisualEyes”Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technological

Initiatives The University of Virginia, 2016. http://www.viseyes.org/viseyes.htm.

Geltner, Guy. “Coping in Medieval Prisons,” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 151-

172.

---. “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory.” History

Compass 10 (2006): 261-274.

---. “Social Deviancy: A Medieval Approach.” In Why the Middle Ages Matter:

Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, edited by Celia Chazelle, Simon

Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, Amy G. Remensnyder, 29-40. New York: Routledge,

2012.

---. “’The Best Place in the World’: Imagining Urban Prisons in Late Medieval Italy.” In

Cities, Texts, and Social Networks, 400-1500, edited by Caroline Goodson, Anne

E. Lester, and Carol Symes, 263-278. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010.

---. The Medieval Prison: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Gibson, Mary. “Global Perspectives on the Birth of the Prison.” The American

Historical Review 116 (2011): pp. 1040-1063.

Pugh, R.B. Imprisonment in Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1968.

CHAPTER II

PURGATORY, LIMBO, AND THE RISE OF THE MEDIEVAL PRISON SYSTEM IN

ENGLAND

Prison and Purgatory were closely connected through their purpose of correction and rehabilitation, a process effected by the spiritual and financial assistance of the medieval Christian community. Many believed that souls of the recently deceased manifested to the living near their graves or in churches in order to request that donations be paid on their behalf to the Church for intercessory prayers and masses that would shorten their stay in Purgatory. It was also believed that helping those souls not only enabled the living to memorialize loved ones who had passed on, but would mitigate their own suffering in the afterlife. Likewise, inmates in earthly prisons enjoyed a reciprocal relationship with their communities. They were allowed out of their spaces of confinement at appointed times in order to receive alms for their upkeep and maintenance in jail. The community was obligated to keep an eye on prisoners, offer them spiritual assistance in the form of prayers, and to give them financial assistance— without which many would perish from starvation. Both prisons and graveyards were located at the center of each town or village in the pre-Reformation period, reminding the community of its obligation to help its marginal figures. The Church assured all

Christians who aided pre- and post-mortem prisoners that their own sentences in

Purgatory would be shortened by their charitable deeds.

This mutually beneficial relationship, which led both the givers and receivers of aid to earlier salvation, also worked to the advantage of the Church and state. The latter benefitted by shifting the cost and care of prisoners onto the prisoners themselves and to their communities; and the former benefitted by encouraging congregants to make sizable donations to churches and monasteries for intercessory prayers and masses for the dead. It would be reductive, however, to conclude that laziness and greed on the part of religious and secular authorities were at the root of the process of punishment and reform of pre- and post-mortem prisoners in the Middle Ages. Contrary to what many critics of Purgatory have argued,1 the idea of a temporary place of redemptive punishment located between Heaven and Hell was not the invention of a greedy Popish

Church determined to profit from the grief and fear of its ignorant followers. That the

Catholic Church greatly profited from the selling of indulgences in the High and Late

Middle Ages is irrefutable; however, the concept of Purgatory itself did not originate in the Latin Christian Church, nor was it established to serve an economic need. Rather, it predates the Judeo-Christian belief system by several thousand years, and has been a firmly established feature in many older eastern belief systems, as well as an important part of Islam since the religion’s inception.2 The belief in Purgatory has served different needs in different religious contexts. For Christians in the Middle Ages, it was a source of comfort to those who needed the afterlife not only to be more clearly defined, but more forgiving. It gave hope to those who could not meet the impossibly high standards

1 See footnotes 150, 160, 170 2 See footnotes 155, 165, 175 14

set by the Church for salvation—especially members of the rising middle class who spent a great deal of time and effort in the pursuit of material gain.3 And once the

Church distinguished between venial sins that do not result in immediate damnation and mortal sins that do, Purgatory became a place for those who committed lesser sins. The profiteering enterprises of the Church and state emerged long after the belief in a post- mortem third place had firmly taken root in the medieval Christian imaginaire. And it was not until the thirteenth century that Purgatory was codified and achieved official status in the Church, becoming deeply entangled with the economy of salvation.

This process began with Pope Innocent III’s decretal a nobis in 1199, which stated that a person dying under excommunication could be absolved after death, provided the excommunicant showed sufficient repentance and clear signs of contrition before death and on the condition that his or her heirs were willing to satisfy all outstanding debts to the Church on behalf of the deceased.4 The decretal made clear that excommunicants who died un-absolved would go to Purgatory instead of Hell and that they, as with all Purgatory inmates, could be released from this prison through prayer, donations, and masses offered on their behalf by the living.5 The Fourth Lateran Council further elaborated the Church’s position on Purgatory by stating that it is not just a “state of mind” or a process, but a concrete place in the afterlife from which inmates could be

3 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 4 Christian Jaser, “Ritual Excommunication: ‘An Ars Oblivionalis’?” in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, eds. Brenner, Elma, Cohen, Meredith, and Franklin-Brown, Mary (Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2013), 129. 5 Henry Charles Lea, LL.D., A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church (New York: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1968), 332. 15

released with spiritual and (especially in the cases of debt) financial assistance from the living.6

The idea of Purgatory, therefore, served several needs in the medieval community: it provided a more defined sense of an afterlife that was more forgiving than the early

Christian model; it presented grief-stricken families with a means of memorializing deceased loved ones; and it encouraged people to help those who were ill, impoverished, or incarcerated by promising those who performed charitable acts shorter terms of punishment in Purgatory. Medieval Christians sincerely believed that they had an obligation to help those who were less fortunate, and the Church encouraged them to believe that by doing so, they were helping to secure an earlier release from Purgatory for themselves. The subsequent commodification of this exchange benefitted religious and secular authorities and became the focus for attacks by Protestant Reformers, which will be discussed in further detail in the final chapter.

The English Reformation discouraged belief in Purgatory, so that the ways in which Christian communities cared for and memorialized their dead changed significantly. The Reformed Church removed intercessory prayer and masses for the dead from Sunday services, and prohibited certain memorial practices at gravesites that honored the deceased in ways that were distinctly Catholic. How and where the living buried the dead also changed after the Reformation—though this final change was more gradual and occurred over two centuries. Because Catholics believed that the dead

6 Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 305-314. 16

appeared to and petitioned the living near their graves or close to churches, baptized

Christians who died in a state of grace were buried in consecrated ground, close to or inside of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries. Because the dead were located at the center of each community, their presence reminded the living of their obligation to the deceased in Purgatory. Reformers pushed for extramural internment because they associated this practice with Catholic superstition and were concerned that too much religious meaning was ascribed to burial places.7 This was met with much resistance by religious and lay people alike. By the nineteenth century, however, the process of relocating the dead from center to periphery was complete.

After the Reformation and through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prisons were also moved to the outskirts from their central and highly visible location in each medieval community.8 The central location of prisons, the relatively short prison terms, and the allowances granted to prisoners to receive guests, leave prison to beg for alms, and to attend mass all facilitated the moral and spiritual rehabilitation of prisoners and expedited their eventual release and integration back into their communities. In this way, earthly prisoners were very much like their counterparts in Purgatory—of marginal status, but still very much an important part of the community.

As the Middle Ages came to a close and secular prisons proliferated, the focus shifted away from a model of purgation and rehabilitation to one of punishment,

7 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 296-297. 8 Guy Geltner, “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory,” History Compass 10 (2006): 263. 17

permanent confinement, exile, and invisibility.9 The “birth of purgatory” extended the system of purgative confinement and absolution to the post-mortem realm. This system also depended on the support of the living and was imagined by medieval writers as the hagiographical ghost story or the Purgatory vision narrative, which served to remind the living of their responsibilities as members of the body of Christ to those who resided in the margins and were in need of mercy and reincorporation. This connection between

Purgatory and prison was permanently lost once the community stopped seeing incarceration as a means of correction, reform, and reincorporation. The changes that occurred after the Reformation will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters.

This chapter provides a solid historical context for arguments I make in later chapters and is divided into three sections. The first section provides a genealogy of the concepts of Purgatory and Limbo, how they functioned in the early and late Middle

Ages, and their connection to the economy of salvation. The section begins with Jacques

Le Goff’s discussion of the “birth” of Purgatory and then examines the theological basis for the adoption of both Purgatory and Limbo in the Middle Ages by examining how

Tertullian, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Thomas

Aquinas compensate for ambiguous passages in the Old and New Testament regarding these two intermediary spaces. The second section discusses the process of excommunication in the Latin Church. Using various secondary sources, this section details the different forms and practices of excommunication in the Middle ages and

9 Guy Geltner, “Coping in Medieval Prisons,” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 160. 18

discusses the legal, economic, and social exclusions to which excommunicants were subjected until they were absolved by the Church. The third section examines the rise of the prison system in England in the Middle Ages and provides a brief overview of incarceration in pre-and post-Conquest England. The final section includes information about laws governing punitive imprisonment in England as well as the early prisons and prison populations in the pre- and post-Conquest era.

The Marginal Dead: Space, Time, and Agency in Purgatory and Limbo

The most comprehensive modern work on the subject of Purgatory was published in 1984 by Jacques Le Goff, titled, The Birth of Purgatory. Le Goff’s seminal work not only provides a history of the concept from its origins in the pre-Christian era, but makes a claim that the idea of Purgatory flourished in the High Middle Ages in response to the socio-economic and spiritual needs of the rising middle class.10 Le Goff asserts that when the word purgatory began to function as a noun in the thirteenth century, the once- vague notion of a third post-mortem space began to take shape as a well-defined idea that disrupted spiritual binaries, such as good and evil and Heaven and Hell.11 Le Goff argues that around the twelfth century, the rising middle class destabilized socio- economic binaries in the medieval feudal system. The once-stable three-estate system in the European Middle Ages, which consisted of the empowered nobles, clergy, and the disempowered peasantry, began to shift in the twelfth century as cities grew and the economy changed. The idea of a post-mortem third-place that was not fixed and static,

10 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory. 11 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 154-176. 19

but dynamic and allowed mobility, agency, and choice would have appealed to a rising class of merchants, craftsmen, and urban workers who were acquiring greater wealth and power through hard work and industry. Le Goff is not claiming that the model of

Purgatory was created by the emerging middle class, but that Purgatory was “…linked to the evolving structures of feudal society. Its principle was this: to introduce an intermediary category between two extremes. The new category was not made secondary or subordinate to the original two. Rather, the center was raised up…Purgatory was one of a group of phenomena associated with the transformation of feudal Christendom, of which one key expression was the creation of ternary logical models through the introduction of an intermediary category. The model, I am quite sure, was firmly rooted in socioeconomic structures.”12 Essentially, Purgatory evened the spiritual playing field for the members of the emerging middle class, for whom the achievement of salvation in life was made more difficult because of their involvement in commerce and material gain. Purgatory extended the process of salvation beyond the grave, allowing the living to focus on making money and acquiring power.

Craig Koslofsky aptly summarizes Le Goff’s assertions about the various

Christian theological concepts that gave rise to more concrete notions of Purgatory in the

Middle Ages: “Purgatory developed at the intersection of three separate concepts in the

Christian tradition: first, prayer (and other intercession) for the dead; second, postmortem purification as part of the process of salvation; and third, the localization of

12 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 225-227. 20

this postmortem purification in a unique eschatological time and place.” 13 Koslofsky also adds that “these three strands probably did not intersect as precisely as Le Goff argues: instead they combined and separated as the doctrine and practice of Purgatory evolved into place during the twelfth century.”14

It should also be noted here that there are other slight inaccuracies in the timeline that Le Goff provides for the unfolding of certain events and ideas that led to the “birth” of the concept of Purgatory. For instance, he asserts that although the idea of Purgatory flourished in the Middle Ages, the concept itself originated in Greek theology, which was indebted to various ancient Greek philosophies and religions. Le Goff claims that the two “inventors” of Purgatory, Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215) and Origen (c.

184 – c. 254), drew from Platonism, Orphism, Pythagoreanism, as well as other

Hellenistic philosophies and religious texts when they created the new concept of a post- mortem third place.15 Although Le Goff acknowledges that Purgatory makes use of certain motifs that existed in ancient Eastern belief systems that pre-date or are contemporary with the Greek and Roman civilizations, he promptly dismisses them as vague “ancient imaginings.” 16 More specifically, he argues that any resemblance between concepts in older Eastern religions and ideas in the Christian tradition are a coincidence. For example, he states that “certain features of Zoroastrian eschatology are reminiscent of Christian conceptions that led to Purgatory, even if there was most likely

13 Craig, Koslofsky, “Separating the Living from the Dead: Wessel Gansfort and the Death of Purgatory,” Essays in Medieval Studies 10 (2011): 130. 14 Koslofsky, “Separating the Living from the Dead: Wessel Gansfort and the Death of Purgatory,” 130. 15 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 52-56. 16 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 17-51. 21

no direct influence.”17 Le Goff’s assertion that the features of Zoroastrian eschatology are reminiscent of certain apocalyptic Christian conceptions fails to take into account an accurate chronology that places the Zoroastrian belief system several millennia before

Christianity.18 It also fails to acknowledge what many scholars have claimed about influences of Eastern ideas on Christian ideology—particularly assertions that

Zoroastrianism informed certain Judeo-Christian eschatological concepts (which include the idea of Purgatory). For example, Miguel Asin, who stated that “the idea of purgatory was highly developed in Zoroastrianism and Islam before it was a major concept in

Christianity,” was one of the first scholars to note the transmission of the Zoroastrian concept of Purgatory to later Judeo-Christian and Moslem belief systems.19

17 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 19. 18 Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion of the Persian Empire until Arabic Umayyad Caliphate overthrew the Sassanid Empire and replaced the older belief system with Islam in the seventh century. Zoroastrianism is a dualistic belief system that posits equal power shared between a benevolent god of light and an evil god of darkness who fight until the world comes to an end and all souls are judged and sorted into Heaven or Hell. The religion’s main text is the Zend Avesta, which was composed in Avestan around 6,500 BC to 6,000 BC. See Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism (Leiden: Brill, 1975); and Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1979); Khodavandi, Mehraban Khodavandi, Zoroaster and His Religion (Tehran: Fravahar, 2005); and Peter Clark, Zoroastrianism: An Introduction to an Ancient Faith (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998). 19 Miguel Asin, Islamic Eschatology and the Divine Comedy, trans. Harold Sunderland (New York: Routledge, 1968), 112. Also see George William Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1918); Peter Clark, Zoroastrianism: An Introduction to an Ancient Faith (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998); and R. C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (London: Wei- denfeld and Nicolson, 1961) for further discussion about Zoroastrian influence on Judeo-Christian conceptions of Purgatory and the Apocalypse. Their discussions also include information about how in Zoroastrian Purgatory, punishments are inflicted that match the sins committed by its inmates in kind and degree. For further information about points of transmission of Zoroastrian ideas to sections of the Bible, see Stephen L. Harris. Understanding the Bible (Boston: MA: McGraw-Hill, 2003). Harris explains in detail how large sections of the texts that formed the Torah were revised from its original form when the Hebrew community came into contact with Zoroastrianism in the period that followed their exile to Babylon in 587 BC. Major sections were composed and reworked to incorporate Zoroastrian eschatological ideas (which includes the concept of Purgatory); Note: Some of the above information about Zoroastrianism apocalypticism can be found in the second chapter of my MA thesis, titled 22

Zoroastrianism was the first ancient belief system to represent time as linear, periodized, and non-repeating. It rejected the idea of a periodic renewal of the cosmos and presents a progressive, non-deteriorating world cycle. This belief system replaced cyclical time, where the earth is periodically destroyed and renewed through a cosmogonic ritual act, with linear time, where there is a definite beginning, middle, and an apocalyptic end.20 In a linear system, Purgatory replaces reincarnation as a means of spiritual progress and purification.21 Each individual follows a personal and universal timeline, where he or she is judged upon death and again at the end of time. Those whose sins do not qualify them for either Heaven or Hell must spend time in Purgatory in order to purify their souls and become worthy of salvation.

Although the eschatological model is firmly established in the Judeo-Christian belief system, neither the Torah nor the Bible ever explicitly mentions Purgatory. There are, however, several passages in the Old and New Testament that reference, though ambiguously, purification by fire before final judgment, as well as a post-mortem space that is neither Heaven nor Hell.22 Le Goff states that 2 Maccabees, an apocryphal text in the Old Testament, was referenced by early Christian theologians affirming the efficacy

Zoroastrian Dualism in Paradise Lost (2011). See Katayoun Torabi, “Zoroastrianism in Paradise Lost,” (master’s thesis, California State University, Northridge, 2011), 1-33. 20 Holy Gathas, trans. D.J. Irani (Bombay: India: Iran League, 1927), 6-10. 21 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 306. 22 The following are passages from the Old and New Testament suggest a post-mortem third-place and/or purification after death: “1 Corinthians 3:10-15, 15:29-52; Matthew 5:25-5:26, 12:31-12:32, 12:36-37; 1 Peter 1:7, 3:18-20, 4:6; 2 Peter 2:9; Hebrews 9:27-28, 12:29; Zechariah 9:11; Revelation 20:12-14; 1 John 5:16-17; Ecclesiastes 9:10; Jude 1:6; Acts 2:27; Ephesians 4:8-10; Psalm 6:5; Psalm 16:10; Luke 12.48; 2 Tim. 1.16-18. The Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, ed., John R. Kohlenberger III (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 1997), http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Excommunication/type/kjv. 23

of prayer for the dead and “providing the existence of a belief in Purgatory: ‘For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should have risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead. And also in that he perceived that there was great favour laid up for those that died godly, it was a holy and good thought. Whereupon he made a reconciliation for the dead that they might be delivered from sin.’”23 Robert Osei-Bonsu argues that the Church cites the following New Testament passages to support the doctrine of Purgatory: Matthew 5.25-26; 12.31-32; Luke 12.48; 1 Corinthians 3.10-15;

15.29; 2 Timothy 1.16-18; and 1 Pet. 3.18-20, and 2 Maccabees However, the passages are so ambiguous that the Church’s strongest evidence lies in the apocryphal 2

Maccabees passage.24 Osei-Bonsu claims that in the absence of scriptural evidence for

Purgatory, most of the information about this post-mortem space comes to us from the works of early Church theologians.25

Tertullian, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and

Thomas Aquinas compensate for ambiguous passages in the Old and New Testament regarding Purgatory. Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 240), a Latin Christian theologian from

Carthage urges a widow to in “De Monogamia” to make oblations for the soul of her dead husband and to pray that his soul finds rest in the resurrection to come. Although he does not explicitly refer to Purgatory, he is the first to have written about the necessity of

23 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 43. 24 Robert Osei-Bonsu, “Purgatory: A Study of the Historical Development and Its Compatibility with the Biblical Teaching on the Afterlife,” Philosophy Study 4 (2012): 289. 25 Osei-Bonsu, “Purgatory: A Study of the Historical Development and Its Compatibility with the Biblical Teaching on the Afterlife,” 295-296. 24

praying and for and making oblations on behalf of the souls of the dead in order to ease their suffering.26

Origen and Clement of Alexandria, whom Le Goff refers to as the “Fathers of

Purgatory” were the first to distinguish between punishment and purification in the afterlife. Also, Clement is the first to have written about different kinds of punishment in the afterlife necessitated by different kinds of sin. The worst sinners, for example, suffer punitive tortures (kolastikos) and are subjected to a consuming fire that eternally devours the soul. Those who commit minor sins, on the other hand, only suffer corrective or instructive punishment (didaskalikos) and are subjected to a fire that burns away impurities, but does not consume.27 Le Goff states that Origen is more detailed in his description of the fires of purification and goes a step further than Clement in arguing that all souls are impure at the time of death and need to undergo purification by fire. He is eventually deemed a heretic by the Church for his belief in universal salvation (which will be discussed in more detail in connection with Limbo).28 It appears that the ways in which Clement and Origin distinguish between different kinds of sin forms the basis of the Catholic Church’s position on tiered transgressions as well as the eventual categorization of sins into two major groups: mortal (which, if unforgiven before death, result in a soul’s eternal damnation) and venial (which are minor sins that can prevent an unshriven soul from ascending to Heaven until it undergoes purification). The idea that

26 Osei-Bonsu, “Purgatory: A Study of the Historical Development and Its Compatibility with the Biblical Teaching on the Afterlife,” 290. 27 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 52-54. 28 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 54-55. 25

different sins merit different kinds of punishment in the afterlife also provides an elegant solution to the question that had troubled so many theologians before: what happens to a person who has died before he or she has had the opportunity to confess and perform penance for minor sins?

Augustine of Hippo (354 –430), whom Le Goff calls the “True Father of

Purgatory,” continued to develop and define a system of rewards and punishments that operated within a linear-historical structure of tiered sins. He is considered one of the most influential writer on the subject, as he most clearly articulates the main arguments that formed the basis of the doctrine of Purgatory.29 There are several passages in

Augustine’s Enchiridion, The City of God, and in his sermons that affirm the existence of Purgatory. In the Enchiridion, he states that in the time that intervenes between death and resurrection, the soul inhabits a space where it experiences suffering or joy “in proportion to the merit it has earned by the life which it led on earth.”30 Also, the amount of time a soul spends in the purifying fire and the intensity of the punishment also depends on the sins committed.31 Augustine states that some souls suffer punishment in life only, and some after death; post-mortem suffering may not be eternal and may end by Judgment Day.32 Alms, masses, and prayers, offered on behalf of the living and by the Church on behalf of the dead help ease posthumous suffering. Augustine states:

29 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 61-84. 30 Augustine of Hippo, Augustine Catechism: Enchiridion on Faith Hope and Charity, trans. Bruce Harbert (New York: New City Press, 2008), 29:109. 31 Augustine of Hippo, Augustine Catechism: Enchiridion on Faith Hope and Charity, 18:69. 32 Augustine of Hippo, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Hendrickson Publishing, 2009), 21:13. 26

defunctorum animas pietate suorum vivientium relevari, quum proillis sacrificium mediatoris offertur, vel elemosynae in ecclesia siant. Sed eis haec prosunt, qui cum viverent ut haec sibi postea possent prodesse meruere…nemo autem se speret quod hic neeglexerit, cum obierit, a Deo promereri.

[souls of the dead are benefited by the piety of their living friends, when the sacrifice of the Mediator is offered for the dead, or alms are given in the church on their behalf. But these services are of advantage only to those who during their lives have earned such merit, that services of this kind can help them… No one, then, need hope that after he is dead he shall obtain merit with God which he has neglected to secure here.] 33

Augustine stresses the importance of completing as much penance in this life as possible and makes clear that only those who are baptized before death may benefit from prayers, masses, and donations offered by the living on their behalf.34 Therefore, the suffering of the unbaptized dead cannot be relieved in any way by the living. This does not, however, mean that all of the unbaptized dead reside in Hell; as they may inhabit the other post- mortem middle ground, called Limbo.

Gregory the Great (c. 540-604), in his Dialogues, states that the fire of purgation exists after death; however, it is only limited to venial sins—or “very light sins, which the fire doth easily consume (IV. 39).35 Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), a Dominican friar, in Summa Theologica, elaborates on the concept of punishment by fire in Purgatory by stating that not only is the body separated from the soul at death, but it is also separated from the beatific vision of G-d. Furthermore, the soul in Purgatory suffers pain

33 Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion ad Laurentium, trans. Albert C. Outler (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1955), C.CIX. 34 Augustine of Hippo, Augustine Catechism: Enchiridion on Faith Hope and Charity, 110. 35 All citations from the Dialogues of Gregory the Great are taken from The Dialogues of St. Gregory, trans., Edmund Garratt Gardner (London: P. L. Warner, 1911), https://archive.org/details/dialoguesofsaint00greg. 27

greater than anything experienced on earth.36 Le Goff states that “in the mid-twelfth century, fire not only evoked a place but was the spatial embodiment of the purgative phase through which certain souls passed after death.”37 Osei-Bonsu adds that the

Church continued to develop and define the importance of the doctrine of Purgatory, which eventually received ecclesiastical approval at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the First and Second Councils of Lyons (1247), the Council of Florence (1439-43), and the Council of Trent (1563). Over time, Purgatory was not just a “state of mind” or a process, but a concrete place in the afterlife.38

Theological accounts make clear that Purgatory is a hot and fiery place that metes out a variety of punishments that are proportional to the sins of each inmate.

Beyond that, however, we are given little information about what Purgatory actually looks like, where it is located, and how inmates inhabit the space. The few instances of literary and artistic depictions of Purgatory in the pre- and post-Conquests periods tend to be vague and inconsistent. Sara Foot observes that “…the afterlife had various shapes, allowing for punishment for past sins to be exacted in multiple environments. Although heaven and hell generally lay at the outer edges of the other world, the nature and relationship of the places in between varied.39 In general, accounts of Heaven and Hell are more numerous, detailed, and tend to be more consistent than those of Purgatory. We

36 Rober Hannah, “Purgatory,” The Catholic Encyclopedia Volume 12. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), accessed July 2015. < http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12575a.htm#III>. 37 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 154. 38 Osei-Bonsu, “Purgatory: A Study of the Historical Development and Its Compatibility with the Biblical Teaching on the Afterlife,” 291. 39 Sarah Foot, “Anglo-Saxon ‘Purgatory,’” Studies in Church History 45 (2009): 96. 28

find that in various narratives about the afterlife, inmates in punitive spaces are tortured by ice (The Vision of Drihthelm and The Vision of Tundale); and fire (The Vision of

Tundale, A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown, Fifteenth-Century Woman

Visionary, The Vision of Drihthelm, and The Vision of Furseus); while some are devoured by serpents (The Vision of Tundale and A Revelation of Purgatory by an

Unknown, Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary); and others are made to cross a slippery a bridge between damnation and salvation (The Vision of Tundale, Visio Pauli, and St.

Patrick’s Purgatory).

Perhaps the difficulty in trying to represent Purgatory in art and literature lies in the fact that it is defined in the negative. It does not possess any of the beauty, peace, or joy of Heaven; nor will its miseries ever terrify and fascinate the mortal imagination as

Hell does. Difficulties in depicting Purgatory may also be due to “a fundamental problem with the idea itself: the doctrinal and dogmatic notion of Purgatory remained essentially nebulous, and…was never codified in terms that could be translated visually…”40 Additionally, since medieval art “tended to resolve into binary oppositions or pairs,” the transition to a ternary model was difficult, especially if that third element is by its very nature something dynamic and changeable that defies depiction as a static object, place, or concept.41 Purgatory, both as a physical space and as a state of mind, represents transition, movement, and becoming. Such concepts are difficult to represent in visual and written media and are perhaps best left to the imagination.

40 Binski, Medieval Death Ritual and Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 193-194. 41 Binski, Medieval Death Ritual and Representation, 198. 29

One consistent feature in the depiction of the afterlife, however, is the spatialization of good and evil. Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory form a spatial triad, where

Heaven is up, Hell is down, and Purgatory is somewhere between the two. Passages in the Old and New Testament refer to Heaven in terms of light, elevation, and ascent

(Psalm1139:8, Isaiah 25:10, 2, Corinthians 12:2, among others), while Sheol and Hell are described in terms of darkness, depth, and descent (Luke 10:18, Matthew 13:50,

Revelation 12: 7-10, among others).42 Binsky states that the Judeo-Christian belief system’s set of ordering principles borrows from older pre-Christian traditions that were hierarchical and dualistic. This orientation is “…also aesthetic in character, and so the dualistic hierarchy of Christian thought yielded a vertical spatial matrix not only for celestial and terrestrial power but also for image-formation. This was enriched by the possibilities of using the left-right axis (another dualistic organization of space on horizontal terms).” 43 Binky points out that the Apostle’s Creed depicts Christ sitting at

G-d’s right hand as he sorts the virtuous from the wicked and sends the former off to the right before they ascend to Heaven and the wicked to the left before they sink downward into Hell. Orientation along vertical and horizontal spatial matrices also extends to cardinal directions. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the east and south are symbolically associated with G-d and renewal, and the north and west are associated with death and

42 Binski, Medieval Death Ritual and Representation, 166. 43 Binski, Medieval Death Ritual and Representation, 167. 30

the devil.44 Vertical and horizontal spatial elements often represent sin and virtue in medieval narratives.

The slow passage of time in penal spaces is another consistent feature in most narratives involving Purgatory. Asin, for example, cites the Seven Sleepers and asserts that an hour in Heaven is equal to a century on earth, and that an hour on earth is the same as a century in Purgatory. Suffering is prolonged, causing both mental and physical anguish.45 Le Goff states that time spent in Purgatory is surprisingly short—only a few days or months. Because the punishments are so intense, however, each hour feels like an eternity. The concept of dual time is also present in Irish folklore. Humans who visit

(or are abducted to) the fairy other world spend only short amounts of time there, but find that in their absence centuries have passed on earth.46 Time seems to pass quickly in places where suffering is less severe.

The dead were occasionally allowed leaves of absence from Purgatory (and on rare occasions from Hell), but only at very specific times. According to Jean-Claude

Schmitt, in the Voyage of Saint Brendan, which was inspired by the Visio Pauli, Judas explains that he is allowed to leave Hell and rest on an island from Saturday evening to

Sunday evening during the Marian holidays, Easter, Pentecost, and two weeks during the

Christmas season.47 Asin states that in Moslem accounts, certain fortunate individuals

44 Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), 69. 45 Asin, Islamic Eschatology and the Divine Comedy, 220. 46 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 294-295. 47 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 176. 31

also received a respite from Hell each week from Friday evening to Saturday morning.48

Schmitt states that in certain early accounts, souls roamed the earth restlessly in a sort of aerial Purgatory. In other accounts, souls were trapped in the middle of the earth during the day, came to the surface at night in order to visit the places where they sinned as well as their graves, and returned to the middle of the earth again before Matins. Once the doctrine of Purgatory established the post-mortem space as a fixed place, the Church rejected aerial and dual Purgatory models in favor of one that allowed inmates a respite from the myriad tortures of their prison only during certain times of the year.49 Inmates were allowed to visit earth and their kin only on St. Michaels Day, at Christmas, on the anniversary of their death, and in the period that stretched from the Day of the Dead to

All Saint’s Day.50 Once souls were sufficiently purified, they were allowed one last earthly visit, which occurred immediately “after the prayers and masses from which they benefited directly, in order to attest to the efficacy of those suffrages, to ask the living for an additional effort, and to thank them for their help before disappearing forever.”51

Purgatorial boundaries were necessarily permeable because the dead were largely dependent on the living for the mitigation of their suffering through intercessory prayer.

Souls on leave from Hell, however, could in no way benefit from the living, and only returned to earth for momentary relief or to torment and abuse the living.

48 Asin, Islamic Eschatology and the Divine Comedy, 184. 49 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 151. 50 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 173-174. 51 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 173. 32

Before Purgatory became a fixed place, souls of the dead who did not belong in either Heaven or Hell roamed the earth and the air, haunted their places of sin, and hovered around their graves. Purgatory inmates were subject to two different systems of time and inhabited “multiple realities.”52 Binsky very aptly states that Purgatory was at once “everywhere and nowhere.”53 As a transitional space of flux and change, where human agency and free will extended beyond the grave, it offered imperfect souls a second chance to attain salvation and called on the community of the living to effect that salvation. In the ancient world, the concept of Purgatory emerged in response to the shift from a cyclical time scheme that effected salvation through reincarnation to a linear eschatological model. The flourishing of this concept in the West in the Middle Ages can be attributable to several factors: the rise of the middle class, a more distributed economy, urbanization, the institutionalization of the prison system, and the shifting identity and function of the Christian Church. Purgatory reinforced communal identity in this transitional period by redirecting some of its attention to the needs of its marginal figures—both living and dead. By emphasizing rehabilitation and reintegration, the

Church firmly established itself as the mediating authority between man and G-d.

Limbo, like Purgatory, is a post-mortem middle ground that upsets the original

Judeo-Christian binary of good and evil, punishment and reward, and Heaven and Hell.

It is, however, a space entirely distinct from both Purgatory and Hell in both purpose and function, as it responds to and is shaped by a very different set of theological questions

52 Binski, Medieval Death Ritual and Representation, 199. 53 Binski, Medieval Death Ritual and Representation, 199. 33

concerning those who are fit for neither Heaven nor Hell. Purgatory, which serves the purpose of punishing deceased sinners in the interest of rehabilitating them to join the blessed in Heaven, is a space where punishments match, in degree and kind, the sins committed in life. The purpose of Limbo, on the other hand, is to house the souls of the unbaptized and functions as a place that punishes its inhabitants by denying them the gift of the beatific vision. Purgatory is a temporary and rehabilitative space that underscores the importance of contrition, confession, and communal faith. Limbo is a permanent space that reifies the connection between the sacrament of baptism and divine grace.

Both spaces are defined by Christocentric theology and demonstrate the importance of the mediating authority of the Church and its clergy in the process of salvation.

Limbo is a product of the second of two competing narratives of salvation that emerged in the early Christian Church. The first was born in the Greek tradition with

“Justin Martyr, developed by Origen,54 achieved orthodox expression by Gregory of

Nyssa, and stressed the universal presence of Christ” that would eventually lead all of G-

54 Origen’s arguments on universalism are closely tied to the concept of the apocatastasis. Fredrick Norris points out that Origen wavered between universalism and what later became the Church’s orthodox position that salvation could only be achieved through Christ. Norris states: “One could not know in advance which audience would be most likely to accept the gospel, because of the hope engendered by God's overpowering love or because of the fear stimulated by God’s threat of hell coupled with God’s demand for ethical living. Most audiences of hearers or readers include both groups; knowing this, Origen the pastoral preacher probably kept his view of salvation economically ‘open’ for a greater effectiveness.” This passage is from Fredrick W. Norris, “Apokatastasis,” in The Westminster Handbook to Origen, ed. John Anthony McGuckin (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2004), 59-62. See also Gregory Heidl, “The Influence of Origen on the Young Augustine; A Chapter of the History of Origenism (New Jersey: Georgias Press, 2009), 189-192. Heidl states: “Augustine would endeavor to re- interpret this claim (of universalism) in Retractiones: ‘This must not be taken to mean that all things return to that from which they fell away, as Origen held, but only all those that do return. For those who are punished in everlasting fire do not return to God from whom they fell away. Yet all who fall away are so ordered that they are where it is most fitting that they be those who do not return being, as begins them, in punishment.’” 34

d’s created beings to salvation.55 The second narrative, most clearly articulated by Latin theologians, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine of Hippo, refuted Greek Universalism by locating salvation not only in the knowledge and acceptance of the teachings of

Christ, but in receiving baptism in His Church.56

The Church’s rejection of Greek universalism placed baptism, which was viewed as the only means of reconciling mankind to G-d after the Fall, at the center of the orthodox model of salvation. This position, however, was challenged by religious scholars in the Middle Ages who promoted extrinsic models of salvation, such as

Pelagianism on one end of the theological spectrum and William of Ockham’s nominalism on the other. Pelagius, a monk born in Brittany in the late fourth century, received an education in Rome and began his career as an aesthetic, teacher, and theologian.57 Although Pelagius, like Augustine, rejects heterodox Greek and

Manichaean universalism,58 his teachings depart significantly from Augustine and the

55 J. Patout Burns, “The Economy of Salvation: Two Patristic Traditions,” Theological Studies 37, no.4 (1976): 599. 56 Burns, “The Economy of Salvation: Two Patristic Traditions,” 599. 57 Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 263. 58 Manichaeism, a religious movement named for its prophet, Mani (216-276 AD), combined elements of Gnostic, Christian, Orphic, and Zurvanite belief systems. Popular for a time in the Persian Empire, the religion was taken with its remaining followers into the Roman Empire after the prophet Mani was put to death. It spread quickly and enjoyed a large following until it met with resistance from the Roman authorities and the early Christian Church. In brief, Manichaeism teaches that a) the spirit, which originated in light, is trapped in matter in its brief existence on earth; b) universal salvation will be achieved through liberation of the light of the soul from the darkness of the material world—which was created by a false and worldly god; c) the presence of light and darkness in the physical world was believed to be a manifestation of good and evil; d) Manicheans are divided into the “elect” who pray, preach, and teach, and “listeners” who learn from and support the “elect”;5) the mediating authority of the Christian Church and its clergy is questionable. See RC. Zaehner, Teachings of the Magi (New York: The McMillan Company, 1956), 53-63; and “Saint Augustine,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 24, 2000, accessed July 30, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/. 35

Orthodox Church on the issue of original sin and the importance of baptism as a means of salvation. He acknowledges that while mankind’s free will was compromised when

Adam and Eve succumbed to the serpent’s temptation in Eden, the taint of original sin, which was passed down to all of humanity from Adam, does not hinder mankind’s ability to choose between good and evil.59

Pelagius’s emphasis on the power of free will as well as good works effectively decenters Christ and the Church by foregrounding human agency in the process of salvation. At the other end of the theological spectrum, William of Ockham, a

Franciscan friar and theologian born near London around 1287,60 proposes a salvation model that is just as extrinsic as the Pelagian one. He posits that salvation does not depend of good works or man’s ability to exercise free will correctly, but on “divine acceptation.”61 Ockham states that G-d alone determines whether or not a person or his or her actions are meritorious or sinful and that “No human being will ever be saved or be able to be saved without created grace, and no human being will ever elicit or be able to elicit a meritorious act without such grace.”62 Pelagius and Ockham occupy two extreme ends of a spectrum.

59 Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 264-266. 60 Rega Wood, Ockham on the Virtues (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1997), 3-4. 61 David Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 36. Aers compares Ockham’s arguments on grace and free will, which focus on “divine acceptation with its extrinsicizing of grace and its emphasis on G-d’s help of those who help themselves,” with Pelagianism (which extrinsicizes free will) as well as with Augustinian and Thomistic teachings, which treat both as semi-intrinsic processes. This is part of a larger argument that examines Langland’s understanding of free will, grace, and human agency and how different theologies might have informed Piers Plowman. 62 Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology, 40-41. 36

Augustinian and Thomstic theologies concerning agency, grace, sin, and salvation fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. According to Aers, Aquinas rejects the extrinsic model in favor of an intrinsic one, arguing that “divine agency draws people to charity, ‘not as to what is external to them but what is their very own.’ Grace implants a gift in humans that draws them beyond themselves to participate in divine life…an intrinsic inclination to fulfil a supernatural end.”63 In Augustine’s model of salvation, “there is neither a negation here of all human agency nor a passivization that hollows out human responsibility and will, any more than there is assertion of an independent human autonomy in the making of what Christians understand as a good life, doing well.”64 Augustinian theology emphasizes a sort of double agency or will in the process of salvation where an individual possesses both a desire and willingness to choose good over evil and is gifted with G-d’s grace, which works in him or her to overcome sin.

This double agency is what Burns refers to as an operative and co-operative process of salvation:

In its natal state, humanity seeks only sinful actions and lacks all resources to initiate the process of salvation. The divine intervention which terrifies by imposing the law constitutes the first discontinuity. Thereafter, a continuous series of divine operations and human co-operative responses establishes a person in a state of salvation. When the person is properly terrified, G-d intervenes a second time in the preaching of the gospel and gives the operative grace of faith. The faithful person prays for charity, and the Holy Spirit is sent into his heart. This operative grace, which makes a person good, then co-operates in his good works and his prayer for perseverance. G-d again intervenes with an operative grace to maintain His elect in innocence and love until death. Finally,

63 Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology, 31. 64 Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology, 95. 37

an operative grace raises and transforms the flesh and bestows on the soul the fullness of charity in the vision of G-d.65

Augustine’s Christocentric position, very much favored by the Church, not only promotes a strong belief in the mediating authority of the clergy, but teaches that G-d’s grace is conveyed through the sacraments—especially the sacrament of baptism. Both

Augustine and Aquinas view original sin as a corruption of body and soul that tainted mankind’s ability to exercise reason, free will, and correct judgment. Man partakes in

Adam’s sin due to shared human nature. In Adam mankind is fallen and only through

Christ is humanity cleansed, elevated, and ultimately redeemed. G-d’s grace, won through Christ’s sacrifice, is the only means of reconciliation with G-d. And that grace is conveyed through the sacrament of baptism.66

The question remains whether those who are unbaptized—either because they were born before Christ or because they were simply unaware of the Advent—go to

Heaven or Hell. The Bible is mostly silent on the issue, though John 9:4 and 2

Corinthians 5:10 make clear that G-d’s swift and final judgment at the time of death ends all possibility for change or redemption.67 This seems to contradict the idea of Purgatory, but supports Limbo, which like Heaven and Hell is a permanent post-mortem space.

Other passages in the Bible allude to a middle ground for those who lived and died before the birth of Christ: Luke 16:19-26, refers to the Bosom of Abraham as a space

65 Burns, “The Economy of Salvation: Two Patristic Traditions,” 612-613. 66 Christopher Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 62, no. 2 (1998): 217-220. 67 The Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, ed., John R. Kohlenberger III (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 1997). 38

where the Patriarchs resided prior to their liberation by Christ; 1 Peter 3:18-20 and 1

Peter 4:6 refer to Christ’s preaching to the prisoners who reside in the realm of the dead; and Ephesians 4:1-16, Romans 10:6-8, and Zechariah 9:11 all refer to Christ’s freeing prisoners from a post-mortem pit.68 According to Patrick Toner, “It is principally on the strength of the Scriptural texts, harmonized with the general the doctrine of the Fall and

Redemption of mankind, that Catholic tradition has defended the existence of the limbus patrum as a temporary state or place of happiness distinct from Purgatory.”69 Based on limited Scriptural evidence as well as certain apocryphal texts, such as the Gospel of

Nicodemus, theological scholars such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Gregory the Great, determined that the Fall made it impossible for mankind to ascend to Heaven before the

Advent, necessitating a sort of temporary posthumous prison or holding place until

Christ’s descent into the underworld.

In examining Augustine’s position on a posthumous holding place, Christopher

Beiting notes that although he acknowledges the existence a post-mortem space separate from Heaven and Hell in the Enchiridion, he is very cautious about making any definitive statements about its existence for the unbaptized who died before the Advent.

Augustine’s observations about the Bosom of Abraham and the Decent of Christ, however, influenced later theologians in forming more concrete ideas about the limbus

68 The Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, ed., John R. Kohlenberger III (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 1997). 69 Patrick Toner, “Limbo,” The Catholic Encyclopedia Volume 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), accessed Sept. 2015. . 39

patrum.70 Beiting observes that in Genesi ad Litteram, Augustine argues that after a soul is separated from its body upon death, it ascends to either Heaven or Hell, where it experiences either pleasure or torment. The soul remains connected to the body, however, retaining its image and is subjected to an attenuated form of the pain the body experiences as it decays on earth. All sensations experienced by the soul in Heaven or

Hell prior to Judgment Day are doubled after the resurrection unites spirit and flesh in the same space.71

In Confessions, Augustine describes the Bosom of Abraham as a place that is pleasant, expanding on “the imagery presented in LK.xvi.22ff. The cooling water the rich man desires becomes Christ, the living water. Furthermore, the souls in this realm are capable of interceding for the living.”72 Based on 1 Peter 3:18-20, theological scholars have asserted that Christ’s preaching to spirits in prison is “analogous in its effect to the salvation of eight persons on the Ark and, therefore, to baptismal regeneration.”73 Aquinas considers 1 Peter as well as Augustine’s assertions that the

Bosom of Abraham is a sort of posthumous prison, where the righteous dead do not suffer bodily pain, and concludes that the only change to have occurred in their condition

70 Christopher Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” Augustiniana 48, no.1-2 (1998): 22. 71 Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” 22-23. 72 Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” 24. 73 Milton Gatch, “The harrowing of Hell: a Liberation Motif in Medieval Theology and Devotional Literature,” Florilegium 22 (2005): 76. 40

after Christ’s Descent was their final relief from the spiritual anguish of being excluded from the beatific vision of G-d.74

One point of departure between Augustine and Aquinas seems to be whether or not the Bosom of Abraham is the same place as the Limbo of Hell. In Summa

Theologica, Aquinas addresses Augustine’s argument in Genesi ad Literam xxxiii that although the Bosom of Abraham is not necessarily a negative place because G-d’s angels took Abraham there after his demise, Hell is never mentioned in a positive way, and the two are therefore separate places. Aquinas argues that while the Bosom of Abraham is an entirely separate space from Hell, it is the same as the limbus patrum. He states that before the Advent

…the limbo of hell and Abraham's bosom were one place accidentally and not essentially: and consequently, nothing prevents Abraham's bosom from being after Christ’s coming, and from being altogether distinct from limbo, since things that are one accidentally may be parted from one another…The state of the holy Fathers as regards what was good in it was called Abraham’s bosom, but as regards its deficiencies it was called hell. Accordingly, is Abraham’s bosom taken in an unfavorable sense nor hell in a favorable sense, although in a way they are one.75

Aquinas’s treatment of the question hinges on the function of each of the spaces and the nature of its inhabitants—the former being negative and the latter, positive.

Henry Charles Lea notes that once the Doctrine of Purgatory was established and a system of sacramental absolution was in place, the need for a temporary space for

74 Gatch, “The harrowing of Hell: a Liberation Motif in Medieval Theology and Devotional Literature,” 76. 75 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger, 1947) Q lxix. Art. 4. 41

souls awaiting Judgment Day such as Abraham’s Bosom disappeared. Aquinas, along with other notable theologians, believed that judgment occurs at death and that souls are sorted into Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. Aquinas held that Abraham’s Bosom, which was the same as the limbus patrum, was completely emptied when Christ liberated the holy fathers.76 He was careful to note that not all souls were released from Hell during

Christ’s Harrowing and that Jesus visited only the limbus patrum, while making his presence felt in all parts of Hell. Beiting states that Christ descended to “the hell of the damned, to chastise its occupants; to purgatory (Aquinas classes purgatory alongside hell) to bring hope to its occupants; and to the hell of the Fathers, where ‘he brought the light of eternal glory,’…Christ’s soul descended to that place only in hell where the just were being held, so that he might, as to his soul, visit in their place those whom he had, according to his divinity, inwardly visited by his grace.”77 Both Augustine and Aquinas imagine the limbus patrum as a space that is in a separate part of Hell “greatly above” the hell of the damned as well as Purgatory and just below Heaven.78 They also limit those liberated from Limbo to the patriarchs who were extended G-d’s grace because of their faith and good works. Milton Gatch states that another version of the Descent of

Christ emerged that involved the liberation of “all faithful humanity…the righteous men and women of old (the ancient just),” which then became the more pervasive theory.79

76 Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 316. 77 Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 62, no. 2 (1998): 223. 78 Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” 224. 79 Gatch, “The harrowing of Hell: a Liberation Motif in Medieval Theology and Devotional Literature,” 76. 42

Gatch also states that the Descent of Christ assumes a narrative where the

Harrowing marks the moment that Christ rescues humanity from the Devil, who has ruled over mankind since the Fall.80 This narrative is most consistent with what Gustav

Aulen classifies as the “classic” theory of atonement, also known as the ransom theory.

This dualistic model of salvation involves “Christus Victor” sacrificing himself in order to defeat the Devil so that humankind can be reconciled to G-d.81 One aspect of this theory involves Deus absconditus, where G-d hides his divinity in the incarnate Christ.82

After the Fall, it was agreed that all humans were owed to Satan and handed over in death. All such agreements were nullified, however, when Satan presumed to kill Christ due to his failure to recognize his divine nature. Christ caused Satan to stumble into a trick, which then led to a new contract that promised Satan only those who continued to deny Christ. The second atonement theory is satisfaction model, which was supported mainly by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) who believed that the ransom model was inadequate. This theory explains the Crucifixion as Christ’s attempt to satisfy man’s debt to G-d by becoming a man and sacrificing himself for the world’s sins.83 The third theory is called the moral influence theory and was supported by the medieval scholastic and nominalist Peter Abelard (1079-1142), who argued that mankind’s redemption occurs through a new understanding of G-d gained by Christ’s incarnation, teachings,

80 Gatch, “The harrowing of Hell: a Liberation Motif in Medieval Theology and Devotional Literature,” 77-78. 81 Gustav Aulen, Christus Victor (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2003), 4-7. 82 Aulen, Christus Victor, 110-111. 83 Aulen, Christus Victor, 81-92; 145-154. 43

and crucifixion.84 Aulen states that the classic model of atonement is never abandoned and that is “far too deep-rooted and powerful to disappear altogether; and it is still lived on in hymnody and in art.”85 The classical model remained popular in medieval literature as well; although all three theological models were quite blurred and tended not to be theologically consistent.

Although the limbus patrum provides a solution for the unbaptized faithful who died before the Advent, it does not answer the question of whether those who died unbaptized in infancy are saved or damned. All humans are tainted by original sin, regardless of age or circumstance, and that sin can only be removed through baptism.

Although this subject is never explicitly addressed in the New Testament, Scripture does make clear that baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation (John 3:5), that men are born into the world in a state of original sin (Romans 5:12), and after death the opportunity for regeneration through baptism ceases and those who die in that state are excluded from the beatific vision of G-d (John 9:4, Luke 12:40, 16:19,2 Corinthians

5:10).86 In the absence of clear Scriptural evidence, this issue remained a subject of intense debate among theological scholars.

Gregory Nazianzus, the Archbishop of Constantinople (329-390), for example, argues that those who neglect or reject baptism will be damned, and those who fail to receive baptism “through no fault personal fault…will not be damned since they have no

84 Aulen, Christus Victor, 95-97; 145-154. 85 Aulen, Christus Victor, 98. 86 Toner, “Limbo,” accessed Sept. 2, 2015. . 44

personal sin…However, neither will they be saved.”87 This, of course, includes children who die unbaptized. Augustine of Hippo elaborates on that position, stating that since infants are incapable of possessing faith and since all humans are born damned due to original sin, their souls remain damned until they receive baptism. Beiting states that

Augustine’s arguments—especially those refuting the Pelagian notion of eternal life, the denial of original sin, and universal salvation—helped shape and define the concept of

Limbo.88 Beiting also states that for Augustine, “ultimate salvation depended not on innate goodness or on merit of any kind, but rather was totally dependent on the mystery of God’s grace.”89 Other Latin theologians such as Jerome and Gregory the Great eventually accepted Augustine’s very rigid stance, though it was contested by many for being too rigid in its stance regarding infants. Augustine tempered his position by stating that although infants cannot be saved through suffrages by the living—as they lived without faith, they “suffer the lightest punishment of all.”90 Once Augustine distinguished between the kind of suffering experienced by unbaptized infants in Hell and the suffering of other damned souls, the concept of limbus puerorum began to be more widely accepted.91

Augustine’s position is Christocentric, focusing on the Church and its sacraments. Later medieval theologians, such William of Ockham, echo the rigid line

Augustine draws between salvation and damnation; however, they locate the process of

87 Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” 231. 88 Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” 9. 89 Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” 14. 90 Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” 17. 91 Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” 20-21. 45

salvation solely in G-d’s judgment: “Ruminating of why unbaptized infants are owed eternal punishment when such infants have never acted sinfully, Ockham does not pause to subject such doctrine to the pressure of God’s reconciliation to the world in Christ.

Instead he merely affirms that punishment is due because God so ordained.”92

Occupying a sort of middle ground between Pelagian universalism and Ockham’s extrinsic view of salvation is Thomas Aquinas, who builds on Augustine’s earlier concepts concerning the fate of unbaptized infants. Aquinas posits that unbaptized infants are not just subjected to an absence of suffering, but are able to experience a sort of happiness and peace. This position was adopted by most theologians in the Middle

Ages and remained unchallenged until the Reformation.93

The debates surrounding the nature of the two limbos and the types of punishments suffered by the inhabitants led to the development of Aquinas’s fourfold conception of Hell:

One is the hell of the damned, in which are darkness and the lack of the divine vision, both with regard to the lack of grace, and the fact that there is sensible punishment there; and this hell is the place of the damned. Another is the hell above that, in which are darkness both because of the lack of the divine vision and because of the lack of grace, but there is not there sensible punishment: and it is called the limbo of children. Another is above that one, in which are darkness with regard to the lack of the divine vision, but not with regard to the lack of grace, but there is there the punishment of sense; and it is called purgatory. Another is greatly above it, in which is darkness with regard to lack of the divine vision, but not with regard to the lack of divine grace, nor is there sensible punishment there; and this is the hell of the holy fathers; and to this place alone Christ descended with regard to place, but not with regard to the experience of darkness.94

92 Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology, 41. 93 Toner, “Limbo,” accessed Sept. 2, 2015. . 94 Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” 229. 46

Paul Binski points out that unbaptized infants were buried in unhallowed ground—alongside other spiritually and socially marginalized bodies, such as “heretics, lepers, suicides…and excommunicants,” thereby creating a “topographical equivalent on earth” for infants whose souls were consigned to the margins of Hell.95 To avoid this tragedy, the Church allowed midwives to baptize infants—which is the only instance a woman is allowed to administer any sacrament on behalf of the Church.96 Although the

Church made clear that unbaptized infants consigned to the limbus puerorum do not suffer, their condition is permanent and there is no possibility for salvation. Jenni

Kuuliala speculates that it is impossible to know how the laity would have understood or processed the concept of an infant limbo; however, the many ghost stories that crop up in the early Christian era and the Middle Ages about the souls of infants returning to petition the living for help in obtaining salvation may reflect the intense desire parents and the community in general would have had to see all children united with G-d in death.97

Augustine must have seen the dangers of such ghost stories offering false hope to communities that experienced this sort of loss, because he discusses two ghost stories involving children who petition the living for salvation. Beiting states that Augustine interprets the stories in a way that emphasizes the importance of baptism in the process

95 Paul Binski, Medieval Death Ritual and Representation, 56. 96 Binski, Medieval Death Ritual and Representation, 56; see also, Charles G. Herberman, The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church volume xvii “Baptism” (New York: Catholic Way Publishing, 2014). 97 Jenni Kuuliala, “Baptism and Interaction with Supernatural Creatures,” The Visual Culture of Baptism in the Middle Ages; Essays on Medieval Fonts, Settings and Beliefs (2013): 175-176. 47

of salvation.98 The first tale involves a boy who comes back to life to request baptism, receives it, and dies shortly thereafter. The second story is about the seven-year-old brother of St. Perpetua who appears to his sister in a vision and asks for her help in releasing him from a place that looks like Purgatory. In the first tale, the boy is allowed entry into Heaven because he came back to life and quickly received baptism before dying again. Augustine stressed that this tale illustrates how baptism must be received before death (in this special case, before a miraculous second death) to be effective. In the second tale, Augustine argues that there is no evidence that suggests that Perpetua’s brother was not baptized before death, so his sister’s prayers released him from

Purgatory, not Limbo.99

Despite the careful distinctions made by religious scholars between the fate of baptized and unbaptized souls and whether those souls found themselves in one of the

Limbos, Hell, or Purgatory, it is difficult to know how these ideas manifested in the daily spiritual practices of the laity. It appears that those distinctions are sometimes blurred or at least treated as a false dichotomy in literary accounts of the post-mortem spaces. They often deviate from the orthodox position held by the Church in that time period. Limbo, Purgatory, and Hell seem to be interchangeable in medieval poetry and prose, as souls return from all three places in order to torment the living, to request aid in their salvation process, or merely to offer comfort to those grieving their loss. The

98 Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” 15-16. 99 Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” 15.

stories are numerous and varied and will be explored in further detail in later chapters.

The following section provides an abbreviated history of the process of excommunication in the Latin Christian Church in the Middle Ages. It is important to note that one had to have been a baptized Christian in order to be excommunicated from the Church. Therefore, this religious penalty, which sometimes continued into the afterlife, is connected to Purgatory rather than Limbo.

The Liminal Body: Excommunication, Exclusion, and (In)Visbility in the Middle

Ages

From Ecclesiastical Latin ex- (out of) and communis (common), excommunication is the most severe form of ecclesiastical censure, meant to exclude a member of the Christian community “from participation in the sacraments and services of the church, or from religious rites in general.”100 Defined by the church as medicinal, rather than punitive, excommunication excludes in order to allow a transgressor time and space to reflect and repent before seeking absolution from the Church.101 Evolving from earlier forms of social and legal exclusion—such as the simple curse, common to all cultures that informed the Bible—the practice of religious censure and social marginalization eventually became grounded in more complex theological concepts, manifesting, for example, as the anathema—or setting apart—in Greek culture and the

100 “Excommunication, n.”. OED Online. June 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.lib- ezproxy.tamu.edu:2048/view/Entry/65861?redirectedFrom=excommunication (accessed July 01, 2015). 101 Auguste Boudinhon, “Excommunication.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5, New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909, accessed July 4 2015. . 49

Khe-rem in the Rabbinical tradition. The Khe-rem involves “excommunication accompanied with the most severe curses and denunciations of evil.”102

In due time, the practice of setting apart, denouncing, and excluding sinners as a means of purging spiritual evils from a community was adopted by early Christian groups, though the precise date that Christian prelates began to exercise the rite of excommunication cannot be known as records from this time period are scant. Elisabeth

Vodola speculates that the early Church, which had granted bishops disciplinary authority in the ecclesiastical courts by the third century, had also likely institutionalized the practice of excommunication.103 Around the third century the Church—drawing from passages in the Old and New Testament104 as well as early Christian literature—began to differentiate between social and liturgical exclusion, barring excommunicants from participating in the Eucharist while allowing them to remain in the community as shunned individuals. One of the Church’s earliest texts, the third-century Syrian

Didascalia Apostolorum, for example, instructs the faithful to watch over sinners in the community, but prohibits them from associating with those who stubbornly remain unrepentant.105 The Didasclalia also “for the first time prescribed that anyone who

102 Samuel Fallows, The Popular and Critical Bible Encyclopedia and Scriptural Dictionary Fully Defining and Explaining All Religious (New York: Howard-Severance Co., 1912), 67-68. 103 Elisabeth Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University California Press, 1986), 7. 104The following passages in the Old and New Testament reference exclusion as a means of punishment: Matthew 18:15-18; 1 Corinthians 5:1-6, 5:11-13; 2 Corinthians 2:5-11; 1 Timothy 1:20; Numbers 15:30, 19:20; Romans 16:17; 2 Thessalonians 3:6; Titus 3:9-11; Ezra 10:8; John 9:22, 12:42; Galatians 4:17. The Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, ed., John R. Kohlenberger III (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 1997). 105 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 8. 50

associated with an excommunicant be similarly disciplined.”106 Thus, by the third century, excommunication had become common practice in social and religious institutions in medieval Europe.107 Nearly eight centuries later, disputes over various doctrinal issues of theology caused a major rift in the Christian Church that eventually led to the establishment of the separate Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

Although very different practices regarding excommunication emerged in each tradition,108 this section only focuses on the practice as it existed in the Latin Catholic

Church in the Middle Ages.

Excommunication: Forms and Practices

Two distinct forms of excommunication had developed in the Latin Church by the end of the twelfth century. The first, minor excommunication, was

“uniformly defined by canonists and by Gregory IX (cap. lix, De sent. exc., lib. V, tit. xxxix) as prohibition from receiving the sacraments.”109 Those who incurred the penalty of minor excommunication were allowed to attend mass—though prohibited from partaking of the Eucharist—and could be absolved by any confessor.110 The second form, major excommunication, entailed “the full social exclusion of the biblical tradition, belonged to the ecclesiastical courts. The judges who imposed it needed no

106 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 8. 107 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, vii. 108 For a complete list of canons concerning excommunication in the Eastern Orthodox Church, see: “Canons of the Holy Apostles I-XL,” The Canons of the Eastern Orthodox Church, accessed August 25, 2015. https://sites.google.com/site/canonsoc/home/canons-of-the-apostles/canons-i-xl. 109 Boudinhon, “Excommunication,” accessed July 42015. . 110 Boudinhon, “Excommunication,” accessed July 2015. . 51

priestly ordination (which many of them lacked) but the power of jurisdiction…the authority…to discipline subjects.”111 Major excommunication made possible the ecclesiastical punishment of lay transgressions—such as failure to pay debts. An accuser or complainant could bring a civil case to trial in an ecclesiastical court, provided he paid the necessary fees, and could even block an excommunicant’s petition for absolution. Vodola states that lay debt cases comprised the majority of the excommunication lawsuits and “came to the church courts by custom or concession of the secular jurisdiction and, above all, in the guise of perjury cases, because contracts were habitually sealed with an oath.”112

By 1139 major excommunication had been further divided into ferendae sententiae, which could only be inflicted by judicial sentence in a court of law; and latae sententiae, which could be inflicted immediately as the crime was committed. Latae sententiae, part of the Si quis suadente canon promulgated in the Second Lateran

Council in 1139, allowed the Church to anathematize excommunicants without requiring judicial process. Latae sententiae, however, was challenged by many canonists because it subjected sinners to the most severe form of punishment allowed under excommunication without due process of law.113 Gratian, one of latae sententiae’s most vocal opponents, argued that unless sinners are formally named and convicted by judicial process they should not be subjected to complete social and religious

111 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 36. 112 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 37-38. 113 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 28-29. 52

exclusion—a penalty reserved only for those under major excommunication.114 By the time the Third Lateran Council convened in 1179, however, canonists who were far more concerned with the alarming spread of heretical groups throughout Europe no longer resisted the idea of latae sententiae, but employed it quite liberally as a means of defending the Church against its enemies.115

From the late twelfth century on, therefore, latae sententiae could be inflicted at will and by whomever had jurisdiction in the Church, including the Pope, cardinals, bishops, papal legates, vicars, as well as parish priests.116 Although latae sententiae cut short the otherwise lengthy and complicated process of excommunication, the penalty could only be imposed on living baptized Christians. In principal, the Church maintained that “among living persons, those who have not been baptized have never been members of the Christian society and therefore cannot be deprived of spiritual benefits to which they have never had a right; in this way…pagans, Moslems, and Jews, though outside of the Church, are not excommunicated.”117

In practice, however, the Church excommunicated many non-Christians in the

Middle Ages, including Jews. Occurring during periods of social and political unrest,

Jewish excommunication was more prevalent in Spain, France, and Germany than in

114 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 29. 115 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 30. 116 Boudinhon, “Excommunication,” accessed July 4, 2015. . 117 Boudinhon, “Excommunication,” accessed July4, 2015. < http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5022.htm#article1>. 53

England.118 Hannah Meyer states that the constant power struggle between ecclesiastical and secular authorities in medieval Europe often manifested in “disputes over control of the Jewish communities in their midst…(and) on several occasions, prelates in Western

Christendom sought to employ their most potent weapon when engaging in such contests, that of excommunication.”119 Members of the Jewish community who incurred excommunication were expected to appear in court and, if found guilty of the charges brought against them, subject to severe social censure. In practice, however, the penalty was largely ignored, as Jews were considered wards of the Crown and under the jurisdiction of the sovereign. Attempts by Church prelates to excommunicant Jews were perceived as a usurpation of secular authority and went largely ignored.120 Meyer states that in England and on the Continent secular authorities often declined to enforce penalties imposed by ecclesiastical authorities and excommunicated Jews rarely experienced any disruption or change in their social or economic status either within or outside of their own communities.121

Another group exempt from excommunication were the dead, as the Church held that “the baptized cease, at death, to belong to the Church Militant, and the dead cannot be excommunicated. Of course, strictly speaking, after the demise of a Christian person, it may be officially declared that such person incurred excommunication during his

118 Hannah Meyer, “Making Sense of Christian Excommunication of Jews in Thirteenth-Century England,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, No. 4 (2010): 612. 119 Meyer, “Making Sense of Christian Excommunication of Jews in Thirteenth-Century England,” 598. 120 Meyer, “Making Sense of Christian Excommunication of Jews in Thirteenth-Century England,” 613. 121 Meyer, “Making Sense of Christian Excommunication of Jews in Thirteenth-Century England,” 615, 627. 54

lifetime. Quite in the same sense he may be absolved after his death; indeed, the Roman

Ritual contains the rite for absolving an excommunicated person already dead (Tit. III, cap. iv: Ritus absolvendi excommunicatum jam mortuum).”122 The posthumous forgiveness of excommunicants was sanctioned by Pope Innocent III’s decretal a nobis in 1199 and benefitted both the Church and the heirs of the deceased, as it allowed the former to use excommunication as a means of debt collection and the latter a chance to put loved ones to rest, body and soul. The decretal stated that post-mortem absolution was allowed in cases where the excommunicant was contrite at the time of death and on the condition that his or her heirs were willing to satisfy all of the deceased’s debts.123

The decretal was later bolstered by the Fourth Lateran Council’s elaboration on its position regarding Purgatory, stating that those who had not been absolved before death were not necessarily in Hell, but in a transitional space from which they could be liberated with the proper spiritual attention from (and in cases of debt) remuneration by the living. Another strong inducement to pay the decedent’s debts came in the form of the Church’s posthumous excommunication formularies, which deprived the sinner of all funerary services as well as the right to be buried in consecrated ground.124 The Church, therefore, had the power to keep certain individuals in a liminal state long after death by

122 Boudinhon, “Excommunication,” accessed July 4, 2015. < http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5022.htm#article1>. 123 Christian Jaser, “Ritual Excommunication: ‘An Ars Oblivionalis’?” in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, eds. Brenner, Elma, Cohen, Meredith, and Franklin-Brown, Mary (Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2013), 129. 124 Jaser, “Ritual Excommunication: ‘An Ars Oblivionalis’?” In Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, 133. 55

relegating the soul to Purgatory and the body to unholy ground until he or she was deemed worthy of forgiveness and reintegration.

Excommunication: Legal, Economic, and Social Exclusions

The degree and kind of marginalization experienced by living excommunicants depended upon socio-economic status, the form of excommunication inflicted, and whether or not their excommunication was made public. Ferendae sententiae excommunication was necessarily public, as it was imposed and removed by judicial process. Latae sententiae, on the other hand, could be incurred publicly or privately. If private, its effectiveness depended largely upon the excommunicant’s sense of guilt to compel him or her to seek absolution. Unrepentant excommunicants who remained so for a long period, could be deemed contumacious and the excommunication would then be made public in order to put additional pressure on the transgressor.125 Publicizing a sentence of excommunication proved to be a very effective weapon against contumacy, as it shifted the penalty from the arena of private guilt to public shame and subjected a disobedient excommunicant—whether king or commoner—to contempt, ridicule, and exclusion.

As the penalty for minor excommunication was limited to exclusion from the

Eucharist, the remainder of this section focuses on the social, economic, and religious sanctions imposed on individuals by major excommunication. Legal rights of excommunicants were severely curtailed as they could neither file civil suits, nor bring a

125 Boudinhon, “Excommunication,” accessed July 4, 2015. < http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5022.htm#article1>. 56

formal accusation against an individual in a criminal hearing. Additionally, excommunicants could not serve as judges, proctors, advocates, or witnesses; and only had limited rights as defendants.126 Adopting the term infamia from Roman law—which was applied to disgraced individuals who were barred from voting—early canonists introduced the term into canon law during the Council of Carthage in 419 in order to prevent marginal figures such as excommunicants, heretics, pagans, Jews, and Moslems from bringing accusations against clerics in court.127 By the thirteenth century, this ban was extended to prevent excommunicants from filing lawsuits against any entity in any criminal or civil case.128 All legal rights of an excommunicant, however, were immediately restored once they were absolved by the Church.

Legal transactions outside of the courtroom were much more difficult to monitor and regulate. Vodola states that “Roman infamia, the foundation of canon law on the excommunicant’s status in judicial proceedings, did not extend to legal matters outside the courts, and indeed Roman law gave little guidance.”129 Canonists debated over whether or to what extent excommunicants should be allowed to conduct business, enter into contracts, and collect debts. Pope Innocent III’s decretal Vergentis prohibited

126 See the “Loss of Legal Rights” and “Excommunicants in the Courtroom” in Excommunication in the Middle Ages, by Elisabeth Vodola. 127 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 73-75. 128 In the twelfth century, the Church tried to distinguish between heretics and other excommunicants and “soon called forth a series of papal decretals that precisely defined excommunicants’ legal status. Lucius III’s Intelleximus affirmed that excommunicants could be present in court only as defendants other decretals of Innocent III and Honorius III forbade excommunicants to prosecute crimes in the civil procedures…” For more information about excommunicants’ rights in court, see Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 82-87. 129 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 128. 57

Christians from entering into contracts with heretics, but did not specify whether contracting with excommunicants would be permissible. Innocent the III issued the canon Si vere in 1203 in response to a dispute that arose between Crusaders and excommunicated Venetians over monies owed.130 The ideas that formed the basis of Si vere in that particular instance were later more broadly applied by canonists to answer the question about contractual relationships with excommunicants in general. It was eventually determined that although entering into new contracts with excommunicants was prohibited, excommunication did not preclude one’s obligation to honor a contract or debt once entered.131

How excommunication affected relationships with family, friends, and the community in general was a far more complicated issue. Although still part of the community, an excommunicant was no longer under the protection of the Church and considered to be in the power of the Devil. Relegated to marginal status, along with lepers, heretics, and dangerous animals, excommunicants were viewed as spiritually sick and a source of contagion to be avoided on pain of excommunication. While it was permissible to lodge with an excommunicant it was not permissible to eat, drink, or converse with such and individual; nor was it permissible exchange letters or gifts with an excommunicant as “the contagion of minor excommunication was transmitted through them.”132 If, however, an excommunicant’s status was not made public, those

130 See Vodola’s “Si vere” section in Excommunication in the Middle Ages for a complete account of the events that gave rise to the Innocent III’s decretal concerning business contracts with excommunicants, 132-135. 131 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 135-156. 132 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 53-54. 58

who were aware of the penalty were only obligated to avoid the excommunicant secretly, as contact with a private excommunicant was only considered a venial, rather than a mortal sin.133

All excommunicants—public, private, major, and minor— were to varying degrees excluded from their religious communities. While minor excommunicants were only barred from participating in the Eucharist, major excommunicants were prohibited from hearing mass altogether. They were even prohibited from entering the church and the consecrated ground surrounding the building itself. Any priest who allowed a person under major excommunication to celebrate mass was likewise excommunicated—a penalty that could only be lifted by the Pope.134 Kings and commoners alike were subject to exclusion from their religious and social communities, as the Church inflicted the punishment and enforced its penalties regardless of wealth, social standing, gender, or age.

The only exception made by the Church, however, concerns the immediate family of an excommunicant. Gregory VII established Quoniam multos, a canon which decreed “that the wife and family of an excommunicated dominus would not incur excommunication.”135 Prior to the Quoniam multos, an excommunicant’s entire family— spouse, children, and even siblings—shared in his guilt and incurred excommunication alongside the offending sinner. Vodola points out that divorce, separation, or even

133 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 44-50. 134 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 54-58. 135 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 60. 59

withholding sex from an excommunicated spouse on the grounds that he or she is an excommunicant was disallowed by the Church, as the sin of divorce and neglecting marital obligations were considered a far more grievous sin than associating with an excommunicant. Needless to say, until Quoniam multos was established, family—and especially spouses—were in a serious predicament, facing punishment for either neglect of familial duty or for the sin of associating with an excommunicant. Quoniam multos, however, failed to address whether or not an individual should be allowed to marry after he or she has been excommunicated. This issue was the subject of debate among canonists because the Church could not perform marriages for excommunicants because they were barred from the sacraments. However, the Church also wished to prevent the greater sin of fornication and clandestine marriage. Vodola speculates that though not officially sanctioned by the Church, marriages were still probably performed for major and minor excommunicants.136

Quoniam multos also compelled servants and wage earners to continue to communicate with and perform contracted work for an excommunicated employer.

Feudal obligations, however, were suspended by the Consuetudines feudorum, which released vassals from fighting for, aiding, defending, sending arms to, paying court to, visiting, traveling, lodging, eating, drinking, or conversing with an excommunicated lord.137 In theory, this decree should have been an effective weapon against

136 Quoniam multos also protected children conceived after one or both parents were excommunicated and allowed them to inherit the estate upon the death of excommunicated parent(s). Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 65-67. 137 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 67-69. 60

contumacious feudal lords, as it could severely undermine their power; however, in practice Consuetudines feudorum was often ignored—especially in times of war.

All penalties imposed by excommunication were immediately removed when the

Church absolved a sinner. With the exception of a few cases, where the sentence of excommunication was set for a fixed period of time, major excommunication could be removed formally in court by the judge who imposed the sentence and minor excommunication could be removed in church by a confessor, priest, or bishop.138 Other less formal methods of removing excommunication involved being addressed publicly by the priest or bishop who inflicted the sentence, or by receiving a papal kiss. These less conventional methods signaled to the public that the excommunicant had been forgiven and the sentence removed.139 Though the practice of excommunication is still very much in effect today, as time has advanced and institutional punishments have become more internalized, guilt has replaced shame140 and, as a result, this ecclesiastical punishment does not seem to carry the same weight as it once did. Though the Church still uses the penalty of exclusion in order “cure” a wayward soul, the medicinal value now resides entirely in an excommunicant’s sense of guilt, relocating the spiritual struggle to the more private realm of conscience, rather than relying on the power of

138 Boudinhon, “Excommunication,” accessed July 4, 2015. . 139 The papal kiss, “often specified as an act forbidden to excommunicants, was an important medieval symbol of incorporation…the kiss might also have stood for feudal relationships, since it accompanies the ceremony of homage that sealed the bond between vassal and lord.” Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 50-53. 140 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York Vintage Books, 1979). 61

communal shame to push an excommunicant to repentance. In the Middle Ages, excommunication was not only a way of distributing punishment and control among the

Christian community, but it was also a means of distributing the responsibility for the salvation of each and every soul. Sin, redemption, and salvation was very much a communal responsibility.

Carceral Spaces (Un)Bound: Space, Place, and Mobility in Medieval English

Prisons

The openness, centrality, and visibility of prisons, gaols, and other places of physical detention and punishment in the Middle Ages extended the boundaries of communal responsibility; and as with the Church’s treatment of spiritual transgressors, those who had broken the law were never exiled, but remained very much a part of the community.141 This section provides a brief overview of the prison system in pre-and post-Conquest England and explores how prisoners functioned within carceral spaces as well as in their respective communities. This section will also lay the groundwork for connections I will establish in later chapters between Purgatory and prison spaces as they developed in tandem in the Middle Ages.

Given the scarcity of written records and the lack of surviving carceral structures from this time period, it is sometimes difficult to put together a salient historical narrative about incarceration in pre- and post-Conquest England. Ralph Pugh found that

141 Guy Geltner, “Social Deviancy: A Medieval Approach,” Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, eds. Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, Amy G. Remensnyder (New York: Routledge, 2012), 38. 62

when writing his seminal 1968 work on medieval English imprisonment, it was necessary at times to piece together sources which were “widely scattered and only partially relevant.”142 The Anglo-Saxon period does, however, provide us with a surprising amount of information about early legal codes as they existed during the reigns of various kings. It is, of course, difficult to determine how or to what extent these laws were actually put into practice in towns and villages, and what steps, if any, the king took to enforce his laws at the local level.

Levi Roach, who analyzes the role of written royal law codes in Anglo-Saxon legal culture (and focusing mainly on Æthelstan’s laws), refutes Patrick Wormald’s assertion that kings considered the written codification of law to be “little more than informal and often idiosyncratic efforts to enshrine oral decrees in writing...(and) the act of law-making presented the king in a uniquely royal (and indeed imperial) fashion, in the mould of Moses, Solomon and the Roman emperors of antiquity.”143 Roach contends that the king’s written ordinances did indeed carry weight and that royal authorities went to great lengths to disseminate the king’s oral proclamations to local governments after setting them down in writing. This, however, did not preclude local authorities from drafting by-laws to supplement royal ordinances. Roach points out that the Anglo-Saxon law-making system was quite flexible and “what was considered important was the gist of royal pronouncements and not their precise wording, and therefore local authorities

142 R.B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 384. 143 Levi Roach, “Law Codes and Legal Norms in Later Anglo-Saxon England,” Historical Research no. 86 (2013): 465. 63

were welcome to adapt, update and even add to Æthelstan’s ordinances, so long as they remained true to their spirit.”144 Roach observes that in many instances it is difficult to distinguish the laws drafted by the king from those created by local governing bodies, indicating that local laws and royal decrees were on an equal footing.145 The supplementation of royal decree by local by-laws, therefore, seems to confirm that royal law codes were not simply set aside or ignored; however, the question of how such laws were put into practice locally still remains.

Extant legal records reflect a system that was in a constant state of flux prior to the Norman Conquest. Laws were significantly revised under each successive king to the extent that crimes which earned a fine in the reign of one king could result in the death penalty under another. The law also never distinguished between civil and criminal matters.146 The codes drafted by King Æthelberht of Kent around the time of his conversion to Christianity in 597, for example, addressed both criminal and civil offences by issuing punitive fines. Those who defaulted on contracts or caused property damage under King Æthelberht paid only a slightly lower fine than those who committed theft, rape, and murder.147 Approximately a century later, King Wihtred of Kent (c. 670-

725) revised the code to include the death penalty as an option for the crime of theft: chapters 26-27 of Wihtred’s law code state that if a freeman or a slave is caught stealing,

“se cyning ðreora anes; oððe hine man cwelle oþþe ofer sæ selle oþþe hine his wergelde

144 Roach, “Law Codes and Legal Norms in Later Anglo-Saxon England,” 477. 145 Roach, “Law Codes and Legal Norms in Later Anglo-Saxon England,” 477, 481. 146 Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 89. 147 Lisi Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 8-14. 64

alese.” [the king may decide which of the following three courses shall be adopted— whether he shall be put to death, or sold beyond the sea, or held to ransom for his wergeld.]148 The death penalty is also mentioned in the law codes of King Ine of Wessex

(c. 670-726) in connection with anyone who “gefeohte on cyninges huse” [fights in the house of the king].149 In this time period the death penalty was inflicted more often for the crime of theft than for any other offence, including homicide. King Æthelstan (894-

939) was especially aggressive in trying to eradicate theft because he saw it as a direct threat to his power, particularly his ability as king to maintain order, safety, and peace.150

II Æthelstan chapter 1 states: “Ærest þæt mon ne sparige nænne þeof þe æt hæbbendre honda gefongen sy ofer XII winter 7 ofer eahta peningas.” [First, no thief shall be spared, who is seized in the act, if he is over twelve years old and if [the value of the stolen goods] is more than eight pence.]151 Lambert explains that Æthelstan equated theft with oath-breaking and treason, as all subjects at the age of twelve were expected to take an oath to refrain from committing acts of treason and disloyalty against the king or his subjects.152

Assault and homicide, on the other hand, were treated with what may seem at first glance to be greater leniency, allowing the guilty party to pay a wergild to the victim’s family in an amount equal to the value of the victim’s life, in the case of

148 F.L. Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922) 28-31. 149 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 39. 150 T.B. Lambert, “Theft, Homicide and Crime in Late Anglo-Saxon Law,” Past & Present 214 (2012): 15. 151 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 126-127. 152 Lambert, “Theft, Homicide and Crime in Late Anglo-Saxon Law,” 16. 65

murder; or to the victim himself in an amount equal to the value of any damaged body part(s), in the case of bodily injury.153 Wergild payments were scaled according to status so that a murdered thegn’s wergild was 1,200 shillings and a common ceorl’s was only

200 shillings, values which Lambert states “are present throughout the West Saxon legal corpus, remaining unchanged from Ine’s reign to that of Cnut.154 A person convicted of homicide was also liable for payment to the victim’s lord (manbot fine) and king

(fihtwite fine) in addition to the wergild. All payments were status-dependent, the wergild being the largest, followed by the fihtwite and then the manbot. Lambert states:

“the best-case scenario for criminality involves the killing of an ordinary freeman with a wergild of 200 shillings and a manbot of 30; the king’s fihtwite of 120 shillings…”155

Given the value of a shilling in the Anglo-Saxon period, however, all fines were punitive regardless of the rank of the victim.156 In an age when a sheep was valued at 1 shilling

153 Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law, 37-39, 195-198. Alfred’s sequencing of personal injury laws is based on the list that Æthelberht compiled 300 years earlier. Alfred’s penalties are listed in two sections: the first section is top to bottom: “head, ear, eye, nose, tooth, cheek, jaw, windpipe, tongue, shoulder, arm, arm bone, thumb, nail, shooting finger, middle finger, gold finger, little finger, stomach, thigh, shank, big toe, second toe, middle toe, and little toe”; and the second section, according to Oliver, seems to be a random compilation: “scrotum, lower arm, visible wound, loins, shoulder, hand, rib, skin-break, eye/hand/foot, calf, shoulders, ‘large’ sinew, ‘small’ sinew, and spine.” Personal injury laws scaled fines according to the importance of the area of the body injured. In Æthelberht’s reign, for example, an offender could be fined 10 sceattas, or half of a shilling, for a minor injury, such as striking off a toenail and 20 to 50 shillings for serious injuries, such as fracturing a skull or putting out the eye of a low-rank freedman. The penalties went up for each injured body part according to the rank of the injured party. Putting out the eye of a first rank freedman, for instance, cost 80 shillings and could be as much as 100 shillings for a freeman or woman. The most expensive fine, however, was inflicted for castration and cost the offender as much as 3 wergilds. 154 Lambert, “Theft, Homicide and Crime in Late Anglo-Saxon Law,” 18. 155 Lambert, “Theft, Homicide and Crime in Late Anglo-Saxon Law,” 20. 156 One of the earliest forms of currency was the sceatta, a small coin, which according to Oliver was equal to a “unit of gold whose weight equaled that of a grain of barely corn.” Under King Æthelberht, a shilling was equal to 20 sceattas and remained in use until around the eighth century, when it was phased out by the penny. See Oliver 83. The penny and the pound were adopted by as main units of currency in Mercia under King Offa (c. 730 – 796) and were eventually used throughout the land shortly thereafter. It is 66

and a slave was worth 20 shillings it would have been cost prohibitive to take any life— especially for the poor since fines were not scaled to income level but to the value of the person injured or killed.

Mutilation, outlawry, exile, and in rare cases, incarceration were other forms of punishment inflicted for various crimes in this period, which continued into the post-

Conquest era. Pugh defines three different types of incarceration:

Imprisonment in England has no connected history before the end of the twelfth century. Its origins, however, are antique and certainly stretch back before the days of Alfred…Imprisonment may be analysed according to the object which it is designed to serve: to hold the prisoner until he can be tried, to punish him after he has been convicted, or to make life so unpleasant for him that he yields to his captor’s will. In the first case it will be custodial, in the second punitive, and in the third coercive. The three types tend to merge and in the Middle Ages were never clearly kept apart. ”157

Pugh states that mutilation, fines, exile, and death were more commonly practiced than imprisonment. Of the three types of incarceration, however, custodial is the oldest and

difficult, of course, to pinpoint the exact value of a pound, shilling, or penny in this time period as the relative values of silver and gold on which currency was based changed rapidly; however, around the eighth century, it appears that 1 pound was equal to 20 shillings, 1 shilling was equal to 12 pence, and 1 mancus equaled 30 pence. See Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 201, 214 and Ronald Edward Zupko, British Weights and Measures: A History from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 11. Each king revised existing law codes and introduced different punitive fines according to the shifting values of material property. In the reign of Ine a sheep was worth 1 shilling (chapter 55); under Æthelstan a slave was worth 1 pound, a horse was a half- pound, a sheep was 1 shilling, an ox was 1 mancus, a cow was 20 pence, and a pig was 10 pence (part VI, chapter 6, § 1-2). See Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 55, 161. Under King Æthelred (c. 966-1016) a slave was worth 1 pound, a horse was 30 shillings, a mare or colt was 20 shillings, a mule was 12 shillings, an ox was 6 shillings, a cow was 5 shillings, a swine was 1 shilling and 3 pennies, a sheep was 1 shilling, and a goat was 2 pennies. Craik, George L. Craik, The Pictorial History of England: Being a History of the People, as Well as a History of the Kingdom, vol. 2 (London: W and R Chambers, 1855), 262. 157 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 1. 67

most common form and relied chiefly on the Sheriff’s authority—as the prisoner was his responsibility from the moment of arrest to the time the accused was brought to trial.158

Coercive imprisonment, which was at first reserved for those who had outstanding debts to the crown, was then extended to contumacious excommunicants in order to urge wayward souls to repent.159 As previously discussed, debt cases comprised the majority of the excommunication lawsuits, so that in many instances, debtors and contumacious excommunicants were one and the same. In 1236 the Statute of Merton introduced a new form of coercive incarceration, punishing those who abducted heirs under the age of fourteen in order to marry them off for personal gain.160 It was not long before coercive imprisonment was extended yet further to punish anyone who failed to satisfy what Pugh calls a “the technical requirement of the law,” such as those who provided false evidence in court, challenged or sabotaged judicial decisions, failed to appear in court, failed to follow through with an appeal or lawsuit once filed, or forged documents, among other offences.161 Coercive prison sentences were of an indefinite length and usually ended with a fine, ransom payment, or the performance of a desired act.162

In many instances the line between coercive and penal imprisonment remained unclear. Pugh argues that imprisonment was probably coercive if a sentence could be brought to an end by payment or the performance of a specific duty, and was penal if the

158 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 2-3. 159 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 5-9. 160 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 8. 161 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 8-13. 162 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 14-15. 68

sentence was set for a fixed term. There are only a few references to penal, coercive, and custodial imprisonment in the Anglo-Saxon Law Codes. The earliest legislation concerning punitive imprisonment is found in King Alfred’s law code, chapter 1, § 2 and

§ 6:

“§ 2. Gif he þonne þæs weddige þe him riht sie to gelæstanne 7 þæt aleoge, selle mid eaðmedum his wæpn 7 his æhta his freondum to gehealdanne 7 beo feowertig nihta on carcerne on cyninges tune, ðrowige ðær swa biscep him scrife, 7 his mægas hine feden, gif he self mete næbbe. § 6. Gif he ut oðfleo ær þam fierste, 7 hine mon gefo, sie he feowertig nihta on cercerne, swa he ær sceolde.”

[§ 2. If, however, he pledges himself to something which it is lawful to carry out and proves false to his pledge, he shall humbly give his weapons and possessions to his friends to keep, and remain 40 days in prison at a royal manor, and undergo there whatever [sentence] the bishop prescribes for him; and his relatives shall feed him if he himself has no food. § 6. If the man runs away before the term [of imprisonment is completed] and is recaptured, he shall remain in prison 40 days, as he ought to have done at first.]163

The second reference to incarceration occurs in chapter 3 of the law codes of King

Edward and Danish King Guthrum (c. 885), which sentence men of orders to serve an unspecified amount of time in prison if convicted of adultery, fighting, stealing, or perjury and if they are unable to provide a surety for punitive fines charged for said crimes.164

Æthelstan’s (924-927) and Cnut’s (985-995) law codes concerning imprisonment are also closely tied to surety, but appear to be coercive as well as punitive. Certain crimes of theft, for instance, were punishable by imprisonment for no less than 40 days.

163 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 62-65. 164 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 103. 69

Release from prison, however, depended upon a payment of 120 shillings and a promise from the relatives of the convict that they would stand surety in the amount of the convict’s wergild against further theft. Repeat offenders would forfeit their relatives’ surety or return to prison for an unspecified amount of time (II Æthelstan chapter 1, § 3-

4).165 Witchcraft and sorcery that resulted in homicide was punishable by 120 days in prison, a 120-shilling payment to the king upon release, a wergild payment to the victim’s family, and a guarantee of surety from the convict’s relatives that he would not repeat the crime (II Æthelstan, chapter 6, § 1).166 Æthelstan’s laws concerning theft are later modified to exclude the death penalty for persons under the age of 15, on the grounds that putting someone so young to death would be an act of cruelty. If a thief under the age of 15 does not resist arrest or try to escape from custody, then he may go to prison until he pays a wergild. If no prison is available, his relatives are to stand surety for him in the amount of his wergild to ensure that he will not commit another crime. In the absence of both prison and relatives willing to stand surety, the young offender must swear that he will refrain from committing further crimes and will remain in bondage until he pays a wergild. Repeat offenders, regardless of age, are to be put to death (VI

Æthelstan chapter 12, § 1-2).167 King Cnut also used imprisonment as a coercive measure, adding that if a man without friends or supporters “þæt he borh næbbe, æt frumtyhtlan ðonne gebuge he hengene 7 ðær gebide, oð þæt he ga to Godes ordale 7

165 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 127-129. 166 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 131. 167 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 169. 70

gefare ðær þæt he mæge.” [as not to be able to produce a surety, on the first occasion that he is accused he shall go to prison, and wait there until he goes to God’s ordeal where he shall experience whatever he can.]168

Generally, most penalties involved fines, death, mutilation, outlawry, or exile, but rarely prison.169 Unfortunately, the few references to imprisonment in the Anglo-

Saxon period do not provide us with any information about what prisons or gaols were actually like or where they were located. We know that in some instances there were no prisons or gaols to house offenders and the law had to compensate for this lack with surety allowances. Although we do not have very much information about prisons or incarceration in the Anglo-Saxon period, it is noteworthy that incarceration—including punitive imprisonment—did exist outside of the Church.

By the thirteenth century penal incarceration, which had long been an integral part of the ecclesiastical system of discipline, had become an important part of the secular legal system as well. According to R.B. Pugh

Throughout the Middle Ages the church imprisoned both the secular and the regular clergy. In the early thirteenth century it also imposed it on laymen as well…Penitential literature had early recognized that forced confinement could furnish opportunities for reflection upon past misdeeds and a change of heart, and

168 A.J. Robertson, The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I (Cambridge: The University Press, 1925), 195. 169 It should be noted here that hostage-taking, which can be considered another form of imprisonment, was an ancient practice that was common in both the pre- and post-Conquest England. According to Ryan Lavelle, the practice was custodial and generally occurred when two leaders of equal status voluntarily handed over members of their own community as a means of ensuring peace agreements. Certain hostages were treated very well and allowed great freedom, while others were treated poorly and confined to keeps or dungeons. The practice varied greatly. Agreements involving hostages were, for the most part, temporary and ended when one or both sides either released or killed their hostages. Mutilation was also sometimes practiced, but as a means to demonstrate “power without breaking the hostage agreement” (292-295). See Ryan Lavelle, “The Use and Abuse of Hostages in Later Anglo-Saxon England” Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006): 269-296. 71

this seems at least sometimes to have been the motive for imprisoning monks and nuns. The same philosophy may have underlain the penal imprisonments of pre- Conquest times. While ecclesiastical influence in such matters, so far probably lessened from the beginning of the twelfth century, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a strong tradition survived that prison was a good and proper punishment.170

Subject to ecumenical laws, priests, monks, friars, and nuns were punished by being confined to a carcer—or a small cell converted for temporary detention for a few days to three years for various transgressions, including disobedience. In many instances, disobedient clergy were detained in the infirmary. Pugh argues that sin was viewed as a spiritual sickness that could be treated in the same manner as a sick body: “For the sick in body the cloister made provision, and it was not unreasonable to make parallel provision for the sick in soul. The geographical and administrative association in some monasteries of the prison and infirmary is an outward demonstration of this attitude.”171

Imprisonment, in a religious context, was seen as curative and a means of bringing a transgressor back to a better way of life. Although prescriptive texts provide little information about how monastic incarceration was put into practice, we do know that it was modeled on the “penitential life, including solitude, long fasts, and prayers.”172

The concept of prison as a purgative space spread to the secular penal system as punitive incarceration became more widely practiced. Pugh states that Baulk House in

Winchester High Street was the first true prison and primarily housed thieves. He is not

170 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 17-18. 171 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 374-382. 172 Geltner, “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory,” 262. 72

sure whether it existed in the pre-Conquest era, but it was shut down by 1115.173 Baulk

House was soon joined by other county gaols, which eventually developed into one of the earliest systems of incarceration in England and served as a model for later prison systems. Each county had a sheriff, whose responsibility it was to manage and maintain its gaol and inmates. The county gaol system, which had disappeared by 1878, utilized converted rooms in castles or government buildings to house convicts. Many of these makeshift penal spaces are no longer standing.174

By the late thirteenth century, the prison system also included franchise and municipal prisons which were owned by secular lords, ecclesiastics, or boroughs, and operated under the authority of the king.175 Because the early prison system was largely unregulated, lords and ecclesiastics were allowed to imprison people freely in stocks, converted rooms in houses, castles, or monasteries for any reason and for any amount of time they thought appropriate. Furthermore, the records documenting incarceration in the early Middle Ages were not specific about whether an inmate was housed in a county, municipal, or franchise prison.176 As stricter regulations were put into place, the power to arrest and detain individuals was reserved for those who could afford to put offenders on trial or to deliver them to another location to be tried within a reasonable time. Small franchise prisons were eventually either shut down or converted to municipal prisons, so that by the fourteenth century most franchise prisons had been

173 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 57. 174 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 57-86. 175 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 87. 176 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 88-97. 73

replaced by Newgate and the Fleet in London, two of the greatest municipal prisons of their time.177

Newgate was the main prison in the city of London, located on Newgate Street and Old Bailey, it was built in 1188, rebuilt and renovated over the course of several years, and eventually demolished in 1902.178 Newgate housed those who committed the most serious crimes—felonies or treason. Although it mainly served a custodial function—detaining those who were awaiting trial (and in many cases) execution—it was also a place of punitive imprisonment for debtors and other convicts whose sentences “ranged from a few days to a year and a day.”179 The Fleet, which was located near the River Fleet in London, was established in 1197, destroyed and rebuilt several times over the years, and eventually demolished in 1846.180 The Fleet mainly housed debtors, who usually became long-term inmates due to their inability to become solvent while incarcerated.181 Life in the Fleet, which was similar in size and importance to

Newgate, was easier for inmates “because it was ‘the King’s owne proper prison next in

177 The following is a list of municipal prisons, which had been erected by 1250: Winchester, Southampton (1182-3), Newgate (1188), Preston (1200), Great Yarmouth (1213), Kingston upon Thames (1220), Gloucester (1221), Cambridge (1224), Oxford and Worcester (1231), Farringdon (1238), Oxford (1244), Wilton (1249), York (1248), Winchelsea (1200), King’s Lynn (1212), and The Fleet (1196-97)—although it was not always a municipal prison. For more information about this list of prisons, see Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 98, 114. 178 Margery Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Academy of America 18, no. 2 (1943): 233. 179 Margery Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” 233. 180 Walter Thornbury, “The Fleet Prison,” in Old and New London: Volume 2 (London: 1878). http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol2/pp404-416. 181 Thornbury, “The Fleet Prison,” http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol2/pp404-416. 74

trust to his Tower of London.”182 A more comfortable stay, of course, also meant more expenses for prisoners housed there.

As the prison system in England developed and expanded over time, individual prisons became specialized, with different prisons serving different criminal populations.

Whereas Newgate was reserved for the worst criminals, the Fleet held mainly those convicted of minor crimes. Three other prisons are also worth noting here: 1) Marshalsea

(established in 1373 and closed in 1842) was located in Southwark and housed the poorest debtors, those who were charged with sedition, and those who committed crimes at sea; 2) Ludgate (established in 1215 and closed in 1765) was located near the London

Wall and held “freeman of the City of London confined for debt, trespass, contempt and other more minor offences”; 3) and the Tower of London (founded in 1066) housed felons, political prisoners, noblemen, and princes.183 According to Pugh, because the

Tower was the most heavily-fortified prison and closest to the King’s person, it was the most secure and, therefore, the most desirable place for prisoners of every type. The accommodations for state prisoners, prisoners of war, princes, and the nobility were spacious and relatively clean. For other minor criminals, the Tower was an honorable and comparatively comfortable alternative to Newgate. The Tower was a place of imprisonment for Jews as well, since they were considered wards of the sovereign and needed to be housed near his or her person.184

182 Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” 246. 183 Graham S. McBain, “Modernising the Law on Escape, Prison Breach & Rescue,” Review of European Studies 6, no. 4 (2014): 157. 184 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 122-124. 75

Once convicts were sorted into different prisons based on kind and degree of crime committed, they were further segregated within prisons according to class, gender, economic status, ethnicity, and whether the crime for which they were convicted was considered “heavy” or “light.” In Newgate, for example, inmates were divided into three categories: 1) freemen of the city and citizens; 2) foreigners and people of inferior rank or economic standing (who could not pay for good accommodations); 3) felons and those suspected of great crimes, who were assigned to cells in the basement.185 There was also an effort to separate women from the general population in prison. Although information about the detention of female offenders is scant, extant records reveal that

Newgate, York, Oxford, and Maidstone were among the first major prisons that provided a separate room (or in the case of Newgate, a separate stone tower) for female inmates.186

Separate accommodations for female inmates, however, did not guarantee comfort and safety. Women in Newgate were initially confined to a room that was too small for their number that did not have a restroom, forcing them to go through a particularly rough section of the men’s prison, called the “Bocardo,” in order to use the facilities.187 Many of the smaller prisons were not subdivided and often forced inmates into a single, cramped space. Prison spaces were for the most part dark, putrid, malodorous, overcrowded, and disease-ridden. Pugh states that although in the late

185 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 352-355. 186 Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” 239; and Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 357-358. 187 Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” 239. 76

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries some efforts were made to improve conditions, the leading cause of disease in prisons continued to be the impurity of drinking water, caused by the lack of proper drainage and by the contamination of the water supply by nearby industrial runoff.188

As for the prison structures themselves, Pugh states that the “visualization of a medieval prison would be much eased if we knew more than we do about the size of prison populations.”189 Given the lack of information about prison structures (as many were destroyed and rebuilt over the course of their existence) and the fluctuation of prison populations all over England, it is difficult to reconstruct the day-to-day life of a prisoner in the medieval penal system. We do know that, aside from disease, the most difficult aspect of medieval imprisonment was boredom and the slow passage of time.

Guy Geltner states: “Broadly speaking, these men, women, and (occasionally) children had scarce access to either labour or formal programming. Their diversions, moreover, were scarce: reading material was hard to come by, space for recreational activities limited, alcohol mostly prohibited, drugs were nonexistent, and prostitutes rare.

Financial and legal aﬀairs could occupy some of a prisoner’s time, but these would soon

188 Pugh points out that in 1354, disease spread among the prisoners of the Fleet because nearby butchers “deposited the entrails of slaughtered cattle upon an adjacent wharf, and in 1356 because some Londoners, without authority, had established tanneries and latrines upon the banks of the surrounding ditch. Likewise, in 1441 the prisoners in Ludgate were exposed to risk because a joiner tried to stop the efflux of Ludgate gaol into the city ditch on the north side of the prison.” Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 331-333. 189 Pugh postulates that early gaols were made out of wood and that the Fleet, which was a purpose-built prison, was made out of stone. Newgate, in its first few incarnations was probably made of wood, as were prison cells in castles. Additionally, all prisons possessed irons, fetters, or stocks to further restrict the movement of certain prisoners. See Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 347-349, 366, 370. 77

be ﬁnished and seldom guaranteed even an occasional leave.”190 The physical and mental strain of living in confined spaces, where there was little to do but endure the slow passage of time in overcrowded and disease-ridden cells amongst other desperate and demoralized prisoners seems to account for the high death rate. In this way, prison echoes Purgatory, whereby power structures are mapped onto time—causing a prolonged state of suffering which affects inmates physically and mentally. Geltner points out that in many cases, a one- or two-year prison sentence was a death sentence.

And for families of prisoners who were poor, even the shortest of prison sentences could result in financial ruin, as they were required to support the inmate for the duration of his or her internment.191

Prisoners were expected to pay various fees for their maintenance and upkeep, including intake or release fees, fees to remove irons or fetters, a cell fee, and fees for beds, bedding, food, ale, fuel, light, and other sundry items.192 Often, unscrupulous

190 Geltner, “Coping in Medieval Prisons,” 153. 191 Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, 57. 192 Pugh states that in the thirteenth century, gaolers (those hired by sheriffs or appointed by local lords to maintain gaols and guard inmates) received payment in the range of 5 pence to 10 ½ pence per week, depending on their location (165). In certain exceptional cases, in the fourteenth century, some gaolers took home as much as 4 pence per day (166). In addition to their regular wages, gaolers collected fees from prisoners—either on admission or on release (166-168). In 1444 a statute limited such fee collection to 4 pence per prisoner upon intake or on release (169). By 1488, however, certain prisons increased their fees to 8 pence for prisoners who committed minor crimes and 24 pence for those charged with felonies (170). Ludgate charged 8 pence per prisoner; Counters sent a limit at 4 pence; and Newgate charged 4 pence (170). Gaolers also charged prisoners rent for their prison cells and fees for other goods and services, such as “food, drink, fuel, light, beds, and bedding” (175). Records of such fees are scant; however, Pugh states that one gaoler in Norwich Guildhall charged prisoners as much as 3-4 pence for a gallon of ale in 1534, when the best ale on the market was being sold at 2 pence (176). Rates for basic upkeep in the average prison in East Anglia, for example, varied from 8 pence to 2 shillings per week (175). One record reflects that in 1468 a gaoler at King’s Bench prison charged a merchant 20 shillings per week (175). An additional fee charged to prisoners was the “ironing” fee for the removal of irons once a prisoner was delivered (177). Later regulations in the thirteenth century prohibited such fees being charged to freemen in prison who were convicted of lighter crimes (180). Ironing fees ranged anywhere from 5 78

gaolers tried to make up for their low wages by setting fees above market price for food and ale and pocketing the difference. Gaolers were also known to embezzle funds from grants, charitable donations, and from funds sent by friends and family members to prisoners. Although a small number of prisoners (mainly political prisoners, who were tried quickly) were maintained out of the Exchequer, the majority of the prisoners were required to pay fees for their upkeep out of personal funds, money from friends and family, private donations, posthumous bequests, or alms from the church. 193 Many did not have access to such resources and starved to death. In an age when the average income for a laborer was around 1 ½ pence per day and the average carpenter only made

2 ½ pence per day, then it would have been extremely difficult for a wage-earner or his/her family and friends to pay even the minimum fees charged for basic living expenses.194 Just as Purgatory inmates depended on alms and prayers to relieve their

pence to 5 pounds (179). By the late fourteenth century, limits were set for fees such that the rate for a bed was fixed at 1 ½ pence per night or 3 pence per week, and chamber rent was set at 1 pence per week for prisoners who supplied their own bed (191). Prisoners were also allowed to bring in their own food and ale (191). See Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 165-191. 193 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 319. 194 The following information about currency and wages in the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries is meant to provide some context for the expenses prisoners were expected assume upon internment, and to provide a better understanding of how financially devastating it would have been for an average wage- earner to be imprisoned for any amount of time. In this time period, 1 pound was equal to 20 shillings; 1 crown was equal to 5 shillings; 1 shilling was equal to 12 pence; 1 penny was equal to 4 farthings; 1 mark was equal to 13 shillings, 4 pence. For more information about English currency in the Middle Ages see Kenneth Hodges, “List of Price of Medieval Items,” accessed December 1, 2015. http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html. The following is a list of daily wages for various occupations from 1271 – 1400: 1271-1280: Thatcher 2 ½ pence; Thatcher’s apprentice 1 pence; 1301 – 1310: Thatcher 2 ½ pence; Thatcher’s apprentice 1 pence; Carpenter 2 ¾ pence; Laborer 1 ½ pence; Master Mason 5 pence; 1331 – 1340 Thatcher 3 pence; Thatcher’s apprentice 1 ¼ pence; Carpenter 3 pence; Laborer 1 ¾ pence; Master Mason 5 ½ pence; 1361-1370 Thatcher 3 ½ pence; Thatcher’s apprentice 2 pence; Carpenter 4 ½ pence; Laborer 3 ¼ pence; Master Mason 6 pence; 1391-1400 Thatcher 4 ¼ pence; Thatcher’s apprentice 2 ¾ pence; Carpenter 4 ½ pence; Laborer 3 ¼ pence; Master Mason 6 pence. For more information about daily wages in medieval England see Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); L.F. Salzman, Building 79

misery while they were confined, most prisoners were heavily dependent on their communities for their survival in prison.

Charitable donations came in the form of cash, clothing, and food items. To help supplement their income, gaolers allowed prisoners to beg for alms behind metal grates just outside of the prison walls, chained to posts or by wandering in the streets. This practice, which began sometime before the thirteenth century, became more regulated by the 1430s so that the wanderings of prisoners who took to the streets for alms was restricted to begging in certain areas and on certain days of the week.195 In 1431, for example, Newgate prisoners were only allowed to go out in two pairs at any given time.

One pair begged by the riverside, while the other begged in the city.196 Pugh states that in a very few instances, certain prisoners were allowed to ply their trade in the prison and to sell their work in the market in order to pay their prison expenses. Gaolers, of course, took a cut of all revenue earned, whether through begging or from trade.197

Exeats or leaves of absence were also granted to prisoners—mostly to debtors— in order to allow them time to either negotiate a settlement with their creditors or to conduct business and earn enough capital to make them solvent.198 Incredibly, exeats were also occasionally granted to prisoners so that they could celebrate holidays. Pugh states that in 1520, the aldermen of London allowed all Newgate prisoners out to

in England Down to 1540: A Documentary History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); J.L Bolton, The Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London: Cumbria, 1980). 195 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 328. 196 Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” 240. 197 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 330. 198 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 335-336. 80

celebrate Candlemas on condition that they return promptly to prison again.199 Bassett states that by the fourteenth century allowing visitors into prisons was no longer a privilege reserved for the few, but became common practice, as it served as another means of relief for prisoners.200 Over time, the Common Council instituted more regulations for the prison system that ensured better conditions, as gaolers were held more accountable, corruption was put in check, and the cost of maintaining prisoners was reduced. As a result, by the end of the Middle Ages, it was no longer necessary for prisoners to go out in such great number in order to beg for alms. In many cases, the task was delegated to penitential friars.201

Geltner and Pugh note that the placement of gaols and prisons in central and densely populated areas was a strategic move on the part of city planners and administrators as “Density of population would, it was thought, render escapes more difficult and would help to ensure the health of prisoners by the distribution of alms.”202

Geltner argues that until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prisons were almost exclusively located in the center of cities, which made them accessible to court officials, private creditors, lawyers, and ecclesiastics.203 The central location of prisons and gaols,

199 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 336-337. 200 Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” 245. Also Geltner notes in his article, “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory” that “many different people frequented these compounds: local magistrates and prosecutors, of course, but also priests, physicians, families, friends, charitable officials, business partners, and even prostitutes. Thus, medieval inmates were never fully cut off from surrounding society…” (263). 201 Geltner, “Coping in Medieval Prisons,” 153. 202 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 343. 203 Geltner, “Social Deviancy: A Medieval Approach,” 28. Also, for more information about urban planning and infrastructure from the tenth through the eighteenth centuries, see Barney Sloan, “Archaeological Evidence for the Infrastructure of the Medieval City of London,” Lobecker Kolloquium zur Stadtarchaologie im Hanseraum. IV, Die Infrastruktur, (2004): 87-96. Archaeological evidence 81

the relatively short prison terms, the allowances granted to prisoners to go out into the world to beg for alms, conduct business, or to attend mass, all enabled the rehabilitation of prisoners and facilitated their eventual integration back into their respective communities. In this way, medieval prisons resembled Purgatory in structure and function. The boundaries of these punitive spaces were permeable in order to allow for contact between inmates and the outside world and eventual reintegration upon release.

A strong association between purgation and incarceration developed in the early

Christian tradition as a response to Roman persecution.204 Geltner asserts that “prison’s martyrological pedigree fit uncomfortably with the use of incarceration by secular lords and the clergy’s involvement in the administration of prisons in the post-Constantinian era. Once the Roman Empire legitimized Christianity and finally adopted it as the state religion, bishops and deacons assumed paralegal responsibilities over monitoring prison conditions, albeit this time as imperial officials…use of imprisonment for laymen and the church’s complicity in the implementation came under criticism.”205 The Church, which in Late Antiquity was a small persecuted group, had to redefine itself once it was legitimized and became a large institution that served king and country. Whereas prison spaces in saints’ narratives of Late Antiquity were sites of encounter, violent conflict, and spiritual transformation for holy men and women, early Christian theologians, such as Tertullian, refashioned that concept, associating prisons with Christian asceticism,

supports Geltner’s and Pugh’s observations about the placement of medieval prisons in the most densely- populated sections of the city. 204 Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, 83-84. 205 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 86. 82

penitence, and reflection. In redefining suffering, the Church shifted from a model of

“red martyrdom” to “white martyrdom.”206 In early Christian literature, therefore, prisons became places of spiritual transformation through penitence and purgation, rather than through violent conflict. As stated in the previous chapter, the concept of

Purgatory became defined in the thirteenth century as a as a spiritual prison, in imitation of the ecclesiastical prison system; and the secular prison system, that developed later, attempted to fashion itself as an earthly Purgatory.207 The strong association between prison and purgation reinforced the concept of Purgatory as a divine prison and played an important role in the “economy of salvation.”208

Before the Reformation, in both prison and Purgatory inmates were marginal figures who occupied the center of each community’s social, economic, and spiritual landscape. Schmitt states:

From the year 1000 to the eighteenth century, the proximity of the space of the living to the space of the dead was a major feature of the history of traditional societies and mentalities of Europe. At the end of the ancient regime, the cemeteries of the cities were emptied of their bones and were relocated to the outskirts of the cities. Cemeteries sometimes preceded the establishment of the village. The dead grouped the living around them…concentric circles as can still be seen in so many European villages…Beyond the cemetery extended the rest of the village and even farther, following the classic opposition of the ager and the saltus the cultivated land bordered by a forest. Between the church and the village, the cemetery was therefore an intermediary place, and it played a mediating role.209

206 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 82, 89. 207 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 90. 208 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 88. 209 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 182-183. 83

After the Reformation, however, the dead were being moved to the edges of the community. Although practical reasons—such as overcrowding, contamination, and disease—necessitated the relocation of the dead from center to margin, shifting religious values and increased secularization in the eighteenth century made the move easier to accept.

Over time, prisons were also moved to the outskirts of cities and villages. Geltner states that the prison’s image as a place of purgation and penance was undermined by

“increasing recourse to incarceration in the secular world,” eventually causing imprisonment to be “redefined on a civic register.”210 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the association between prison spaces and Purgatory had all but disappeared.

Both groups—prisoners and the marginal dead—had disappeared from the community.

The expulsion of these marginal figures from center to periphery in the centuries following the Reformation effected a state of permanent exclusion and invisibility from which they have never recovered.

210 Geltner, “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory,” 265. 84

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CHAPTER III

OTHERWORLDY PRISONERS: VISIONS, GHOSTS, REVENTANTS, AND LIMBO

BABIES

Post-mortem punishment as a means of redemption is best explored by focusing on the figure of the ghost in medieval religious culture. Although ghosts are a cultural universal, their particular manifestations in literature in the Middle Ages are characterized by the ways in which the living imagined the afterlife and how they articulated their relationship to the dead through the discourse of Purgatory. This relationship was reciprocal and was predicated upon the belief that the majority of the

Christian dead did not go to Heaven or Hell, but went to Purgatory in order to atone for their sins; and that their suffering in this middle place (or state, before Purgatory became a fixed location in the twelfth century) was mitigated by the efforts of the living. Every good Christian with a healthy pulse was obligated to ease the suffering of those who languished in Purgatory through intercessory prayer, masses, and almsgiving. It was understood that assisting the dead in Purgatory in this way resulted in an alleviation of post-mortem suffering for those who provided spiritual aid. Graveyards and churches were the preferred haunts of the recently dead; however, they also appeared to the living in the places where they committed their worst sins. When and how often ghosts appeared, what form they took, and what they were allowed to reveal to the living about themselves and their condition in the afterlife were delimited by their function as

exemplary figures that the Church used to promulgate doctrine in medieval religious culture.

Medieval ghost stories adapted “to social evolutions… [and] became the instruments of an ecclesiastical policy of moral and religious indoctrination.”1 Jean-

Claude Schmitt calls ghosts “cogs” in an economic machine fueled by the fear of

Purgatory and the selling of indulgences in late Middle Ages.2 The form and function of these “cogs” are indeed patterned on ecclesiastical doctrine and are a kind of propaganda3 for the Church, whose success in promoting such ideas was a result of effective modes of presentation and dissemination through homilies, sermons, poetry, music, dream vision literature, and ghost stories. Ghosts in medieval stories, unlike their pre-Gregorian predecessors, who appeared to the living in order to predict the future, provide helpful information to loved ones, seek revenge, justice, or even reburial, appeared mainly to ask for help from the living in mitigating their suffering in Purgatory.

The early Christian Church initially discouraged belief in purgatorial apparitions.

Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 AD), whom Jacques Le Goff calls the “Father of

Purgatory,” argued in De Cura pro Mortuis, that the spirits of the dead have no reason to concern themselves with the living and those who claim to have had encounters with ghosts were really seeing images of the dead (or imago), rather than real ghostly apparitions. Augustine argued that these images were presented to the minds of dreamers

1 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 77, 156. 2 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 179. 3 C.A. Hosterman, “Teaching Propaganda,” Communication Education, 30 (1981): 157-158. 93

and visionaries by good and evil angels.4 Although he promoted the idea of an interim space of cleansing punishment between Heaven and Hell, he discouraged the idea of purgatorial ghosts. Later theologians, however, disregarded Augustine’s ideas and affirmed that the souls of the departed not only visited the living, but had a kind of material existence that made them vulnerable to corporeal pain.5 Pope Gregory the Great

(540-604 AD) elaborated on these points in Book IV of the Dialogues by including a number of ghost stories that illustrated the importance of prayer, masses, and almsgiving for the salvation of the dead and an easement of their suffering.6 Gregory’s influence and the development of the Office of the Dead in the ninth century set the groundwork for

“the entire apparatus—institution, liturgical, narrative…St. Augustine’s hesitations regarding apparitions of the dead, reservations expressed five centuries earlier, were now definitely discarded. It was henceforth admitted that the dead could indeed appear to the living, such to the benefit of both groups.”7 Theologians revised Augustine’s perspective because ghost stories offered the theologians a means of earthly control. By the ninth century, stories about purgatorial ghosts and their places of punishment began to flourish.

4 Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Saint Austins care for the dead, or His book De curâ pro mortuis: translated into English. The second edition, revised and corrected. n.p.: [London?] : [publisher not identified], 1651. 5 Scott G. Bruce, ed., The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (New York: Penguin, 2016), 55. 6 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, Book IV, trans., Edmund G Gardner (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1911), 177-258. 7 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 34. The Office of the Dead is a set of prayers in the Catholic Church’s Divine Office that are recited for individuals who had passed on, or read more generally on All Souls’ Day for all of the deceased. The prayer cycle is closely connected with Purgatory. 94

This chapter explores stories about the dead in Purgatory that fall into two broad categories. The first involves the dead travelling out of their otherworldly spaces to visit the living in public social settings at appointed times. Schmitt indicates that these encounters were usually conscious visions that involved more than one witness, making these tales a social object that was diffused “within the social space in which it was intended to circulate and in some cases to become a means of political propaganda.”8

The second category includes visions of the otherworld, where a person enters a dreamlike state in order to visit the dead in their spaces of reward or punishment.

Whereas waking visions of ghostly visitors were public and verifiable, otherworld visions were private and individual, and therefore, at greater risk of being subject to diabolical trickery. Their credibility as divinely-inspired, rather than diabolical, relied entirely on the authority of the dreamer.9

Narratives that featured ghostly visitations or visions of the other world have been further defined by scholars by their content and form as either mirabilia, miracula, or exempla. Mirabilia were accounts of supernatural events that inspired fear, curiosity, or delight and seemed to have served a purely diversionary function. Miracula also included fantastical elements, but were connected to specific persons or places and were meant to enhance the reputation of their subjects. Exempla were different from miracula in that they were not connected to specific persons or places, but “derived a moral lesson

8 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 47. 9 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 47, 129. 95

from the reported event, which was understood to be a universal occurrence.”10

Although there is a great deal of overlap between these three categories, only miracula and exempla were connected with purgatorial apparitions. The first section of this chapter examines Anglo-Saxon purgatorial narratives, which are few in number and describe a middle state of punishment between death and Judgment Day in vague terms.

The second and third sections of the chapter shift focus to post-Conquest narratives in

Middle English that feature both ghosts who are temporarily liberated from their otherworldly prisons in order to visit the world of the living; and living visionaries who venture into Purgatory to visit the dead.

The texts selected for this chapter were popular supernatural narratives that circulated widely in their time and were representative of what the Church promoted as official doctrine with respect to Purgatory, penance, and salvation. The selected stories are points on a spectrum that mark a change not only in the way Purgatory was imagined over time, but in how the Church’s role as the mediating authority in the process of salvation continued to increase through the Middle Ages. This chapter will begin with an examination of Soul and Body I and II and an early ghost story written by Bede in

Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (c. 731). These narratives present the earliest views of the afterlife as a vague, interim space between death and Judgment Day. The analysis will continue with Bede’s Vision of Furseus and The Vision of Drihthelm, and then move to a discussion about the revisions that Ælfric of Eynsham made to those

10 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 59-60; Andrew Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001), 45-47. 96

same visions nearly two hundred years later. Each of these visions (and their revisions) are reflective of changing beliefs about Purgatory and respond to anxieties about death and salvation in their respective historical moments. The second and third sections of the chapter shift focus to two ghost stories and two otherworld visions written in the post-

Conquest era. The Life of St. Erkenwald (c.1386) and John Lydgate’s St. Austin at

Compton (c.1420-1440) reflect ecclesiastical doctrine of the period and illuminate the changes that had occurred in the canon due to a shift away from the older Augustinian theological model concerning Purgatory and salvation to the newer model inspired by

Gregory. The older model posited that if the work of penance had not been completed prior to death, it would continue until Judgment Day; whereas the newer model proposed a system of post-mortem penance that involved early release from Purgatory through intercession by the living. The chapter closes with an examination of The Vision of

Tundale (c. 1149) and A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century

Woman Visionary (1422). These visions provide details about Purgatory’s structure and function that were not present in earlier visions or purgatorial ghost narratives. They present a system more focused on correction as the punishments are graded and progressive and fit each transgression in kind and degree. This more well-defined

Purgatory begins to resemble the emergent medieval prison system, both in form and purpose. These narratives show a growing sense of communal responsibility for the salvation of its marginal members, and treat spaces of correction as means of rehabilitation and reincorporation.

Ghosts and Purgatory in the pre-Conquest Period

The earliest accounts of Purgatory that survive from the Anglo-Saxon period present a vague middle state between death and Judgment Day, where imperfect souls experience physical and mental punishment until they are allowed into Heaven. Early beliefs in Anglo-Saxon England about this middle state were primarily influenced by

Augustine, who emphasized an eschatological view that began with baptism and ended on Judgment Day. In Enchiridion ad Laurentium, Augustine states that

Tempus autem quod inter hominis mortem et ultimam resurrectionem interpositum est, animas abditis receptaculis continet, sicut unanquaeque digna est vel requie vel aerumna, pro eo quod sortita est in carne cum viveret. [Now, for the time that intervenes between man's death and the final resurrection, there is a secret shelter for his soul, as each is worthy of rest or affliction according to what it has merited while it lived in the body.]11

Augustine posited a space which held and punished the transgressive dead until the end of the world. According to C.S. Watkins, this older theological tradition, inspired by

Augustine, implies that any penitential work not completed by a person in their lifetime will be continue after death until Judgment Day. A different model of penance and purgation emerged in the Middle Ages and eventually replaced the older tradition, and posited that because it is almost impossible to complete one’s penance during a single lifetime, only the most perfect souls ascend to Heaven at the time of death. This shift began around the ninth century with the development of the Office of the Dead, and was seen by Protestant polemicists as a means of social control by the Church. In this model,

11 Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion ad Laurentium, trans. Albert C. Outler (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1955), C.CX. 98

the majority of the dead go to Purgatory to complete their penance—provided they have shown proper contrition at the time of death. Furthermore, once the work of penance is complete, a person may attain salvation, even before Judgment Day.12 This addresses certain gaps in Augustine’s theory, which states that

Neque negandum est, defunctorum animas pietate suorum vivientium relevari, cum proillis sacrificium mediatoris offertur, vel elemosinae in aecclesia siant…Cum ergo sacrificia sive altaris sive quarumcunque elemosinarum pro baptizatis defunctis omnibus offeruntur, pro valde bonis gratiarum actiones sunt; pro non valde malis propitiationes sunt; pro valde malis etiamsi nulla sunt adiumenta mortuorum; qualescumque vivorum consalationes sunt. Quibus autem prosunt, aut ad hoc prosunt, ut sit plena remissio, aut certe tolerabilior fiat ipsa damnatio.

[There is no denying that the souls of the dead are benefited by the piety of their living friends, when the sacrifice of the Mediator is offered for the dead, or alms are given in the church…when sacrifices, whether of the altar or of alms, are offered for the baptized dead, they are thank offerings for the very good, propitiations for the not-so-very-bad [non valde malis], and, as for the very bad -- even if they are of no help to the dead -- they are at least a sort of consolation to the living. Where they are of value, their benefit consists either in obtaining a full forgiveness or, at least, in making damnation more tolerable.]13

Augustine’s argument promotes intercessory prayer, almsgiving, and masses as a means of helping those who languish in Purgatory, but is vague about how such assistance helps those trapped in the middle state, especially if the dead cannot leave Purgatory until

Judgment Day. The later model, however, addresses the issue by positing a system where intercession by the living can shorten time spent in Purgatory and secure release before Judgment Day. Purgatory, therefore, shifts from a space that resembles custodial

12 C.S. Watkins History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 233-234. 13 Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion ad Laurentium, trans. Albert C. Outler (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1955), C.CIX. 99

imprisonment in early medieval England, where prisoners are held until trial and judgment, to one that looks like imprisonment in the later Middle Ages, where the focus is on purgation and release, rather than on punishment. This transition opened the door for purgatorial apparitions, who were no longer trapped in Purgatory until Judgment

Day, and could leave their punitive carceral spaces—much like earthly prison inmates— in order to ask for assistance from the outside community. This section examines how stories about ghosts and otherworldly visions in pre-Conquest England illuminate the shift from the older Augustinian theological model of Purgatory as a holding place until

Judgment Day to the newer model of Purgatory as a temporary punitive space from which inmates are released once they have been sufficiently purged of sin.

Some of the earliest accounts of the dead returning to the world of the living are featured in a number of Anglo-Saxon poems in which a soul addresses its body in the grave.14 Soul and Body I in the Vercelli Book and Soul and Body II in the Exeter Book are the best known poems in this tradition, both anonymous works were set down in writing in the second half of the tenth century. They feature a damned soul returning to its body once a week in order to chastise it for its sinful behavior while alive.15 Soul and

14 Anglo-Saxon poetry that features souls returning after death to address their bodies in the grave can also be found in Homilies ii and iv of MS. Junius 857 of the Bodleian Library, and Homily XL of MS. Ii. 1.33 of the Cambridge University Library; as well as a homily that appears in both MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 302 and MS Cotton Faustina A ix. See Rudolph Willard, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” Modern Language Association 50 (1935): 957-983 for a more detailed discussion of the manuscripts that contain soul and body narratives. Also, see Riddle 43 in the Exeter Book, which focuses on the soul and body as its subject. 15 All citations of the Exeter Book and Vercelli Book are taken from Krapp, George Phillip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936) and Krapp, George Phillip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Vercelli Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). 100

Body I is slightly longer and includes an address by a saved soul to its body at the end of the narrative. Soul and Body I and II include grisly details about the punishments the damned body undergoes as a result of its earthly transgressions. In line 65 in Soul and

Body I and line 60 in Soul and Body II, the soul reminds the body of its helplessness in death: “Eart ðu nu dumb ond deaf, ne synt þine dreamas awiht.” [You are deaf and dumb—you no longer possess any of your joys]. Unable to speak or comfort the damned soul who berates the body for its suffering in Hell six days of the week, Soul and Body I ends with the body’s silent statement of isolation and decay:

Biþ þæt heafod tohliden, honda tohleoþode, geaflas toginene, goman toslitene, seonwe beoð asogene, sweora bicowen; rib reafiað reþe wyrmas, drincað hloþum hra, heolfres þurstge. Bið seo tunge totogen on tyn healfe hungrum to hroþor. Forþon heo ne mæg horsclice wordum wrixlan wið þone wergan gæst… Bið þonne wyrmes giefl, æt on eorþan. (II. 103-110, 120)

[Its head is broken open, hands corrupted, jaws gaping, throat torn apart, sinews sucked out, neck gnawed up, ribs ravaged by fearsome worms, drinking the corpse in plunder, thirsty for gore. That tongue has been devoured in ten directions, hungrily as their sole comfort— therefore it cannot so briskly bandy about words with that accursed spirit… Now it is a dish for worms, eaten in the earth.] (II. 103-110, 120)

In Soul and Body I, the above description is followed by a passage where the saved soul comforts and thanks its decaying body for sacrificing earthly pleasures for heavenly reward. The saved soul assures its body that its suffering in the grave is temporary and that they will be united in Heaven on Judgment Day (I.136-170). 101

The emphasis in both poems is eschatological. Upon death, souls are immediately judged and confined to an interim state of either reward or punishment until they are sorted into Heaven or Hell after a second universal judgment at the end of time.

Penance, therefore, should be completed before death, as the poems offer no evidence of a penitential middle state in the afterlife for imperfect souls. In Soul and Body I and II, the soul visits its body in the grave every seventh night and must return to a place of punishment (or reward, if saved) for the remainder of the week:

Sceal se gast cuman geohðum hremig, symble ymbe seofon niht sawle findan þone lichoman þe hie ær lange wæg, þreo hund wintra, butan ær þeodcyning, ælmihtig god, ende worulde wyrcan wille, weoruda dryhten. (II. 9-14)

[The soul must come, clamorous with cares, always finding every seventh night its body home, that it earlier bore for a long while, for three hundred winters, unless before then the lord of the people, Almighty God, should bring about the end of the world lord of the multitude.] (II. 9-14)

Although it is not clear where the dead go when they are not visiting their bodies, the interim state is certainly not Purgatory, as there seems to be no possibility of salvation for souls who had sinned in life. The interim space is temporary and permeable, but both features are reminders that the work of penance should have been done prior to death.

The damned soul is released from its prison once a week so that it may witness the suffering of its body and share details of the horrors both will experience in Hell once they are united in three hundred years, or on Judgment Day, whichever occurs first. The time between death and final Judgment punishes through anticipation and offers no hope 102

of salvation for sinful souls. The body-soul themed poems, which have analogues (and possibly their origin) in the Eastern Christian tradition, emphasize the importance of doing the work of salvation before death.16

16 Much of the scholarship surrounding Anglo-Saxon Soul and Body poems, centers on the question of dualism: whether these poems are unorthodox in their implication that the body, as a material object, is evil; and in their suggestion that the body has more agency in the world than the soul. For more information about the discussion of Soul and Body and dualism, see Jacob Riyeff, “Dualism in Old English Literature: The Body-and-Soul Theme and Vercelli Homily IV,” Studies in Philology 112 (2015): 453-468; Benjamin Kurtz, “Gifer the Worm: An Essay Toward the History of an Idea,” University of California Publications in English 2 (1929): 235–61; Cyril Smetana, “Second Thoughts on ‘Soul and Body I,’” Medieval Studies 29 (1967): 193–205; Allen J. Frantzen, “The Body in Soul and Body I,” The Chaucer Review 17 (1982): 76–88; and Michelle Hoek, “Violence and Ideological Inversion in the Old English Soul’s Address to the Body,” Exemplaria 10 (1998): 271–85 (The above list of articles is from Riyeff’s article, p. 455). Frantzen argues against such interpretation and posits that there is no inversion of the body-soul hierarchy if one reads the poem as a penitential piece that emphasizes the body’s “responsibility for the soul’s welfare” (81). In “The Body in Soul and Body I,” Frantzen states that both the body and the soul bear the burden of earning salvation: “The poet exaggerates the body's responsibility in order to underscore the necessity of physical commitment to goals which the mind readily approved…the poet's stress on the body's duty conforms to a Christian commonplace inherent in penitential practice: strength of spirit alone cannot achieve salvation” (81-82). This argument is strengthened if one considers Rudolph Willard’s article, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” which mentions that there are Greek, Syriac, and Slavic analogues to the western versions of the Visio Pauli and the Soul and Body poems (967). See Rudolph Willard, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” Modern Language Association 50 (1935): 957-983. A version of the body-soul theme in Syriac literature is explored by St. Ephrem the Syrian in the Nisibene Hymnes (c. 361 A.D.). In hymn number 69.5, Ephrem states: “Body and soul go to court to see which caused the other to sin; but the wrong belongs to both, for free will belongs to both” (115). In his hymns, Ephrem focuses on salvation history, which begins with the Fall and ends on Judgment Day. In Ephrem’s poetry, man’s separation from G-d and the alienation of body and soul are all a result of the Fall: “3. You looked upon the body, as it mourned, and on the soul in its grief, for you had joined them together in love, but they had parted and separated in pain. 4. The body was fashioned in wisdom, the soul was breathed in through grace, love was infused in perfection – but the serpent separated it in wickedness” (115). Man’s state of alienation will be resolved when body and soul are united at the resurrection. See Ephrem the Syrian, “Carmina Nisibena,” in the Harp of the Spirit: Poems of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, trans. S.P. Brock (London: Aquila Books, 2013), 114-118. In the Eastern Syriac Christian tradition, the practice of asceticism effected salvation through penance, prayer, fasting, and celibacy. Ascetic practices ensured salvation and involved both body and soul. The Syriac ascetic tradition, in which St. Ephrem was writing, posits that there is no soul-body distinction, as the work of salvation is equally spiritual and physical. Susan Ashbrook Harvey states, “…the most influential and enduring aspect of early Syrian Christianity was the concept of the essential ‘oneness’ of the believer’s self, a ‘oneness’ of the body and soul. The importance of religious behavior is here placed in context: what one does with one’s body is indistinguishable from what one believes” (8). Sin is what separates the body from the soul and sets them at odds with one another. See Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Thinking about the Soul and Body poems in this light, the conflict between the body and soul is not dualistic, but caused by Original Sin and individual sin. Therefore, as 103

Other early Anglo-Saxon accounts of the dead returning to the world of the living include ghost stories and visionary tales in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English

People.17 Bede’s ghost stories, like the Soul and Body poems, follow the Augustinian theological model of penance, emphasizing the importance of atoning for sins prior to death; whereas, his accounts of the living visiting the otherworldly spaces of the dead, begin to show a shift to the newer theological model that increasingly emphasized post- mortem purgation. The Venerable Bede (672-735 A.D.), a monk in Northumbria, wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731, which includes “only a few accounts of apparitions of the dead to the living, and these tend to follow the hagiographic model of earlier saints’ lives, whereby the spirits of the dead are emissaries from heaven, sent to convey the divine will to the living.”18 The second of the two ghost stories that appears in this work is more of a hagiography than a ghost story and involves a dead prior, named Boisil, who visits his subordinates in order to instruct them on a better course of action regarding their missionary work in foreign lands. The first ghost story, however, is of greater interest to this study as it focuses on worldly suffering as a means of penance and salvation. Torhtyght, a nun, has a vision of her abbess’s death before falling into a long period of illness and suffering, which is described as follows:

Cuius ut uirtus, iuxta Apostolum, in infirmitate perficeretur, tacta est repente grauissimo corporis morbo, et per annos nouem pia Redemptoris nostri prouisione multum fatigata, uidelicet ut, quicquid in ea uitii sordidantis inter

Frantzen argues, the subject of the body-soul poems is “not theology, but penitential practice,” emphasizing the importance of doing the work of salvation before death (81). 17 All citations of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People are taken from Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 18 Andrew Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2001), 9. 104

uirtutes per ignorantiam uel incuriam resedisset totum hoc caminus diutinae tribulationis excoqueret (360).

[Now in order that her strength, like the apostle’s, might be made perfect in weakness, she was suddenly afflicted with a most serious bodily disease and for nine years was sorely tried, under the good providence of our Redeemer, so that any traces of sin remaining among her virtues through ignorance or carelessness might be burnt away by the fires of prolonged suffering] (360).

Torhtyght must suffer physically in this life in order to purge herself of earthly sin.

Bede’s description of her sins being “burnt away by the fires of prolonged suffering” recalls Pope Gregory’s Dialogues (590-604 A.D.),19 wherein he defines the nature of purgatorial fire as something that cleanses minor sins that may be pardoned in the next world, but does not purge major sins (IV.39). Purgatorial fire can either be “the fire of tribulation, which men suffer in this world,” as Torhtyght does through physical illness, or as flames in the next world that burn away all minor sins (IV.39). Gregory compares minor sins to wood, hay, and stubble, and warns that the cleansing fires of Purgatory in the next life are only for “very light sins, which the fire doth easily consume. Yet we have here further to consider, that none can be there purged, no, not for the least sins that be, unless in his lifetime he deserved by virtuous works to find such favour in that place”

(IV.39). Purgatorial fires only complete the work of penance for minor sins in the next life.

Of the two types of purgation Gregory discusses in his Dialogues—earthly and otherworldly, Bede’s story of Torhtyght promotes the former. The story continues with

19 All citations of the Dialogues are taken from Pope Gregory I, The Dialogues of St. Gregory, trans. Edmund Garratt Gardner (London: P. L. Warner, 1911). 105

an appeal that Torhtyght makes to the apparition of the deceased Abbess Æthelburh, who visits her in a vision. The long-suffering Torhtyght begs for release from her earthly suffering and learns from the apparition that her period of earthly purgation is set for a fixed period of time that will neither be shortened nor lengthened, to which Tortgyth responds: “Si omnimodis ita definitum est, neque hanc sententiam licet inmutari, obsecro, ne amplius quam haec solummodo proxima nox intersit” (362). [If this is definitely fixed and the decree is unalterable, then I pray that it may not be put off beyond the following night] (363). Æthelburh assures her that her suffering is nearly at an end and that she will be released from her earthly pains after a night and a day. This ghost story exemplifies the older theological model which emphasizes the importance of penance and purgation through hardship and earthly tribulation, rather than through post- mortem punishment in Purgatory. In fact, Torhtyght is not allowed to die and will not be

“released” from her suffering until she has served out her term of cleansing punishment on earth. Later medieval ghost stories—especially those that were written after the development of the liturgy of the dead around the ninth century—reflect a shift to the newer theological model of salvation where most of the work of penance is completed after death. In later ghost stories, the relationship between the living and the dead changes as well, so that instead of the dead comforting the living as we see in

Torhtyght’s story, the living are expected to comfort and help the dead while they serve out their terms of punishment in the afterlife.

Although Bede’s ghost stories seem to reflect an older model of salvation and provide little information about Purgatory and the afterlife, his visionary accounts are

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quite different and reflect Gregory’s teaching on the soul’s experience after death. The stories recounted in Gregory’s Dialogues “provide impressive details of the experiences of the dead. Further details were offered by Bede, in his account of The Vision of

Drihthelm and The Vision of Furseus in Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.”20

Bede’s visionary narratives show both Augustinian and Gregorian influences, in the ways that they focus on the final resurrection and judgment, and offer notable details about the experiences of the dead. Bede’s collection includes The Vision of Furseus and

The Vision of Drihthelm. Both accounts respond to anxieties about paganism in the time period and warn that a “superficial conversion to Christianity was not enough to merit entry into heaven. Only those believers who embraced the Christian faith with a true change of heart and a contempt for this world would experience God’s abiding presence in heaven.”21 Bede’s re-working of the visions of Furseus22 and Drihthelm23 detail the horrors of punishment in the afterlife in order to encourage Christians to avoid Purgatory altogether. Although Purgatory may burn away minor sins in the afterlife, it can be avoided by rejecting paganism and living a good Christian life of contrition and denial.

Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 955- 1010 A.D.) later reworks these visions in his homilies in

20 Lynne Grundy, Books and Grace Ælfric’s Theology (London: King’s College London Medieval Studies, 1991), 213. 21 Bruce, The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, 81. 22 The Vision of Furseus has its origin in Ireland, the birthplace of the saint. According to Eileen Gardiner, Bede’s version of The Vision of Furseus “is based on a Latin vita of unknown authorship. The vision also found independent of HEGA embedded in Furseus’s vita which consists mostly of his visio. It is about 100 words in length and recalls the Book of Enoch in its four-fold division of hell. Later versions...are included in the Legenda Aurea and in Vincent of Beauvais” (104). See Eileen Gardiner, Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook (New York Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 104. 23 Bede derives his account of Drihthelm from the relatio of Haemgisl. See Gardiner, Medieval Visions, 95. 107

response to anxieties about correct preaching and teaching in the Christian faith.

Purgatorial vision narratives in the Anglo-Saxon period focus on the importance of completing penitential work before death and discourage leaving any clean-up work to the afterlife. According to Watkins, these early narratives of the afterlife are consistent with the older Augustinian theological model of penitence and salvation. After the establishment of the Doctrine of Purgatory, however, both ghost stories and visionary accounts speak to an entirely different set of anxieties and problems, and foreground

Purgatory as the primary place for penitential work. This section will focus on Anglo-

Saxon visionary literature as it appears in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English

People and in Ælfric’s homilies two centuries later.

Bede’s Vision of Furseus is set in the province of Essex, where a holy man, who has converted many pagans to Christianity, has three visions. In the third vision he sees angels and demons engaged in combat and is himself taken up by three angels to see the four fires that consume the world—falsehood, covetousness, discord, and injustice (272-

3). The good angels, seeing Furseus distressed by the encroaching fire, assure him that

“Quod non incendisti inquit non ardebit in te; nam etsi terribilis iste ac / grandis esse rogus uidetur, tamen iuxta merita operum singulos examinat, quia uniuscuiusque cupititas in hoc igni ardebit.” [That which you did not kindle will not burn you; for although the conflagration seems great and terrible, it tests each man according to his deserts, and the evil desires of everyone will be burned away in this fire] (272-3). This line is reflective of Gregory’s Dialogues, which state that Purgatory’s cleansing fires match earthly sins in kind and degree in order to make sinful souls fit for salvation.

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Despite the good angels’ reassurance, Furseus is burned on the jaw and shoulder when the evil spirits hurl the body of a burning sinner out of the fire at him. Furseus recognizes the burning sinner as a man he had received clothes from after his death. The evil spirits accuse Furseus of accepting property from that man who “qui ad mortem poeniterent esset agendum” [died in his sins…] (274-5). Furseus’s sin was failing to provide sufficient advice to a man who repented in the hour of his death. He allowed the man to die insufficiently shriven and then accepted his property. Once the vision ended and Furseus returned to his body, he made an effort to better advise those who sought salvation on the deathbed. The burns that he received as an incorporeal spirit, became scars on his physical body, which reminded him of his duty as a spiritual advisor and agent of penance and salvation in the world. Again, in this account, the emphasis is on contrition and penance before death—even if one is on his or her deathbed. Furseus’s sin was his failure to properly facilitate earthly penitential work.

Bede’s second visionary narrative, which he describes as miracle that occurred

“Namque ad excitationem uiuentium de morte animae…” [In order to arouse the living from spiritual death…] (488-9), offers a more detailed picture of Purgatory as a real place of punishment. The Vision of Drihthelm presents two spaces of punishment for souls that are neither fit for Heaven nor Hell. Drihthelm, a family man who lived a religious life, falls ill and dies in the nighttime. As his family mourn his passing, he suddenly wakes up, informs his wife that although he has returned he plans to live a very different life. He gives away his possessions and encloses himself in the monastery at

Melrose, committing himself to a life of prayer, fasting, and chastity for the rest of his

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days. While he was dead, a guide travelled with him into the east until they came upon an infinite valley with fire and ice on either side: “unum latus flammis feruentibus nimium terribile, alterum furenti grandine ac frigore niuium omnia perflante atque uerrente non minus intolerabile praeferebat” [one side of it was exceedingly terrible with raging fire, while the other side was no less intolerable on account of the violent hail and icy snow which was drifting and blowing everywhere] (488-491). The valley is filled with souls that jump back and forth between the fires on one side of the valley to the icy peaks on the other in a futile attempt to seek relief. While it is not clear how Drihthelm and his guide arrive in this place or where it is located, Drihthelm’s guide explains that this “est locus in quo examinandae et castigandae sunt animae illorum, qui differentes confiteri et emendare scelera quae fecerunt, in ipso tandem mortis articulo ad paenitentiam confugiunt, et sic de corpore exeunt.” [is the place those souls have to be tried and chastened who delayed to confess and make restitution for the sins they had committed until they were on the point of death; and so they died] (494-5). These tormented souls will eventually go to heaven, with the help of alms, masses, and intercessory prayer, but have to serve out their terms of punishment for a period appropriate to their sins. This passage teaches its audience that while it is acceptable to repent at the very last moment on the deathbed, it is preferable to do the work of penance earlier in life so that these terrible punishments may be avoided altogether. This is very much in line with the earlier theological model that emphasizes the importance of performing penance before death, rather than leaving it for the afterlife. The Vision of

Drihthelm also includes elements of the later theological model that allows for an earlier

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release from Purgatory with the assistance of the living. This passage emphasizes—to a much greater degree than The Vision of Furseus or Bede’s ghost stories—the need for the living to assist the dead with alms and intercessory prayer. Drihthelm’s vision includes elements from both the older and newer theological models and illuminates a transition that is occurring in this period with regard to how Purgatory was imagined as a space of post-mortem punishment.

After his guide offers Drihthelm a glimpse of Hell, he takes him to a second

Purgatory—one that holds “animae eorum qui in bonis quidem operibus de corpore exeunt; non tamen sunt tantae perfectionis, ut in regnum caelorum statim mereantur introduci; qui tamen omnes in die iudicii ad uisionem Christi et gaudia regni caelestis intrabunt.” [the souls of those who depart from the body practicing good works; but they are not in such a state of perfection that they deserve to be received immediately into the kingdom of heaven; nevertheless all of them at the day of judgment will enter into the presence of Christ and the joys of the heavenly kingdom] (494-495). This space seems to be a response to Augustine’s Purgatory, which holds the imperfect dead until final

Judgment, without any promise of an earlier release. Augustine also argues that intercessory prayer and almsgiving benefit the dead in Purgatory, but is unclear how their intervention aids the dead. This inconsistency is resolved by the presence of two spaces: one for the contrite, but sinful souls who are physically punished and whose terms of punishment may be shortened through intercessory prayer; and a second

Purgatory for the not-so-bad souls—or who Augustine calls non valde malis—who are exempt from physical punishment, but must serve their time in a less-heavenly space

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until Judgment Day. The non valde malis Purgatory demonstrates that even those who had lived good lives were still not completely sinless and were, therefore, not worthy of immediate entry into Heaven. In the Later Middle Ages, these two spaces resolved into one place in most visionary narratives, where all imperfect souls undergo physical punishment according to their sins and for as long as their sins merit. Their time in such a place could extend to Judgment Day, if they had to be cleansed of a great many sins, or could be shortened by the intervention of the living.

Approximately two hundred years later, Ælfric of Eynsham recasts The Vision of

Furseus and The Vision of Drihthelm in ways that reflect the Church’s growing influence in the process of salvation. Ælfric’s Vision of Furseus follows Bede’s account closely, but expands on the narrative in two areas, adding details about who Furseus was and the information he received during his vision. Unlike Bede’s Furseus, who dedicates his life to converting pagans, Ælfric’s saint busies himself with building mynsters. And after his otherworldly vision, he “ferde ða geond eal Yrrland and Scotland, bodiende ða ðing þe he geseah and gehyrde” [went then over all Ireland and Scotland, declaring the things that he had seen and heard…] (346-347). This is very different from Bede’s Furseus, who would only “ordinem autem uisionum suarum illis solummodo, qui propter desiderium conpunctionis interrogabant, exponere uolebat.” [give an account of his visions to those who questioned him about them, because they desired to repent.] (274-

275). Ælfric’s Furseus is a teacher, whose vision inspired him to instruct all who would listen, not just those who asked about what he saw and learned in the otherworld. It is his responsibility to teach what he has learned about avoiding the pitfalls of sin and attaining

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salvation. This account underscores the important role that the clergy play as spiritual intercessors in the process of salvation. They had a responsibility to share what they knew and to guide their flock by good example.

Aelfric’s vision cautions those who would take on the responsibility of teaching and preaching in the Church. Two priests tell Furseus that there are four things that cause men’s souls to perish—two of which concern false teaching and poor leadership through bad example: “Ofer ðam lareowum is Godes yrre swy ðost astyred, for ðan se hi forgymeleasiað þa godcundan bee, and ymbe ða woruldðing eallunge hogiað. Biscopum and sacerdum gedafenað þaet hi heora lare gymon, and ðam folce heora ðearfe secgon.

Mynster-mannum gedafenað þaet hi on stilnysse heora lif adreogon. [over the teachers is God's ire most excited, because they neglect the divine books, and are wholly solicitous about worldly things. To bishops and priests it is fitting that they attend to their doctrine, and say to the people their need. To monastic men it is fitting that they lead their lives in stillness] (342-343).24 In this retelling, Furseus is a monk, a teacher, and a founder of monasteries and churches—much like Ælfric himself, whom Lynn

Grundy refers to as an influential theological teacher whose knowledge of G-d extends

“beyond the confines of the monastery to the ordinary people.”25

According to Grundy, Ælfric’s work and “teaching on the interim between the death of the body and the day of judgment is based on the information given by

24 All citations of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies are taken from Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, the First Part, ed. Malcom Godden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 25 Grundy, Books and Grace Ælfric’s Theology (London: Kings College London Medieval Studies, 1991), 9. 113

Augustine, and expanded with the materials provided by Gregory and Bede…Ælfric does not speak of ‘purgatory’, but he has come a long way on the route to giving the locus of cleansing fire a name and concrete existence.”26 Like Bede, Ælfric’s homilies stress the importance of contrition, confession, and penance during one’s lifetime, but go a step further by including additional material about almsgiving. Ælfric’s Vision of

Drihthelm describes the saint as a man who, like Furseus, “manega ðre gerihtlaehte mid worde and gebysnunge” [corrected many others by word and example] (354-355). He ends his homily by appending a short narrative taken from Gregory’s Dialogi about another man who came back to life after a visit to the otherworld. This man saw a glorious house being built for a shoemaker in Rome who had dedicated his life to making money so that he could distribute the majority of his weekly income to the poor.

The otherworldly builders explained that the beautiful house was the man’s heavenly reward for his many sacrifices in life. Ælfric uses this tale to further illustrate the efficacy of almsgiving and charitable works. Ælfric explains that those who perform acts of charity in order to help the deceased who are in torment as well as those who suffer in life are rewarded with G-d’s mercy. He states “Micel is Godes mildheortyns ofer mancynne, þam ðe well willað” [Great is God's mercy over mankind, to those who are benevolent] (356-357). Ælfric’s final statement in his homily of The Vision of Drihthelm echoes Augustine’s sermons on almsgiving. Grundy states that Ælfric’s teachings were in step with Augustine’s belief that that salvation was not gained by simply avoiding sin,

26 Grundy, Books and Grace Ælfric’s Theology, 242. 114

but by giving alms as well: “Non ergo itis in regnum, quia non peccastis: sed quia vestra paccata eleemosynis redemistis” [Ye shall therefore go into the kingdom, not because ye have not sinned, but because ye have redeemed your sins by alms] (Augustine, Sermo

LX.x.10).27 Augustine’s sermon echoes Matthew 6:1-4: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.” The teachings of Augustine, Gregory, Bede, and Ælfric extended the benefit of almsgiving to the suffering dead, an idea that was continued by the Church into the Middle Ages. The Church encouraged Christians to aid the poor, the sick, prisoners, as well as the tormented dead, by promising those who performed charitable acts shorter terms of punishment in Purgatory, thus reinforcing a reciprocal relationship between the givers and receivers of aid.

Bede’s stories of the dead and Ælfric’s homilies about the afterlife are points on a spectrum that mark a shift not only in the way Purgatory was imagined, but in the

Church’s role in the process of salvation. Both Ælfric and Bede revised their sources in ways that responded to the needs, beliefs, and anxieties in their own age and reflected both the older theology of Augustine and the newer theological model inspired by the

Gregory’s Dialogi. Like Bede, Ælfric’s homilies stress the importance of contrition, confession, and penance during one’s lifetime; however, Ælfric expands on his source texts in order to put a greater emphasis on both the intercessory role of the living on behalf of the dead in Purgatory, and the intercessory role of the Church and its ministers

27 Augustine quoted in translation by Grundy, Books and Grace Ælfric’s Theology, 273. 115

in the process of salvation. Aelfric’s vision narratives speak to clergy—instructing them in the ways of correct teaching and preaching the Christian faith; and to laypeople— encouraging almsgiving, prayers, and mass as a means of helping those suffering in the interim spaces of punishment. Urging the living to assist the dead in Purgatory becomes a central theme in otherworldly narratives—ghost stories and visionary accounts— starting in the Anglo-Saxon period and continuing through the Middle Ages.

The Church’s encouragement of almsgiving, prayer, and charitable works on behalf of the living and the dead, led to the development of a reciprocal relationship between those who benefitted from assistance and those who offered it. Stories about the afterlife in the Anglo-Saxon period began to show this reciprocity, which was developed to a greater degree in otherworldly accounts in the post-Conquest era. In the Anglo-

Saxon period, supernatural stories include elements of the older Augustinian theological model as well the newer model inspired by Gregory that assumed that penitential work had to be completed after death, since it could not be sufficiently completed in life. The

Vision of Drihthelm, for example, includes elements of both models as it presents two post-mortem punitive spaces: one that resembles custodial prison, where imperfect souls are detained in a less-than-heavenly space until Judgment Day; and a second that looks like the punitive prison system that was emerging in the late Anglo-Saxon period, where penitent souls undergo physical punishment according to their sins and suffer until they are sufficiently cleansed. After the creation of the Office of the Dead and the establishment of the Doctrine of Purgatory, the shift to the new theological model was complete. Ghost stories flourished that detailed the mutually beneficial relationship that

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existed between the living and the dead and visionary accounts in the post-Conquest era also become more detailed in their description of Purgatory. Unlike The Vision of

Drihthelm and The Vision of Furseus, which offer few concrete details about post- mortem spaces of punishment, later medieval visionary accounts of the otherworld describe spaces that resemble earthly punitive spaces in organization, purpose, and function. The following sections focus on two ghost stories, Life of St. Erkenwald

(ca.1386) and John Lydgate’s St. Austin at Compton (ca.1420-1440); and two otherworld visions, The Vision of Tundale (c. 1149) and A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown

Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary (1422). These supernatural narratives were written in the post-Conquest era and are representative of the Church’s teachings with regard to

Purgatory and the intercessory role that the living were expected to play in the process of salvation for those imprisoned in Purgatory.

Ghosts and Purgatory in the post-Conquest Period

This section examines how representations of post-mortem punishment and redemption in Life of St. Erkenwald (ca.1386) and John Lydgate’s St. Austin at Compton

(ca.1420-1440) are reflective of ecclesiastical doctrine and explore the ways in which these stories illuminate the changes that had occurred in doctrine due to the shift away from the older Augustinian theological model concerning Purgatory and salvation to the newer model inspired by Gregory. Gregory’s influence and the development of the

Office of the Dead in the ninth century allowed theologians to set aside Augustine’s reservations about purgatorial apparitions and ushered in what Schmitt calls the

“invasion of ghosts” phenomena. The ways in which the purgatorial apparitions

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interacted with their living community and what they revealed about their post-mortem existence was patterned on ecclesiastical doctrine and propagated the policies and practices of the Church. These stories are also representative of how authors writing about Purgatory in this time period associated post-mortem spaces of punishment, like

Purgatory, Limbo, and Hell with earthly secular prisons—an association which became familiar to medieval audiences.

The Life of St. Erkenwald and St. Austin at Compton both feature souls that return from the dead to ask for absolution and release from Limbo and Purgatory respectively. The anonymous Life of St. Erkenwald focuses on the shift from paganism to Christendom in Britain in the early Middle Ages and tells a tale of the discovery of an old tomb during the construction of a Christian church over the foundation of an ancient pagan temple. When the tomb is opened, the perfectly-preserved body of a richly- adorned pagan man is discovered and St. Erkenwald is summoned to determine his identity. After praying for guidance, St. Erkenwald questions the corpse, which becomes animated by a “goste lyfe” and tells the assembled audience that he was a Breton judge under King Belinus and died before the birth of Christ. For reasons unknown to him, he was left behind in Limbo during the Harrowing. After praying for salvation, G-d grants his grace through St. Erkenwald and the tormented soul of the honest pagan judge ascends to heaven as his body disintegrates and turns into dust.28

28 Ruth Morse, ed. St. Erkenwald (New York: DS Brewer, 1975), 320-324. 118

The life of St. Austin at Compton, by John Lydgate, also features a petition made by an animated corpse followed by a post-mortem dispensation of grace. In this narrative, St. Austin visits a town called Cumeton in order to mediate a dispute between a parish priest and a lord who refuses to pay his tithes. Austin concludes the unsuccessful mediation by conducting a mass after asking that all excommunicants leave the church. To the astonishment of the assembled parishioners, a corpse rises from a tomb and leaves the church. Once mass ends, St. Austin questions the corpse, who tells him that he was a lord who ruled the land over a century ago and died in a state of sin because he failed to pay his tithes and was excommunicated by the local parish priest. St.

Austin raises the priest from the dead and asks him to absolve the sinner so that he may be released from Purgatory. The priest agrees and both of the resurrected figures return to their tombs and their souls rest in peace.29

In both narratives the deceased petitioners are granted absolution and freed from their post-mortem prisons through the intercession of the Church. Although both of their post-mortem prisons seem to function as transitional places of punishment and purification, they are two very different spaces. In the Life of St. Erkenwald, the pagan judge resides in and is released from Limbo, which was imagined as a place at the edge of Hell that housed the souls who did not qualify for either Heaven or Hell, that is, unbaptized infants and pagans. The miserly lord in St. Austin at Compton, on the other

29 Gordon E. Whatley, E. Gordon, Anne B. Thomson, and Robert Upchurch, Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections, (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005), 213-250. 119

hand, spent over a century in Purgatory, which was imagined as a place of transient post- mortem punishment and purification that prepared imperfect souls for Heaven.

Both stories have similar trajectories and seem to convey the same hopeful message of post-mortem salvation for penitent souls; however, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that these ghost stories—which are patterned on traditional ecclesiastical doctrine and are meant to be instructive—actually promote two very different sets of ideas. The Life of St. Erkenwald impresses upon its audience, the importance of baptism as well as the efficacy of good works and faith in the attainment of salvation; while the story of St. Austin at Compton is meant to instruct the public about the importance of paying tithes in a timely manner, and demonstrates the consequences of excommunication for those who fail to do so.

The Life of St. Erkenwald was composed around 1386 and was a recasting of the

Gregory/Trajan legend30 that was, per Ruth Morse, “widely-known in medieval Europe, and was widely used to refer to the problems of the salvation of the righteous heathen.”31

The St. Erkenwald-poet liberally revised his source text(s) in response to several problematic inconsistencies in the Gregory/Trajan legend. For instance, the legend never explains how the Emperor Trajan (53 to 117 AD) was liberated from Hell, a place of

30 In the Gregory/Trajan legend, Pope Gregory I learns that Trajan—a good Emperor, a just judge, and a virtuous pagan—is in Hell. He weeps and prays to G-d for his salvation, and salvation is granted. 31 Ruth Morse, ed., St. Erkenwald (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1975), 19. Morse states that the Gregory/Trajan story is widely attested and appears in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale, the Fiore di Filosofi, and in Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso. In England, the Gregory/Trajan story appears in John of Salisbury’s Policaticus, in Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, and in Piers Plowman. For a more complete examination of the versions of the Gregory/Trajan legend as they were written from the eighth through the late fourteenth century, see E. Gordon Whatley, “The Uses of Hagiography: The Legend of Pope Gregory and the Emperor Trajan in the Middle Ages,” Viator 15 (1984): 25-63. 120

permanent confinement and punishment. Augustine and Gregory repeatedly discourage prayers for souls in Hell as they are absolutely ineffective. Also, Trajan, who was alive during the time of Christ and was aware of his teachings remained a pagan, never baptized. Baptism is essential to the process of salvation according to the teachings of

Augustine, Gregory, and the orthodox Catholic Church. And, lastly, there is no evidence that Trajan expressed any regret about his heathenism or had any desire to be saved. The decision to save Trajan was entirely Gregory’s. The St. Erkenwald-poet corrected these inconsistencies by setting the story in medieval London and by recasting Trajan as a virtuous pagan judge in Limbo and Gregory as St. Erkenwald. According to Morse, “the earliest mention of Erkenwald, Bishop of London, is Bede’s brief biography in the

Ecclesiastical History,” wherein he is described as saint who cured the sick, founded two monasteries, and was consecrated Bishop of London around 675.32 Morse points out that although St. Erkenwald’s story is attested in several sources that predate the St.

Erkenwald-poet’s account, he chose to ignore the bishop’s many miracles and accomplishments and wrote him into a completely different storyline.33 This section argues that the poet rewrote the Gregory/Trajan legend so that it would align with the orthodox view on baptism and reinforce the Church’s teachings in this time period on salvation as a reciprocal and communal act.

The St. Erkenwald-poet establishes the vita’s authority through its formal features and by constructing a credible historical context for its subjects. As part of the

32 Morse, St. Erkenwald, 12-13. 33 Morse, St. Erkenwald, 15. 121

Alliterative Revival movement that flourished in the last half of the fourteenth century, the poem’s stylistic features recall an older period, when England was ruled by the

Anglo-Saxons in the pre-Conquest era. The poem opens with a description of how the

Anglo-Saxon migration in the fifth and sixth centuries ushered in a new era of paganism, which flourished for many years until it was stamped out by Pope Gregory I’s emissary,

St. Augustine of Canterbury (597-604/05).34 Our story begins shortly after the events of the Conversion, when St. Erkenwald is Bishop of London and the people are re- establishing Christianity in the land by building churches over old pagan temples. The poem’s alliterative verse mirrors the time period in which it is set, and lends it a kind of historical gravity appropriate to a salvation narrative. The poet provides additional historical details when the temporarily resurrected judge tells the assembled crowd that he lived in London when it was called “New Troy,” after Brutus built the city and 480 years before the birth of Christ, and that he “was of heire and of oyer in þe New Troie /

In þe regne of þe riche kynge þat rewlit vs þen, / The bold Breton Ser Belyn, Ser

Berynge was his brothire (211-213). The ease and elegance with which the poet handles the intricacies of historical poetic form, the details that he provides about historical events and of foreign pagan practices lends credibility to the vita and underscores the poet’s authority as a wise and knowledgeable conveyor of critical information.

34 The poet lumps a number of different non-Christian belief systems (such as Mithraism and Islam), into the general category of paganism, and anachronistically ascribes these “pagan” practices to the pre- Christian Anglo-Saxons who migrated to England in the fifth and sixth centuries. 122

The St. Erkenwald-poet also establishes the vita’s credibility by situating it within a Christian framework that defines all of the fantastical elements as demonstrations of G-d’s power for the benefit of the Christian community. This prevents the tale, which is essentially about a resurrected talking corpse, from becoming what

Schmitt calls a simple mirabilia. In fact, as Morse points out,35 it is through the exchange between the dean and Bishop Erkenwald in lines 144-175 that the poet sermonizes on the story’s fantastical elements and puts them in proper perspective. As the dean marvels at the judge’s perfectly-preserved body, Erkenwald reminds him of G-d’s power to bring about such things that man’s limited understanding would perceive as a miracle.

Erkenwald refocuses the dean’s sense of wonder by reminding him that G-d is the only real miracle and cautions him about further indulging his curiosity: “deuyne we no fyrre.

/ To seche þe sothe at oure selfe ᵹee se þer no bote. / Bot glow we all upon Godde & His grace aske,” (160-171). It is only by the authority of G-d and through G-d’s Church and its ministers that the body of the pagan judge is reanimated and able to speak. Erkenwald only accepts the task of confronting the corpse after he weeps and prays to G-d for the power of discernment: “Thurghe his deere debonerte, ‘digne hit, my lorde, / In confirming, þi Cristen faith fulsen me to kenne þe mysterie of þis meruaile þat men opon wondres.’” (123-125). And it is only after Erkenwald conducts a full mass honoring the

Holy Spirit that the saint approaches the tomb in order to compel the dead man to tell his story. The task of questioning the corpse is reserved for a prelate of the Church, who has

35 Morse, St. Erkenwald, 36. 123

the power to determine whether it was “ioyned to ioy oþer iuggid to pyne” (188). At no time does the corpse address any other member of the gathered congregation, nor does it offer any information other than what is requested by G-d’s authorized agent. The corpse does not utter a single word until line 193, as more than half of the miracula is dedicated to the description of the Church’s anxieties about this anomaly and the preparations for its confrontation with the dead man. The audience is repeatedly reminded that G-d, not the talking corpse, is the main focus of this vita.36

What follows is a court-like interrogation of the judge, who has been reanimated

“þurghe sum lant goste lyf of hym þat all redes” (192). The dead pagan judge communicates with St. Erkenwald through a spirit-life lent to his corpse by G-d. It becomes clear only later in the poem that it is the pagan judge’s body, and not his soul, that interacts with St. Erkenwald. The first piece of evidence is the body’s use of first person and the present perfect continuous tense when he complains about what feels like an immeasurable amount of time spent in the grave: “þe lengthe of my lying here, þat is a lewid date, / Hit [is] to mec[h]e to any mon to make of a nommbre” (205-206).37 The judge then speaks of his soul in the third person and uses the present-tense when describing its detainment in Limbo: “& þer sites my soule, þat se may no fyrre,” (293).

From this, we can assume that the body’s interaction with Erkenwald and the soul’s imprisonment in Limbo occur simultaneously. At the very end of the poem, the body

36 E. Gordon Whatley, “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context,” Speculum 61, no. 2 (1986), 330-363. 37 All emendations are from Ruth Morse’s edition of St. Erkenwald (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1975). 124

speaks of the baptism as a gift received by “vs” in line 333, referring to itself and the soul as separate entities. He then narrates his soul’s journey from Limbo to Heaven for the assembled congregation before he falls silent and decays (329-346).

The poet utilizes the dual consciousness of the soul and body to demonstrate an important point about the nature of reanimated corpses. He makes clear that the corpse is revived through a ghost-life lent by G-d, and not powered by the corpse’s own soul or— worse yet—the devil. This distinguishes the narrative from the mirabilia that focus on gruesome revenants who terrorize the innocent. Scott G. Bruce points out that stories about revenants “first appeared in medieval narratives in the eleventh century and the popularity of stories about their ruinous rampages remained strong until the end of the

Middle Ages.” 38 These stories share several things in common: the corpses that are reanimated typically belong to terrible people whose souls are damned; these corpses are dangerous not only because they are violent and diabolically-powered, but because their rotting carcasses spread disease; and revenants are best neutralized by decapitating the corpse, removing the heart, and burning the carcass.39 Revenants created a great deal of anxiety among people in the Middle Ages, as is evidenced not only by the numerous stories about rampaging corpses and menacing Limbo babies, but by the corrective missives drafted by religious authorities, such as Burchard of Worms, who dedicated a number of sections in the Decretorum Liber Decimus Nonus (c.1008-1012) to

38 Bruce, The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, 117. 39 Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories, 89; Bruce, The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, 117. 125

admonishing people who engaged in superstitious or magical practices over the bodies of the dead—either to reanimate them or to prevent their reanimation. For example, in his chapter concerning women’s vices, he states that “If [a woman] dies from her birth pangs, they impale the mother and her child into the ground with a stake in the same grave. If you have done or approved of such, you should do penance for two years on appointed fast days.”40 Extra-Christian beliefs and practices concerning the dead were common enough to warrant corrective missives such as Burchard’s and were a constant source of frustration to religious authorities. Although the Church discouraged staking or decapitating corpses of the damned, they did prohibit the burial of such corpses in consecrated ground. This included the bodies of unbaptized infants—and in certain cases, their mothers if death occurred in childbed and if the body of the infant was not removed prior to burial. John Mirk, a late fourteenth-century canon, for example, was a strong proponent of excluding both mothers who died during childbirth and their unbaptized infants from Church burial.41 Because the revenant is reanimated by the devil, the St. Erkenwald-poet is careful to distinguish the pagan judge from revenants by mentioning that he is reanimated by a borrowed “goste-lyf.” The poet was aware of such distinctions and took careful measures to make it apparent.

The St. Erkenwald-poet also carefully distinguishes the reanimated corpse of the pagan judge from common revenants by emphasizing its incorruptibility. The pagan

40 Burchard of Worms, “Concerning Women’s Vices,” in Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500, ed. and trans. John Shinners (Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 470. 41 Christopher Daniel, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066-1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), 103. 126

judge explains that because he was a good man and a fair judge in life, the people dressed him in rich attire befitting a king. His corpse and the fine clothes that covered it remained uncorrupted and incorruptible through Christ’s love of his good works and excellent sense of justice (265-272). The lack of decay is a mark of G-d’s grace, and recalls stories of the uncorrupted bodies of saints. The pagan judge’s corpse, like the earthly remains of saints, is an instrument of G-d that functions as a site of spiritual transformation for the community that interacts with it. Its incorruptibility offers a clue about why the judge was left behind during the Harrowing of Hell and how his soul was allowed to be released from that space.

It is important to keep in mind that the space the pagan judge resides in is

Limbo—specifically, the limbus patrum—which Augustine and Aquinas see as a place that is in a separate part of the Hell of the damned and located a little above Purgatory.42

Unlike the Hell of the damned, where Trajan languishes before Gregory’s prayers release him, the limbus patrum was reserved for the pre-Christian patriarchs who were extended G-d’s grace because of their faith and good works. Although the inhabitants of this place did not suffer sensible punishment, they were denied the beatific vision of G- d. In this sense, the judge’s description of Limbo as isolating and lonely is consistent with Thomist theology:43

“Quen we are dampnyd dulfully into þe depe lake & exilid fro þat soper so, pat solempne fest: þer richely hit arne refetyd þat after right hungride. My soule may sitte þer in sorrow & sike ful colde

42 Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 62, no. 2 (1998), 224. 43 Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” 229. 127

Dymly in þat derke dethe – þer dawes neuer morowen, Hungrie in wyt Helle hole & herken after meeles, Longe er ho þat soper se oþir segge hyr to lathe.’” (302-308)

The judge does not suffer bodily, but is in exile, forever denied communion with

G-d and the saints. It seems rather clear that the pagan judge was a good man, favored with G-d’s grace, but the question remains, why was he left behind to languish in Limbo during the Harrowing? Ruth Morse cites a passage from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa

Theologica, wherein he posits the possibility that Trajan had not been eternally damned.44 Aquinas states, in part, that Trajan and all such persons “were consigned to hell, not finally, but as was actually due to their own merits according to justice: and that according to higher causes, in view of which it was foreseen that they would be recalled to life, they were to be disposed of otherwise.”45 St. Erkenwald’s admonition of the dean who marveled at the judge’s well-preserved corpse, echoes Aquinas’s statement about

G-d’s providence and how his unknowable actions effect a higher cause. The pagan judge’s incorruptibility, which is read by the audience as a miracle, suggests that he was already always in a state of grace and that his baptism at the end of the miracula is the final step in his salvation.

The pagan judge was left behind in Limbo during the Harrowing so that he would be released precisely at a moment in history when Christians were reclaiming

44 Morse, St. Erkenwald, 21. Morse references the following passage in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica III Suppl .q 71 art 5. In this section, Aquinas states in part: “De omnibus talibus enim similiter dici oportet quod non erant in inferno finaliter deputati, sed secundum praesentem propriorum meritorum iustitiam: secundum autem superiores causas, quibus praevidebantur ad vitam revocandi, erat aliter de eis disponendum.” 45 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger, 1947), Q lxxi. Art. 5. 128

England from the pagans, and so that he could be released by St. Erkenwald in the presence of his congregation. If one considers Aquinas’s position on the salvation of good pagans, then there is no reason to believe that a man such as the pagan judge would remain in a state of damnation. According to Augustine, because he is a heathen and never received baptism, he cannot be saved.46 However, as E. Gordon Whatley points out, medieval theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, believed that certain men and women who lived good lives and died before the coming of Christ could attain salvation in one of two ways: “fides explicita,” which involves receiving secret knowledge of the coming of Christ by divine illumination; and “fides implicita,” which involved living a life according to a good ethical code and performing good works in the hopes of reward in the afterlife.” 47 Whatley states that this does not apply to pagans, such as Trajan, who failed to receive baptism after having had “a reasonable chance to hear and respond to the Gospel.”48 The pagan judge, however, could be saved under the purview of

Aquinas’s second allowance, the “fides implicita.”

Additionally, the pagan judge expresses a strong desire to commune with G-d once he learns of Christ’s incarnation. Augustine’s theology emphasizes a sort of will in the process of salvation, where an individual must possess both a desire and willingness to choose good over evil in order to receive G-d’s divine grace. As explained in greater detail in chapter two, this process refers to an operative and co-operative process of

46 Please refer to the section titled, “The Marginal Dead: Space, Time, and Agency in Purgatory and Limbo,” in chapter two of this dissertation for more information about Augustine and Aquinas’s position with respect to baptism and the limbus patrum. 47 Whatley, “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context,” 343. 48 Whatley, “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context,” 343. 129

salvation, whereby a “faithful person prays for charity, and the Holy Spirit is sent into his heart. This operative grace, which makes a person good, then co-operates in his good works and his prayer for perseverance.”49 Although this process is reserved for the living, Erkenwald and those who are present, cannot help but be moved by the pagan judge’s demonstration of faith in Christ and his great desire to be saved so that he may commune with G-d. When Erkenwald questions the pagan judge about being left behind in Limbo, his response comes in the form of a prayer addressed to Christ. He laments that he “was non of þe nommbre þat þou wyt noy boghtes / Wyt þe blode of thi body upon þe blo rode,” and implores Christ to deliver him from Limbo (289-290). By engaging with G-d through prayer, the pagan judge is participating in a sort of posthumous co-operative process of salvation—something that Trajan never does. So, the question remains, if the judge was meant to be saved at some point after the

Harrowing, then why the long delay?

According to Cindy Vitto the pagan judge was left behind during the Harrowing of Hell “to serve as an object lesson for later Christians,” who were meant to understand the importance of the Harrowing as a turning point in salvation history.50 It is my contention, however, that the pagan judge’s delayed salvation as well as his delayed decomposition demonstrates not only the importance of baptism, but that salvation is a reciprocal act. The pagan judge’s body, because of its incorruptibility, functions as a

49 J. Patout Burns, “The Economy of Salvation: Two Patristic Traditions,” Theological Studies 37, no. 4 (1976): 612-613. 50 Cindy L. Vitto, “The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature,” American Philosophical Society 79, no. 5 (1989): 53. 130

locus for spiritual transformation, for himself and for the assembled congregation who are affected by the spectacle. The pagan judge’s plight moves St. Erkenwald and his congregation to tears. The assembled onlookers, which Morse calls “a most important

‘character’ in ‘St. Erkenwald’” are apportioned a great deal of narrative space.51 Once they hear of the pagan judge’s longing to commune with G-d, they are moved to tears:

“Þus dulfully þis dede body deuisyt hit sorowe / þat alle wepyd for woo þe words þat herden” (309-310). The Bishop is also moved to tears and baptizes the corpse with

“lauande teres” (314). These tears become the cleansing waters of baptism, which the pagan judge credits with liberating his soul from Limbo:

And also be þou, bysshop, þe bote of my sorowe And þe relefe of þe lodely lures þat my soule has leuyd in. For þe words þat þou werpe and þe water þat þou sheddes— þe bryȝt bourne of þin eghen—my bapteme is worthyn! (327-330).

Significantly, the pagan judge’s baptism occurs while he is temporarily animated by the

“goste lyfe.” Since the dead cannot be baptized, the poet seems to borrow from

Augustine’s retelling of the ghost story about a young boy who comes back from the dead in order to receive baptism.52 The poet is careful to convey to the audience that this dead pagan judge is alive by the grace of G-d, but only slightly and very temporarily.

The pagan judge’s baptism is a public spectacle, carried out with the consent of the entire Christian congregation. Grundy states that “in eliminating sin, baptism affords a new relationship with God, a new beginning.”53 If the pagan judge was indeed left

51 Morse, St. Erkenwald, 39. 52 Please refer to the discussion about the limbus puerorum in chapter two of this dissertation 53 Grundy, Books and Grace Ælfric’s Theology, 179. 131

behind during the Harrowing to serve as an object lesson, then his delayed and very public baptism was for the benefit of the community in order to reinforce its faith. The congregation saved the pagan judge with sympathy, tears, and prayers and he, in turn, taught them a valuable lesson about faith, good works, and baptism. This important lesson occurs at a time when the Church is reclaiming England from the pagans and renewing its presence in the minds and hearts of the faithful. The pagan judge’s baptism is an erasure of pagan error and parallels the Church’s efforts to reclaim pagan sites of worship for the Christian faith. This can only be achieved with the help and cooperation of the community. Communal salvation is at the center of the St. Erkenwald-poet’s recasting of the Gregory/Trajan source story. The miracula illustrates the reciprocal relationship between the Christian community and its marginal members and underscores the intercessory role of Church in the process of salvation.

Another miracula that illuminates the relationship between the living and the marginal dead is the tale of St. Austin at Compton, written by John Lydgate around

1420-1440.54 This story, as with many miracula, explores an ecclesiastical issue in order to provide a theological lesson to its audience. This miracula in particular involves the correct and timely payment of tithes, but also shares many plot structures in common with the St. Erkenwald poem. Both works feature the dead rising to petition a Church minister for salvation in full view of a very sympathetic Christian congregation. Though

54 All references to the St. Austin poem are taken from John Lydgate, “Saint Austin at Compton,” in Saint’s Lives in Middle English Collections, 1000-1500, eds. E. Gordon Whatley, with Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch (Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 132

the particular message of each miracula differs slightly—the efficacy of good works, faith, and baptism in St. Erkenwald; Church tithing and the process of excommunication in St. Austin at Compton—the general concern is the same in that both poems emphasize the intercessory role of the Church in the process of salvation and reinforce the idea that salvation is a communal act.

Despite its many anachronisms,55 Lydgate effectively synthesizes his sources in order to promote the cult of St. Augustine of Canterbury (597-604/05), and “to further the efforts of the church authorities (as exemplified in the Lambeth Constitutions of

1281) to regularize the use of excommunication against various forms of resistance to church law, and rigorously to enforce the payment of tithes for the support of the parish clergy.”56 Working from at least two source texts, Lydgate writes a rhymed verse hagiography that is preserved in six manuscripts.57 The poem begins with a meditation on four stories in the Bible that justify the practice of tithing: Cain and Able, Abraham and Melchisedech, Isaac and Jacob, and Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder. Each one illuminates a slightly different aspect of the practice of

55 Whatley points out that the excommunicant petitioner was a lord in Romano-Britain, before a formal system of tithing was ever in place, and long before a streamlined system of excommunication was established to deal with such transgressions. See E. Gordon Whatley, “Introduction to Saint Austin at Compton,” in in Saint’s Lives in Middle English Collections, 1000-1500, eds. E. Gordon Whatley, with Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch (Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 216. 56 Whatley, “Introduction to Saint Austin at Compton,” 216-217. 57 Whatley mentions the life of St. Benedict of Nursia by Pope Gregory I and a story about a withheld tithes in Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium (1181-1192) as sources for Lydgate’s St. Austin at Compton. This section of the dissertation chapter focuses on the poem included in Whatley’s anthology—found in Harley 2255. 133

tithing and all four are connected to an overarching argument that associates tithing with the sacrifice that Christ made for the salvation of mankind.

Lydgate refers to the story of Cain and Abel as “The original ground of devout offryng” (3). If we are to read the stanza about Cain and Abel against the “Killing of

Abel” in the Townley Play cycle, then Cain may be analyzed as a figure of despair.58 He cheats G-d by withholding his best sheaves, not out of avarice but because of false prudence. Cain’s reluctance to sacrifice the best portion of his crop to G-d stems from his fear that what is left to him will not be enough for his sustenance. This suggests a lack of faith in G-d on Cain’s part and is a form of desperatio, a mortal sin. This tale is indeed the “original ground,” not only because it is “first type or figure…of Christ’s sacrifice of Himself to God, and of the Eucharist that re-enacts it,”59 as Whatley suggests, but because this biblical story represents man’s internal struggle to overcome the sin of despair. The placement of the Cain and Abel story at the beginning of the meditation cautions those who would withhold tithes that such an action suggests a lack of faith in G-d.

Lydgate’s second stanza focuses on the offering of bread and wine that

Melchisedech makes to Abraham in Genesis 14:18. The poem refers to Melchisedech as a “bishop, preest and kyng” (9). By including the Melchisedech and Abraham story as one of the justifications for tithing, Lydgate focuses our attention on the important role

58 Britt Mize, “Middle English Drama” (lecture, English 607 Texas A&M, College Station, TX, March 28, 2014). 59 Whatley, “Introduction to Saint Austin at Compton,” 221. 134

of priests in the celebration of the Eucharist during Catholic mass. Whatley calls

Melchisedech the “archetypal priest of God’s church,”60 which prompts Lydgate’s readers to consider the human component of the Catholic mass by contemplating the priests who conduct the service and mediate man’s encounter with G-d during Holy

Communion.

This section is followed by a contemplation of Abraham’s vision of the ladder of angels in stanza five, where he promises G-d a tenth of his wealth if he is returned to his homeland. The ladder symbolizes the mediation of Christ, as his human nature grounds him on earth and his divine nature connects him (and all of mankind through him) to G- d. The Eucharist is a ritual commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice for mankind. The passage that feature’s Jacob’s vision of the ladder returns our focus to the spiritual aspects of the Christ’s sacrifice before turning our attention back to its material components in the next passage about Isaac and Abraham.

Starting in stanzas six and seven, Lydgate transitions to the story of Isaac and

Abraham, that begins and ends with a discussion of “Wyn, oyle, and wheete,” which

Lydgate calls “frutis moost acceptable / To God above were offryd up for tythes” (47-

48). Abraham sacrifices oil, wine, and wheat to G-d, along with his only son, Isaac. This passage, and the story of Melchisedech and Abraham center on the material aspects of sacrifice: the priests who carry out the Eucharistic ritual that commemorates and re- enacts Christ’s sacrifice for mankind; as well as the materials they use for the ritual—oil,

60 Whatley, “Introduction to Saint Austin at Compton,” 221. 135

wine, and bread. These stories paired with Abraham’s vision of the ladder and the story of Cain and Abel illuminate both the material and the spiritual aspects of sacrifice, which are re-enacted in the form of tithing and Holy Communion. Whatley states “Tithing is just one manifestation of the cycle of offering and sacrificing that is at the heart of the

Christian faith and the economy of redemption and salvation. People give up, sacrifice, part of their incomes to make their own oblation, in effect, of bread and wine to the clergy and the church, who are thereby enabled in turn to offer continually to God the

Eucharistic prayers and the sacrificial oblation of Christ’s body and blood.”61 Without tithing, there is no Eucharistic ritual, and in essence, no Church. One form of sacrifice fuels the other and is necessary to the process of salvation. Lydgate’s ghost story, like the St. Erkenwald-poet’s, is ultimately about the reciprocal nature of salvation. So, it is appropriate that he begins his account by framing tithing as a form of sacrifice that ultimately helps those who make their timely payments to the Church.

Lydgate’s argument is a difficult one to make, for obvious reasons, but one that needs to be made early on in order to prevent his audience from sympathizing with the wayward lord and the stingy knight who are excommunicated for their failure to pay tithes. His meditation concludes with:

…all folk in their livynges That trewley tithe with glad herte and face, Patriarkis, prophetis in ther writynges, Shal evere encreese with fortune, hap, and grace (61-64).

61 Whatley, “Introduction to Saint Austin at Compton,” 222. 136

And conversely, those who withhold tithes will never prosper. A variant of this warning is found in a popular English proverb of the period (c. 1480): “What is withheld from

God, the devil often takes.”62 There is also an entire section of Purgatory dedicated to deadbeat tithers in The Vision of Tundale, which will be explored in the following section of this chapter. People were warned in many ways that avoiding the payment of tithes was a serious offence with spiritual and real-world consequences.

The most serious response to unjust tithers was excommunication, which was a practice that did not come into full effect in Europe until the mid to late twelfth century.63 Additionally, a strict system of tithing did not emerge until approximately the ninth century.64 As Lydgate’s story is set in a time shortly before the events of the St.

Erkenwald narrative (when Pope Gregory I sent his emissary, St. Augustine of

Canterbury (597-604/05) to stamp out paganism), neither the parsimonious lord nor St.

Austin would have known about the ecclesiastical consequences of unpaid tithes or how to navigate the legal intricacies of excommunication. As stated above, Lydgate’s anachronistic setting, in all probability, stems from an interest in promoting the cult of

St. Austin and supporting the Church’s use of excommunication as a means of correction for unjust tithers.65

62 John Shinners, ed, Medieval Popular Religion,1000-1500 (Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 399. 63 For a more detailed treatment of the development of excommunication in the Middle Ages, please refer to chapter two of this dissertation. 64 Whatley, “Introduction to Saint Austin at Compton,” 216. 65 Whatley, “Introduction to Saint Austin at Compton,” 216-217. 137

After Lydgate’s meditation on the importance of tithing, he dedicates sixty-nine lines to a detailed description of St. Austin’s conversion of pagans in England at the behest of Gregory the Great, thus establishing St. Austin as an unimpeachable agent of the Church. This is important for reasons stated in the discussion about St. Erkenwald’s anxieties about his powers of discernment. Erkenwald weeps and prays to G-d for the power to understand and interpret the mystery surrounding the appearance of an uncorrupted body in the middle of London. What that moment makes clear is that the power to correctly interpret supernatural occurrences comes from G-d through His prelates, who like St. Erkenwald and St. Austin, must be beyond reproach.66

In the next few stanzas, St. Austin establishes himself as a just judge, “sad and wel avised” (169). He is called to Cumeton to mediate a dispute between a village knight who has refused to pay his tithes and the parish priest who has excommunicated him for said offence. Austin hears both sides and finds the knight intractable. The knight argues

My labour is ay from yeere to yeere, By revolucioun, that the lond be sowe; Afore this peple stondyng here arowe, By evidence to maken an open preef, What maner boost that ony man list blowe, I with the ninth wil have the tenthe cheef (187-192).

The contumacious knight declares that since he has earned his wealth by his own labor he will keep his entire income. Austin’s decision to uphold the parish priest’s sentence of

66 In his discussion of three hagiographical ghost stories (the Life of St. Martin, the Life of St. Germanus, the Life of St. Patrick), Bruce states: “In each case the saint demonstrated his holy power by compelling the spirits of the dead to reveal their identity and the cause of their unrest” (34). In the hagiographies that Bruce examines, the undead appear to saints in churches or in graveyards in order to ask for intercession. These stories illustrate the importance of correct discernment by agents of the Church. See Bruce, ed., The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, 34-37. 138

excommunication in this court-like proceeding, formalizes the process of excommunication in a way that would have resonated with contemporary audiences. As discussed in greater detail in chapter two of this dissertation, excommunication, in the

Middle Ages, existed in two forms that were well known to the people: minor excommunication—where the excommunicant was allowed to attend mass, but was barred from taking the Eucharist; and major excommunication—where the excommunicant was allowed to stay within the community, but was socially ostracized and denied “’Os, orare, vale, communion, mensa nagature’ [Kiss, prayer, greeting, community and table].’”67 Major excommunication could either be inflicted by judicial sentence in an ecclesiastical court, a process called ferendae sententiae; or immediately as the crime was committed, called latae sententiae. It appears that the knight’s sentence of excommunication was inflicted by latae sententae—since he questioned its validity by appealing the decision—and then formalized by ferendae sententiae.

After his pronouncement, St. Austin holds mass and then asks all excommunicants to vacate the church before Holy Communion: “Ech cursyd man that wer out of grace, / Tyme of his Masse that every maneere wiht / That stood accursyd, voyde shulde his place” (198-200). To the horror of the assembled congregation, a corpse rises out of one of the tombs in the church and leaves the building, and then proceeds to wait patiently until mass is concluded. As he approaches the corpse, Austin makes the sign of the cross and sprinkles holy water before “the careyn gan compelle /

67 Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen, and Mary Franklin-Brown, eds. Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture (Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2013), 130. 139

‘In Jesu name, that lyst for man to bleede, / What that art trewly for to telle’” (222-224).

Like the St. Erkenwald-poet, Lydgate carefully situates his narrative within a Christian framework, where the mystery of the resurrected dead man is resolved in a Church, after mass, and by a high-ranking prelate. A popular contemporary English proverb reads:

“Thou shalt not believe in all spirits.”68 Because of St. Austin’s impeccable reputation as a holy man and just judge, his powers of discernment, which come directly from G-d, are unquestionable. He alone is authorized to determine whether the corpse is good or evil. Furthermore, Austin is in complete control of the situation as the corpse only addresses him once it is compelled to speak in the name of Christ, and only divulges information requested by the saint. In this way, the tale is a miracula, rather than a simple mirabilia designed to delight and terrify with details of ghoulish revenants.

Like the pagan judge, St. Austin’s corpse returns in order to ask for release from his otherworldly prison. He explains that he was a lord in Cumeton 150 years ago and because he refused to pay his tithes “Stood accursyd for my rebellioun” (228). Like the stubborn knight, the miserly lord was indignant about having to pay his hard-earned income to the Church and describes himself as “contraire, forward, and obstinate” (245-

248). After 150 years in a space that he describes as “a dirk prisoun of desolacioun /

Mong firy flawmys, voyd of remissioun,” the miserly lord realizes his error and is at last contrite and willing to make restitution (252-253). The miserly lord makes clear that his prison is Purgatory, where, unlike Limbo, the punishments are sensible and meant to be

68 John Shinners, ed, Medieval Popular Religion, 400. 140

corrective. Pursuant to Pope Innocent III’s issuance of the decretal ‘a nobis’ in1199, it was understood that persons dying under excommunication would go to Purgatory instead of Hell and could be absolved after death under certain conditions.69 The miserly lord and the pagan judge suffer in two very different post-mortem penal spaces, which is easy to forget, since they communicate with the living from these spaces in a similar manner and are released by what initially appear to be similar ecclesiastical processes.

The dead in both St. Austin at Compton and the Life of St. Erkenwald possess a sort of dual consciousness of the soul and body, not unlike the deceased in the Soul and

Body I and II poems. The bodies and souls of the dead remain tenuously connected after death, but seem to also suffer separately–or, in the parish priest’s case, repose in quiet contemplation—until Judgment Day. Lydgate’s miserly lord, for example, complains that he experiences pain and humiliation in his soul, as it burns in purgatorial flame, as well as in his body, which he describes as an “owgly careyn lamentable” (279) that slowly rots in the grave and becomes “stynkyng flesh” (235). Being present in both places, enables the dead to easily communicate with the living. In this way, purgatorial apparitions are very much like their earthly counterparts in medieval prisons—locked away in spaces with permeable boundaries, which facilitated communication with the outside community in order to enable aid. These spaces were meant to be temporary places of punishment that facilitated the rehabilitation of the inmates through contact with the outside world. As such, the miserly lord’s description of Purgatory as a dark

69 Elma Brenner, Meredith Cohen, and Mary Franklin-Brown, eds. Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, 129. 141

prison would have been a commonplace association to medieval audiences who encountered the concept in so many homilies, poems, proverbs, ghost stories, and vision narratives in that time period.

Once the miserly lord relates his story and expresses his contrition, Austin and the congregation are moved to tears: “Hooly Austyn with the people enviroun / Wept of compassioun, as they to watire woold” (255-256). His contrition motivates Austin to help him, but in order to do so he must summon the parish priest who inflicted the sentence of excommunication. Austin raises the body of the dead parish priest in the name of Christ and commands him to speak. The dead priest confirms that he excommunicated the miserly lord after repeatedly trying to counsel him about the importance of tithing. Finding him intractable—in the same way that the parish priest and St. Austin found the knight to be intractable at the beginning of this story—he excommunicated the miserly lord (281-288). St. Austin then asks the dead parish priest to remove the sentence of excommunication, pointing out that the miserly lord is repentant and willing to do penance for his sin. Austin urges him to be merciful as Christ was merciful and tells him that since “’On hym thu leydist a ful dreadful bond, / To thee it longith the same bond to unbynde’” (305-306). After the congregation is again moved to tears, “pitously sobbyng,” (324) the dead parish priest agrees to lift the sentence of excommunication, but only after the miserly lord performs penance by meekly receiving several lashes. The physical punishment that the miserly lord receives on earth completes his term of punishment and allows him to return to his grave in peace. Both

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the miserly lord and the dead parish priest return to their graves, where they will await reunion with their souls in Heaven on Judgment Day.

St. Austin’s questioning of both the miserly lord and the dead parish priest who excommunicated him, looks very much like an ecclesiastical trial or hearing. Both sides are questioned, the congregation votes with its tears, and the offending party makes restitution before being released from his punishment. The judicial process of major excommunication was quite commonly practiced in Lydgate’s time and would have been familiar to his audience. It was inflicted in an ecclesiastical court and required that a litigant petition and pay for the excommunication of the defendant. In some cases, the litigant could even block the defendant’s request for absolution in court.70 The resurrected priest in the tale of St. Austin at Compton, therefore, could have ignored St.

Austin’s plea for mercy as well as the congregation’s display of grief on behalf of the excommunicant and blocked the miserly lord’s petition for salvation. That he chose not to, however, demonstrates that carceral spaces—both earthly and post-mortem—are meant to be temporary and rehabilitative, rather than purely punitive.

As in the Life of St. Erkenwald, it is significant that in Lydgate’s miracula the prelate and his entire congregation sob in sympathy for the posthumous petitioner. An excommunicant was viewed as a member of the Corpus Christi “cut off from this source of life…as a withered branch cut off from the True Vine (John.15.6).”71 Vodola states

70 Elisabeth Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University California Press, 1986), 37. 71 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 191-192. 143

that an individual gains his or her identity as a corporate member of the church community through baptism at the beginning of life. And if excommunicated, he or she is viewed as a withered branch who regains that identity and is reincorporated into the church community through penance and absolution.72 The excommunicated lord regains his place through a pardon from the resurrected priest who originally performed the ritual, but was also aided by the tears that St. Austin and the congregation shed for him.

His reincorporation was a community effort, where the body, fragmented through sin, healed itself through sympathetic—and in the pagan judge’s case, baptismal—tears.73

The miserly lord’s posthumous absolution was a public spectacle performed in full view of the congregation,74 meant as an object lesson to all of those who would doubt the efficacy of sacrifice. As a result, the stubborn knight learned his lesson and began paying his tithes at the end of the poem (393-400). The condition of the miserly lord’s corpse and its location is an important part of this spectacle. His body, unlike the pagan judge’s, is not uncorrupted, but in a state of suspended decay. The gathered congregation are uneasy in the presence of the miserly lord’s rotting corpse: “Of this terrible doolful inspeccioun / The peeplis hertys gretly gan abave, / Whom to behoolde

72 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 191. 73 Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages, 51. 74 Schmitt points out that in ghost stories that feature purgatorial apparitions, ghosts appear to priests or to people in Church as often as they do to family and that in miracula and exempla they tend to follow “symbolic networks controlled by the Church” (67). He also argues that “Relationships of spiritual kinship in medieval society played a no less fundamental role than did those of natural kinship. They intersected, increased, and extended the networks of solidarities that gave force and cohesion to a society, notably by including the memory of the dead in the thoughts and activities of the living” (190). In pre-Christian ghost stories and in mirabilia, ghosts usually appear to family and friends. This shifts when the ghost stories are used as exempla, as is the case with the Life of St. Erkenwald and St. Austin at Compton. See Schmitt, Ghosts, 67, 190. 144

they cowed no coumfort have” (259-261). Although the miserly lord is not a revenant, spreading chaos and disease, he does cause dis-ease in the crowd, as his very presence violates natural law. His body’s placement in a tomb inside of a church is another violation, as those who died under a sentence of excommunication were not allowed to be buried in hallowed ground. This is why the miserly lord states “My cursyd careyn, ful of corrupcioun, / By Goddis angel was cast out of my grave” (231-232). Those who died under a sentence of excommunication were buried in the same unhallowed ground as those who died without being absolved of mortal sin: unrepentant murderers, oath- breakers, thieves, adulterers, suicides, prostitutes, heretics, and the unbaptized, who had no hope of salvation, and could not benefit in any way from the prayers of the living.

Consequently, they were disposed of in unmarked graves beyond city limits so that they would be forgotten. Because their souls and corpses were thought to be under the power of the devil, they were more likely to become the restless dead, making them a danger to the community. Resurrected ghosts and walking corpses, therefore, functioned as a metaphor. They remained visible and violated natural laws that governed life and death because they were not allowed to occupy any normal space in the medieval imaginaire.

The miserly lord, who was not damned, but excommunicated, was viewed as being spiritually sick and in need of a cure. Such marginal figures were excluded, but never completely exiled or forgotten. And because of this, the miserly lord was able to reach out to the community for help.

Whether in Limbo or in Purgatory, unbaptized and un-absolved souls of the dead occupied a penal space between Heaven and Hell and while alive, they lingered between

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life and death—a visible part of the community, excluded but not forgotten.

Furthermore, those who died under excommunication were buried in unconsecrated ground, were denied rites of passage, and their “corpses were credited with incorruptibility and consequently, with continuing vitality.”75As stated above, although the pagan judge and the excommunicated lord occupied different post-mortem penal spaces, there are many similarities between the two. Both inmates emerge from their posthumous prisons in their earthly bodies. Although the pagan judge has fared a little better than the miserly lord, as his “colour and his clothe has caȝt no defaute” (148), the excommunicant lord, who is described as “Terrible of face” in line 204, is still recognizable as the man who ruled the village over a century before. Brenner points out that this type of narrative was part of an “invasion of ghosts” tradition that that was associated with the “‘birth of purgatory that accentuated the obligations of the living to the dead.”76 The supplicants cross over the boundary between life and death in order to obtain absolution. Once received, marginal entities, which seem to be simultaneously in

Purgatory or Limbo and among the living on earth during the petition process, pass into

Heaven and their bodies are allowed to transition into a permanent state of death.

Although the pagan judge in St. Erkenwald is not an excommunicant, he undergoes such a transformation after he is baptized: “For as sone as þe soule was sesyd in blisse /

Corrupt was þat oþir crafte þat couert þe bones,” (345-346). The same process is implied in St. Austin of Compton, when the absolved lord retreats to his grave after he performs

75 Brenner, Cohen, and Franklin-Brown, eds. Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, 136. 76 Brenner, Cohen, and Franklin-Brown, eds. Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, 137. 146

penance (336). No longer marginal figures, the former pagan and the absolved excommunicant are reincorporated into the body of Christ and allowed—spiritually and physically—to take their proper place in the cosmic order.

Visions of the Otherworld in post-Conquest England

This section returns to an examination of visionary literature, continuing from the visions of Drihthelm and Furseus in the Anglo-Saxon period to the visions of Tundale and an anonymous nun in the fifteenth century. The visionary accounts of Drihthelm and

Furseus provide valuable insight into a shift that occurred in how Purgatory was imagined as a state, in the early Middle Ages, to how it was understood as a concrete place, with more well-defined features, in the later Middle Ages. The Vision of Tundale and A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary, like many other stories about the dead in the Middle Ages, were didactic and reflected

Orthodox Church doctrine. The visionary accounts of the high to late Middle Ages provide details about Purgatory’s structure and function that were missing in earlier visions or purgatorial ghost narratives. Both The Vision of Tundale and A Revelation of

Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary reveal a detailed system of reward and punishment that shapes the landscape of the afterlife. In these visionary narratives, the relatively well-defined space of Purgatory is organized not only according to sin, but according to social class, occupation, and, in certain cases, gender. In fact, the spaces of post-mortem punishment in many mid-to-late-medieval visionary narratives begin to resemble, in purpose and function, the punitive spaces in the emerging medieval prison system. This section argues that this new clarity about Purgatory’s punitive

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landscape leads to a greater material and spiritual emphasis on the role of the people and the Church in the salvation of those in carceral spaces—both living and dead.

Visions, like purgatorial ghost stories, were a popular literary genre in the Middle

Ages,77 and involved a disruption of the natural cosmic order by the travelers who crossed over from the world of the living into the realm of the dead. Unlike purgatorial apparitions, however, visionaries did not typically make their journeys voluntarily. Their forays into the otherworld were usually followed a period of stress, severe illness, or temporary death; and their movements and interactions with otherworldly beings were constrained by their tenuous connection to the world of the living, and controlled by supernatural guides. Eileen Gardiner divides visions into three categories: apocalyptic visions (which are concerned with salvation history); mystical visons (which record a

“personal struggle of the soul toward a union with the divine”); and otherworld visions

(which involve “an isolated event in the life of the visionary,” where a visionary travels through the otherworld in a dream or temporary state of death).78 Gardiner makes further distinctions between otherworldly visions that are “justice seeking,” which explore places where justice was dispensed; and “penance-producing visions,” where visionaries visit Hell and/or Purgatory either to return to earth in order to perform penance or to carry out masses, almsgiving, and prayers for those who continue to suffer in otherworldly places of punishment.79 Many visions include elements from multiple

77 Eileen Gardiner, Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook, xv. Gardiner states that there are currently sixty extant visions in multiple manuscripts, translated into several languages. 78 Gardiner, Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook, xvii-xx. 79 Gardiner, Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook, xxv. 148

categories as there is a great deal of overlap. This study focuses on penance-producing visions of the otherworld as they best exemplify what the Church was attempting to teach people about the efficacy of good works, penance, mass, alms, and prayers for the salvation of those who give and receive such aid.

The Vision of Drihthelm and The Vision of Furseus, which were analyzed in a previous section of this chapter, were among the earliest recorded visions in England.

Like other early stories about the afterlife, these visions described Purgatory in a less clearly-defined way. Later otherworld visions are more detailed in their descriptions of

Purgatory as a place of progressive punishment, and offer some insight into how people in the Middle Ages understood punitive correction. This section analyzes The Vision of

Tundale (c. 1149) and A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century

Woman Visionary (hereafter, referred to as A Revelation of Purgatory), written around

1422. Both visions are indebted to The Vision of Drihthelm and The Vision of Furseus and present Purgatory as a place of sensible punishment, where the baptized can complete their penitential work after death. The Vision of Tundale and A Revelation of

Purgatory present a multifaceted view of Purgatory that aligns with the later theological model of post-mortem salvation that was inspired by Pope Gregory I—which assumed that penitential work had to be completed after death, since it could not be sufficiently completed in life. The Vision of Tundale and A Revelation of Purgatory are the focus of this section because they offer two slightly different views of Purgatory in the post-

Conquest period. The former was a visionary narrative of immense popularity, written by an Irish monk and reproduced later for a wide audience in the Middle Ages; while the

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latter was written by an anonymous woman for a more exclusive, religious audience and was less-well known. Both visions, however, exemplify the Church’s “attempt to enclose, contain, and define all manifestations of popular piety,” in order to press such narratives into the service of promulgating the Doctrine of Purgatory.80

The Vision of Tundale, one of the most popular religious narratives of the Middle

Ages, is about a knight of questionable morals who lapses into a coma for three days and is guided by an angel through Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory before returning to earth a reformed man. Originally written by an Irish Benedictine monk, named Marcus, around

1149, the vision was revised by a Cistercian monk, Helinand of Froidmont around 1235 in the Chronicon. St. Vincent of Beauvais adapted Helinand’s version of Tundale in the

Speculum Historiale (1244-1254), which was then adapted into “thirteen vernaculars.”81

The story exists in “150 Latin manuscripts and five fifteenth-century manuscripts,” all of which make very few changes to Marcus’s original Tundale.82 The fifteenth-century narrative83 analyzed in this section, is a faithful retelling of the original twelfth-century version, which was written around the time when Purgatory was adopted as doctrine and

80 Gardiner, Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook, xxvii. 81 Edward E. Foster, Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Gy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004), 179. 82 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Gy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale, 179. 83 All citations of The Vision of Tundale are taken from Edward E. Foster, Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Gy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004). Foster’s version of a Vision of Tundale is from the National Library of Scotland MS Advocates’ 19.3, fols. 98r-157v. [c.1425- 1450]; British Library MS Cotton Caligula A. ii, fols. 95v-107v. [c. 1400-1450]; British Library MS Ashmole 1491 (SC 7656), [c. 1400-1450]; MS Takamiya 32 (olim Penrose 10 olim Penrose 6, olim Delamere), fols. 166v-75v. [fifteenth century].

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the practice of almsgiving, masses, and prayer for the salvation of the marginal dead was actively promulgated by the Church.

The Vision of Tundale is a balanced narrative that divides its 2,383 lines almost equally between detailed descriptions of the spaces of punishment and the spaces of reward. Passus I through IX describe Tundale’s journey through progressively worse parts of Purgatory, culminating in his arrival at Hell’s gate in Passus X. This climactic scene is then followed by seven Gaudia, starting with the spaces reserved for the valde non malis and ending at Heaven’s gate. Like The Vision of Drihthelm, Tundale’s

Purgatory houses souls who must endure physical and mental punishment for serious sins as well as not-so-bad souls who must serve their time in a pleasant space just outside of Heaven until the end of the world. Sin, in Tundale’s otherworld, is spatialized.

Each sin is associated with a specific punishment and a specific place. As such, the landscape of Purgatory is shaped by its function as a place of correction. This is a feature found increasingly in later medieval otherworld visions; however, The Vision of Tundale is unique in that the spaces of punishment in Purgatory are roughly organized according to the seven deadly sins. Edward Foster states that because The Vision of Tundale was a

Cistercian creation, the narrative is presented as a history, and Tundale’s progress through the nine sections of Purgatory was meant to inspire serious contemplation about the consequences of worldly sins.84 This otherworld vision remained popular for centuries and was reworked by anonymous writers in the fifteenth century in ways that

84 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, 185. 151

relied “on a more popular taste for the grotesque and horrific, mediated by eventual consolation, rather than on Cistercian spirituality. That four of the five manuscripts of the Middle English version include a large number of romances…may argue that interest in Tundale was consistent with more general interest in stories of adventure.”85

Tundale’s octosyllabic rhymed couplets was very much in the style of the popular romance genre. Its form reveals something about its function as an adventure story—or a mirabilia—in the fifteenth century. However, Foster argues that although the “fifteenth- century audience may have seen fiction where a twelfth-century audience saw history…the demonstration of God’s tempering of justice with mercy must have contributed to the latter audiences’ pleasure and solace.”86 Twelfth- and fifteenth-century audiences would have understood that Tundale’s Purgatory, despite its horrors, is ultimately a salvific space that demonstrates G-d’s mercy.

One of the most interesting features of this vision is that the protagonist is not a good man. This stands in stark contrast to many otherworld visions whose protagonists are mostly good people who had lived respectable, if not nearly sinless lives. The author of The Vision of Tundale presents a protagonist who is rich, noble-born, and of low moral character. The story begins with the narrator’s lengthy enumeration of Tundale’s faults, which are later echoed in a mock-congratulatory manner by the fiends who find

Tundale after he lapses into a death-like coma. Tundale, a “man of wykud fame” is guilty of pride, envy, covetousness, gluttony, lechery, adultery, slander, treachery, and

85 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, 188. 86 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, 188. 152

usury (20-27, 189-208). The fiends terrify Tundale by telling him that because he never loved G-d and failed to do any charitable work, he will go straight to Hell, where masses, prayers, and works of charity carried out on his behalf “Myght not help thee from the peyn of Hell / for eyvermore therin to dwell” (213-214). Tundale’s angel guide arrives on the scene and reassures him that though he will suffer for his sins, his punishments are temporary and “Goddus mercy schall thee save, / Allthaff thu servydyst non to have” (257-258). It is clear from this exchange that although Tundale deserves eternal damnation, he will only go to Purgatory. After the author dedicates the introduction as well as the entire first Passus to establishing Tundale’s low moral character, the audience cannot be left in any doubt that G-d is merciful and Tundale is, indeed, a terrible human being. Tundale’s presentation as a flawed character at the beginning of the poem might have been the author’s attempt to make his protagonist more relatable as a sort of everyman with whom his audience could easily identify; however, Tundale’s sins, many of which are criminal, are too excessive to make him a relatable—or even a likeable—character. It seems more likely that that the author intended his audience to read Tundale as a rich and privileged member of the mercantile class, wholly dedicated to commerce and the pursuit of material gain. Tundale is representative of the emerging middle class—which included merchants, physicians, lawyers, tradesmen, and other professionals in the Middle Ages—whose salvation, Le

Goff argues, was complicated by their involvement in worldly pursuits and was therefore dependent upon the existence of a purgatorial middle ground. Who Tundale is, the sins he committed in life, how he is punished in Purgatory, and what he sees in the afterlife

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suggest that this otherworld vision may be a criticism of, or perhaps even a warning to the members of the mercantile class who misuse their wealth and power. The fifteenth- century manuscripts that included the later versions of The Vision of Tundale were likely commissioned by and for an upper-class audience, since the high cost of manuscript production at the time would have precluded the commissioning of such works by members of the working class, and because four of the five extant manuscripts of the

Middle English version include a great number of romances, fit for a secular rather than a religious audience. It seems likely that The Vision of Tundale was originally written as a means of the Church passing judgment on, or even asserting influence and power over the newly-rich members of the emerging middle class, who despite their earthly power are portrayed as just as likely to be subject to divine wrath. And if the otherworld vision was originally written as a religious commentary on the mercantile class, it was included in the later manuscripts that contained mostly secular materials commissioned by the wealthy to serve as a sort of spiritual mirror that warned those with wealth and power of the consequences of abusing their authority. Tundale’s sins and punishments in

Purgatory are closely tied to his status as a knight and a member of the mercantile class, and are specific to his station as a rich and powerful man who exerts control over people of lesser means.

Tundale’s many sins stem from his insatiable desire to make money and manifest in his interactions with the people he exploits. He is guilty of usury (52-55), withholding tithes (56), price gouging (57-58), and fixing the market (59-60). Tundale demonstrates pride, greed, gluttony, and wrath in his dealings with a man who is indebted to him for 154

three horses, and with whom he dines on the night that he succumbs to what seems to be a stroke or heart attack. The desperate debtor cannot pay the inflated prices by the impossible deadline that Tundale has set, so he uses flattery and the promise of a grand meal to appease the knight’s “wrothe” (70-76). After Tundale begins to feel ill at dinner, he declares that he is about to die and cries out for mercy before losing consciousness:

“A Jesu Cryst, Y aske Thee mercy” (95). Tundale is not a religious man and has no love for G-d or Church, a fact that the author makes abundantly clear by mentioning it three times within the first 215 lines of the poem. So, it is only the knight’s last-minute request for mercy that saves him from Hell. The angel explains that there is a balance between justice and mercy, but mercy often wins out even when the most wicked souls repent:

But thei that ar wykyd and synfull kyd And no penans in body dyd, God takyth on hem no venjans, Yf thei hadon any repentans. Throw His mercy ar thei save. But yette the sowle som peyn schalt have (831-837).

Although it is preferable to do the work of penance in life, it can always be done in the afterlife. And because punishment for each and every sin is inescapable, it is nearly impossible to complete the work of penance in life and, therefore, must be continued in some form in the afterlife.

As Tundale’s soul moves through Purgatory, he learns that each of the nine spaces is dedicated to punishing souls according to their sins and scaled to match the severity of the sins committed in life. In Passus VI, for example, Tundale finds himself in a place reserved for those who, driven by avarice, had committed theft, more

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particularly those who committed general robbery, stole church property, or withheld tithes. The angel explains that “Yche wyckyd dede, more or lesse, / Schall be ponnysched aftur the trespass” (639-640). And because he stole a cow from his neighbor, Tundale must undergo punishment in this place by leading a wild cow across a very narrow and spiky bridge that spans a fiery lake full of hungry beasts. The angel further explains that since Tundale returned the cow, he will not suffer the full measure of this punishment: “And for he had is cow agayn, / Thu schalt have the lesse payne

(637-638). Foster notes that “gradations of suffering [is] a point not always noted in visions…[and] The Vision of Tundale is distinctive in the way it associates specific places with specific sins.”87 In several of the locations described in the Passus, inmates suffer more or less depending on the crimes they committed in life. While the knight’s trip across the bridge was terribly unpleasant, it was preferable to being devoured by the hungry water beasts below who dined on the souls of those who robbed people, destroyed churches, and committed sacrilege (598-630).

Tundale’s Purgatory, which is based on a system of graded penalties, and punishes its inmates in places associated with their sins, looks very much like the emergent medieval (and to a certain extent, our modern) prison system. As the prison system in England developed over time, individual prisons became specialized and served different criminal populations. Within the prison system, convicts were sorted into different prisons according to the kind and degree of crime committed. Of the

87 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, 181. 156

municipal prisons in London, for example, Newgate detained those who committed the most serious crimes, such as treason or felony. Its population was then sorted according to heavier and lighter crimes and separated into different parts of the prison.88 The similarities between Tundale’s Purgatory and the medieval prison system end there, however, as the inmates in Tundale’s otherworldly prison do not serve out their sentences in one place, but migrate through the system and are punished in multiple spaces for an indeterminate amount of time before they are either released or ushered into Hell permanently.

Tundale moves through each of the sections of Purgatory, and despite being guilty of every one of the seven deadly sins, suffers sensible punishment in only five locations before coming to the gates of Hell. Although the angel never explains why

Tundale avoids physical torture in the first three spaces, it becomes apparent as the narrative progresses, that he is spared punishment only in the spaces that do not directly address his overarching sin of avarice. Tundale is merely a witness in a space dedicated to wrathful murderers in Passus II, for example, because he is not a kin-slayer, nor is his wrathful behavior connected to violence, but, rather, greed. In fact, Tundale’s wrath is only ever aroused by the prospect of losing some part of his wealth (68, 76). His faults are closely tied to the sin of avarice and his greed is an all-consuming sin that engenders in Tundale an insatiable need to amass material wealth by whatever means necessary, including theft.

88 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 352-355. For more a more detailed discussion of the emerging medieval prison system, see chapter two of this dissertation. 157

Of the two spaces in Purgatory reserved for the punishment of thieves, Tundale suffers in the second, as he is not only guilty of theft but of short-changing the Church.

In Passus III, thieves who have stolen by force “Or throw falsehed any mon bygylys / Or wynnyght mennus gude with wykyd wylys,” are swept back and forth between fire and ice (385-386).89 The angel assures the terrified knight that he will suffer no bodily pain in this space, but supplies no further information about who the suffering thieves are, from whom they stole, their motivations for stealing, or why Tundale is spared punishment in this place. It is unclear why Tundale, a cow-thief, is exempt from punishment in Passus III until he arrives at the second space reserved for thieves who are not only guilty of robbing ordinary people, but stealing from the Church by removing property or by withholding tithes. The place of punishment in Passus VI is a far more appropriate space for Tundale to rectify his crimes of theft since, in addition to stealing his neighbor’s property, he had failed to fulfill his financial obligations to the Church.

The knight was covetous and slothful in carrying out his duties to the Church: “Nou warkus of mercy wold he worch; / He lovyd never God, ne Holy Chyrch. / With hym was never no charyte” (29-31). It is because of these failings that Tundale suffers alongside an unjust tither whom he encounters halfway across the narrow, spiky bridge.

Neither the knight, leading his wild cow, nor the man burdened with heavy sheaves of grain can make room for the other to pass: “So narrow then the brygge was / That

89 This scene is indebted to The Vision of Drihthelm, where the visionary encounters sinners who are swept between fire on one side of an infinite valley and ice on the other. Why the sinners suffer such punishment, however, is never made clear in The Vision of Drihthelm. 158

nowdur might for othur pas. / To hom bothe hit was grette peyn” (667-669). Turning back is also not an option for these two men whose feet, at this point, have been reduced to bloody shreds by the spikes. Both the knight and the unjust tither share a moment of mutual pain as they consider their bloody feet, the impossible length and narrowness of the bridge, their unwieldy burdens, and the ravenous beasts waiting with open jaws in the boiling water below. Looking at one another “Thei wepton sore. Gret dele there was,

/ For nowdur might lette odur pas” (681-682). It is only after both are reduced to tears by their shared pain that the angel removes Tundale from the bridge and ends his suffering.

That Tundale and the unjust tither are a component of each other’s torture further underscores the knight’s avarice. The sheaves of grain that the unjust tither must carry across the bridge recalls the sheaves that Cain withheld from his tribute to G-d. In the previous section’s discussion about tithing in St. Austin at Compton, Cain’s imperfect tribute was interpreted as an act of false prudence, rather than avarice. In this context, however, withholding a tribute to G-d can only be interpreted as an act of avarice.

Although the author never explicitly states that Tundale is guilty of withholding tithes, his failure to do good works, perform acts of charity, and his lack of “love” for the

Church puts him in the same position as the unjust tither, where they undergo nearly the same painful punishment together on the bridge. This penalty suggests that Tundale’s failure to fulfill his obligation to the Church is both spiritual and financial and that this is one of many avarice-driven offences that the sinful knight must atone for in Purgatory.

Tundale’s sins are all subsumed into and manifest as aspects of his greed. We learn from the knight’s diabolical accusers in Passus I that even Tundale’s lustfulness is

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just another manifestation of his avarice: “Thu hast ylovyd myche lechery, / And myche thu has usud voutry” (193-194). The fiends congratulate him on his lechery and taunt him about his adultery. Whether Tundale simply coveted another man’s wife, or was himself married when he committed adultery, his adulterous behavior further establishes him as an avaricious man who was driven to acquire things and people, regardless of what he already possessed. Tundale is a lecherous covenant-breaker whose transgressions earn him a place in two different parts of Purgatory dedicated to correcting such behavior. Interestingly, he finds himself in the company of religious men in these two spaces. In Passus VII, Tundale enters an oven house before being poked, stabbed, and torn to pieces by weapon-wielding fiends. After being re-formed and torn apart several times, Tundale is surprised to see “within that dungeon / Mony men of relygeon/ That full were of fowle vermyn” (796-799). The angel explains that because everyone in the world is marred by sin—even newborn children—nobody escapes G-d’s justice. This is one of the main points in A Revelation of Purgatory, which posits that even the most devout servants of G-d occasionally sin in word, thought, or deed and must pay the price, either in this life or the next. It appears that Tundale is punished in this space for his lust alone, and not adultery, as there is no mention of breaking vows or violating covenants in this place. The other inhabitants, whom the knight refers to as

“men of relygeon,” are connected to the church, but do not appear to be ordained priests or monks who have broken any vows of chastity by indulging in lecherous behavior. The priests, monks, and nuns who have broken such vows suffer in the next space that

Tundale visits.

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In Passus VIII, the lustful inmates who have broken vows are swallowed by a large bird and impregnated by barbed snakes that are born through various parts of the body. Here, Tundale encounters clergy again, specifically

…ordeynyd for men of relygyon That kepud not well hor profession; For monkus, channons, prestus, and clerkus, And for odur men and wemen of Holy Kyrke That delytus hor bodys yn lechery, or in any odur maner of foly, And dothe not as ther ordyr wyll, But ledus hor lyffe aftur ther wyll (961-968).

These religious people are monks, nuns, priests, and clerks who are punished by barbed serpents for having broken the vows of celibacy they took when they dedicated their lives to the Church. They are covenant-breakers whom Tundale notes are punished more severely than any other sinner he has seen in Purgatory so far. The angel explains that their punishment is more severe because they broke their covenant with G-d and the

Church. Those who are ordained or have taken religious vows are held to a higher standard, and are, therefore, punished more severely when they sin (955-972). This is evidenced by Tundale’s relatively short sentence in this part of Purgatory. Tundale is punished for his adultery for what seems like a fraction of the time that the lustful clergy must spend in this place. That religious figures are subject to the same temptations and commit the same sins as laypeople, but are held to higher standards and punished more severely, is a popular theme in otherworld visions and becomes a focal point in A

Revelation of Purgatory.

Once Tundale atones for his sexual transgressions, he moves into a final place of physical punishment, detailed in Passus IX, where sinners are beaten with hammers on 161

forges by diabolical blacksmiths. Foster states that “what has earned the sinners their places in Vulcan’s forges does not appear to be any particular type of sin, but rather the sheer number of sins they have committed…Tundale must suffer, because he has been a perpetrator of many and various sins.”90 One very interesting feature in this place—and in all of the places where Tundale is subjected to physical torment—is the presence of large creatures or mechanisms with mouths and jaws that are designed to devour, consume, and eventually break down sinners as a means of punishment. In Passus IX,

Vulcan and the other large blacksmiths seize souls who arrive in their space and immediately throw them into a forge that resembles a fiery mouth: “Owt of hor mowthus com grett smoke. / These smythus wer full of sowlys within / that wepton and madyn grett dyn” (1036-1038). So too are sinners roasted in a large, mouth-like oven in Passus

VII before they are stabbed and speared by devils for their sexual sins (709-712). In

Passus VI large beasts threaten to swallow Tundale as he crosses a narrow bridge over their waters; and sinners in Passus VIII are greeted at the gate by a large bird, who “was bothe fell and greedy / And swollod tho sowlys that wer redy” (895-896). Acheron, a monster whose gaping mouth is as large as nine-thousand men, greets his guests by devouring them in Passus V, the first place in which Tundale undergoes physical punishment (445-446). The angel explains that the giant beast is insatiable, like the covetous people he devours:

His sette to swolo covetyows men That in erthe makyght hit prowd and towghe And never wenon to have ynowghe,

90 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, 184. 162

But evur coveton more and more And that hor sowlys forthynkon sore (484-488).

The avaricious are further consumed by snakes, adders, and lions in the belly of the beast. Acheron holds dominion over a place specifically designed to punish the covetous; however, because of Tundale’s all-consuming greed, he either encounters or is devoured by similarly insatiable monsters in in each of the five spaces he undergoes physical punishment.

It is appropriate, then, that Tundale’s all-consuming greed is corrected by large, devouring monsters who repeatedly rip him to pieces until he is sufficiently humbled.

Tundale, after all, occupies a similar position of power in the world. He is a rich and well-positioned knight and member of the mercantile class whose wealth and far- reaching power enable him to exploit smaller men. As a knight and member of wealthy mercantile class, Tundale has failed in his obligation to protect those under his power.

His violation of the reciprocal bond that exists between the rich and their subordinates has revealed, yet again, that Tundale is a covenant-breaker.91 His punishment by the river-swallowing Acheron, whose actions echo the leviathan in Job 40:1892 imbue

Tundale’s covetousness with religious significance. The avarice of secular and religious authorities is made all the greater by their access and power.

91 John H. Y. Briggs, et al, “The medieval Origins of the English Criminal Justice System,” in Crime And Punishment In England: An Introductory History (London: University College London Press,1996), 1-2. According to the concept of Noblesse Oblige, Tundale, who has been entrusted with so much wealth, has a moral obligation to protect those who are less privileged. His abuse of that privilege and the authority with which people have entrusted him parallels the abuse of authority that the men and women of religion have been entrusted. 92 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, 260. 163

The author’s commentary on exploitative men and women of power continues as the knight journeys into Hell and discovers, to his great surprise, that Lucifer is “Cheffe of markenes and pryncypalle,” bound in hell and suffering as much pain as he inflicts on the damned souls he tortures (1464-1465). The author’s presentation of Lucifer as the principle prisoner of Hell, rather than its king, aligns with the Church’s monistic concept of evil. This is the same concept behind St. Austin’s statement that Christ “is Lord and

Kyng, / Hevene and helle obeye to His biddyng” in St. Austin at Compton (340-341); and the author’s reference to Mary as “emperice of helle and purgatory” (846-847) in A

Revelation of Purgatory. Evil is an absence of G-d and, therefore, lacks power. Lucifer, as the first and greatest transgressor, suffers the most in Hell and has the least power.

Suffering alongside Lucifer are the princes and prelates who abused their G-d-given authority in life. Although Tundale is not physically punished in Hell, the angel ensures that he witnesses the suffering souls of “men that ar of muche myght, / That don to pore men wrong and unryght…/ And streyn the pore, that are lesse” (1437-1438, 1441). Just as the covetous souls in Passus V are devoured by Acheron, these greedy “prynces of wykydnes” in Hell are consumed by Lucifer, the prince of shadows (1442). Abuse of power, especially at the expense of the poor and weak, is the greatest evil.

Although Tundale is guilty of covetousness, oath-breaking, and abusing his power, he is spared punishment in such a place because he invoked G-d’s mercy. A clear pattern emerges as the knight travels through Purgatory, Hell, and into the places reserved for the non valde malis as well as the boni (saved). The less engaged one is with the material world in life, the closer he or she will be to Heaven in the afterlife.

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This pattern becomes more apparent in the seven Gaudia that detail seven spaces just outside of Hell that house both imperfect souls who undergo mild punishments and those who sit in the gardens of Earthly Paradise, waiting for the end of the world. In Gaudium

I, for example, souls suffer only mild pain as they are buffeted about by a whirlwind in a pleasant field. The angel explains that these were honest people whose nominal efforts to relieve the poor through good works and almsgiving rendered them unfit for immediate entry into Paradise or Heaven (1517-1528). As Tundale travels through each of the seven spaces, he encounters the souls of kings who were just, but slightly flawed

(Gaudium II); the souls of those who maintained chaste marriages (Gaudium III); martyrs, saints, chaste monks and nuns (Gaudia IV and V); founders of churches

(Gaudium VI); and holy virgins who are allowed to gaze on Heaven and all of creation

(Gaudium VII). Each location is more beautiful than the last and filled with joyful souls awaiting entry into Heaven. Unlike the places described in the Passus, these souls remain in their assigned location from the time of their death to Judgment Day.

The inmates of Gaudium I are the only inhabitants described in the Gaudia to suffer sensible punishment and like their earthly prison counterparts who had committed lighter crimes, serve out their sentences in more tolerable places in prison. When

Tundale begs the angel to allow him to remain in the location with a view of Heaven, he is told that

There may non dwelle here, But holy vyrgyns that have bene Chast and kept hor bodys clene, And for the love of God allmyghty Have forsake the world all holely, And to God ar gevyn fro all ylle 165

Whith all her thoghttus and all her wyll. But suche a thoghtte and wyll was no in thee When thu wast in thi nowne poste” (2272 – 2280).

Tundale is advised to live a clean life free of sin before he reluctantly returns to his body. This is a difficult task given that the souls in the locations described in Gaudia II through VII range from exceptionally good to almost impossibly perfect. Since even the smallest sin can ensnare a soul and send it to any one—or several—of the spaces detailed in Passus II through X, Tundale dedicates the remainder of his life to religious asceticism after giving away his money and worldly possessions to the poor. The message here may be that the only truly perfect knight or merchant is one who has entered religious life by taking vows. A less cynical reading, however, would be that earthly penance and divine mercy spare souls from receiving their just desserts.

The Vision of Tundale was originally written by Marcus, a Benedictine monk as a penitential piece, and then slightly secularized for a later audience. Foster states that although this otherworld vision mentions the importance of suffrages, they “were to become prominent soon after Marcus’ work, when the doctrine of Purgatory became more the property of the Dominicans than the Cistercians.”93A Revelation of Purgatory

(1422), written two centuries after establishment of the Doctrine of Purgatory, makes suffrages its focus by going into great detail about various punishments meted out to otherworldly prisoners for their earthly sins and then enumerating which prayers and

93 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, 185. Foster explains that the Dominicans and preaching friars were far more concerned with suffrages than the Cistercians, who viewed “Purgatory as part of their meditative spirituality.” 166

masses most effectively help expunge those sins. Like The Vision of Tundale, A

Revelation of Purgatory, associates specific sins with a specific punishments and specific places. The landscape of Purgatory in this later visionary account is also shaped by its function as a place of correction, though it is less detailed in its geographical descriptions than The Vision of Tundale. Its boundaries, however, seem to be more permeable. The visionary is not only visited by a purgatorial apparition, but visits the otherworldly prison herself two times by simply falling asleep. The kind of freedom to travel between worlds that the visionary nun and her ghostly visitor has is similar to what was allowed earthly prisoners, who not only left their cells in order to seek help, but regularly received visitors in their prison spaces. This permeability ultimately facilitated rehabilitation.

A Revelation of Purgatory was written by an anonymous nun in Winchester around August 1422 and survives in three manuscripts.94 According to Marta Powell

Harley, this otherworld vision is unique because it is “the only one that does not originate in a Latin or continental version,” and it documents a woman’s personal religious experience in a way that ties it to “the tradition of female visionaries and writers in the Middle Ages.”95 Although Harley does not define the author as a mystic,

94 Marta Powell Harley, ed., A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown, Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary: Introduction, Critical Text, and Translation, Studies in Women and Religion 18 (Lewiston: Mellen, 1985), 3. The three extant manuscripts are: Longleat MS. 29 (L), fols. 155r-165v; the Thornton MS (Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91) (T) fols. 250v-258r; and Bodleian MS Eng. Th. C. 58 (B), fols. 10r-12v. All citations of A Revelation are taken from Harley’s edition. 95 Harley, A Revelation of Purgatory, 22. Harley states that because nothing is known about the author, there is no “justification for describing her as a mystic, a term reserved for those who pursue ‘a conscious, deep, and intimate union of the soul with God’ through a program of asceticism and contemplation” (27). 167

like Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, and other medieval women visionaries, the author positions herself as a conduit for divine truths. Despite her secondary status as a woman, or perhaps because of it, she is an ideal mediator for otherworldly knowledge.96 The author takes us through a Purgatory that is a distinct place of graded and progressive punishments, where intercessory prayer, almsgiving, and masses are efficacious in relieving the suffering of otherworldly prisoners. Like the Vision of

Tundale, A Revelation of Purgatory promotes the later theological model of post-mortem salvation, inspired by Gregory I, which posited that the difficulty of completing penitential work in life almost always necessitated its completion in the afterlife. This narrative reflects and even “propagandizes for”97 Church doctrine by focusing heavily on the intercessory role of the nun, her confessors and priests, as well as laypeople who assume the burden of helping those suffering in Purgatory. This otherworld vision is exceptional because it is also a ghost story, and as such, its legitimacy as an orthodox

Christian story must be validated in very specific ways by both the nun and by her confessor.

A Revelation of Purgatory differs from other ghost stories because the central character must confront and determine the legitimacy of the visiting purgatorial apparition alone. by Jean-Claude Schmitt, who distinguishes between ghosts as public

96 Some interesting features of A Revelation of Purgatory, are as follows: the two protagonists are women, women are better represented in this narrative, and the anonymous female author seems more comfortable describing the punishments female bodies undergo. In male-authored visionary narratives women are either only nominally present or completely left out. 97 Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), 221, quoted in Harley, ed., A Revelation of Purgatory, 19. 168

objects and otherworld visions as private events, states that “An apparition…never involved just two actors, a dead person and a living one, but an entire chain of witnesses, intermediaries, informants, scribes, preachers, and listeners; more than a distinct supernatural event, the apparition was a cultural object that was developed socially depending on its circulation.”98 While this is certainly true in St. Austin at Compton and the Life of St. Erkenwald, explored in the previous sections of this chapter, the ghost in A

Revelation of Purgatory only reveals herself privately to the visionary nun, who later records the account after disclosing its details to her confessor. The nun is just as diligent as St. Austin and St. Erkenwald in discerning the nature of the spirit, but must do so without the benefit (or protection) of witnesses. The ghost initially threatens to harm the nun if she does not help her, stating “Cursed mot þou be and wo worth the bot thou hast

þe to be my help,” before rushing menacingly toward the visionary (65-66). Like Austin and Erkenwald, she invokes Christ’s protection before compelling the spirit to reveal its nature: “I coniur þe in þe Faderas name and þe Son and þe Holy Gost, þre persons in on

God in Trenyte, þat þou tell me what þou art þat þus trauaillest me and wheþer þou be a spirite of purgatory to haue help of me oþer a spirite of helle to ouercome me and trowble me” (79-84). The ghost reveals herself to be a nun named Margaret who had served in a religious house known to the visionary author. The ghost also verifies that she is a purgatorial apparition, rather than a fiend or damned soul, by requesting that prayers and masses be said on her behalf in order to ease her suffering in Purgatory.

98 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 186. 169

The ghost is then further authenticated by the confessor who hears the visionary nun’s story. And in this way, the process of validating the nun’s vision begins. We learn about the nun’s story in the form of a confession, wherein the she very carefully discloses every detail of her visionary experience to her priest. Because visionaries had direct access to supernatural information that was not mediated or controlled by the

Church, these extra-ecclesiastical experiences not only threatened to diminish the

Church’s authority, but ran the risk of being diabolical illusions disguised as divine visions. It was, therefore, necessary for “authorized mediators” to examine visions, as they did ghostly apparitions, in order to “built a barrier against diabolical temptations.”99

In this way, the veracity of the nun’s vision—including the ghost story—is established by a “chain of trustworthy” witnesses and memorialized by an “auctoritas – an

‘authorized’ text or person – whose necessary mediation intervened between the individual and the mysteries of the hereafter.”100 This same anxiety about authenticating otherworld visions exists in many visionary stories, including The Vision of Tundale,

The Vision of Thurkhill, The Vision of Owain, and St. Patrick’s Purgatory, among many others.

Once the nun’s visionary account and ghost story are verified as orthodox, we learn a little about the prison Margaret lives in before the nun provides her personal account of the place. Margaret will not tell the nun about Hell, as she has “no leve” (211) and cannot share any information about Heaven as she “came noȝt ȝit therein” (218). The

99 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 43. 100 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 42. 170

ghost explains that she languishes in the first and the third of three purgatories. The first is the purgatory of righteousness, or a general purgatory, with three fires that punish all sinful Christians; the second is the purgatory of mercy, the pains of which may be suffered during one’s lifetime in the world in the form of sickness, tribulation, or sacrifice in the form of almsgiving; and the third is the purgatory of grace, where men and women suffer in the places of their greatest sins until G-d grants them release.101

The inmates of the third purgatory may appear to men and women either in the world or in Purgatory; while they are awake or asleep (765-793). This space explains the phenomena of purgatorial apparitions and reconciles the old ghost stories before

Purgatory became a fixed place—where souls freely roamed the earth, air, graveyards, and their places of sin—with ghost stories told after Purgatory became a well-defined space. The author of A Revelation of Purgatory adds the purgatory of grace in order to account for previous inconsistencies having to do with the relative freedom to move between worlds that ghosts enjoyed. The purgatory of grace presents multiple layers of liminality, where souls who already exist in an unsettled state between Heaven and Hell, can also move freely between earth and the otherworld. They inhabit multiple spaces and realities, appearing to people in waking visions or in dreams, where they have the power to bring the living into the spaces of the dead.

101 Harley, A Revelation of Purgatory, 696-795. Margaret explains that the first purgatory consists of three fires. The greatest is for those who are guilty of committing the seven deadly sins and who have not done penance before dying. The middle fire is reserved for those who are mostly guilty of venial sins and who have been shriven more generally or who have not completed their penance. The “clear” fire is the least harsh and reserved for religious men and women who committed sins and completed their penance in life. They only spend a little time in this fire before going to Heaven (696-795). 171

The purgatory of grace allows a relatively free exchange between inmates and their outside community in the interest of redemption and release—not unlike gaols in the Middle Ages. Margaret’s access to the outside world as well as her ability to bring the nun back to Purgatory strengthens her case by showing the nun first-hand how miserable her condition in the afterlife is. It is important to note here that Margaret is not the nun’s guide, but a soul, like the miserly lord and the pagan judge in St. Austin at

Compton and the Life of St. Erkenwald, who approaches the nun for help. Margaret, however, goes a step further than the other ghosts previously discussed by bringing her living contact into the world of the dead, thus transforming a ghost story into a vision and almost collapsing the distinction between the two. However, unlike other vision narratives, where travelers are shown the horrors of Purgatory and Hell as a warning to themselves and to others in the world, the nun’s vision is meant to convince her to order the necessary number of masses and prayers that will help secure Margaret’s release.

This combined purgatorial ghost story and otherworld vision focuses on the efficacy of suffrages in the process of salvation—a process ultimately facilitated by Purgatory’s permeable boundaries and the unprecedented access the dead have to the world of the living.

That purgatorial apparitions contact members of their spiritual community, rather than kin, after gaining access to the world of the living further underscores the Church’s mediating authority in the process of salvation. The miserly lord, the pagan judge, and

Margaret all appear to members of their Christian community, rather than to family members or their descendants. In purgatorial narratives, ghosts tend to follow Christian

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spiritual ties, rather than kinship ties (as in pre-Gregorian ghost narratives). Purgatorial apparitions are encompassed in the “symbolic networks controlled by the church…[which] intersected, increased, and extended the networks of solidarities that gave force and cohesion to a society, notably by including the memory of the dead in the thoughts and activities of the living.”102 In this period, the Christian community was expected to share the burden of caring for liminal figures, such as the dead, the sick, and those in prison. In this way, the dead were memorialized not only by their kin, but by their Christian community who prayed for and donated alms in their name and for their benefit. Suffrages were effective because they promised those who undertook charitable work that their suffering in Purgatory would be reduced in proportion to their good deeds. Therefore, it follows that ghosts in the supernatural stories of the English Middle

Ages, appeared as often—if not more often—to their spiritual communities at or near their Churches, as they did their own kin. The Church, whose authority was central in the process of salvation, shared some of that authority with the community in the interest of caring for the physical and spiritual well-being of its most marginal members.

Once Margaret gains the visionary’s trust, she makes a very specific request. She asks the nun to have a total of thirteen masses, the miserere mei deus chant, and the Veni

Creator hymn said for her very devoutly and with much feeling over the next five days by six different priests. When asked about the specificity of the prayers, Margaret tells her that certain prayers are more effective than others and can even banish “wikked

102 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 67, 190. 173

spirits þat trauaillen hym to þat temptacion shal be voidet at þat tyme” (147-150). In this way, certain prayers serve a triple function: they exorcise demons who attack the living, they help eliminate the decedents’ suffering in Purgatory, and they mitigate future purgatorial punishment for the person who prays. Furthermore, prayers that are said more devoutly more effectively banish the pains of Purgatory (100-104). These substantial efforts undertaken by the nun and her six priests shorten Margaret’s sentence by three years and significantly decrease the intensity of the pain that she must still suffer (679-683). What this implies is that the enormous cost of helping a loved one or a valued member of the Christian community out of Purgatory was something only a few could afford. Although payment is never discussed, as Margaret is a beloved member of the Church, such services would have come at a steep price for anyone else.103 In a space where suffering was imagined to be so intense that each hour in Purgatory feels like a century in normal time, it is not surprising that people were eager to pay more than they could afford for masses, intercessory prayer, and indulgences.104

Indulgences figure prominently in this visionary account, as Margaret describes the second purgatory, called the purgatory of mercy, where people suffer

…by sekenesse and grete tribulacions in þis wor[l]de and aftyr contricion þat þay hadde and aftyr þe pardon þat þay haue purchased ham in þe world, whils þay wer out of dedely syn. For þay may purchace ham so mychel

103 R. Kiermayer, “How much money was actually in the Indulgence Chest,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 17 (1986): 303-318. According to Kiermayer, “The price for an indulgence was 1.2 or even 1.5 percent of the annual income for citizens in those income brackets, a sizable ‘voluntary’ contribution in addition to all their other church related expenses” (311). 104 Miguel Asin, Islamic Eschatology and the Divine Comedy, trans. Harold Sunderland (New York: Routledge, 1968), 220. 174

pardon in this world þat shal fordo al þe peynes of purgatory and lyghtly brynge ham to þe blisse of heuyn. And þis is anoþer purgatory, and þis is þe purgatory of mercy (765-773).

Each day of sickness and tribulation in this world cancels a year of suffering in

Purgatory (726-728). However, if one is wealthy enough he or she can “serve” his or her time in the purgatory of mercy by purchasing pardons so that s/he may skip sensible punishment altogether and go straight to Heaven. The commodification of salvation, which benefitted religious and secular authorities, was the main point of contention in the debate surrounding Purgatory during the Reformation and became a focus for attacks by Protestants reformers who wanted to eliminate the corrupt practice of selling indulgences altogether.105 By the time A Revelation of Purgatory was written, indulgences had been a well-established practice for at least two centuries.106 That only the very wealthy could forgo Purgatory by paying for the necessary services of the

Church was a bitter truth reflected in a popular English proverb of the period (c.1488):

“Copper money, copper soul-mass [said for the departed soul].”107 Of course, serving

105 Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church (New York: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1968), 305-314. 106 Indulgences, which were “a remission for the temporal punishment, or penance, imposed on a confessed sinner that had to be performed either in this world or in purgatory,” were initially meant to encourage good works and almsgiving for the benefit of the poor, the sick, and prisoners. Small indulgences were also granted for such pious acts as building churches, hospitals, roads, going on pilgrimage, serving in the crusades, and reciting devotional prayers (Shinners 401). However, the practice became corrupt over time, which the Church tried to curb by limiting both the terms of remission and the ease and frequency with which they were distributed. Shinners states: “As grants of indulgences increased beginning in the thirteenth century, an inflationary spiral set in; people collected more and more indulgences for ever-growing terms of remission so that by the fifteenth century indulgences were typically measured in thousands of years instead of days” (401). For a more detailed account of indulgences see Shinners, ed, Medieval Popular Religion, 401-408. 107 Shinners, ed, Medieval Popular Religion, 399. 175

time in the purgatory of mercy, in A Revelation of Purgatory, also involved sacrifice through almsgiving, which benefitted the poor, the sick, and those serving sentences in prison. In this way, Purgatory served a far more positive economic function.

The best option, of course, was to try to complete the work of penance in life.

This is the message that Tundale, Drihthelm, Furseus, and the nun receive during their travels. Devils taunt the inmates that they are torturing in A Revelation of Purgatory with this truth: “‘For wit ȝe welle þis is noȝt helle--þis is an instrument of Goddis ryȝtwisnesse to purge ȝow of ȝour syn in purgatory. And for ȝe wold noȝt vse penaunce in ȝour lyfes and ar ȝe came her’” (574-579). This statement later becomes a warning as it issues from the mouth of a sinner who is torn limb from limb for the sin of lechery

(325-332). Like the previously discussed otherworld visions, A Revelation of Purgatory details the horrors of Purgatory in order to encourage people to avoid them altogether by living sin-free lives.

The geography of A Revelation of Purgatory is less distinct than the purgatorial landscape in The Vision of Tundale; however, the punishments more appropriately match the sins they are meant to correct. For example, in the greatest fire where the seven deadly sins are punished, the covetous are forced to drink melted gold and silver; the lecherous must take a bath in a tub of poison (320-326); the prideful are made to wear stinking garments (262-264); the gluttonous must dine on snakes and adders (292-298); the slothful alternate between ice bath and blazing fires (298-31); and wrathful and envious have their hearts and tongues pulled out by fiends (270-280). The penalties are graded and progressive, as the inmates suffer for the “synnes þay loved best, euery man

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in his degree” (344). In this otherworld vision, as in The Vision of Tundale, we see a more well-defined punitive system, but one that is concerned about the punishments fitting the crime, in kind and degree. This is significant because penalties are carried out with an intent to correct the transgressor, rather than just for the sake of inflicting pain.

As in The Vision of Tundale, the covetous in A Revelation of Purgatory are primarily penalized for their abuse of power and their failure to help those in need (317-

319). In both narratives, those who suffer the most in Purgatory are the rich and powerful who have misused their authority. Whereas The Vision of Tundale focuses on the sin of covetousness in connection with the abuses of power by members of the upper classes; A Revelation of Purgatory focuses on the abuses of power by the members of the Church and cites lechery as the overarching sin at the root of all other sins committed by religious men and women. Just as Tundale, having been entrusted with great wealth, had a moral obligation to protect those who were less privileged, religious men and women having been entrusted with the care of men’s souls had a moral obligation to help the weak avoid sin. As such, the fiends torture lecherous clergy “’for þe fals myspendynge of Goddis goode þat ȝe spend in wast, in cursed lechery, and about ȝour false glotony and ȝour wikked pride’” (392-394). The nun recounts how compared to the adulterous and unchaste laypeople, the secular priests and secular women suffered more, and the religious men and women and prelates of the Church suffered the most and longest (454-455).

The worst punishment, however, is the worm of conscience that gnawed at the heartstrings of those who committed sins against their conscience and were insufficiently

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repentant at the time of death (428-440). Margaret is similarly gifted with a worm of conscience for her failure to carry out a pilgrimage before she died. The worm is not removed until after she experiences the full complement of punishments in all three fires. The worm of conscience is the most painful part of her purgation and the last to be removed. A Revelation of Purgatory is unique in its emphasis on internal as well as external suffering. Tundale, Drihthelm, and Furseus experience a range of emotions, including fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and self-pity. Their emotional distress, however, seems to stem from fear and physical pain, rather than genuine pity or sympathy for the inmates of Purgatory. Although it would be an exaggeration to state that the nun experiences sympathy for Margaret, she does become an active participant in her salvation upon witnessing her suffering. After the nun sees Margaret’s torment in the great fire of the first purgatory, she is moved to help her sister by promptly asking the six priests that Margaret had mentioned to perform thirteen masses. The nun helps once again on her second visit to Purgatory when Margaret, having been cleansed in all three fires, cannot enter Heaven until she is relieved of the worm of conscience. The worm is only removed when the nun assumes Margaret’s burden by agreeing to make a pilgrimage on her behalf (850-859).

The priests who sang the lengthy masses for Margaret’s soul and the nun who accompanied her as she suffered in the wretched spaces of Purgatory were all active participants in her salvation. This otherworld vision, like The Vision of Tundale, not only promotes Church doctrine by encouraging a communal effort in the process of salvation, but acts as a kind of spiritual mirror that warns those in power of the consequences of

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abusing their authority. Both visions reflect a detailed system of graded and progressive punishments that match in kind the sins they correct. This system of reward and punishment that shaped the otherworldly landscapes in The Vision of Tundale and A

Revelation of Purgatory, had not yet fully developed in earlier otherworld vision narratives, such as The Vision of Drihthelm and The Vision of Furseus. The Anglo-Saxon visions were written when Purgatory was beginning to be imagined as a place, rather than a state. As representations of Purgatory became more detailed, so too did the need for the Christian community to help mitigate the suffering of imperfect souls (living and dead).

Visions of the otherworld focused on penance performed by the dead in spaces that resembled, in form and function, the medieval prison system that was developing in the post-Conquest period. The gruesome details of otherworld visions motivated those who wished to shorten their own sentences in Purgatory to aid those currently suffering in such spaces. Ghost stories, on the other hand, encouraged aid by focusing on a completely different aspect of Purgatory: the dead themselves, and how they interacted with their living communities in order to secure release. In the Life of St. Erkenwald and

St. Austin at Compton, the deceased petitioners describe their otherworldly prisons in vague terms. Where they are punished in the otherworld and how are not as important as why they are punished and what steps need to be taken by the Church and the Christian community in order to relieve their suffering. Purgatorial apparitions, like their earthly counterparts in medieval prisons, were detained in spaces with permeable boundaries, which facilitated communication with the outside world in order to secure their release.

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These spaces, like the spaces described in otherworld visions, were temporary and enabled the rehabilitation through contact with the outside world. The association between prisons and the spaces of Purgatory described in Life of St. Erkenwald, St.

Austin at Compton, The Vision of Furseus, The Vision of Drihthelm, The Vision of

Tundale, and A Revelation of Purgatory was common in the Middle Ages.

As stated in the previous chapter, both earthly and otherworldly punitive spaces were imagined in similar ways as they co-evolved in post-Conquest England. Purgatory served as a model for punitive imprisonment in the secular world.108 The concept of

Purgatory as a spiritual prison was shaped by the ecclesiastical prison system; and the secular prison system, that developed later, attempted to fashion itself as an earthly

Purgatory.109 This is especially evident in the ways that the inhabitants of said punitive spaces interacted with those in the community tasked with assisting them. The reciprocal relationship that existed between the givers and the receivers of aid impacted the way in which many social institutions, such as prisons, developed in the Middle Ages. The idea that those who transgressed could be rehabilitated with the help of the community necessitated ease of access for those who rendered aid. Prisons, hospitals, churches, and graveyards were located at the center of each community, providing convenient points of contact between those in need and those in the community who were willing to help. The boundaries of such places were necessarily permeable because the inhabitants of these punitive spaces were largely dependent on the living for the mitigation of their suffering

108 Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 88. 109 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 90. 180

through almsgiving and intercessory prayer. Purgatory inmates were released weekly, during the Sunday period, to visit the living in churches or near graveyards in order to ask for help in relieving their suffering in Purgatory, much like their earthly counterparts, who were allowed to travel out of their cells once a week, during the

Sunday period, to attend mass or beg for alms.110 The stories examined in this chapter demonstrate how Purgatory became more standardized and prison-like over time. And as this post-mortem prison became more defined, so too did the material and spiritual obligations of the people toward those in carceral spaces—both earthly and otherworldly.

110 Willard, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” 957-983. See Willard for information about the Sunday period. 181

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CHAPTER IV

EARTHLY PRISONERS: WRITING BY AND ABOUT PRISONERS IN THE

MIDDLE AGES

The rhetoric of earthly and otherworldly imprisonment focuses on penance rather than punishment because incarceration was seen as a moral and spiritual corrective that facilitated the reform and reintegration of medieval prisoners. The concept of prison as a penitential space had its beginnings in the early Christian tradition following the Roman persecution. Once Christianity became Rome’s state religion, Christians could no longer identify as persecuted outsiders and had to redefine themselves accordingly. Early

Christian theologians promoted a model of “white martyrdom,” where holiness and spiritual perfection could be achieved through prayer, contemplation, penance, and ascetic self-denial in solitary prison spaces. This was a shift away from “red martyrdom,” where Christians were tested through torture, public humiliation, and death in the arena. The “white” model of martyrdom allowed prisons to be imagined as spaces of introspection and spiritual development.

The conception of prisons as places for spiritual development shaped the ecclesiastical system of discipline and confinement and influenced the secular punitive system that emerged in England a few centuries later in the post-Conquest era.

Ecclesiastics were punished by confinement to a carcer, or small prison cell, for various

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transgressions, including disobedience.1 Because sin was viewed as spiritual sickness that could be treated in the same manner as physical illness, prison cells were often located in monastery infirmaries. Punitive confinement was practiced with great regularity in the Church and became a model for both the secular prison system in

England as well as Purgatory, both of which developed in tandem from the thirteenth century through the Middle Ages. The concept of prison as a corrective space had a great impact on how Purgatory was imagined as an otherworldly prison. As Andrew Skotnicki states, prison, like Purgatory, “is a place of temporal confinement whose aim is the reform of the inmate for the purpose of fruitful reintegration into a sacred community.

Their primary point of contact during their long period of incubation was monasticism: itself a place of voluntary incarceration that provided the spatial contours and structural regimen for the universal penal edifice.”2 The medieval secular prison system and the concept of Purgatory that started to develop shortly after the Conquest, were modeled on the long-standing tradition of ecclesiastical discipline and confinement.

1 According to Ralph Pugh, the precise stage at which ecclesiastical prisons grew is undeterminable; however, he states that as early as 816 AD prisons are spoken of as commonplace in the synod of Murbach. Pugh states: “Whether there were such prisons in pre-Conquest England is hardly ascertainable, but they certainly existed soon after the Conquest. The Constitutions of Lanfranc, besides enjoining other punishments, make unmistakable provision for imprisonment which varied in its nature with the gravity of the fault” (374-375). See R.B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). Guy Geltner claims, however, that the “Church inflicted erring clerics and monks with prison sentences (sometimes known as detrusio) at least since the fourth century” (262). See Guy Geltner, “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory,” History Compass 10 (2006): 261-274. 2 Andrew Skotnicki, “God’s Prisoners: Penal Confinement and the Creation of Purgatory,” Modern Theology 22 (2006): 85. This was quoted in Anthony Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 91, no. 1 (2016): 4. 188

The previous chapter explored popular stories about purgatorial apparitions and otherworld visions, which were representative of what the Church promoted as official doctrine with respect to post-mortem penance and salvation. As the secular medieval prison system became more standardized so too did the language describing places of punitive confinement—both earthly and otherworldly. Concepts surrounding prison and

Purgatory developed in tandem through the Middle Ages and became deeply entwined, giving rise to a new economy that encouraged future Purgatory prisoners to help current earthly and otherworldly prisoners in order to lessen their own suffering in the afterlife.

The Church assured those who performed charitable works for the sick, the poor, prisoners, as well as the tormented dead that their own sentences in Purgatory would be mitigated by their good works. Because earthly and purgatorial incarceration served a similarly rehabilitative function, Purgatory was often referred to as a G-d’s prison and earthly prisons were seen as versions of Purgatory in this world.

This chapter focuses on earthly prisoners and their prison spaces in medieval poetry, plays, sermons, carols, and hagiography. The first section of this chapter begins with an exploration of the themes of “red” and “white” martyrdom in the lives of Juliana of Nicomedia and Margaret of Antioch, two popular incarcerated saints, whose faith is tested as they undergo a full range of punishments in the public arena as well as in their private prison cells. After analyzing the Old English version of Juliana of Nicomedia’s life preserved in the Exeter Book, I will discuss six of the many extant versions of St.

Margaret’s life. I argue that each version illuminates a shift in emphasis from the saint’s public ordeal with a pagan tyrant to her private struggle in a prison cell with a demon

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and the sins he represents. The texts in this section include the The Latin ‘Passio S.

Margaretae,’ (c.900); the Old English life of St. Margaret in the Cotton Tiberius A. iii manuscript, (c. 1050); the Old English life of St. Margaret in the Cambridge, Corpus

Christi College 303 manuscript, (c. 1150); The Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte

Margarete (c. 1225) in the Katherine Group, MS Bodley 34; John Mirk’s fifteenth- century Sermon on St. Margarete in the Festial, (c. 1403); and John Lydgate’s Lyfe of

Seynt Margarete, (c. 1415-1426).

The next section examines medieval attitudes toward incarceration and socially marginal people in sermons from John Mirk’s Festial (c. 1403) and Instructions for

Parish Priests (c. 1403); poetry and carols from John the Blind Audelay’s The Counsel of Conscience (c. 1426); and excerpts from medieval doomsday plays. The final section analyzes the late-medieval genre of prison writing, looking specifically at George

Ashby’s the Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463 and the anonymous Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune (c. 1461). Both poems were written by prisoners who underwent punitive incarceration. Ashby’s account is of special interest as it deals with debt, a term that has both legal and metaphysical implications. Debt, in the Middle Ages, was seen as both an offence against the community and against G-d. In late medieval prison writing, incarceration was what Megan Cassidy-Welch refers to as a “multivalent concept,” as prison was both an idea and a physical space where confinement and liberation were in constant tension.3 Ashby, like other medieval prison writers comes to

3 Megan Cassidy-Welch, Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150-1400 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5. 190

realize that his confinement and all the suffering it entails becomes a form of penance that eventually enables physical and spiritual release. Because earthly prisons and

Purgatory were primarily corrective, prisoners in both spaces were seen as figures worthy of help and even imitation.

From Red to White Martyrdom: Prison as a Spiritual Crucible

The period following the Roman persecution saw many changes, including the ways in which Christians defined themselves in their faith.4 Once Christianity was adopted as the state religion in the post-Constantine era, religious authorities assumed

“paralegal responsibilities over monitoring prison conditions…use of imprisonment for laymen and the church’s complicity in the implementation came under criticism.”5 When the Church aligned its interests with Rome, Christians could no longer define themselves as a small persecuted group whose holiness was achieved through suffering, torture, and death in the public arena of state persecution. That avenue was closed once Christianity was legitimized and began to serve the Roman state. Early Church theologians, such as

Tertullian, redefined Christian suffering by shifting from a model of “red martyrdom,” where faith was tested by violence and death in the public arena to “white martyrdom,” where spiritual perfection was achieved through penitence, introspection, and purgation in solitary prison spaces.”6 In Late Antiquity, imprisonment was imagined as a kind of crucible for spiritual transformation that wove itself inextricably into monastic life. Both

4 Guy Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 83- 84. 5 Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, 86. 6 Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, 82, 89. 191

voluntary and involuntary imprisonment became a fundamental part of the Christian faith. Prison spaces as the new sites of holiness and Christian becoming were an integral part of ecclesiastical enclosure and confinement, which subsequently served as a model for both the secular prison system and a purgatorial post-mortem middle ground that developed through the Middle Ages. Both Purgatory, which was imagined as a divine prison, and the secular prison, which fashioned itself as an earthly Purgatory, have their roots in monastic confinement and enclosure.7

Saints’ lives feature monastic confinement and ecclesiastical imprisonment as a means of transformation. Both “red” and “white” martyrdom are represented in many hagiographical accounts as saints undergo the full complement of punishment and humiliation in public forums as well as in private prison cells before they are put to death. Megan Cassidy-Welch discusses how St. George, St. Agatha, and St. Barbara experience public torture and periods of painful or frightening incarceration before their execution. Cassidy-Welch explores in greater detail the lives of two more imprisoned saints: the Nun of Watton, who had an adulterous affair with a fellow monk and was cleansed of her sins after performing a period of strict penance in a monastic prison; and

Christina Mirabilis, who was imprisoned twice and then released after proving that her erratic behavior following a near-death experience was divinely, rather than diabolically inspired.8 Many other vitae, including the holy men and women that Æfric wrote about

7 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 90. 8 Megan Cassidy-Welch, Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150-1400 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 192

in his collection of saints’ lives (St. Eugenia, St. Lucy, St. Cecilia, and St. Agnes), feature public torture and incarceration as part of the process of martyrdom.9 Cassidy-

Welch argues that the function of imprisonment in martyr’s lives was to “emphasise a saint’s unique encounters with the divine.”10

Juliana of Nicomedia and Margaret of Antioch are two well-known incarcerated saints who have not been explored in depth in Cassidy-Welch’s recent work or in other scholarship that focuses on medieval religious imprisonment. Like many martyr-saints in the Christian tradition, they undergo a range of punishments in public and in private, reflecting both “red” and “white” models of martyrdom. The Old English poetic version of Juliana of Nicomedia’s story survives as a single copy in the Exeter Book and was set down in writing around 970-990 AD. The Anglo-Saxon poem is attributed to Cynewulf, who likely worked from a Latin life of St. Juliana in the Bollandist text Acta

Sanctorum.11 Although several versions of St. Juliana’s life12 were recorded in the

Middle Ages, I have chosen the Old English version in the Exeter Book because it is the earliest version of the vita and has received a great deal of scholarly attention. The vita is

9 Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, Ed. Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1881). 10 Cassidy-Welch, Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, 38. 11 Krapp, George Phillip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), xxxvi-xxxvii. 12 Versions of St. Julian of Nicomedia’s life are found in: Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, trans. Branger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (New York: Arno Press, 1969); Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson, The Katherine Group MS Bodely 34 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2016); and þe Liflade St. Juliana from Two Old English Manuscripts of 1230 AD, ed. Oswald Cockayne (London: Early English Text Society, 1872). The manuscripts in Cockayne’s edition are Royal 17 A XXVII and Bodeian Library, Bodley 34. St. Juliana’s life in the Katherine group is similar to St. Margaret’s life in the same manuscript in that it focuses more on the saint’s confrontation with the demon in prison than it does her public conflict with her pagan suitor. Juliana’s demon, like Margaret’s, mainly focuses on leading young women sexually astray. 193

set in the time of the Diocletian persecution and opens with Juliana’s refusal to marry a rich and powerful senator named Heliseus because of his pagan beliefs. In defiance of her father and her powerful pagan suitor, Juliana refuses to marry and is publicly tortured and then thrown into prison, where the bulk of the story takes place. A devil appears to Juliana and presents himself as a heavenly angel sent by G-d to warn her of further tortures and urges her make sacrifice to Heliseus’s gods so that “þy þu þæs deman scealt / eadhreðig mæg, yrre gedygan” (256-257). [by those means you may be able to happily escape the judge’s wrath] (256-257).13 Helisius’s proposal of marriage not only involves a legal union, but requires Juliana’s unconditional acceptance of his demonic pagan gods. Juliana refuses both as she, seeing through the demon’s ruse, is authorized by the Holy Spirit to capture the devil and torture a confession out of him.

Not only is Juliana’s Christian resolve tested in this dark prison space, but she exercises her powers of discernment—a privilege usually reserved for religious men of authority in the Church. The previous chapter discussed how encounters with the supernatural left people vulnerable to diabolical trickery and that it was only through G- d’s authorized agents, such as St. Austin, St. Erkenwald, and the anonymous nun’s confessor, that such experiences were properly judged as divine or diabolical. In this narrative, Juliana performs this function by herself and in much the same way as St.

Austin and St. Erkenwald discerned good from evil. She prays to G-d for insight and protection:

13 All citations from the Exeter Book are taken from Krapp, George Phillip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). 194

Nu ic þec, beorna hleo, biddan wille ece ælmihtig, þurh þæt æþele gesceap þe þu, fæder engla, æt fruman settest, þæt þu me ne læte of lofe hweorfan þinre eadgife, swa me þes ar bodað frecne færspel, þe me fore stondeð. Swa ic þe, bilwitne, biddan wille þæt þu me gecyðe, cyninga wuldor, þrymmes hyrde, hwæt þes þegn sy, lyftlacende, þe mec læreð from þe on stearcne weg. (III. 272-282)

[Now I wish to ask you, Protector of Warriors, Eternal Almighty, by the noble creation that you, Father of Angels, established at the start, do not permit me to turn aside from the praise of your blessed gift, as this herald who stands before me bids me with his fear-spell. So I wish to ask you, gentle Lord, the Glory of Kings, to reveal, Herdsman of Majesty, what this thane might be, bouncing in the breeze, and who instructs me upon a rough road away from you]. (III. 272-282)

In a dramatic reversal of roles, Juliana, the tortured saint, becomes the torturer. She subdues the devil who attacks her and forces him to reveal not only his plans for her punishment, but compels him to enumerate all of his misdeeds since the beginning of time. Juliana performs a kind of exorcism, as the demon’s confession results in a humiliation that causes not only a permanent loss of credibility among his diabolical cohort, but a total relinquishment of all of the power that he wields in Hell as the privileged son of Lucifer. Compelling a demon to reveal its identity is an important part of the ritual of exorcism. Juliana Dresvina points out that “the formula ‘Who are you?’ suggests that the name of the demon is very significant in exorcism, and the catalogue of its very deeds further contributes to determining its identity, necessary to diagnose

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demonic possession and to drive the demon out.”14 Although Juliana’s devil never speaks his own name (at least not in the surviving leaves of the damaged manuscript), he does detail the nature of his work, his motivation, and provides information about where he comes from. In revealing this information, the devil gives Juliana the power she needs to defeat him. He realizes that his encounter with Juliana has made him a traitor and mournfully states that Juliana “goda ussa / meaht forhogde, ond mec swiþast / geminsade, þæt ic to meldan wearð” (619-621). [disrespected the power of our gods, and humiliated me most strongly, so that I became a traitor] (619-621).

The transformation from tortured young girl to divinely-empowered warrior-saint occurs not in the public forum that Heliseus controls, but in the dark prison cell where

Juliana dons G-d’s holy mantle to do battle with Satan himself through one of his most powerful agents. In doing so, she defeats the originator of the false faith that Heliseus and his ilk force on everyone through fear, coercion, and violence. Juliana’s battle with the demon in prison, however, is not just an extension of her conflict with Heliseus. It also functions as a metaphor for private struggle with faith and conscience. While

Juliana’s conflict with Heliseus occurs in the public arena where she is shamed and physically tortured, her encounter with the devil relocates her spiritual struggle to space of seclusion, away from the public eye and to the more private realm of conscience. And it is in this prison space that the devil assaults the saint with his most powerful weapon he has at his disposal—his words. Here, she is presented with a far greater challenge to

14 Juliana Dresvina, “The Significance of the Demonic Episode in the Legend of St. Margaret of Antioch,” Medium Aevum 81 (2012), 192. 196

her faith because she must overcome great doubt and confusion caused by the devil’s lies and trickery.

Juliana meets the devil’s assault by subduing him and examining him rigorously in five grueling rounds. In each round, she demands more detail about his nature, the nature of his evil work, and its effects on herself and all of creation. Although there is a gap in the manuscript where Juliana’s first question is put to the devil, I inferred from the response he provides in listing his general misdeeds in the world, that she asked him a general “who are you?” question. The second question focuses on his mission against her: “’þu scealt furþor gen, feond moncynnes, / siþfæt secgan, hwa þec sende to me’"

(III. 316-318). [‘You must speak further yet, Enemy of Mankind, of your mission here, and of who sent you to me’] (III. 316.318). Her third question demands more information about how the devil is able to harm the righteous (IV. 345-351); the fourth focuses on the devil’s betrayal of Christ and his saints (IV. 417-428); and the final question returns to the devil’s dark deeds and his attacks on the children of men (V. 454-

460). Each of the devil’s answers are variations on the same theme: he overcomes people—weak and strong, wicked and holy—through trickery, lies, and temptation. In a free will system, the devil must be a liar in order to represent his cause as a better alternative to G-d’s, and a tempter in order to make sin seem sweet.15 The devil uses a combination of fear, lies, and temptation to trap Juliana, though unsuccessfully.

15 Katayoun Torabi, “Zoroastrianism in Paradise Lost,” (master’s thesis, California State University, Northridge, 2011), 62. 197

Juliana’s desire to learn about sin, its agents, and its effects on all of creation is a process that brings about her spiritual transformation. In this dramatic encounter with the devil in her prison cell, she not only forces him to relinquish his power by making him divulge his secrets, but she learns about evil in order to overcome it in all of its manifestations. This scene dramatizes the process of spiritual self-examination and introspection that persons struggling with doubt or grappling with moral and spiritual issues must undergo in their journey toward G-d. And in this way, the prison cell functions as a purgatorial space where sins are exorcised through prayer, rigorous examination, solitude, and self-denial.

St. Margaret of Antioch’s story, which originated in the fourth century, follows a similar trajectory, as she is tortured in public and then subdues the devil while she is imprisoned for her refusal to marry a powerful pagan prefect named Olibrius. This section focuses on St. Margaret’s encounters with her diabolical tormentors in six of the many versions of the vita that survive. St. Margaret’s story, which has been re-written over the centuries and in many languages, including, Greek, Latin, Old English, and

Middle English, allows for an examination of a shift that occurs in the representation of public torture and solitary confinement within a single saint’s life. In the earlier versions, both “red” and “white” models of martyrdom are equally represented; however, over time, and especially through the High Middle Ages—as prison becomes more closely associated with penance and purgation both in the real world and in the stories people told about themselves through hagiographical, poetic, and homiletic depictions of their monsters and heroes—St. Margaret’s conflict in prison is foregrounded and eventually

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takes precedence over every other aspect of the narrative in its later iterations. In the versions of St. Margaret’s vita that John Mirk and John Lydgate wrote in Middle English in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the prison scene had become the main focus of the narrative—where Margaret, like Juliana, is transformed from persecuted young girl to triumphant saint, battling Satan’s demons. Margaret’s story, which was one of the more popular and enduring narratives in the Christian tradition, changes over time, shifting focus from her public persecution in the arena to her private conflict with the devil in prison.

The legend of Margaret of Antioch—or Marina in the Greek tradition—is commonly “associated with the persecution under Diocletian and Maximian” in the early fourth century, though contemporary accounts of the persecution never mention her among those who were martyred.16 It is this lack of historical evidence for Margaret along with the fantastical narrative elements of the legend that eventually led the Vatican to suppress her cult in 1969.17 From its obscure origins in the East, however, the legend was transmitted in the West around the late eighth century, where it became especially popular and continued to flourish through the sixteenth century. The vita features a young girl, born to pagan parents, and fostered by Christians. She catches the eye of a powerful pagan prefect, named Olibrius, who has her tortured and thrown into prison because she wishes to remain a virgin and declines his marriage proposal. In prison, she

16 Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis, The Old English Lives of St. Margaret (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3. 17 Clayton and Magennis, The Old English Lives of St. Margaret, 3. 199

encounters a dragon, who tries to swallow her, but bursts apart when she makes the sign of the cross. She is then visited by the dragon’s brother, a shadowy devil, whom she traps under her foot and questions thoroughly before sending him to Hell. The next day,

Olibrius’s men continue to brutally torture her and eventually behead her, which inspires a mass conversion of all who witness her martyrdom. In every iteration of the tale, her body becomes a holy relic, and she is venerated as the patron saint of expectant mothers and childbirth. Perhaps it is because she was the patron saint of childbirth that she was so popular in the Middle Ages and her story was so often set down in writing.18

The earliest extant Latin version of the legend dates to the late eighth century and derives from the Greek Passio a Theotimo (dated around the first half of the ninth century). Variants of the Latin legend become the source for a number of the vernacular adaptations composed in Old English—two remain extant in only a single manuscript: the first is preserved in the Cotton Tiberius A. iii ms (dated around the eleventh century); and the second appears in the early twelfth-century Cambridge Corpus Christi College

303 manuscript.19 There are also numerous Middle English versions of the vita. In order to explore the shift in focus that occurs from St. Margaret’s public trials to her

18 There were other patron saints of pregnancy and childbirth besides St. Margaret of Antioch: St. Brigit of Kildaire (451-525 AD), a nun who founded a convent; St. Ursus of Aosta (6th century AD), a bishop; and St. Raymond Nonnatus (13th century), a monk. Besides St. Brigit, St. Margaret is the only female patron saint of childbirth and is certainly the most interesting saint in this list, which may account for her popularity. It also may explain why she was more popular than St. Juliana, who is very generally referred to as the patron saint of illness. St. Margaret seems to have had the advantage here since her life is very similar to St. Juliana’s, but she is attached to a more specific issue that would have been of great concern to almost everyone in the Middle Ages. St. Margaret’s popularity led to the commissioning of many versions of her life, which is why I have chosen to examine six different versions of her life written over five centuries for this project. 19 Clayton and Magennis, The Old English Lives of St. Margaret, 41, 84. 200

experiences in prison in the different versions of her life, this section briefly examines her interactions with her persecutors—both human and diabolical—in the The Latin

‘Passio S. Margaretae,’ in the Paris Bibliothèques Nationale Lat. 5574 manuscript, dated c.900; the Old English life of St. Margaret in the Cotton Tiberius A. iii manuscript, dated c. 1050; the Old English life of St. Margaret in the Cambridge, Corpus Christi

College 303 manuscript, dated c. 1150; The Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte Margarete

(c. 1225) in the Katherine Group, MS Bodley 34; John Mirk’s fifteenth-century Sermon on St. Margarete in the Festial, dated c. 1403; and John Lydgate’s Lyfe of Seynt

Margarete, which was commissioned by the Anne Mortimer, Countess of March around

1415-1426.20 The Latin ‘Passio S. Margaretae’ (hereafter Passio) was written in Mercia around the tenth century, making it one of the earliest versions of the story set down in writing in the Anglo-Saxon world. The only two vernacular lives of Margaret are extant in the Cotton Tiberius A. iii (hereafter Tiberius) and the Cambridge Corpus Christi

College 303 (hereafter CCCC) manuscripts. In the two earliest versions—the Passio and

Tiberius—“red” and “white” martyrdom are almost equally represented, as the number of words exchanged between Margaret and her earthly persecutors are nearly the same as the words shared with her diabolical oppressors. There is a small shift in the CCCC

20 All citations of the St. Margaret’s vitae in Old English and Latin, along with their translations into Modern English are taken Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis, The Old English Lives of St. Margaret (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); All citations of St. Margaret’s life in the Katherine Group are taken from Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson, The Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte Margarete MS Bodely 34 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2016); All citations of St. Margaret’s vitae from John Lydgate’s Lyfe of Seynt Margarete and John Mirk’s fifteenth-century Sermon on St. Margarete are taken from E. Gordon Whatley, Anne B. Thompson, and Robert Upchurch, Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005). 201

version that foregrounds Margaret’s encounter with the devil in prison. In the early

Middle English version, The Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte Margarete, the demonic encounter takes precedence over every other interaction. The demonic encounter also becomes the main focus in the Middle English versions by Lydgate and Mirk, who are writing in a time when punitive confinement had not only been firmly established as a part of the secular prison system, but was also frequently being written about as a spiritual corrective in the emerging genre of prison writing (discussed in greater depth later in this chapter).

I map Margaret’s interactions with her earthly and otherworldly persecutors in each of the above-mentioned works by focusing on their verbal interactions in each narrative. I have chosen the above versions of St. Margaret’s vita because they represent a cross-section of her life over time, beginning with the earliest Latin and vernacular versions in England (Passio, Tiberius, and CCCC); continuing with a well-known anonymous early Middle English version written for a cloistered female audience (The

Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte Margarete); and concluding with two late medieval versions of the life by two influential medieval writers: John Lydgate and John Mirk.

Lydgate (whose work is explored in other sections of this project) pens a poetic version of St. Margaret’s life for an expectant mother; while Mirk (whose work is also examined in other chapters of this dissertation) writes about the saint’s life in a sermon. The versions of the life that I have chosen for this project provide a broad picture of St.

Margaret’s life in the Middle Ages. I track verbal exchanges in each of the versions of

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St. Margaret’s vita using Gephi,21 a network analysis tool that visualizes each instance of speech that occurs among the characters in the different versions of St. Margaret’s story.

The characters are represented by the circles (called nodes) in the graphical network and their verbal exchanges are represented by the lines that connect them (called edges). The larger and darker the node, the more the character speaks; and the thicker the lines connecting the nodes, the greater the number of words exchanged between the characters. For example, in the Gephi network graph below, which visualizes the speech instances in the Passio, St. Margaret speaks and is spoken to more than any other character; therefore, her node is not only the largest, but the darkest shade of green. The more a character speaks to another character, the darker and thicker the line connecting those two characters is. For example, in figure 1 below, Olibrius speaks to Margaret eight times and Margaret speaks to Olibrius nine times. The devil speaks to Margaret five times and Margaret speaks to the devil six times. The edges connecting Margaret and Olibrius, therefore, are slightly thicker and darker than the ones connecting Margaret to the devil because more words are exchanged between Olibrius and Margaret. The dove, on the other hand, is connected to Margaret by one, thin line because it speaks to

Margaret only three times, and is never spoken to. These network visualizations do not represent any non-verbal interactions among characters. This exercise only records and visualizes instances of speech among characters in the versions of St. Margaret’s life.

21 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 203

Additionally, the distance between nodes and the distribution of nodes on the graph are random. Gephi offers a range of options for creating different layouts using various algorithms. For example, a user may select a force-directed algorithm that draws nodes that are more highly connected closer together and forces nodes that are less connected further apart. Force-directed algorithms are excellent for graphs that visualize hundreds or even thousands of nodes. Since the graphs in this project only visualize a few characters, I did not use a force-directed algorithm to map out relationships. I used a random layout instead, since the number of speech instances among the few characters in each life are already effectively visualized using color intensity, node size, and edge thickness.

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Figure 1 Network Graph Generated for the Latin ‘Passio S. Margaretae’ (c. 900) Using Gephi 22

22 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 205

Figure 1, above, visualizes one of the earliest versions of St. Margaret’s vita in

The Latin ‘Passio S. Margaretae’, which was set down in writing after Christianity was established as the official state religion in Rome and after the shift from “red” to “white” martyrdom was already well underway. It, however, precedes the secularization of punitive imprisonment in the medieval world that begins in the Anglo-Saxon period under King Alfred, but is not systematized until well after the Norman Conquest. In this early narrative Margaret’s conflict with Olibrius (“red martyrdom”) and her battle with the devil in prison (“white martyrdom”) are, for the most part, equally represented. The scenes with Olibrius and Margaret are more prominently featured here, but only slightly more than her encounter with the devil. Over time Margaret’s confrontation with her diabolical tormentors in prison takes precedence and becomes the main focus of the story—a change that parallels the Church’s increasing preoccupation, through the

Middle Ages, with prison as space for spiritual transformation through penitential work, self-examination, and self-denial.

This shift becomes slightly more evident in the Tiberius and CCCC versions of

Margaret’s life, which were written in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, respectively. In the Tiberius version, Margaret’s dialogue with the devil and Olibrius are almost evenly balanced, with 411 words shared with the devil and 470 words shared with Olibrius. Her interactions with Christ take precedence in this version of the story, as a great deal of narrative spaces is dedicated to Margaret praying to Christ for protection against her enemies, totaling 492 words. Like St. Austin, St. Juliana, and St. Erkenwald, she prays for discernment. Margaret prays to Christ several times, but is only answered (through

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the dove) after she has defeated the dragon in the prison cell and when she faces the devil in the shape of a “sweartne man” [black man] (13). Figure 2 visualizes the Tiberius version and reflects an almost equal exchange between Margaret, Olibrius, and the devil.

Figure 2 Tiberius A. iii MS, c. 1050 (Gephi)23

23 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 207

In the CCCC version of the vita, the number of words Margaret shares with the devil (565 words) exceeds the number of words that she shares with Olibrius (430 words). This is a marked increase from the two earlier versions set down in writing in

Anglo-Saxon England. Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis point out that the Old English writer made many changes to CCCC’s source text (the Latin BHL no. 5303, written in the ninth century) which increase Margaret’s authority in her interactions with Olibrius and the devil.24 This version not only makes the demonic prison scene the focus of the narrative (visualized in Figure 3 below), but includes a reference to the ninth hell when

Margaret threatens the devil in her prison cell: “’Geswiga þu earmingc, ne hæfst þu nan

þingc on me to donne, ac eall þu eart full and þu scealt faran into þære nigenda ni þhelle and þu scealt þær onfon þa yfelan geweorc, þe þu her gefremest and gefremed hæst’”

(CCCC passage 10). [‘Be silent you miserable man, you have nothing to do with me but you are completely vile and you will have to go into the ninth hell of malice and you will have to undergo there the evil afflictions which you are perpetrating here and have perpetrated’] (CCCC passage 10).25 As there is no mention of hell in CCCC’s source text, Clayton and Magennis argue that this detail is the CCCC-author’s “free adaptation” of the idea that crimes committed in this world are met by fitting punishments in the next.26 This concept is prominently featured in otherworld visions of Purgatory and Hell, which present these spaces as post-mortem prisons where wayward souls are made to

24 Clayton and Magennis, The Old English Lives of St. Margaret, 64. 25 Clayton and Magennis, The Old English Lives of St. Margaret, 160-161. 26 Clayton and Magennis, The Old English Lives of St. Margaret, 175. 208

pay for their crimes. Margaret’s devil will languish in the more permanent prison space of Hell once she strips him of his powers as Juliana had done to her diabolical tormentor.

Figure 3 Cambridge Corpus Christi College 303 MS, C. 1150 (Gephi)27

27 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 209

The CCCC version foregrounds Margaret’s encounter with the devil in prison to a greater degree than the earlier Passio and the Tiberius versions and adds a detail about his space of punishment in the otherworld, where he will receive his just desserts. The prison scene gains more narrative space in the anonymous Liflade ant te Passium of

Seinte Margarete, John Lydgate’s Lyfe of Seynt Margarete, and John Mirk’s Sermon on

St. Margarete. In The Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte Margarete, St. Margaret exchanges 1,076 words with Olibrius and 2,374 with the devil (visualized in Figure 4 below). In Lydgate’s version, the saint shares 481 words with Olibrius and 544 words with Sathan (visualized in Figure 5 below).

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Figure 4 The Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte Margarete (c. 1225) (Gephi)28

28 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 211

Figure 5 John Lydgate’s Lyfe of Seynt Margarete, c. 1415-1426 (Gephi)29

29 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 212

In Mirk’s sermon, Olibrius plays his part as earthly persecutor, but he has no direct dialogue with Margaret. Her verbal exchanges are mostly with the devil, totaling 193 words, which far exceed her verbal interactions with any other character in the narrative

(figure 6 below).

Figure 6 John Mirk’s Sermon on St. Margarete MS, 1403 (Gephi)30

30 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 213

As the legend was rewritten through the Middle Ages, the prison episode generally became more dominant, and the dialogue between Margaret and the devil continued to gain narrative space. The shift reflects not only how prison was increasingly imagined as an important place of purgation and spiritual transformation, but parallels the rise of the secular medieval prison system, which modeled itself on the older ecclesiastical prison system that fashioned itself as an earthly Purgatory. Not all of

St. Margaret’s lives foreground the prison episode, however. Notable exceptions are the anonymous Stanzaic Life of Margaret (late thirteenth century),31 which drastically abbreviates the prison episode and the much earlier mid- to late-ninth century Old

English Martyrology, which eliminates the episode altogether.

Certain authors had chosen to exclude the demonic episode “due to suspicion of its depiction of Margaret’s encounter with the dragon and demon.”32 Brian McFadden states that the vernacular versions do not “merely replicate the Latin source text,” but are adapted to preserve elements the author feels are “most important for the textual communities” for which they are written.33 Abbreviated or excluded demonic episodes in the numerous versions of the legend were most likely due to anxiety about “the sensational and possibly heretical material that could obstruct belief,”34 which was what

31 Brian McFadden, “’The Books of Life’” Theotimus as Narrator of identity in the Old English Lives of St. Margaret,” English Studies 86 (2005): 478. 32 McFadden, “’The Books of Life’” Theotimus as Narrator of identity in the Old English Lives of St. Margaret,” 473. 33 McFadden, “’The Books of Life’” Theotimus as Narrator of identity in the Old English Lives of St. Margaret,” 473. 34 McFadden, “’The Books of Life’” Theotimus as Narrator of identity in the Old English Lives of St. Margaret,” 474. 214

eventually led to the cult’s suppression by the Church in 1969. Exceptions to the shift from red to white martyrdom in the versions of St. Margaret’s story, arose because of local and immediate concerns of the authors. But, these are exceptions, and the move from “red” to “white” martyrdom is present in the overall arc through time. When the demonic encounter is present, especially in the Middle English period, the saint’s dialogue with the demon in prison takes precedence over her very public conflict with

Olibrius and his pagan followers. According to McFadden, the reason for including and even foregrounding the episode may be due to the ways in which “the ‘sensational elements’ dramatize how sin breaks down human interaction, and the authors contextualize them to make them work for orthodox purposes.”35 In other words, in the different versions of St. Margaret’s legend the devil seems to speak to the particular sins and transgressions that haunt the community in which the narrative was composed, thus functioning as a kind of a mouthpiece for the community’s anxieties about sin in that cultural moment.

Like Juliana’s devil, Margaret’s diabolical tormentor assaults her with his words.

When the devil enumerates his evil deeds in the CCCC version, they seem to be an admixture of physical maladies, natural disasters, and moral transgressions brought about by his supernatural powers:

‘Sume ic spræce benam and sume heora hlyste; sumen heora fet and sume heora handa, and heo þurh þæt creopeles wurðon; sumum ic eagen benam and sumum his gewittes; sume ic slæpende beswac and sume eac wacigende; sume mid winde and sume mid wætere; sume mid mæte and sume mid drænce, ofte þonne

35 McFadden, “’The Books of Life’” Theotimus as Narrator of identity in the Old English Lives of St. Margaret,” 478. 215

hio ungebletsodon wæren; sume mid slehte and sume on some; sume on morðdædum; and sume mid oðres mannes wif gehæmdon; sume mid feowerfoted nytene for minum willen gefremedon; and sume heora eldran mid wordon gegræmedon’ (§15).

[‘And I will tell you yet more about my deeds, one by one. For I deprived mankind, those who believed in God, of all prosperity: I have deprived some of speech and some of their hearing; some of their feet and some of their hands, and because of that they became cripples; I deprived one of his eye and one of his senses; I led some astray while they were sleeping and some also while they were awake, some by means of wind and some by means of water; and some by means of food and some by drink, often when they were not blessed; some with slaughter and some in reconciliation; some in murders; and some when they had sexual intercourse with another man’s wife; some on my account had relations with four-footed beasts; and some enraged their parents with their words’] (§15).

The impressive list demonstrates how evil manifests in the world through St. Margaret’s devil in many different ways. He can cause blindness, manipulate the elements, and tempt people to engage in various sexual transgressions with two-footed and four-footed partners. Of the texts that I examined for this section, the CCCC version is the only one that mentions the devil’s ability to cause illness and physical disaster. The Passio and

Tiberius texts, limit the devil’s powers to the evil he ushers into the world by tempting mankind to exercise free will wrongly.

In the Passio version, the devil states “’Ego sum qui pugno cum iustis et incendo renes eorum et abceco oculos eorum et facio eos obliuiscere omen cælestem sapientiam.

Et cum dormierint uenio super eos et excito illos a somno ad mala opera, et quos non possum mouere de somno facio eos in somno peccare’” (§15). [‘I am the one who fights with the just, enflames their passions, who blinds their eyes and makes them forget all heavenly wisdom. When they are asleep I come upon them and rouse them from the sleep to wicked deeds, and those whom I am unable to move from their sleep I cause to

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sin in their sleep’] (§15). This statement is very closely replicated in section fifteen in the Tiberius version. The CCCC presents an all-powerful devil who not only wages war on mankind through deceptive rhetoric and subterfuge, but can also spread disease, cause crop failures, and natural disasters. With all of these powers at his disposal, however, he chooses to use the former against Margaret, thus underscoring the importance of rhetoric and subterfuge in the devil’s battle with humans in a free will system. In this way, the demon tries to set a trap for Margaret by attempting to turn her interrogation of him into a dialogue. In a line that very closely replicates the Passio, the devil in the Tiberius text asks Margaret: “’hwanon is þin lif and þin lichama and hwanon is þin geleafa, oþþe hu wæs Crist wuniend on þe? Sage me þis, þonne secge ic þe ealle mine dæde’” (§16). [‘whence comes your life and your body, and whence your soul and your faith, and how did Christ come to be dwelling in you? Tell me this, and then I will tell you all that I should speak to you…’] (§16). The devil temptingly offers her arcane knowledge in exchange for information about her connection with Christ. Sensing his subtle manipulation, she tells him that he is not worthy of hearing her story and sends him to Hell. In section sixteen in both the CCCC and Passio, the demon promises her that if she releases him, he will cease his evil work in the world and never bring harm to anyone again. Margaret responds to these lies by sending him into the depths of the earth.

In John Mirk’s Sermon on St. Margarete, however, the devil makes no promise of good behavior and does not try to lure Margaret into further dialogue, but ends his long list of evil deeds with the chilling statement that he and his demonic number

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“fylleth the eyre and don Cristen men the gref that we connyn and mowne’” (65-66).

More than any other devil in earlier versions, Mirk’s devil is especially interested in making Christians violate church sacraments by engaging in lechery, adultery, and murder; and his “favorite evil deed is to make Christians forget their baptismal vows.”36

Margaret’s fight against Mirk’s devil represents the challenge in Mirk’s day in getting the community to maintain their covenant with the Church by honoring baptismal vows.37

Lydgate’s devil also challenges Margaret with subtle rhetoric and lies; but, this version focuses on St. Margaret as a virgin and a woman whose intercessory powers effectively mediate G-d’s divine message because she is a humble vessel. When St.

Margaret confronts Sathan, she tells him to “…’Remembre of thee how I have victorye, /

A clene mayde, by powere femynyne, / Whiche shal be rad to myn encrees of glorye’”

(318-320). Margaret’s power as divine conduit is increased because she is a woman who has lived a “clene” life. That G-d acts through a “mere woman” to defeat Sathan himself, demonstrates his great power. Her effectiveness as G-d’s conduit is made possible by her virginity and chastity. Lydgate explains that it is because of her “grounded clennesse and of religioun, / Of chastite founded on prudence; / God gaf to hir soverayn excellence”

(508-510). Once Margaret subdues the devil, he laments that his defeat at her hands is all the more humiliating because she is a woman:

Yif that a man, whiche had force and might,

36 Sherry L. Reams, Middle English Legends of Women Saints (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2003), 140. 37 Reams, Middle English Legends of Women Saints, 112. 218

Had me venquyssed, I might it welle sustene; But now, allas, ageyn al skele and right, A cely virgyne, a mayde pure and clene, Hath me bore doun in al my felle tene; And this, allas, bothe ate eve and morowe Is grettest cause of my dedly sorowe. (331-337)

St. Margaret forces a confession from Sathan, who tells her how he does great damage to mankind “’By ther malys and ther temptacions’” before releasing him back to Hell, completely defeated (387).

Like the other versions of the devil that St. Margaret battles, he is a liar and a tempter. The emphasis of this retelling, however, is on how Margaret’s chastity, purity, and humble femininity make her a worthy conduit of G-d’s divine power: “’God gaf to hir soverayn excellence / In hir tyme that she sholde be / to alle a maisterasse of virginite’” (510-512). Lydgate sets St. Margaret up as an exemplar to all who struggle with sin, but very specifically targets women. “Virgine” and its derivatives “virginite,” and “virgynite” appear no less than fourteen times in this brief, 539-line poem.

“Maydenhede” appears twice; “clene” and “clennesse” appear three times; “chaste” and

“chastite” appear seven times; “femynyne” appears once, and “mayde” and “mayden” appear seventeen times. Not surprisingly Lydgate’s work, which sets St. Margaret up as a virtuous female vessel for G-d’s divine gifts, was commissioned by a noblewoman about to give birth for the first time.38

The anonymously written Liflade ant te Passium of Seinte Margarete in the

Katherine Group was also written for a female audience, but one that was very different

38 Reams, Middle English Legends of Women Saints, 112. 219

from Lydgate’s. This version of St. Margaret’s life was addressed to a group of cloistered virgins in the West Midlands. It is not surprising, therefore, that the saint’s feminine virtues are lauded, that the prison scene is foregrounded, and that the devil who torments St. Margaret is obsessed with leading people, especially young women, to sexual sin. He brags that he imposes “luvefule thohtes” upon unwary young women, so that they “unmenskith hamseolf bimong worldliche men, ant forleoseth the luve nawt ane of heh in Heovene ah of lah ec on eorthe” (3-6). Both the anonymous hagiographer’s and Lydgate’s reworking of St. Margaret’s life are examples of how the story is contextualized to meet the needs of different audiences.

The devil in each saint’s life represents the sins and transgressions that plague the religious community in which the narrative was composed. What the devil says in one age slightly shifts in another, resonating with the beliefs, fears, and anxieties of religious audiences through the centuries and in various locations. Although it may not be possible to determine with exact certainty what, in each time or place, inspired writers to modify these devils in the ways they did, it is possible to consider how each version of the prison demon seems to reflect certain ideas and concerns prevalent in the time period in which it was were written. Juliana’s devil, for example, is a liar who corrupts the world by presenting pagan ideas as orthodox. He tries to win Juliana to Helisius’s bed and pagan belief system by pretending to be an angel sent by G-d to convince her that

Helisius’s gods are worthy of worship. After Juliana subdues him, he confesses to her that his father, Satan, sends his minions into the world “’ þæt we soðfæstra / þurh misgedwield mod oncyrren, / ahwyrfen from halor, we beoð hygegeomre, / forhte on

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ferðþe’” (325b-328a). [“’to convert the mind of the soothfast through wicked deceit, to turn them away from their salvation’”] (325b-328a). Juliana’s strength lies in her ability to discern good from evil and orthodox beliefs from pagan falsehood. Roughly contemporary with Juliana’s tenth-century Old English life is the Passio version of St.

Margaret’s legend. This devil—and the Tiberius devil, whose language in many places echoes the Passio devil’s—is also preoccupied with leading good Christians to “forget all heavenly wisdom” (§15). These stories, which reflect anxieties about paganism—or at least religious backsliding—were set down in writing in a time following the Viking invasions in the eighth and ninth centuries that re-introduced paganism. In response, the

Church renewed its efforts to convert the people and institute reforms in the ecclesiastical system in the early tenth century. The devil in the twelfth-century CCCC version of Margaret’s life shifts our focus to the problem of sexual sin, always a concern in the Church. This devil’s main obsession seems to be tempting people to indulge their lust in new and creative ways. Unlike Juliana’s devil and Margaret’s devil in Passio and

Tiberius, he is all-powerful and can attack Margaret in a very physical way, but chooses to use words instead. This emphasizes the power of rhetoric in Margaret’s more private battle of sin and conscience in her prison cell and casts into sharp relief her public and very physical struggle with Olibrius.

By comparison, Margaret’s verbal exchanges with Olibrius are static and formulaic. He confronts the saint with threats and demands and she repeatedly rejects him before she is tortured and put to death. The episode is mostly the same in every iteration, mainly changing in length as it becomes more abbreviated over time, giving

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narrative ground to the scene in the dark prison cell where Margaret must battle a demon with her wits, words, and good Christian character. This establishes Margaret’s sainthood in a very different way. The conflict between good and evil here changes from public spectacle to a private internal struggle where the saint must overcome her own sinful nature in order to resist the demon’s temptations. In this way, the devil functions as a metaphor for the sins that haunt not only the saint, but the religious community she represents. The power that the saint gains over the demon not only serves as an example to all of those in the religious community struggling to overcome sin, but also echoes

Christ’s temptation in the desert. McFadden refers to the saint’s struggle with the devil as an imitatio Christi, since Christ is tempted by the devil in the desert and confronts other demons in the Gospels by exorcising them.39 Margaret, like Juliana, wins the battle of wits and words with the devil by engaging him in conversation just long enough to learn his identity in order to effect his expulsion. Dresvina also draws a parallel between

Margaret’s banishment of the devil and the exorcisms Christ performs in in the second- century Christian apocryphal text, The Questions of Bartholomew and the exorcism

Solomon performs in the fifth-century pseudoepigraphical treatise The Testament of

Solomon.40 She points out that Solomon’s use of his seal to subjugate demons, the appearance of the demons in both accounts, and Christ’s and Solomon’s method of questioning demons are all echoed in St. Margaret’s legend. Dresvina argues that as

39 McFadden, “’The Books of Life’” Theotimus as Narrator of identity in the Old English Lives of St. Margaret,” 478 40 Dresvina, “The Significance of the Demonic Episode in the Legend of St. Margaret of Antioch,” 193- 199. 222

“The Testament of Solomon was probably intended as a manual for exorcism, it would make sense to suppose that the demonic episode was included in the legend of St.

Margaret with a similar purpose, transplanting Judeo-Hellenistic expertise onto Christian soil.”41 St. Margaret’s interactions with the demon, which closely mirror Christ’s and

Solomon’s, not only establishes her as one in a select line of exorcists authorized by G-d, but sets this dubious episode within an orthodox Christian framework. Margaret and

Juliana are exemplars, providing those struggling with temptation with a kind of roadmap—or exorcism manual—for overcoming the metaphorical devils that haunt the

Christian imagination. And banishing these ever-shifting demons is consistently achieved through the process of examination, discernment, reflection, introspection, and moral fortitude.

Prisoners and Prison Spaces in the Middle Ages

The prison spaces in which these spiritual exemplars fight their demons is also an imitation of Christ’s temptation in the desert. The early Christian theologian, Tertullian

(c. 155 – 240 AD) states that “The prison serves the Christian as a desert [served] the prophet…Let us take away the name ‘prison’ and call it ‘retirement.’ Even if the body is confined, even if the flesh is detained, everything is open to the spirit.”42 Prison spaces were reimagined by theologians such as Tertullian as places that transformed physical suffering into spiritual empowerment. In The Medieval Prison: A Social History, Guy

Geltner states that

41 Dresvina, “The Significance of the Demonic Episode in the Legend of St. Margaret of Antioch,” 199. 42 Tertullian, quoted in Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, 85. 223

By comparing the prison with the desert, Tertullian linked Christian asceticism with the formative experiences of the Israelites and Christ’s spiritual training. It was a potent union, for self-abnegation offered another path to Christian perfection, a path that augmented and eventually replaced the example of the persecuted martyrs. In order to create continuity and commutability between “red” and “white” martyrdom, that is, between violent death for one’s faith and the penitential life, Tertullian and others turned the confessors’ experiences in prison into a metaphor for self-imposed torment. The metaphor subsequently found its way into monastic spirituality, which spawned a distinct new strand of carceral language. (85)

This carceral language was subsequently applied to the emerging medieval secular prison system that treated crime as a manifestation of sin and prisoners as spiritually sick and in need of a cure. Prison spaces, like Purgatory, were temporary places to correct spiritual ills before inmates could be released.

Imprisonment was integral to the imagery of Purgatory and “frequently conceived as a literal place represented as a prison.”43 The previous chapter examined how ghosts, such as the miserly lord in St. Austin at Compton and the pagan judge in the

Life of St. Erkenwald, refer to Purgatory and Limbo as prisons. Likewise, souls who suffer in Purgatory in the visionary literature, such as The Vision of Tundale and A

Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary, describe their spaces of punishment as prisons. John Mirk’s Festial—a collection of sixty-four sermons composed in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries with a popular audience in mind—contains several sermons that urge congregants to comfort souls in

Purgatory with prayers, alms, and masses, including sermon 65 for All-Souls day, where it refers to Purgatory as G-d’s prison and asks readers to consider the souls: “yn

43 Anthony Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 3. 224

purgatory yn Goddys pryson and haue gret nede to be holpon.”44 Cassidy-Welch explains that “as prisons became more penitential in character…purgatory assumed a more carceral aspect – ‘earthly images of confinement, penance and redemption [were carried] into the world hereafter.’”45 This worked both ways. In writing by prisoners and about imprisonment in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, prisons were often referred to as Purgatory. George Ashby equates prison with Purgatory in Complaint of a

Prisoner in the Fleet 1463, as does the anonymous prisoner-author of Complaint of a

Prisoner against Fortune. Both will be discussed in further detail later in this chapter.

Equating prison with Purgatory in ghost stories, otherworld visions, and prison literature was a common rhetorical trope in the Middle Ages, especially after Purgatory became official doctrine in the thirteenth century and was imagined as a concrete place in the afterlife. The belief in a temporary space of post-mortem punishment became deeply entwined with the emerging secular prison system that tried to fashion itself as an earthly Purgatory. Prison, like Purgatory, was understood as a “place of temporal confinement whose aim is the reform of the inmate for the purpose of fruitful reintegration into a sacred community.”46 Bale suggests that equating prison with

Purgatory stemmed from a growing Western European interest in incarceration and religious imprisonment and has Christological precedents in the Middle Ages.

44 John Mirk, Festial, ed. Theodore Erbe (London: Early English Text Society, 1905), 269. 45 Cassidy-Welch, Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150 1400, 90. 46 Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 4. 225

Christ’s ordeal with Satan in the desert as well as Christ’s imprisonment during the Passion established precedents for prison as a spiritually transformative space—a kind of earthly Purgatory. Although there are only implicit references in the Gospels to

Christ’s imprisonment after his arrest and prior to his crucifixion, an entire tradition sprang up around “Christ’s imprisonment in the representation of suffering heroism” among Latin Christians around the twelfth century.47 This gave rise to an entirely different view of the prisoner and changed him/her from a “figure of outright disgrace to a hero worthy of prayer and charity.”48 Christ’s prison, which is located in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, became an important pilgrimage destination in the

47 In “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” Bale states: “Support for the prison’s historicity was likely extrapolated from the implicit references to Christ’s detention in the Gospels: here, Judas instructs the soldiers to “lay hold on [Jesus], and lead him away carefully” (Mark 14.44), suggesting Jesus’s binding arrest. The story of the two thieves Dysmas and Gestas and the imprisonment of Barabbas (Matt. 27.15–17), together with the references to Jesus led in chains to Annas (John 18.12) and Caiaphas (John 18.24), might likewise be understood to indicate imprisonment” (6,7). Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 6. Christ’s suffering in prison during the Passion was a popular subject featured in many homilies in Old and Middle English. For example, the topic is explored in the Blickling Homilies in “Annuniciatio S. Mariæ” [“Annunication of St. Mary”] (3-13) and “Dominica Prima Quinquagesima” [“Quinquagesima Sunday”] (16-25). The word “carcern” or prison and its cognates appear twenty nine times in the Blickling Homilies, primarily in connection with Christ’s imprisonment; however, it also appears in the “Dominica Pascha” [“Easter Day”] homily (83-96) and the homily on “S. Andreas” [“St. Andrew”] (228-249). In the last two homilies, Christ liberates the Patriarchs from the prison of Limbo and St. Andrew is himself imprisoned after liberating Matthew from a group of pagan Mermedonian cannibals. See Richard Morris, trans., The Blickling Homilies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). Imprisonment in Middle English sermons is discussed later in this chapter. 48 Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 17. Other incarcerated holy men and women (Joseph of Arimathea, Katherine of Alexandria, Paul, John the Baptist, and Peter) inspired a sympathetic view toward prisoners in the Middle Ages. The prison cells and relics of these holy men and women also became a draw for pilgrims. Bale states: “The Prison of Christ complemented other carceral pilgrimage sites—such as the prison cell of Saint Katherine in Alexandria, the Church of Saint Paul’s Prison at Caesarea, the cell and fetter relics of Saint Peter at Jerusalem, and at Rome, Saint Peter’s chains at San Petro in Vincoli and his cell at San Petro in Carcere—to provide a transtemporal contemplative space, at once grim and purgative, for the medieval pilgrim” (27). Also see Craig S. Wansink, Chained in Christ: The Experience and Rhetoric of Paul’s Imprisonments (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). How each of these incarcerated saints influenced views on prisoners and imprisonment in the Middle Ages and the centuries that followed is outside the scope of this project, but is worth exploring in greater detail as part of a larger project on imprisonment in the future. 226

Middle Ages. Traveling to the Holy Land and undergoing voluntary imprisonment in

Christ’s purgatorial space allowed pilgrims to perform a kind of double penance that readied their souls for Heaven.49 The previous chapter explored the theme of pre- purgatorial penance in the form of earthly suffering, self-sacrifice, and pilgrimage in A

Revelation of Purgatory. One of the three purgatories in A Revelation of Purgatory is a space dedicated entirely to earthly suffering and sacrifice in the form of sickness, tribulation, almsgiving, and pilgrimage. Given the dangers of long-distance travel in the

Middle Ages, pilgrimages were seen as a form of sacrifice and recognized as a penitential act that would mitigate the term of post-mortem penance and purgation.

Pilgrimage and voluntary imprisonment in Christ’s cell not only provided a great many pilgrims the opportunity to perform such penance, but also helped reinforce the idea that prisoners were noble sufferers worthy of help, reintegration, and even imitation, rather than figures to be feared, shunned, and exiled.

Bale posits that one of the ways in which the prison space became a site of penance and religious holiness was through its association with Christ’s prison cell; however, his explanation only partially accounts for the charitable posture toward medieval prisoners, who were seen primarily as sinners in need of correction, rather than as criminals to be contained, controlled, and hidden. In a time when anyone could be imprisoned for the slightest infraction, including oath-breaking and debt, there was little difference between prisoners and the rest of society. And since all crime was seen as a

49 Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 30. 227

manifestation of sin, medieval communities, encouraged by the Church, felt a moral obligation to help prisoners to penance and reform. Because of their association with

Christ-as-prisoner, inmates were even valorized in ways that modern audiences often find astonishing.

Modern attitudes toward incarcerated people are drastically different from the

Middle Ages due to a fundamental shift in sentiment that occurred in the early modern period. Thomas Freeman states that at the close of Middle Ages, people increasingly saw crime as a trespass against society and the criminal as an outsider whose activities had to be contained and controlled. This conception of prisoner-as-criminal continues in the

English-speaking world today, where there is “an almost universally held modern belief, albeit one rarely discussed…that those who are imprisoned are, in fundamental ways, different from the members of ‘normal’ society. Although the causes advanced for these differences or, perhaps more accurately, deficiencies, vary sharply—for example, flaws in character, lack of education or training, and genetic defects have all been postulated at one time or another—the idea that prisoners are damaged and dysfunctional is ubiquitous.”50 Prisoners have become the “monstrous other” who languish in a system of social control. Treated as lesser beings, they are locked away in distant places in order to manage and contain behavior that is deemed dangerous to the social order.

Prior to the early modern period, communities did not stigmatize prisoners as criminals because it was understood that anyone could become a prisoner—especially in

50 Thomas S. Freeman, “The Rise of Prison Literature,” The Huntington Quarterly 27. No. 2 (2009): 136. 228

an age when debt was the most common reason for punitive incarceration.51 As such, medieval communities did not see those who were locked away as people who differed in a fundamental sense from those at liberty. Penal law mirrored G-d’s law and incarceration was seen as a spiritual corrective. The belief that prisoners were sinners, rather than criminals, gave rise to the idea that the moral distance between prisoners and their community was negligible. This created a moral imperative to bring all sinners to repentance, which shaped the secular punitive system.52 Short prison sentences, the central location of gaols and prisons, exeats, and allowances made for the frequent reception of visitors enabled reconciliation through regular contact between prisoners and the outside world.

Punitive law also reflected St. Augustine of Hippo’s (354-480 AD) views on punishment. In Letter 95 - To Paulinus and Therasia (408 AD), Augustine states that punishment should be meted out “to forward the spiritual welfare” of those who have transgressed in some way.53 However, Augustine also urges restraint in carrying out such punishments: “…you would not be doing good if you did not punish. Certainly a deserved punishment should always be imposed as gently as possible, but it still should

51 Freeman, “The Rise of Prison Literature,” 136. 52 Todd V. Cioffi, “Prison as Parish: Christian Responses.” Christian History Magazine no. 123 (2017), accessed December 27, 2017, https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/prison-as-a-parish- christian-responses. 53 St. Augustine of Hippo quoted in “Augustine: Letter 95 – To Paulinus and Therasia on How Punishment Can Affect One’s Spiritual Welfare (408 CE),” Georgetown University Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs, accessed December 27, 2017. https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/quotes/augustine-em-letter-95-to-paulinus and-therasia-em-on-how- punishment-can-affect-one-s-spiritual-welfare-408-ce. 229

be imposed.”54 Punitive measures were a means of correction and inflicted in moderation in order to instruct and rehabilitate the offender. Augustine not only emphasized the importance of mercy in connection with judicial leniency, but stressed the value of performing acts of charity for prisoners. As discussed in the previous chapter,

Augustine’s Sermo LX.x.10 echoes Matthew 6:1-4 in stating that one cannot gain entry to Heaven simply by avoiding sin, but must perform acts of charity for those in need, including the sick, the poor, and those in prison.55 The teachings of Gregory, Aquinas,

Bede, and Ælfric align with Augustine’s in this respect and extend this idea to the suffering dead, encouraging those in the community to help both earthly and otherworldly prisoners. The Church assured those who performed charitable works for the sick, the poor, prisoners, as well as the tormented dead that their own sentences in

Purgatory would be shortened by their good deeds. As a result, a new economy emerged with respect to these punitive spaces, where future Purgatory prisoners were helping current earthly and otherworldly prisoners in order to shorten their own sentences in the afterlife. A sort of “pay it forward” system developed because of the connection between prisons and Purgatory that reinforced the reciprocal relationship between the givers and receivers of aid.

The belief that prisoners were worthy of both mercy and charity and that it was everyone’s duty to help prisoners find their way back to the community became so

54 St. Augustine of Hippo Sermon 114A, 5-6 quoted in Donald X. Burt, O.S.A, Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine’s Practical Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 187. 55 Augustine quoted in translation by Grundy, Books and Grace Ælfric’s Theology, 273. 230

deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination that it manifested to varying degrees in popular culture in the form of songs, poetry, carols, plays, and homilies. Instances of this belief in prisoners as important members of the community include poetry and sermons from John Mirk’s Festial (c. 1403) and Instructions for Parish Priests (c. 1403); poetry and carols from John the Blind Audelay’s The Counsel of Conscience (c. 1426); as well as medieval mystery plays performed through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Audelay’s The Counsel of Conscience, for example, includes a carol inspired by

Matthew 25:31-4656 titled, “Seven Works of Mercy,” which promises those who perform works of mercy for the poor, the dead, and those languishing in prison “nyght and day, /

Thi soule to heven hit wil thee bryng—” (10-11).57 This passage is reproduced almost verbatim in Audelay’s “God’s Address to Sinful Men” where the author speaks to his audience in an admonitory tone as G-d himself:

And vysette the seke that in preson be, And beré the dede, I you pray, And cownsel the unwyse, pur charyté, And here my Word when that ye may, And do therafter, both nyght and day, Fore this wil bryng you to my blis;

56 This passage is also called “The Sheep and the Goats” or “The Judgment of the Nations.” See The Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, John R. Kohlenberger III (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 1997). http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Excommunication/type/kjv. 57 All quotations taken from Audeley are taken from John the Blind Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009). Audelay’s collection was selected for this project because it is one of the first author collections of its time produced “when the authority of English writers was still in flux” (3). This is an entire collection written for the singular purpose of meditating on death and penance. The autobiographical element focuses on the author’s need for contrition and his goal of helping others find salvation through his collection. In other words, Audelay’s self-representation as a sinner who is performing penance by writing penitential poetry for other wayward souls is the guiding principle for this collection. Audelay’s work, which was influenced by Mirk, sermonizes about penance and death through poetry and song in ways that demonstrate his skill with metrical form and reflect prevailing ideas on penance in the genre of devotional literature. 231

To heven hit is the hyewaye. Nolo mortem peccatoris. (169-176)

The Counsel of Conscience focuses on good living, penance, and the purgation of sin through works of charity and mercy. Just as Margaret tells the visionary nun about the purgatory of mercy and advises her to live a penitent life and do good works in A

Revelation of Purgatory, Audelay stresses the importance of avoiding Purgatory by completing the work of penance in this life through good works in “Visiting the Sick and

Consoling the Needy.” He tells his readers that by helping others they ultimately help themselves. Praying for the dead in Purgatory and helping the less fortunate will mitigate punishment in the afterlife (352-364). Audelay quotes Gregory the Great who warns that

‘Better hit is now fore thee To wenche the fuyre of purgatoré — Therin cast or that thou be — Thiselfe here wyle thou may.’ (100-104)

Gregory’s statement is central to the theme of Audelay’s collection, which is a penitential work that emphasizes the reciprocal nature of salvation. Its penitential tone responds to a spiritually and socially traumatic episode caused by Audelay’s tangential involvement in a shameful public scandal that occurred in 1417 when he served as Lord

Lestrange’s chaplain.58 Audelay, most likely driven by guilt over the tragic incident, wrote his poems and carols at great physical and emotional cost as an act of atonement.

58 Lord Lestrange was involved in a brawl in St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East Church on Easter Sunday in 1417 that resulted in severe injuries to a knight and the death of another congregant. He served a short sentence in the Tower before being made to perform a penitential walk through the streets of London with his family, which most likely included Audelay. According to Susanna Fein, scholars believe that as Lestrange’s spiritual advisor, he would have felt partially responsible for the tragedy and his penitential collection of poetry was an act of atonement. See John the Blind Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009), 5-6. 232

In one of the final poems of the collection, “Audelay’s Epilogue to The Counsel of

Conscience,” he tells his readers that “This boke I made with gret dolour / When I myght not slep ne have no rest” (484-485). He presents himself as a penitent sinner whose long illness has been an early purgatory for him (14-26) and hopes “To have my payne, my purgatory, / Out of this word or that I dy” (478-479). Audelay’s anxieties about his salvation are clearly articulated in the “Epilogue,” wherein he prays for a good death and direct admittance into Heaven for the earthly pain he suffered because of his illness and in the great personal sacrifice he made in writing his penitential collection. Susanna

Greer Fein states that Audelay’s collection is “in essence a handbook for the remission of sins, with sinfulness understood as a specific quantity of willfully evil deeds and thoughts counted against one’s soul. Thus, penitential acts are needed to reduce the tally, which will come to account when God affixes to each soul its final judgment.”59

Audelay hoped that his collection would serve several purposes: to teach his readers how to avoid Purgatory and Hell through earthly suffering and good works; to show his readers how to live well by his own example of suffering and good works; to ask his readers to pray for his soul after he dies; and to pay off—through the suffering he experienced in the creation of his collection—whatever moral debt he still owed at the end of his life that would prevent his immediate entry into Heaven. In “Audelay’s

Conclusion” he states that his “ryches in heven with dede and worde / I have ypurchest in my levyng, / With good ensampul to odur gefyng” (29-31). He hopes that he

59 Susanna Fein, ed., Poems and Carols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009), 9. 233

purchased his immediate entry into Heaven by writing this spiritually illuminating book before concluding with a plea to his readers “To pray for hym specialy / That hyt made your soules to save” (46-47).

This final plea echoes John Mirk’s request for his readers’ prayers in Instructions for Parish Priests (c. 1403), which Fein believes influenced Audelay’s collection. Mirk’s

Instructions for Parish Priests was written to correct errors in the priesthood as well as other ecclesiastical orders and is contemporary with Audelay’s work, sharing many of the same ideas about penance and salvation.60 Its 1,934 lines are written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets and provide instruction on everything ranging from childbirth, midwifery, and baptism to confession, penance, good works, death, and Purgatory. Both

Mirk’s and Audelay’s work are, for the most part, moral instruction manuals that echo conventional religious thinking with respect to living and dying in a way that ensures an easy transition from this life, through Purgatory, and into Heaven.

Mirk’s section on venial sins reminds its readers that avoiding sin alone will not help one attain salvation. He presents various kinds of penance and good works that one may perform in order to avoid Hell and Purgatory as a list of questions, asking if his readers have properly buried the dead, fed the poor, clothed the naked, helped the sick and incarcerated, and prayed for the dead in Purgatory (1460-1496). Audelay follows

Mirk’s list—which ultimately derives from Matthew 25:35-36—very closely in “Seven

Works of Mercy” and “God’s Address to Sinful Men.” Mirk, Audelay, and the

60 All citations taken from Mirk are from John Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. Edward Peacock (London: Early English Text Society, 1868). 234

anonymous authors of A Revelation of Purgatory and the fifteenth century Vision of

Tundale seem to quantify salvation—in ways that are absent in earlier literature—by enumerating various sins and then listing, in detail, the kinds of penance, prayer, and good works that offset them. The process of debt remission is present in a detailed way in these later works because they were written at least two centuries after indulgences had been a well-established practice in the Latin Catholic Church. They became so deeply ingrained that contemporary audiences would have been conditioned to hear the formulaic listing of penance and good works as a means of remitting sin. Mirk’s sermon on the Assumption of Mary in the Festial expands on Luke 10:38-42 by incorporating the list of good works from Matthew 25:35-36 in order to teach congregants that “a mon may receyue pore, and ȝeue þat hom nedyth mete and dryng, and cloþyng, and herbar, and helpe þe seke, and vysed hom þat be in prison, and bury þe dede. þys ys vndyrstond by Martha.”61 Martha becomes the exemplar of good works and Mary represents contemplation and prayer.

Matthew 25:35-40 explores debt remission in a way that presents the poor, the sick, and prisoners as earthly surrogates for Christ, whom the religious community was tasked with helping in order to attain their own salvation. This concept becomes a popular literary trope not only in visionary literature, poetry, carols, and sermons, but also in medieval drama and is generally voiced by either G-d or Jesus in each of the

Doomsday plays in medieval cycle dramas. In “The Last Judgment” play in The N-Town

61 Mirk, Festial, ed. and trans. Theodore Erbe (London: Early English Text Society, 1905), 231. 235

cycle, for example, Jesus explains to the confused and very distressed damned souls that he just resurrected that they are going to Hell because they failed to do good works:

To hungry and thirsty that asked in my name Meat and drink would ye give none. Of naked men had ye no shame. Ye would not visit men in prison. Ye had no pity on the sick or lame. Deeds of mercy have ye never done. Unharboured men ye served the same. To bury the poor dead man, would ye never do. These deeds do you spill. For your love I was rent on rood And for your sake, I shed my blood. When I was so merciful and so good, Why have wrought against my will? (79-91)62

This passage appears, in similar form, in the extant medieval cycle dramas, including the

Towneley,63 Chester,64 and York65 Judgment plays. The concept that the most unfortunate figures in the community, among whom prisoners are always named, are proxies for

Christ in this world, not only reinforced that prisoners were people worthy of care, but that everyone was obligated to repay their debt of salvation to Christ for his great sacrifice by helping the least fortunate in the community, thus making salvation both a reciprocal and a communal act.

62 S. Spector, ed., The N-Town Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 63 Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, eds., The Towneley Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 466-526. 64 R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 581-628. 65 Davidson, Clifford Davidson, ed., The York Corpus Christi Plays (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute 2011), 229-380. 236

Sin as debt to G-d and one’s community has biblical precedents,66 which Thomas

Aquinas expands upon in Summa Theologica, stating that good works represent an offering, or a sacrifice of oneself to G-d, who is owed fidelity, reverence, and service.67

Aquinas posits that the “nature of the debt to be paid must needs vary according to various causes giving rise to the debt, yet so that the greater always includes the lesser.

Now the cause of debt is found primarily and chiefly in God, in that He is the first principle of all our goods…”68 Crime, which was seen as a manifestation of sin, created for prisoners a moral and legal debt to be repaid to G-d and society. This also created a moral obligation in an always-sinful and divinely-indebted Christian community to help prisoners and other unfortunates. The notion of spiritual debt—and its repayment through good works and penance—eventually became connected with financial debt, which by the fourteenth century was considered a crime and punishable by imprisonment.

While debt was chiefly figured in the medieval period as being accrued against, and thus payable to G-d, several statutes implemented during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries69 contributed toward a shift in the perception of debt such that it

66 Passages in the Bible that refer to sin as debt to G-d include Matthew 25:35-40, Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 7:41-50. 67 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger, 1947), Q lxxxv. Art. 2 and Q c. Art. 5. 68 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Q cvi. Art. 1. 69 According to Ralph Pugh, there were several statutes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that expanded the rights of creditors over debtors, so that by the fourteenth century these rights became indistinguishable from those held by the Crown over insolvent subjects. Pugh states that this process started with the Statue of Acton Burnell in 1283, which allowed merchants to force borrowers to publicly acknowledge the amount of debt and the due date for repayment in front of the mayor. In the event of default, debtors could then be imprisoned for breaking contract. This statute was followed by Westminster II in 1285 and The Statue of 1352, which increased the rights of creditors over their debtors. In the latter 237

became a largely financial obligation owed to an earthly creditor and enforced by secular punitive imprisonment. For instance, pursuant to the Statute of Acton Burnell in 1283, merchants were empowered to force borrowers to publicly declare the amount and due date for their debt in front of secular authorities. The Statute of 1352 continued to expand the rights of creditors over debtors, so that they were allowed to imprison people until the disputed debt was settled. From the Statute of 1352 “sprang all the imprisonings for debt, all the debtors’ prisons or debtors’ wards, and all the lamentations which they brought in their train.”70 The secular prison system in this time period was growing, in part, by the increasing number of debt cases which resulted in punitive imprisonment.

The Church also punished debtors by the use of major excommunication starting around the thirteenth century.71 As discussed in the first chapter of this project, lay debt cases comprised the majority of the excommunication lawsuits and were heard in church courts as perjury cases because “contracts were habitually sealed with an oath.” 72 The

Church approached financial debt as a moral problem that was rooted in the sins of perjury and avarice. Those under a sentence of major excommunication were barred from burial in hallowed ground and were prohibited from partaking of the Eucharist, getting married, entering into new legal contracts, and enforcing feudal obligations. The spiritual, social, and economic pressures of excommunication encouraged debtors to pay

statute, no prior acknowledgement of the debt was required, which allowed creditors to imprison a debtor’s “body until the debt in dispute should have been settled” (45-46). See R.B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 70 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 46. 71 The process of excommunication in the Latin Catholic Church was codified in the late twelfth century. 72 Elizabeth Vodola, Excommunication in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University California Press, 1986), 37-38. 238

what they owed. From the fourteenth century on, financial insolvency was the most common reason for punitive imprisonment and many of those imprisoned for debt were also excommunicants. In this way, the church and state worked in concert with the development and enforcement of debt laws so that debt could be punishable under religious and secular auspices.73

Debt was understood as a moral and legal problem that was punishable by imprisonment and excommunication. The following section, which focuses on prison literature, examines writing by two incarcerated authors—George Ashby (1463) and an anonymous prisoner (c. 1461)—who come to understand their imprisonment for debt as a kind of spiritual and legal corrective. The proliferation of punitive imprisonment due to the new debt laws gave rise to what Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn call a

“flourishing of poems written either in conditions of physical captivity or on the subject of imprisonment” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.”74 As the number of those incarcerated rose dramatically in the later Middle Ages, so too did prison literature— both writing by incarcerated people and writing about prisoners and imprisonment.75

73 Debt laws, which increased prison populations and forced the state to standardize the emerging secular prison system, put pressure on the church and state to incentivize works of charity and mercy. When the prison population started exploding, neither the church nor the state wanted to shoulder the burden of cost, so the “pay it forward to get out of Purgatory” idea helped religious and secular authorities offload the cost of care onto the rest of the community. The frightened parishioners who wanted to avoid what was essentially a sentence in Hell, paid a voluntary tax (either with their time, labor, or with money in the form of tithes or donations apportioned to prisoners in their wills). This allowed the church and state to avoid paying for the maintenance of a growing prison population. This becomes a focus for attacks by anti- Catholic polemicists during the Reformation. See chapter five of this dissertation for more on this topic. 74 Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn, eds., The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005), 1. 75 Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 6. Bale states that the tradition of “Boethian” prison writing owes a debt to Geoffrey Chaucer’s (c. 1343-1400) translation of the work into the vernacular. 239

What emerged around this time was a new literary tradition centered on the prisoner as a penitent figure who at first views his incarceration as unjust before coming to accept it as divinely ordained. Some of the best known works in this tradition include Thomas Usk’s

(c. 1354-1388) The Testament of Love, The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland’s

(1394-1437) The Kingis Quair, Charles d’Orléans’s (1394–1465) the English Book of

Love, George Ashby’s (d. 1475) the Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463, the anonymous Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune (c. 1461), and the prison tracts of

Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542).76 Writing in this genre follows certain conventions that are attributed to Boethius, who penned Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524) in exile—which was understood by medieval audiences as imprisonment in a cell.

The general Boethian formula that prison writing in this genre follows is a sharing of a “sustained concern with the careful inscription of an incarcerated narrator- author, an evident petitionary element, and the tendering of an identity that is highly persuasive to its prospective audience, often employing the situation of imprisonment— its alleged wrongfulness and the author’s virtues in enduring it—in the service of persuasion.”77 There is a point in each of these prison narratives where the incarcerated author transitions from wrongly-persecuted prisoner into a humble penitential figure who accepts his unjust imprisonment so that he may serve out his time in order to pay his debt to society and to G-d. The popularity of Boethius during the Middle Ages in

76 Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 5. 77 Joanna Summers, Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 3. 240

England influenced the language of imprisonment and created a kind of formulaic discourse that informed prison writing in this genre. However, each narrative was still individualized and varied in its expression depending upon the socio-economic status of the prisoner-author, the kind of prison in which he was detained, the crime for which he was imprisoned, and whether his incarceration was custodial, coercive, or punitive.

James I, King of Scotland and Charles d’Orléans, grandson of King Charles V of France, for example, were taken as political prisoners by the English in 1406 and 1415, respectively. They were detained in various homes belonging to the English nobility for a number of years before their eventual release.78 Their stories follow certain Boethian conventions, but also mark out their experience as important political prisoners undergoing custodial imprisonment in a foreign land. Thomas Usk was put under house arrest in 1384 and experienced a period of coercive imprisonment until he was released after divulging information about his master, John Northampton, Lord Mayor of

London.79 George Ashby writes as a debtor undergoing punitive imprisonment for property loss and insolvency. He was a Lancastrian supporter and servant to King Henry

VI. After the Yorkist victory in 1461, he was imprisoned in the Fleet for debt after his property was confiscated.80 Although each of the narratives follows a general Boethian formula, there are significant departures from that general framework that render each account unique to the prisoner-author’s experience in captivity.

78 Mooney and Arn, The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, 17-22, 113-124. 79 Summers, Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, 24-27 80 Mooney and Arn, The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, 10. 241

Since this project explores the ways in which both Purgatory and prison were conceived as spaces of correction, reform, and reintegration by medieval communities, the final section of the chapter will focus on two poems written by prisoners who underwent punitive imprisonment: George Ashby’s Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet

1463 and the anonymous Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune (c. 1461). Unlike coercive and custodial imprisonment, punitive incarceration was intended to punish a prisoner for a set period of time for crimes already committed. In most cases, the length of time spent in prison and the place in which the sentence was served were determined by the crimes for which the prisoner was convicted.81 As the secular prison system developed in England in the Middle Ages, prisons became specialized and served different criminal populations.82 Punitive imprisonment, which was meant to be rehabilitative, disciplined prisoners according to the offences they committed and was a lot like Purgatory in that “a tariffed penance in purgatory and a spell of time in a prison cell were both developing concepts of individual correction, which made punishment individually tailored, negotiable, and terrifying rather than permanent.”83

Both Ashby’s Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463 and the anonymous

Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune are of particular interest in this study because the prisoner-narrators serve punitive sentences and come to view their unjust imprisonment as affliction from G-d to be patiently endured in order to pay for “sins and

81 Richard W. Ireland, “Theory and Practice within the Medieval Prison,” The American Journal of Legal History 31, no. 1 (1987): 9. 82 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 352-355. For more a more detailed discussion of the emerging medieval prison system, see chapter two of this dissertation. 83 Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 29. 242

buy…a shortened stay in Purgatory.”84 Furthermore, Ashby’s work explores punitive imprisonment for the specific crime of debt—a crime with both earthly monetary and metaphysical connotations in the way that debt is considered as both an offence against the social order and a sin against G-d. The word “debt” can both be read literally as money owed or figuratively as the sins one must pay for in order to become reconciled to G-d. Joanna Summers states that Ashby’s readers would have been aware of debt’s double meaning as the word in “Middle English has a much broader semantic range than in modern English.”85 The concept of debt as both moral and metaphysical was communicated through popular literature, vernacular homilies, as well as in Latin encyclopedias and will be explored in Ashby’s Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet

1463 and the anonymous Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune.86

Ashby’s and the anonymous prisoner’s poems follow Boethian form and begin with a complaint against the injustice of their persecution, followed by an acceptance of their suffering as divinely-ordained, and close with a prayer. Ashby’s work is divided into five parts, beginning with an introduction, where we are told about his imprisonment (lines 1-35); followed by a complaint about his suffering in prison (lines

36-119); a lesson to his readers about the transitory nature of earthly wealth and happiness (lines120-308); his leave-taking (lines 309-343); and his closing prayer (344-

84 Mooney and Arn, The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, 173-174. 85 Summers, Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, 161. 86 Summers, Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, 161. 243

350).87 The anonymous prisoner’s much shorter poem consists of three parts: his complaint against the fickleness of fortune (lines 1-42); his acceptance of imprisonment as G-d’s justice (43-118); and his closing prayer to G-d on behalf of all sinners (119-

140).88 Both poets use the wheel of fortune, a popular motif in the Middle Ages, to illustrate the fickleness of fortune and the transitory nature of worldly pleasures.

Whereas the anonymous prisoner follows the wheel of fortune motif with a very general lamentation over the loss of his good name, reputation, friends, wealth, and freedom (64-

70); Ashby gives us specific details about what he has lost and how it affected him.

Lines 57-77, in the Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463, describe Ashby’s forty-year tenure as a civil servant of the signet to King Henry VI and Queen Margaret of Anjou and recalls how his hard work put him in good stead with those in power, including the “duk of Gloucetre…With whom I have be cherysshed right well” (61-62).

At the height of his power, wealth, and happiness, however, he loses everything and bitterly regrets being thrown in prison after spending a lifetime in royal service: “And in theyr service I spendyd all my youth, / And now in pryson throwen in myn age” (71-

72).89 In one quick turn of fortune, he loses everything and is imprisoned for debt, which results in “The grettest peyne that I suffyr of all / Ys that I am put to unpayable det,”

(43-44).

87 All citations from George Ashby’s Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463 and the anonymous prisoner’s Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune are taken from Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn, eds., The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005). 88 Mooney and Arn, The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, 147-150; 173-174. 89 Mooney and Arn state that Ashby’s affinities with the Lancastrians led to the confiscation of his properties by Yorkist King Edward IV and his eventual imprisonment (147). 244

There is a bitterness in Ashby’s tone that suggests he is in prison for debt because of certain debts owed to him. Joanna Summers speculates that as a clerk Ashby would have been familiar with the “notorious difficulties and delays public servants faced in receiving the wages, and in view of the various mentions of Ashby’s own ‘good and unpaid services.’”90 This may explain the bitterness in his tone in lines 71-72, when he states that he was mercilessly thrown in prison in old age after having spent all of his youth in service to the royal family. He also complains that he has been abandoned by friends despite the kindness he has shown them and the favors he had performed for them in the past:

Oon thyng among other greveth me sore, That myn old acqueintaunce disdeyned me To vysyte - though I have doon to theym more Kyndnes - forgetyng me, and let me be, Ne yevyng me comfort, ne wold me se, Ne the werkes of mercy remembryng, Ne my kyndnes to theym before shewyng. (36-42)

Ashby’s lament recalls Christ’s statement to his followers about helping the needy in

Matthew 25:35-40. As discussed above, variations of this passage appear in Audelay’s poetry and carol collection, in Mirk’s sermons, in the medieval mystery plays, and in other popular literary works of the period. Ashby draws on the popular motif to present himself as a Christological figure whose many sacrifices have not been repaid, leaving him isolated, destitute, and utterly wretched. The anonymous prisoner in A Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune also draws on this theme when he complains about how

90 Summers, Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, 143. 245

“They wold me nat oones yeve a draught of drynk… / I have no friende that wil me now visite / In prison here, to comfort of my care” (78, 85-86). Unlike Ashby’s complaint, the anonymous prisoner’s statement about the absence of friends is not tinged with anger or bitterness because he seems to attribute their absence—as well as all of his other losses—to Fortune’s fickle turn.

Another possible reason for Ashby’s incarceration in the Fleet may have been his

Lancastrian ties during a regime change to a Yorkist monarchy in 1461. Summers states that Ashby would have been left unprotected once Henry VI and Queen Margaret fled, so that if he were captured and imprisoned, his lands and properties would have been confiscated, leaving him unable to secure his own release.91 Ashby seems to confirm this in his introduction when he states that he has been completely abandoned as “Myne enemyes on me awakyn, / Takyng awey hors, money, and goodes, / Pullying myn houses downe and gret woodes” (19-21). It is possible that his debts were not accrued prior to his imprisonment, but after he was captured and his assets confiscated, leaving him with an “unpayable det” which had turned him into “a wrechyd thrall” (44-45).

Ashby’s “unpayable det” can also be read as a debt to be discharged by G-d for accrued sins. Ashby’s deliverance from prison is both physical and spiritual and cannot be effected “Without Goddes grace” (47). Ashby’s acceptance of his debt as sin changes the tone of his complaint so that it becomes homiletic by line 120, when he switches to the second person and addresses his readers directly, instructing them to bear their

91 Summers, Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography, 143. 246

worldly suffering patiently. He counsels his readers to “Remember thysylf, thy lyf, thy demert… / Kepe pacience and wyte hyt thyne offence / Nat for that sylf thing but of just sentence” (121, 125-126). Ashby repeats the word “demert” (lack of merit or sin) in line

136, when he tells his readers that through prolonged suffering, they may gain knowledge of their “demeryt” [sins] in order to gain “Goddes hyghe grace” (135-139).

The words “det,” “demeryt,” or “demert,” and “grace” operate on a physical and metaphysical level, presenting carceral confinement as spiritually transformative.

Ashby’s prison poem, like Audelay’s collection of poetry and carols, becomes a written exemplar for those who need instruction in the workings of sin, penitential suffering, grace, divine forgiveness, and release.

Like Audelay, Ashby considers the great effort he put into producing a work that guides sinners to repentance would serve as sufficient penance to offset his spiritual debt and balance his account with G-d. He instructs his book to go out into the world to help troubled souls practice patience in their suffering so that they may “fynde grace” (314).

His poem was meant to be a spiritual corrective, a kind of cure for spiritual “dis-ease.”

Ashby uses the word three times in his poem, in lines 34, 81, and 149. The word

“disease” means discomfort or tribulation in each instance. “Disease” makes its final appearance in Ashby’s homiletic section, where he advises his readers to use “worldly disease” to their advantage—as pain and suffering that will bring one closer to G-d.

“Disease,” like “det,” has a broader semantic range, representing both spiritual suffering and bodily sickness. Physical illness, like crime, was considered a manifestation of sin.

Illness and sin were so deeply connected that it was believed that caring for one would

247

cure the other.92 According to Aquinas, sin in its two major forms—original and individual—create a “debt of punishment” in man that separate him from G-d.93 Ashby argues that it is through discomfort, disease, and earthly suffering that one may pay his or her debt to G-d on earth so that s/he may gain immediate access to Heaven. Earthly debt remission encouraged Tortgyth in Bede’s ghost story (c. 793) to bear her long illness with patience and encouraged the many souls who chose to suffer in the

“purgatory of mercy” in A Revelation of Purgatory, to continue their suffering until they were completely cleansed. Illness, suffering, and punitive confinement are a kind of early Purgatory that Ashby likens to the purification of metal:

And as precyous gold ys thorough puryd By foull metall, led, and claryfyed, Ryght so ys the sowle by trowbyll curyd And by humble prose hygh gloryfyed, As in the scrypture ys specyfyed. So for soules helth hyt ys a gret grace To have here trouble rather then solace. (141-147)

Likewise, the wrongly-convicted anonymous prisoner’s incarceration becomes an early Purgatory that he is pleased to suffer in order to be released from the “…peynes whiche in Purgatory be” (110). Those who are in a state of sin are alienated from G-d and their religious communities. Whether sin manifests as criminal behavior, illness, disease, or a willful and deliberate rejection of G-d, transgressors continued to be viewed as members of the Corpus Christi, seen as spiritually sick and in need of a cure. In the

92 Bruno Barber, Christopher Thomas, and Bruce Watson, Religion in Medieval London: Archaeology and Belief (London: Museum of Archaeology, 2013), 64. 93 Christopher Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 62, no. 2 (1998): 224. 248

previous chapter, the miserly lord who was excommunicated for withholding tithes in St.

Austin at Compton served his time in Purgatory and was eventually absolved after much suffering. The sentence of excommunication was lifted so that he could be reincorporated into the body of Christ and allowed to take his rightful place in Heaven.

The miserly lord’s predicament in Purgatory is what Audelay, Mirk, Ashby, and the anonymous prisoner-writer were desperately trying to avoid by performing earthly penance and, through their writing, encouraged others to do the same. In fact Ashby warns that “Pryson propurly ys a sepulture” for those “Lackyng volunté for theyre dew penaunce” (344, 350). In other words, prison forces those who are unable or unwilling to do penance while they are at liberty to make amends and pay for their sins while confined.

As terrible as a prison sentence in the Fleet was,94 the pains of Purgatory were believed to be far worse, as demonstrated in the The Vision of Drihthelm, The Vision of

Furseus, The Vision of Tundale, A Revelation of Purgatory, St. Austin at Compton, and the Life of St. Erkenwald. Prison spaces—earthly and otherworldly—were seen in the late Middle Ages as transformative and rehabilitative places where sins could be wiped clean. Whether those sins manifested as illness, criminal behavior, debt, or

94 Newgate and the Fleet in London, were two of the greatest municipal prisons of their time. Newgate (built in 1188) housed those who committed the most serious crimes—felonies or treason. The Fleet, (established in 1197) housed mainly debtors and those convicted of lighter crimes. The Fleet was relatively clean and comfortable compared to other prisons as it catered to a prison population that was less violent and relatively wealthy. George Ashby, like all prisoners in the Fleet, would have been allowed to have visitors. The isolation he complains of, therefore, would not likely have been imposed on him by the prison itself. The complete isolation that he laments in the poem may have been imposed by ungrateful friends or simply a rhetorical device exaggerating his suffering to make his plight seem more impressive. For more information about Fleet prison, see chapter two of this dissertation. 249

excommunication (the latter two categories often collapse into a single category, since many incarcerated debtors were also excommunicants), the community felt an obligation to ease the suffering of sinners and bring them to repentance. In doing so, they were helping to pay their own debt to G-d.

Prison spaces came to be viewed as transformative shortly after the Roman persecution when there was a shift from “red” to “white” models of martyrdom that encouraged penitence, introspection, and purgation as ways of attaining spiritual perfection. The lives of Juliana of Nicomedia and St. Margaret of Antioch represent both public and private forms of penance and illuminate the shift toward purgative confinement as the preferred method of penance in the Middle Ages. Prisoners were also valorized to a certain extent once the belief in an imprisoned Christ before the Passion took root in the medieval religious imaginary. The popular belief in Christ’s imprisonment continued to refocus the “rhetoric of imprisonment on piety rather than punishment” and helped forge the “connection between bodily incarceration and spiritual liberation.”95 Because of this connection, prisoners were seen as figures worthy of sympathy, care, and reintegration. And because crime was viewed as a manifestation of sin, prisoners were not viewed as being different from the rest of the community. This understanding shifts in the early modern period, where crime is redefined as an offence against the social order, rather than G-d, resulting in the permanent exile and exclusion of prisoners.

95 Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” 3. 250

This chapter has shown, however, that in the medieval period aiding prisoners was considered an act of charity and mercy, which John the Blind Audelay and John

Mirk encourage their audiences to do in their poetry, carols, sermons, and instructional tracts. This is also demonstrated in George Ashby’s Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet

1463 and the anonymous Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune. Although both prison tracts are formulaic and follow Boethian conventions of writing by a prisoner/exile, each prison narrative includes individualized biographical elements that offers some insight into how medieval incarceration was conceived as rehabilitative rather purely punitive by those in prison as well as their communities.

The next chapter further examines the treatment of earthly and otherworldly prisoners by exploring the physical spaces marked out for them in medieval communities. Prison inmates and the restless dead were confined in permeable spaces that occupied the center of each medieval community’s spiritual landscape until both religious and secular penal practices evolved during the Reformation, leading to the attenuation of the connection between purgation and imprisonment. The shift caused these transgressive figures to move to the periphery of the medieval imaginary, resulting in a kind of permanent geographical exile that continues to this day.

251

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CHAPTER V

FROM RECOVERY TO EXILE: EARTHLY AND OTHERWORLDLY CARCERAL

SPACES IN OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE

Medieval prisoners and the restless dead in Purgatory occupied the center of each community’s social, economic, and spiritual landscape through the Middle Ages. This chapter examines the physical spaces that earthly prisoners and Purgatory inmates inhabited in the world in the medieval period, and explores how their movement from center to margin was effected by the “death” of Purgatory during the Reformation.

Prisons, which were located at the heart of each medieval town or village, were closed down and replaced by new prisons in the outskirts in the post-Reformation era.

Similarly, cemeteries at the center of medieval communities relocated to the outskirts around the same time prisons moved to the periphery. The movement of graveyards and prisons is part of a larger discussion about what medieval post-mortem penal spaces, such as Purgatory, Limbo, and Hell share in common with earthly carceral spaces, and the ways in which liminal figures—such as dead pagans, excommunicants, restless ghosts, and even devils—in medieval narratives engage with those spaces. Earthly prisons and the purgatorial afterlife were closely linked through their purpose of correction and rehabilitation. Punitive measures were a means of reform, and liminal figures were reintegrated after relatively short periods of punishment. Because incarceration was meant to enable reconciliation and reunion between prisoners and their communities, prisons and purgatorial spaces were necessarily permeable.

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Purgatory ghosts ventured out at appointed times near their burial sites in church graveyards to ask their community for help in the form of alms, masses, and intercessory prayer so that they could secure an earlier release from Purgatory and ascend to Heaven.

Likewise, prison inmates, who were jailed in town centers, were allowed out of their prisons to beg for alms for their care and maintenance, to conduct business, to write to the outside community, and even to attend mass. The Church encouraged those in the community to help both earthly and otherworldly prisoners by assuring them that their own sentences in Purgatory would be shortened by their charitable deeds. As discussed in previous chapters, a certain economy developed around these punitive spaces, where future Purgatory prisoners were helping current earthly and otherworldly prisoners in order to shorten their own sentences in the afterlife. Both prisons and graveyards were located at the center of each town or village in the pre-Reformation period, reminding the community of its moral obligations and making it convenient to help its marginal figures. Prisons were typically located near courthouses at the center of town, and the dead were buried in and around cathedrals, monasteries, and parish churches in community centers.

After the Reformation and continuing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, a major shift occurred. Laws governing burial practices changed, and churchyard internments were largely replaced by cemetery burials in the outskirts of town. Although it is tempting to conclude that the relocation of cemeteries from center to margin was driven solely by overcrowding, contamination, and disease, overcrowded burial grounds were a problem long before the Reformation. The constraints on burial

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space in the Middle Ages were addressed by recycling bodies and placing the bones in charnel houses—usually a year or two after initial burial—in order to make room for the newly deceased in churchyards at the center of town. Close burials were an integral part of religious culture before the “death” of Purgatory. Shifting religious values and increased secularization after the Reformation, however, allowed communities to deal with the overcrowding in a more permanent and sanitary way, by relocating cemeteries to the outskirts. Over time, prisons were also moved outside of towns and villages.

Reimagined as spaces of permanent punishment, prisons became spaces of exile and invisibility after losing their association with Purgatory. Using maps and sketches that I collected from the British Library as well as maps that I created with a web-based authoring tool called Visualeyes,1 I chart the movement of gaols, prisons, and graveyards from the heart of each community to the periphery in order to demonstrate that the connection which existed between purgation and incarceration in medieval Christian communities became more attenuated over time—both geographically and in the

Christian social imaginary.

This chapter begins with a brief analysis of non-Christian burial practices in

England in the medieval period, which will be used as a point of comparison in my examination of pre- and post-Conquest Christian burial practices. Whereas certain religions prohibited close burial due to ritual purity laws or fear of the dead, it was an integral part of the Christian belief system. It was widely held that the dead were

1 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes”Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technological Initiatives The University of Virginia, 2016, http://www.viseyes.org/viseyes.htm. 258

connected to their bodies—especially immediately after death—and returned at appointed times to interact with the living. As such, their placement in the center of living communities was essential. The first section of this chapter considers the growing concern with correct burial in the Anglo-Saxon period by examining excerpts from wills, law codes, and homilies. The second section of this chapter discusses burial practices in the post-Conquest era and its relationship with an emerging secular prison system focused on punitive incarceration. This section also examines wills and homilies of the period to demonstrate that with the rise of the punitive secular prison system in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, and the establishment of Purgatory as doctrine in the thirteenth century, a connection is forged between earthly and purgatorial imprisonment. As the Middle Ages come to a close and ideas about Purgatory are set aside in the Reformed Church in England, the connection between earthly and otherworldly prisons is lost and the spaces that both earthly prisoners and purgatorial apparitions inhabit in the world move from center to margin.

Burial Practices in the Pre-Conquest Era

As the recent and very comprehensive study on the subject of medieval prisons by Guy Geltner has shown, the strong association between prison and Purgatory in the

Middle Ages had developed from the end of the Roman persecution.2 In the previous chapter, I discussed how once the Church aligned its interests with Rome, Christians redefined suffering according to a “white” model of martyrdom that privileged private

2 Guy Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 83- 84. 259

contemplation and ascetic self-denial in solitary prison spaces over the “red” model of martyrdom that favored public trial and death as a means of testing and defining

Christian holiness.3 The ecclesiastical system of confinement and discipline that arose as a result of this shift around the fourth century4 served as a model for both the emerging medieval secular prison system and the concept of Purgatory as a divine prison. Because survival and eventual release from both earthly and otherworldly prisons depended upon external assistance, gaols and churchyard cemeteries occupied the center of each medieval village or town.

Long before either Christianity or the connection between purgation and incarceration was established in England, communities buried their dead outside of city walls, far away from human habitation. It was customary for pre-Christian Romans in

England, for example, to bury their dead outside city walls. The distribution of Roman burials from the first through the fourth centuries in London follow this pattern. The four major burial grounds excavated to date lie outside the walls of old Londinium (pictured in the map in figure 7 below).

3 Geltner, The Medieval Prison, 82, 89. 4 See the discussion in chapter three about when the ecclesiastical prisons emerged. Also see R.B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) and Guy Geltner, “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory,” History Compass 10 (2006): 261- 274. 260

Figure 7 Major Romano-Briton Cemeteries in London, post 400 AD (Visualeyes)5

5 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes,” Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technologies Initiatives, The University of Virginia, 2016. www.viseyes.org/visualeyes. 261

According to the Twelve Tables, a set of rules codified around 450 BC, Table X prohibits the burning or burying of corpses within city walls: “Hominem mortuum in urbe ne sepelito neve urito.” [A dead man shall not be buried or burned within the city.]6

In fact, Romans found the Christian practice of burying the dead in the center of their communities repugnant and unsanitary. Pre-Christian Roman remains in England were cremated or inhumed, and the latter form of disposal involved the burial of bodies in a north-east to south-west orientation. The alignment of inhumed remains shifted to a west-east orientation once Romans were Christianized, as they believed that it would allow the newly resurrected bodies to face the east, the direction of Paradise, once they were revived and rose up from their graves on Judgment Day.7

Roman attitudes toward death and dead bodies “changed sharply with the introduction of Christianity, which had far-reaching consequences for the topography of the city. Most cultures have venerated their dead heroes, but what made Christianity different was its veneration…of their physical bodies. Romans found this aspect of

Christianity particularly repugnant and complained about how Christians ‘collected the

6 “The Law of the Twelve Tables,” The Latin Library, accessed March 31, 2018. http://thelatinlibrary.com/law/12tables.html. 7 It is around 314 AD that Roman cemeteries begin to reflect Christian burial practices (with regard to the preference for inhumation, the west-east orientation of bodies, and the absence of grave goods). For more information about non-Christian Roman burial practices see: Dickey Colin, “Necropolis: ‘The corpse has proved to be a bedeviling problem for the City how do we live with our dead?’” Lapham’s Quarterly, accessed October 15, 2016. http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/city/necropolis; Audrey L. Meany, “Anglo- Saxon Pagan and Early Christian Attitudes to the Dead,” The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300-1300 (York: York Medieval Press, 2003); Kenn Pitt, Roman and Medieval Development South of Newgate (London: Museum of London Archeology Service, 2006); Christopher Sparey-Green, “Where are the Christians? Late Roman Cemeteries in Britain,” The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300-1300 (York: York Medieval Press, 2003); and Victoria Thomson, Dying and Death in later Anglo-Saxon England (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2002). 262

bones and skulls of criminals…made them out to be gods, and thought that they became better by defiling themselves at their graves.’”8 The Roman settlement of Venta

Belgarum, for example, like many other pre-Christian Roman settlements in England located its graveyard four hundred meters outside the city walls.9

Burying the dead outside city walls was common practice among most non-

Christian cultures, including the Jewish community, Moslems, Danish, and pre-Christian

Anglo-Saxons. In England, the Jewish community which was established shortly after the Norman Conquest around 1070, buried their dead “beyond the limits of major towns and outside of principal city gates…not less than fifty ells from the nearest inhabited building by law.”10 Although such restrictions were imposed by English authorities in order to exclude non-Christians, Jewish authorities complied as their custom required a separation of their dead from the living and away from gentile communities. The Old

Testament regards corpses as unclean and required their disposal far from human habitation.11 In accordance with Jewish funerary customs and English laws governing the placement of burial grounds in London, the Jewish community buried their dead in

8 Dickey Colin, “Necropolis: ‘The corpse has proved to be a bedeviling problem for the City how do we live with our dead?’” Lapham’s Quarterly, accessed October 15, 2016. http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/city/necropolis. 9 Dickey Colin, “Necropolis: ‘The corpse has proved to be a bedeviling problem for the City how do we live with our dead?’” accessed October 15, 2016. http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/city/necropolis. 10 An ell is a medieval unit of measurement that equals 45 square inches or 1 ¼ yards. Roberta Gilchrist and Barney Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain (London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, 2005), 28-29. 11 The sections of the Old Testament that refer to the uncleanness dead bodies are: Numbers 9:6-10; Numbers 19:11-16, Leviticus 21:11. 263

Cripplegate near St. Giles church outside city limits and were restricted to this location until 1177 (figure 8 below).

Figure 8 Jewish Burial in the Middle Ages from 1070 – 1290 (VisualEyes)12

12 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes,” Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technologies Initiatives, The University of Virginia, 2016. www.viseyes.org/visualeyes. 264

From 1177 to their expulsion in 1290, the Jewish community set up ten more cemeteries, including Jewbury in York—all located outside city limits.

Pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons in England also buried their dead away from living communities. However, unlike the Jewish community whose burial practices were based on Old Testament laws on ritual purity, archaeologists speculate that early Anglo-

Saxons’ preference for burial away from the living stemmed from their fear of the dead.13 Although little is known about how cemeteries were planned and managed in the time preceding the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon people during the sixth and seventh centuries in England, archaeologists have unearthed evidence of early Anglo-Saxons disposing of their dead in various ways, far away from the living. Methods of disposal included cremation, inhumation, boat burial, and the construction of burial mounds.14 In

London, early Saxons buried their dead within the boundary walls of old Londinium, which remained largely uninhabited by the end of the fifth century (figure 9 below).

13 Audrey. L. Meaney, “Anglo-Saxon Pagan and Early Christian Attitudes to the Dead,” The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300-1300 (York: York Medieval Press, 2003), 233. 14 Meaney, “Anglo-Saxon Pagan and Early Christian Attitudes to the Dead,” 236. 265

Figure 9 Early Anglo-Saxon Burial in London 5th Century (VisualEyes)15

15 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes,” Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technologies Initiatives, The University of Virginia, 2016. www.viseyes.org/visualeyes. 266

Audrey Meaney points out that siting graveyards and even places of worship within old

Roman forts, which were thought to be haunted, was a pre-Christian practice among

Anglo-Saxons that not only provided a way of dealing with the terrifying dead, but offered a “general sense of historical and even architectural fittingness.”16 In setting up their places of worship and burying their dead inside the walls of the then-abandoned city of Londinium, the Saxons were able to claim the old Roman stronghold without having to inhabit the haunted space themselves. The placement of their ancestors within the city established a kind of continuity between two great cultures while providing a way of managing their dead.

The Anglo-Saxons abandoned the practice of burying the dead away from inhabited areas once they converted to Christianity and began to see the dead as members of the Corpus Christi who continued their presence in the sacred community long after the death of the body. Although Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 AD), whom

Jacques Le Goff calls the “True Father of Purgatory,” believed that where and how a body is buried does not matter since the dead, who may be in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory do not visit the living, Pope Gregory I’s (540-604 AD) influential Dialogues set aside some of Augustine’s ideas about the dead disappearing from the world.17 Pope Gregory

16 Meaney, “Anglo-Saxon Pagan and Early Christian Attitudes to the Dead,” 233-234. 17 In De Cura pro Mortuis Augustine argues: “Proinde ista omnia, id est, curatio funeris, conditio sepulturae, pompa exsequiarum, magis sunt vivorum solatia, quam subsidia mortuorum” [Consequently, these things, that is, the treatment of the dead, and the embalming for burial, the sepulcher, are more consolation to the living, than to assist the dead.] See Augustine of Hippo, De curâ pro mortuis: II, 4, Col. 594. The second edition, revised and corrected. n.p.: [London?] : [publisher not identified], 1651 quoted in Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 233. 267

argued that the souls of the dead visited the living in order to ask for assistance in

Purgatory and that where the dead were buried enabled their ongoing presence in the world after death. In chapter fifty in Book IV of the Dialogues Gregory states: “Such as die not in mortal sin receive this benefit by having their bodies buried in the church. For when their friends come thither, and behold their sepulchers, then do they remember them, and pray unto God for their souls.”18 Gregory’s views on the dead prompted theologians to ignore Augustine’s doubts about purgatorial apparitions, and—along with the development of the Office of the Dead in the ninth century—set the groundwork for what Jean-Claude Schmitt calls the “institutional, liturgical, [and] narrative” apparatus that promoted Purgatory and its apparitions.19

Due in part to Gregory the Great’s influence, where someone was buried began to matter a great deal in post-Conversion England. Because there was no explicit instruction from the Church on how to bury the dead, practices varied from parish to parish, so that certain bodies were coffined, while others were only interred with a shroud; some graves included goods, while others remained empty; and certain corpses were elaborately dressed, while others wore little. That the bodies were interred near the church mattered more than how they were buried.20 Those who were guilty of mortal sin were prohibited from being buried in the hallowed ground of a churchyard cemetery. In chapter fifty in Book IV of the Dialogues Gregory states: “But those that depart this life

18 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, Book IV, trans., Edmund G Gardner (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1911), 177-258. 19 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 34. 20 Victoria Thomson, Dying and Death in later Anglo-Saxon England (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2002), 32-38. 268

in the state of deadly sin, receive not any absolution from their sins, but rather be more punished in hell, for having their bodies buried in the church.”21 To illustrate his point,

Pope Gregory follows with a ghost story in chapter fifty-two about a Nun in the province of Sabina who died without being pardoned for her “ungracious tongue.” The evening following her burial, the grave keeper sees part of her body burnt in a vision and discovers that the marble over her grave had been scorched by fire sometime in the night as he was experiencing this ghostly vision. Gregory warns “that such as have not their sins pardoned, can reap small benefit by having their bodies after death buried in holy places.”22 Those who died unpardoned became the restless dead and posed a great threat to the community. Their souls in Hell and their bodies under the power of the devil, they sometimes rose from the grave to spread fear and disease; and if buried in hallowed ground, their graves rejected them, as the Nun of Sabina’s grave in Gregory’s ghost story had.

In Anglo-Saxon Britain, those who fell under the very broad category of

“hæðenscip” were excluded from sacred burial. Pursuant to law code II Cnut 5 §1, hæðenscip was defined as follows:

Be hæðenscipe. We forbeodað eornostlice ælcne hæðenscipe. þæt bið þæt man idol weorðige, hæ..ne godas sunnan oððe monan, fyr oððe flod, wæterwyllas oððe stanas oððe æniges cynnes wudutreowa, oððe wiccecræft lufie, oððe morðweorc gefremme on ænig wisan, oððe on blote, oððe on fyrhte, oððe swylcra gedwimera ænig ðing dreoge.

[Concerning heathen practices. We earnestly forbid all heathen practices. Namely the worship of idols, heathen gods, and the sun or the moon, fire or water, springs

21 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, Book IV, 177-258. 22 Pope Gregory I, Dialogues, Book IV, 177-258. 269

or stones or any kind of forest trees, or indulgence in witchcraft, or the compassing of death in any way, either by sacrifice or by divination or by the practice of any such delusions.]23

According to Victoria Thomson, hæðenscip also included oath-breakers, unbaptized infants, law-breakers, adulterers, and non-Christians.24 Thomson states, “Hæðenscip is an evolving term, not a static one, describing a wide range of social, moral, and ethical as well as ritual behaviours…From the early tenth century references to ‘heathen burials’ begin to appear regularly as landmarks in the boundary clauses of reliable charters, and the idea that unhallowed burial is in itself punitive is first visible in legislation from the reign of Æthelstan.”25 Pursuant to II Æthelstan §26:

Ond se ðe manað swerige, hit him on open wurþe, ðæt he næfre eft aðwyrþe ne sy, ne binnon nanum gehalgodum lictune ne licge, þeah he forðfore, buton he hæbbe ðæs. Biscopes gewitnesse, ðe he on his scriftscire by, þæthe hit swa gebet hæbbe, swa him his scrift scrife.

[And if anyone swears a false oath and it becomes manifest he has done so, he shall never gain have the right to swear an oath; and he shall not be buried in any consecrated burial ground when he dies, unless he has the testimony of the bishop, in whose diocese he is, that he has made such amends as his confessor has prescribed to him.]26

The practice of excluding those guilty of moral and legal transgressions from sacred burial continued through the Middle Ages, and will be discussed later in this chapter.

Correct burial was a communal responsibility. If families did not take care of their dead, then guilds were responsible for a member’s burial as well as for funding

23 All citations of Anglo-Saxon law codes taken from A.J Robertson, The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I (Cambridge: The University Press, 1925). 24 Thomson, Dying and Death in later Anglo-Saxon England, 36. 25 Thomson, Dying and Death in later Anglo-Saxon England, 31, 38. 26 F.L. Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922) 6-7, 140-143. 270

masses and prayers for the deceased.27 Payment for burial in hallowed ground is legislated in the law codes of Æthelstan, Æthelberht, Edgar, Æthelred, and Canute. VI

Æthelstan 8 §6 requires each member of a guild to which a decedent belongs to pay a

“gesufel loaf” for his soul.28 I Æthelstan 4, Æthelberht 22,29 II Edgar 5 §2, 5 Æthelred

12, 6 Æthelred 20; 8 Æthelred 13, and I Canute 13 §1 require a “sawelsceatte” or soul- payment to the church for burial and prayers for the souls of the dead.30 In many instances, this payment must be made before the grave is closed. Thomson states that in the 870s the church “is only charging for the privilege of burial, although as the tenth century progresses it seems to develop into a compulsory burial fee as church-associated graves become normal rather than aspiration.”31

Wills of the period also reflect an increasing concern with where the dead are buried and how their souls are cared for. King Alfred’s will stipulates the distribution of two hundred pounds to various minsters, churches, mass priests, and to the poor on behalf of his soul, his father's soul, and the souls of the people for whom he and his father interceded.32 Provisions for continued care of the body and soul after death are included in the wills of many men and women in the Anglo-Saxon period as well. The

27 Thomson, Dying and Death in later Anglo-Saxon England, 112, 115. The practice of guilds paying for burial and masses for the dead continued through the Middle Ages. For more information see Toulmin Smith, ed., English Guilds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963); and John Shinners, ed, Medieval Popular Religion,1000-1500 (Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 330-339. 28 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 164-165. Charging a burial fee continued in the post-Conquest era in England. Churches and monasteries vied for one another for the privilege of burying the dead, as fees were collected for the service. This will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. 29 Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings, 124-125. 30 Robertson, The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I, 22-23, 166-167. 31 Thomson, Dying and Death in later Anglo-Saxon England, 31. 32 Alfred, King of England, The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great, ed. J.A. Giles (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1858), 407. 271

wills of Æðelwold, ealdorman (c. 946) and Ælfric, Archbishop of Canterbury (c. 955 – c.

1010), for example, each grant a sum of cash and goods for prayer for their souls and another separate sum for a “sawelsceatte,” or burial fee.33 In the wills of three Anglo-

Saxon women, bequests are made to minsters and priests for the care of their souls.

Wynflæd, who was possibly a lay abbess (c. 995), specifies the donation of a sawelsceatte to the servants of G-d as a gift given for the good of her soul.34 In this context, sawelsceatte is used much more broadly as it typically signified a fee for the burial of a body in sacred ground. Queen Æthelflæd (c.920-1002) refers to sawelsceatte in a more limited sense when she lists a ring that was given as a burial fee for her lord.35

The will of Leofgifu, a land owner (c. 900), is one of the earliest examples of a layperson stipulating a specific burial location for the benefit of her soul: “And ic kithe

þe mine quide wat ic Crist an and his halegan mine louerdes soule to alisednesse and mine into þe holy stowe þer ic self resten wille þat is at seynt Eadmundes byri.” [And I declare to you in my will, what I grant to Christ and his saints for the redemption of my lord’s soul and mine, to the holy place where I myself wish to be buried, namely, Bury

St. Edmunds.]36

Burial in hallowed ground was a privilege reserved for those who died in a state of grace and could pay for it. Thomson states that whereas law codes prohibited sacred

33 Dorothy Whitelock, ed., Anglo-Saxon Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 30-31, 52-53. 34 Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills, 10-11. 35 Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills, 40-41. 36 Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills, 76-77. 272

burial on the grounds of hæðenscip, homilies were far more concerned with sexual sin.37

Homilies emphasized the importance of both body and soul working in concert for salvation—a theme that prevails in the Body and Soul poetry discussed in chapter two.38

Sawles Warde is an example of a homily that puts a great deal of emphasis on the body as an active participant in performing the work of salvation before death. In this early

Middle English treatise, the body is a protector of the soul, which guards “godes treosor

þat is his ahne sawle…from þe þeof of helle.” [God’s treasure, that is, his own soul…from the thief of hell.]39 In Blickling Homilies II, the faithful are promised heavenly reward if their bodies and all of the sinful physical impulses they are prone to are kept under good regulation. The body will decay once it is separated from the soul upon death until

…Drihten cymeþ on domes dæg, & hateþ þa eorþan eft agifan þæt heo ær onfeng; & bið þonne undeaþlic, þeah he ær deaþlic wære þa heo hine onfeng, & sceal þeah beon gelic his geearnungum.

[…the Lord shall come on Doomsday and shall command the earth to give back that which it previously received. And then the body shall be immortal though it were previously mortal when the soul (first) received it (the body), and (its state) must, nevertheless, be according to its deserts.]40

Although law codes and wills of the period offer evidence of growing concern about correct burial and the sacred community’s obligation to pray for souls after death, this homily is as vague about the intervening period between death and Doomsday as the

37 Thomson, Dying and Death in later Anglo-Saxon England, 173. 38 For a more detailed discussion, see the first section of the third chapter in this project. 39 Richard Morris, trans. Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (New York: Greenwood Press, 1868), 266-267. 40 Richard, Morris, trans., The Blickling Homilies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 20-21. 273

Body and Soul poems. Purgatory, in this time period, was still imagined as a state, rather than a place. And the emphasis in many theological narratives is on completing the work of salvation before death, rather than leaving it to the afterlife. This is in accordance with what C.S. Watkins refers to as the older theological tradition, inspired by Augustine, which stressed the importance of avoiding Purgatory.41 Gregory I’s ideas about spiritual atonement in the afterlife, which replaced Augustine’s, posited the difficulty in completing penance during a single lifetime and allowed for its completion in Purgatory.

As such, a greater emphasis was put on Purgatory and representations of this space became more detailed through the Middle Ages. What began as vague imaginings of a state between death and Doomsday in certain Anglo-Saxon poems, homilies, and supernatural narratives, such as The Vision of Drihthelm and The Vision of Furseus, became more detailed over time. Later medieval ghost stories and visionary accounts of the afterlife were far more detailed and Purgatory eventually came to resemble secular medieval prisons in organization, purpose, and function.

Purgatory’s connection to secular punitive incarceration had not yet been firmly established in the Anglo-Saxon period. Although laws for punitive incarceration appeared as early as the ninth century, custodial and coercive imprisonment were far more common. The connection between secular and purgatorial incarceration was forged after the rise of the punitive prison system in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the establishment of Purgatory as doctrine in 1215. Once that connection was made, the

41 C.S. Watkins History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 233-234. 274

centrality of prisons and graveyards was paramount to the belief system. The bridge between prison and Purgatory in England in the Middle Ages was monastic incarceration, which treated confinement as a form of ascetic penance—an idea that took root early on in Christian Antiquity. As secular authorities in the Middle Ages increasingly resorted to punitive incarceration, they modeled their prisons on ecclesiastical forms of discipline and confinement.

Purgatory was similarly imagined as a space of reform, an otherworldly prison meant to correct and rehabilitate through punishment. Contrary to Jacques Le Goff’s argument, Purgatory was not “born” in the thirteenth century.42 The concept of a post- mortem space of rehabilitative punishment between Heaven and Hell did not arise in the

Christian West, but already existed for centuries in eastern belief systems. Eastern ideas about Purgatory informed the Christian tradition so that the concept had already taken root in the medieval Christian imaginary long before it was codified in 1215.43 What was

“born” in the thirteenth century was the doctrine surrounding this concept. For the first time in England, Purgatory was imagined as a place that was connected to a system of rituals and practices that were assigned monetary values. A system of indulgences for the remission of sin flourished from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, so that

Purgatory became inextricably entangled with the economy of salvation.44 The Church promoted the belief that the survival and release of those trapped in this divine prison

42 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 43 See the discussion about Zoroastrianism in chapter two of this project. 44 John Shinners, ed., Medieval Popular Religion,1000-1500 (Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 401-408. 275

depended on external assistance. Because their points of ingress in the world of the living were churchyard cemeteries, these spaces were placed at the center of each community and helped the living remember their obligation to those who suffered in

Purgatory.

Burial Practices and Imprisonment in the Post-Conquest Era

The location of the dead was so important, in fact, that graves were marked by a large cross near each church, monastery, and cathedral. The bodies in cemeteries were arranged around churchyard crosses, which were erected by the clergy and regularly repaired and replaced.45 Early maps record the location of cemeteries by including images of churchyard crosses. Two examples of prominently-featured churchyard crosses are John Speed’s detail of St. Asaph Cathedral in Flintshire and St. David’s

Cathedral in Pembrokeshire, where the crosses are located in the northern section of properties.46 The burial of the medieval dead in and around churches, monasteries, and cathedrals “must be understood within the framework of Christian cosmology,” which asserts the “notion that the dead continued in existence after expiry of the body…[and] remained in a liminal phase awaiting full resolution on Judgment Day or until absolution.”47 It was understood that while only a few souls went to Heaven, many went to Hell, and most went to Purgatory. Many believed that the soul remained connected to

45 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 38. 46 John Speed An Atlas of England and Wales (British Library shelf mark: Cartographic Items Maps 3055 (8.), 1627). 47 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 6. 276

the body and experienced an attenuated form of the decaying body’s pain.48 The belief in a continued connection between the soul and its decaying body on earth “increased the emphasis on remembering the dead and tending to their needs,” thus transforming cemeteries into “commemorative landscapes,” where families of the deceased would hold graveside vigils, prayers, and engage in other memorial practices at specific intervals.49

Memorial practices at gravesites were especially important because it was widely held that souls in Purgatory often manifested to the living near their graves or in churches in order to ask the living to help mitigate their suffering through intercessory prayer.50 There are many stories in this time period that feature otherworldly apparitions who visit the living near their graves in churchyards to ask for help, two of which have been discussed in this project: The Life of St. Erkenwald, written in the fourteenth century, and John Lydgate’s fifteenth century St. Austin at Compton. These were popular supernatural narratives that circulated widely in their time and were representative of what the Church promoted as official doctrine with respect to

Purgatory, penance, and salvation. They also illuminate how authors writing about

Purgatory in this time period associated post-mortem spaces of punishment, like

Purgatory and Limbo with earthly secular prisons—as the apparitions themselves refer to their spaces of punishment as divine prisons and think of themselves as G-d’s prisoners.

48 Christopher Beiting, “The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo,” Augustiniana 48, no.1-2 (1998): 22-23. 49 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 63. 50 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 182-183. 277

A similar rhetoric emerges around penal spaces whereby Purgatory is interpolated into stories by and about prisoners, often imagined as a kind of earthly Purgatory, and

Purgatory is seen as a divine prison.

Purgatorial ghost stories helped the Church reinforce the idea that prayers and alms for the deceased resulted in reduced sentences in the afterlife for those who performed such charitable acts. The belief in a mutually beneficial relationship between the living and the dead turned graveyards into a hub of activity in each community, functioning as spaces for preaching sermons, holding fairs, and hosting recreations.51

Markets were also often located on or near cemetery grounds as they benefitted from their proximity to churches. Merchants could operate with greater ease because violence was prohibited on consecrated ground and all transactions were tax-exempt since municipal government had no jurisdiction on church lands.52 Many early markets housed some of the first guildhalls and gaols. In 1224, for example, Cambridge city records reflect that the burgesses “leased from the king the stone house of Benjamin the Jew in the marketplace of use as a gaol.”53

The Cambridge lease record is one of many documents that demonstrates that by the thirteenth century, penal incarceration, which had long been an integral part of the ecclesiastical system of discipline, was becoming an important part of the secular legal

51 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 63. 52 Dickey Colin, “Necropolis: ‘The corpse has proved to be a bedeviling problem for the City how do we live with our dead?’” Lapham’s Quarterly, accessed October 15, 2016. http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/city/necropolis. 53 Terry R. Slater, “Lordship, Economy and Society in English Medieval Marketplaces,” Lords and Towns in Medieval Europe: The European Historic Towns Atlas Project, eds. Anngret Simms and Howard B. Clarke (Farnham Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 229-230. 278

system. Secular authorities were hard-pressed to find space for people who were made to serve time in prison as punishment for criminal activity. Until the thirteenth century, detention in secular prisons was reserved for those awaiting trial, held for ransom, or in need of persuasion. As discussed in the previous chapter, punitive imprisonment was quickly becoming the most prevalent form of incarceration in the thirteenth century due to new debt laws. As the number of prisoners serving out punitive sentences rose in the

Middle Ages, so too did the financial strain on the community who were responsible for their care and upkeep. Guy Geltner argues that “the rise of urban prisons was accompanied by the fragmentation of a long-standing association between imprisonment and purgation, a nexus that was heir to Christian martyrological literature and monastic spirituality.”54 In other words, as secular authorities increasingly relied on punitive imprisonment as a method of discipline in Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the association between incarceration and purgation was attenuated. It is my contention, however, that the connection between imprisonment and purgation in

England is lost much later, after the Reformation.

Debt laws increased prison populations in the thirteenth century in England, which put tremendous financial pressure on communities to care for people serving time.

Religious and secular authorities, however, managed to avoid bearing the cost of care for prisoners by convincing the faithful that it was their sacred duty to assume this burden.

The promise of avoiding Purgatory through charity and good works encouraged people

54 Guy Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, 102. 279

to donate alms, food, and clothing to prisoners who went out into the community to beg for help. Large bequests were also made to prisoners in wills of the period. John Toker, a vintner in London, for example, lists prisoners among his beneficiaries in his will dated

1428: “Also I bequethe to be distribued among prisoners in the prisons of Ludgate,

Marchalsie, Kyngesbenche, And the Countours in London, that is to seie, in euery of the seid prison[s], the prisoners to praie for my soule, xx.s; And among the prisoners in the

Flete, and the Clerkes conuict at Westminster, that is to seie, in euery of tho two prisons, to pray for my soule…”55 Toker’s will, like many others in the Middle Ages, makes provision for the poor, the sick, and the incarcerated in the hope that his charity will help him avoid suffering in the afterlife. Toker ends each bequest with a request that his imprisoned beneficiaries pray for his soul. Toker, like many who wished to avoid serving time in Purgatory were motivated by the “pay it forward” economy that developed around Purgatory and secular prisons, to assist prisoners with alms, clothing, food, prayers, and posthumous donations. The central location of cemeteries and prisons served as visual reminders to parishioners of their sacred duty to earthly and otherworldly prisoners. The belief that incarceration was a purgative space for both the

55 Furnivall, Frederick James, ed. Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, London: A.D. 1387- 1439: with a Priest’s of 1454 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), accessed March 29, 2018. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/textidx?c=cme;idno=EEWills. For more information about medieval English wills see: F.W. Weaver, ed., Somerset Medieval Wills 1501-1530 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1903); also, medieval English wills can be found in digital form at: L.L. Duncan, trans., “Medieval & Tudor Kent P.C.C. Wills” Kent Archaeological Society, accessed March 29, 2018. http://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/Research/Libr/Wills/Bk47+48/Contents.htm.; and Andrew Clark, ed., Lincoln Diocese Documents, 1450-1554 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), accessed March 29. 2018. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;idno=LinDDoc.; and Reginald R. Sharpe, D.C.L., ed., Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Hustings, London A.D. 1258-1688 (London: John C. Francis, Took’s Court, E.C., 1889), accessed March 29, 2018. https://archive.org/stream/p1calendarofwill00londuoft#page/n9/mode/2up/search/prison. 280

incarcerated and those who assisted them allowed religious and secular authorities to offload a great portion of the cost for a growing prison population onto the community.

This practice became a focus for attacks by Protestant Reformers who argued against the exploitative nature of Purgatory. It was during the Reformation and after the “death” of

Purgatory that what Geltner refers to as the carceral “nexus” disappears. Prisons were eventually regulated by the state and mainly funded by taxes as a result of forces brought about by the “death” of Purgatory.

Before prisons were managed by the state, inmates who were expected to pay for their own upkeep—which included everything from fees for intake, beds, bedding, food, light, and the removing of iron shackles—were heavily dependent upon community charity in the form of cash, clothing, and food.56 Without this aid, many of the poorer prisoners would perish from hunger. The placement of gaols and prisons in densely populated sections of a city or in towns discouraged escape attempts and ensured prisoners access to the courts, attorneys, clergy, and to those who provided alms and other items necessary for their maintenance.57 Exeats, or leaves of absence, were granted to prisoners in order to allow them the opportunity to negotiate a settlement with their

56 Margery Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Academy of America 18, no. 2 (1943): 245. 57 R.B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 343; Guy Geltner, “Social Deviancy: A Medieval Approach,” Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, eds. Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, Amy G. Remensnyder (New York: Routledge, 2012): 28. Also, for more information about urban planning and infrastructure from the tenth through the eighteenth centuries, see Barney Sloan, “Archaeological Evidence for the Infrastructure of the Medieval City of London,” Lobecker Kolloquium zur Stadtarchaologie im Hanseraum. IV, Die Infrastruktur, (2004): 87-96. Archaeological evidence supports Geltner’s and Pugh’s observations about the placement of medieval prisons in the most densely-populated sections of the city. 281

creditors, in the case of debt, or to conduct business in order to earn enough money for their own upkeep in prison.58 Exeats were also occasionally granted to prisoners who wished to attend mass or celebrate religious holidays.59 Such leaves of absence from prison were allowed for the same reason priests were permitted frequent visits to inmates: prisons in the Middle Ages were seen as spaces that could bring about spiritual reform. As in Purgatory, an inmate’s eventual release depended upon his or her complete rehabilitation, which not only involved serving out one’s sentence, but required that the prisoner adopt an attitude of repentance for the sin of their crimes. Here too, the community readily aided in the physical and spiritual care of prisoners because they believed that their aid would shorten their own suffering in Purgatory. The proximity of prisoners to the rest of the community, the short prison sentences, the allowances for visitors, and the exeats for conducting business, begging for alms, and attending mass all facilitated their moral and spiritual correction and reintegration. In this way, earthly prisoners were very much like their counterparts in Purgatory—of liminal status, but still very much an important part of the community.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the charitable attitude toward prisoners stemmed from the fact that “men of all conditions were forced into prison, including courtiers, aristocrats, merchants, and clergy; whereas members of the social elite and even the middle class are, in modern democratic societies, imprisoned in much smaller

58 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 335-337. 59 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 336-337. As stated in chapter two of this project, “Pugh states that in 1520, the aldermen of London allowed all Newgate prisoners out to celebrate Candlemas on condition that they return promptly to prison again.” 282

proportion than individuals of lower social standing.”60 Additionally, “crime was seen largely as a manifestation of sin and thus primarily as an offense against God.”61 A number of medieval prison narratives, including George Ashby’s Complaint of a

Prisoner in the Fleet 1463 and a Complaint of a Prisoner Against Fortune, treat crime as both a moral and legal offence. Both the anonymous prisoner and George Ashby hope that their suffering in earthly prison will make good their debt to G-d so that their

Purgatory sentences will be commuted to time served. Since prisoners were seen as sinners, rather than criminals, they were not stigmatized by those at liberty. On the contrary, the community at large felt it their duty to help prisoners repent and reform.62

There are several accounts of prisoners having contact with and receiving help from the outside community. In the Fleet, which detained debtors and those convicted of minor crimes, prisoners of higher rank were treated to better accommodations and even allowed the freedom to stroll around the prison grounds during the day. A gentleman named John Paston, for example, was imprisoned alongside Sir Henry Percy in 1465 and lived quite comfortably until he was released.63 Paston’s servants took care of his needs and his wife, Margaret Paston, stayed with him for a time during his incarceration.64

Even poorer prisoners were allowed to leave their cells and receive visitors, though their movements were more restricted and their accommodations smaller and in less desirable

60 Thomas S. Freeman, “The Rise of Prison Literature,” The Huntington Quarterly. Vol. 27. No. 2 (2009): 133-146. 61 Thomas S. Freeman, “The Rise of Prison Literature,” 133-146. 62 Thomas S. Freeman, “The Rise of Prison Literature,”133-146. 63 Margery Bassett, “The Fleet Prison in the Middle Ages,” The University of Toronto Law Journal 5, no. 2 (1944), 399. 64 Basset, “The Fleet Prison in the Middle Ages,” 399. 283

sections of the prison. Other major prisons sorted their populations according to socio- economic status, gender, ethnicity, and whether the crime for which they were convicted was considered a minor or major offence. In Newgate, for example, the most serious offenders who could not pay for better accommodations served their time in the dark and damp basement; and those who were poor, foreign-born and lower class resided just a level above the basement.65 Wealthier prisoners and those convicted of minor crimes occupied the more spacious cells on the upper floors. Women, who were mostly imprisoned for theft or prostitution, were separated from the general population.

However, these early attempts to give women better accommodations were unsuccessful as their cells were cramped, dark, and unsanitary, and often forced them to have contact with male prisoners who assaulted them.66

Despite the poor living conditions for certain inmates—or perhaps because of them—prisons were seen as penitential spaces and were treated as a kind of earthly

Purgatory, where prisoners like George Ashby and the anonymous prisoner could pay their debt to both society and G-d for the sin of their crimes. As the prison system developed and became more regulated from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, the concept of Purgatory, which was initially shaped by the ecclesiastical prison system, became more defined. In the narratives that featured purgatorial apparitions that visited the living or in stories where the living visited the dead in their spaces of punishment,

65 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 352-355. 66 Bassett, “Newgate Prison in the Middle Ages,” 239; and Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 357- 358. 284

Purgatory becomes more prison-like over time. Later Purgatory vision narratives provide details about Purgatory’s structure and function that were not present in earlier visions or purgatorial ghost narratives. They present a system more focused on correction as the punishments are graded and progressive and fit each transgression in kind and degree.

This more well-defined Purgatory begins to resemble the emergent medieval prison system, both in form and purpose.

The boundaries in corrective spaces were permeable, which is one of the most important distinctions between Purgatory and Hell (as well as one of the distinctions between modern ideas of imprisonment and prisons of the Middle Ages). This permeability facilitated contact between those in need and those in the community who were willing to help. Ghosts ventured out into the world of the living, near graveyards or around churches, during the Sunday period. The pagan judge in the Life of St. Erkenwald and the miserly lord in John Lydgate’s St. Austin at Compton each confront the living near their churchyard graves on Sunday. In Soul and Body I and II, the soul “…cuman geohðum hremig, / symble ymbe seofon niht sawle findan / þone lichoman.” […must come, clamorous with cares, / always finding every seventh night / its body home.]67

Though the damned soul never interacts with anyone other than its own decaying body in the grave, its time of release from its space of punishment is during the Sunday period, which Rudolph Willard states was originally defined according to Leviticus 23,

67 Krapp, George Phillip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936) and Krapp, George Phillip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Vercelli Book, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). 285

32 as Sunset on Saturday to Sunset on Monday. The Sunday period was eventually extended so that by the eleventh century “Anglo-Saxon law defined the Sunday period as from the ninth hour of Saturday until dawn on Monday, showing thus, apparently, the influence of the new dominical movement, perhaps also of the Sunday Epistle.” 68 In the

Life of St. Erkenwald and St. Austin at Compton, the dead used their short period of respite to ask the living for help, much like their earthly counterparts, who were allowed to travel out of their cells once a week during the Sunday period to attend mass or beg for alms.69

As noted in chapter one, both prison and Purgatory sentences were relatively short. According to popular belief, the soul languished in Purgatory and was allowed to wander in the world “only while the corpse was in a transitory or liminal stage of decomposition, with taphonomic processes well advanced after one month and largely complete within one year.”70 Purgatory sentences lasted anywhere from a few days to a few years, which explains why close burial of the newly dead was so important and how charnelling the same body after a year or two was acceptable.71 A popular medieval

English proverb states “He is long dead who died a year ago.”72 After a year had passed, it was generally accepted that the dead moved on. Despite short sentences, time moved

68 Rudolph Willard, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” Modern Language Association 50 (1935): 971-972. 69 Guy Geltner, “Coping in Medieval Prisons,” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 153. 70 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 28. 71 According to Jennifer Crangle, “Charnelling was still practised in the post-Reformation period but it was devoid of religious meaning” (379). See Jennifer Crangle, “Why did England Change its Mind?” Anthropological Reformations – Anthropology in the Era of Reformation, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis (Bristol: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, 2015), 379. 72 John Shinners, ed, Medieval Popular Religion, 400. 286

slowly for Purgatory residents. Margaret begs the visionary nun in A Revelation of

Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary to have thirteen masses sung for her by six priests for the relief of her soul—an enormously expensive and time consuming undertaking in order to shorten her Purgatory sentence by what seems to be an insignificant amount of time. The conditions were so miserable in Purgatory that even shortest sentence felt like an eternity.73 Time passed slowly in medieval prisons as well.

Geltner points out that in many cases even a one- or two-year sentence could result in financial ruin or death for prisoners who were poor.74 In addition to financial strain, prisoners were subject to poor living conditions. The most difficult aspect of imprisonment, however, was boredom due to the slow passage of time in dirty, dark, and cramped quarters which offered little in the way of relief or entertainment.75 Both earthly and otherworldly prisoners were subjected to two different systems of time, so that time itself became a punishment. This, along with the permeability and visibility of punitive spaces, created a sense of urgency in the community to help those who languished in prison and reinforced the importance of proper burial for those trapped in Purgatory.

Correct burial figures prominently in the works of John Audelay, John Mirk, and in the many law codes, wills, and homilies in the pre- and post-Conquest time periods examined in this project. John Mirk’s Festial (C. 1403) includes a sermon that stresses the importance of making sure the dead were properly placed in and around churches:

73 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 294-295. 74 Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, 57. 75 Guy Geltner, “Coping in Medieval Prisons,” Continuity and Change 23 (2008): 153. 287

“Now, sir preste, tak gode hede in þi byriing, lest þou do any error, as ofton is seyne; for

þou schalte know þat þer ben some þat schullon ben byriod in chyrch and in chyrch-

ȝarde, and some in chyrch- ȝorde and not in chyrch, and some neyther in chyrch ne in chirch- ȝorde.”76 Mirk distinguishes between those who should be allowed burial within the church, those allowed to be buried in churchyard cemeteries, and those who should be excluded from sacred burial altogether. Certain places on church ground were considered holier than others. Mirk states that only ministers of the church and patrons of the church who have protected the institution in some way should be allowed burial within the church. Others who had been baptized and shriven before death may be buried outside, in the church yard.77 According to Gilchrist, the most sacred burial spaces in churches, monasteries, and cathedrals—that is, the chapel, aisles, the choir, the entrance of the chapter house, and the high altar—were reserved for the benefactors of the Church and high-ranking clergy.78 Gilchrist states that burials in the cloister aisles and garth, the spiritual core of an abbey, were rare but not unheard of for the religious of higher rank.

The higher-ranking clergy were also given the option of burial in the more desirable southern and eastern sections in churchyard and monastery cemeteries; while monks, nuns, vicars and those of lower rank were placed in the northern and western sections of cemeteries.79 High-ranking clergy and laypeople who were rich, well-born, and

76 Mirk, Festial, 297. 77 Mirk, Festial, 297. 78 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 56. 79 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 56-62. 288

influential received the choicest burial plots within churches, monasteries, and cathedrals.

The distribution and treatment of bodies was not only class-based, but highly gendered. Men and women of lower rank were relegated to churchyard burial, with women buried in the far less desirable northern and western sections. Infants were mainly buried in the western cemetery, which was the least desirable location, as it was near the nave and gatehouse and, therefore, more exposed to the public. Eastern cemeteries were more private and mainly reserved for the bodies of clergy and laymen.80

Female bodies, infant corpses, and diseased remains were additionally coffined more often than male bodies. Gilchrist states that coffining bodies in the Middle Ages was rare and speculates that in the pre-Reformation period, coffining had more to do with attitudes toward the body than with social status. According to Galen’s humoral theory, the bodies of women and children were understood as inchoate versions of male bodies—colder, wetter, and therefore, “more susceptible to decay. The coffin excluded diseased bodies from view and protected the wetter and more changeable bodies of women and children from premature decay so that the bodily integrity is preserved for resurrection.”81 The dead were buried according to age, sex, occupation, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. The divisions that ruled men and women in life were mapped

80 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 64-65. 81 It was only in the post-Reformation period that the use of coffins was seen as a privilege reserved for the rich. It was increasingly associated with class and social status. Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 66, 111-127. 289

onto the afterlife and dictated the distribution of bodies within and among churches, monasteries, and cathedrals.

In addition to the restrictions on the placement of bodies within and around churches, certain churches and monasteries attracted different groups of people. For instance, cathedrals attracted the wealthy; monasteries were mainly restricted to male burial until the thirteenth century; and nunneries had equal numbers of men and women.82 Friaries accepted a high number of women and children; Almshouse graveyards include a high number of elderly people; infirmary hospitals mainly include young men between the ages of 16-25; leper hospitals buried leper victims as well as a large number of non-leprous young women and infants; burial grounds belonging to the

Knights Hospitaller were dedicated to interring convicted felons who had been shriven; and the majority of the poor opted for low-cost burial in their own parish churchyards.83

Additionally, certain friaries and monasteries attracted members from foreign communities in London and around England. The Austin Friars of London and St.

Thomas of Acre catered to the Italian population in London; the Crutched Friars of

London were chosen by German merchants; and the Franciscans in Boston were chosen by foreign merchants in Lincolnshire.84 Hierarchies that existed in the world of the living were extended to the world of the dead—in the distribution of bodies in the graveyard and souls in Purgatory.

82 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 68. 83 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 56-77, 202-213. 84 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 64. 290

In chapter three, I discussed how certain divisions in class, gender, and vocation exist among inmates in purgatorial vision narratives. Earthly hierarchies are not just reproduced in Purgatory, but inverted. In A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown

Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary and The Vision of Tundale, for example, religious men and women suffer more and for much longer periods of time for the same sins committed by laypeople. Souls that had the most wealth and wielded the most power in life, undergo the most severe punishment in the spaces that are closest to Hell in The

Vision of Tundale. As Tundale moves from the periphery, where milder punishments in

Purgatory are administered, to the center, where people are more severely tortured, he encounters princes and prelates who had misused their authority in life. Tundale finds that at the very center of the nightmarish landscape, reside the denizens of Hell who suffer alongside Lucifer himself. Tundale describes them as “men that ar of muche myght, / That don to pore men wrong and unryght” (1437-1438).85 In post-mortem spaces of punishment, transgressors who, in life, had rank and power occupy the center of an intensely miserable system where they are made to suffer the most and longest.

Although prisoners reside at the center of the community in an earthly punitive system, external hierarchies that privilege the rich and powerful are still “frequently grafted onto the space and routine of these institutions, as is apparent from the classification of inmates into wards according to their ability to pay rather than the crimes they

85 Edward E. Foster, Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Gy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004). 291

committed (in the case of prisons) or their physical condition (in hospitals).”86 Pugh, however, states that in England many factors determined how inmates were classified into different prisons and wards, including the crimes they committed. In theory, wealthy, well-born prisoners who committed only light crimes would serve time in relatively more comfortable prisons, such as the Tower or the Fleet, and have better accommodations within those walls. Hierarchies that are mapped onto earthly carceral spaces are inverted in otherworldly prisons. The reason may be that reality seldom lives up to the ideal. Although prisons were modeled on monastic confinement and touted as earthly purgatories, worldly hierarchies persisted.

Despite the differences in how the rich and powerful were treated in each place, prisons were still seen as earthly purgatories. The permeable boundaries of prisons and

Purgatory, which facilitated aid for the prisoners, is one of the most important distinctions between Purgatory and Hell. Hell was seen as a permanent place of punishment reserved for the most wicked and irredeemable sinners. Those who died without being absolved of mortal sin went to Hell and were denied a Christian burial in hallowed ground. Unrepentant murderers, oath-breakers, thieves, adulterers, suicides, prostitutes, heretics, excommunicants, and the unbaptized, who had no hope of salvation, could not benefit in any way from the prayers of the living and were consequently disposed of in unmarked graves beyond city limits so that they would be quickly forgotten. John Mirk argues for the exclusion of the unbaptized and those who died in a

86 Guy Geltner, “Social Deviancy: A Medieval Approach,” 32. 292

state of sin on the grounds that they, like Satan and Adam, had angered G-d and, therefore, do not deserve to be “byried in sentuary.”87 Because their souls and corpses were thought to be under the power of the devil, they were more likely to become the restless dead, making them a danger to the community. Therefore, it was not unusual to bury such corpses at crossroads, in prone positions, in a north-south orientation, or to dismember, decapitate, or even burn them.

These burial sites, of course were not accounted for in parish records or represented on maps of the period and were entirely forgotten. One such cemetery, named Crossbones, was discovered in Southwark in the 1990s. Crossbones housed the bodies of approximately 15,000 indigents, convicted criminals, prostitutes, and unbaptized infants. The cemetery is quite isolated and located at a great distance from the major cemeteries located within the walls of the old City of London (figure 10 below).

87 Mirk, Festial, 298. 293

Figure 10 Major London Cemeteries in the Middle Ages (1386) (VisualEyes)88

88 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes,” Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technologies Initiatives, The University of Virginia, 2016. www.viseyes.org/visualeyes. 294

Crossbones was separated from the rest of the city by the River Thames (figure 11 below). This practice derives from older pagan traditions that imagined water as a powerful boundary that held the restless dead at bay.

Figure 11 Crossbones cemetery in a very isolated location across the River Thames (VisualEyes)89

89 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes,” Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technologies Initiatives, The University of Virginia, 2016. www.viseyes.org/visualeyes. 295

There was a very strong sense of inside and outside in the medieval period.

Survival depended upon remaining inside the town limits, as outside lay a jumble of orchards, pastures, meadows, wooded areas, and for the exiled dead, oblivion.90 By the end of the Middle Ages, however, the demands of an exploding population and a new understanding of environmental causes of disease completely redefined community boundaries. The nineteenth century, for example, witnessed the closure of run-down, overcrowded prisons like Newgate, Marshalsea, the Fleet, and Maidstone in the city center and the establishment of prisons in the outskirts of town. As discussed in greater detail in chapter one, all of the major prisons in the Middle Ages were located at the center of each village or town. Two of the most important municipal prisons in the

Middle Ages were Newgate Prison, established in 1188 and the Fleet, established in

1197. Geltner argues that the central location of prisons enabled inmates’ access to the outside world and discouraged escape attempts (figure 12 below maps the major prisons in medieval London).

90 John Schofield, London 1100-1600: The Archaeology of a Capital City (Oakville: Equinox Publishing, LTD., 2011), 221. 296

Figure 12 London Prisons in the Middle Ages (VisualEyes)91

91 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes,” Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technologies Initiatives, The University of Virginia, 2016. www.viseyes.org/visualeyes. 297

Their closure in city centers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was due to a number of factors, including rising real estate prices, exponential population growth, and the failure of city officials and reformers to make prison conditions safe and livable.

Poor prison conditions not only compromised the health and well-being of inmates, but were a source of disease and contamination that posed a threat to the surrounding community.92 For example, not long after the construction of a moat around the Fleet in

1335, the prison’s immediate neighbors began to drain sewage from their homes and stables onto its banks and in the nearby Fleet River, so that both became clogged within just twenty years, making them unnavigable and completely unhealthy.93 Impurity of drinking water was a problem in all of the major prisons, including Ludgate, Newgate,

Marshalsea, and the Tower. Pugh states that before 1435, Newgate did not have a clean water supply and even lacked a drainage system for its privies.94

These unhealthy conditions continued for a long time. What finally enabled the removal of prisons from center to periphery was the breaking up of the carceral “nexus” that connected prison and Purgatory through their common goal of reform and rehabilitation. Geltner states: “According to one study, over 25 percent of Londoners’ wills between 1376 and 1531 contained bequests for the material benefit of prison inmates. In sum, evidence of the prisoners’ social ties with the extramural world confirms that prison life in the Middle Ages was as far from its present stereotype as a

92 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 331-333. 93 Basset, “The Fleet Prison in the Middle Ages,” 394. 94 Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 331-332. 298

‘hellhole,’ as it was from our modern conceptions of prisons as ‘total’ institutions.”95 As the connection between incarceration and purgation disappeared with the “death” of

Purgatory in the post-Reformation era, incarceration was seen as a civic problem to be regulated by the state and supported through taxes. Views on crime and sin also changed so that prisoners were increasingly viewed as criminals who acted against the social order, rather than as sinners in need of moral and spiritual correction.96 Once these changes occurred, the reasons for moving prisons to the periphery outnumbered the reasons for repairing and maintaining them at the center. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the closure of the larger medieval prisons and the establishment of new municipal prisons outside London city limits (see figure 13 below). All but one of the first prisons built after the medieval prisons’ closure in the 1800s are still in operation. Holloway Prison, built in 1852, served both male and female populations until

1903, when it was converted into a women’s prison until its closure in 2016.97 Brixton

Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, and Windsworth are all still in operation. Given their location within the ever-expanding boundaries of London, all are now category A,

B, or C prisons (one, two, and three grades below maximum security).

95 Geltner, “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory,” 263-264. 96 Freeman, “The Rise of Prison Literature,” 136. 97 Hannah Al-Othman, “Holloway Prison to be Closed and Sold off for Housing,” Evening Standard, accessed November 26, 2015. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/holloway-prison-to-close-and- sold-off-for-housing-a3123396.html. 299

Figure 13 London Prisons after 1800 (VisualEyes)98

98 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes,” Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technologies Initiatives, The University of Virginia, 2016. www.viseyes.org/visualeyes. 300

During the Victorian era, overflowing graveyards were also moved to the outskirts. Parliament agreed with health officials and city planners that cemeteries should be placed outside of London city limits and professionally managed and sanctioned the first commercial cemetery company to form in 1830. A group of commercially-run, expensive, private cemeteries, called the Magnificent Seven, flourished for a short time, before the demand for decent and affordable burial drove the need for public authorities to open new municipal burial grounds.”99 Figure 14 below, maps the first commercially-run cemeteries in London. Many of the cemeteries mentioned in the map below are still in limited operation today. When they were first established, they offered the Victorians a clean and healthy environment in which to bury their dead. Highgate, for example, is a wildlife sanctuary as well as a graveyard and features trees, wildflowers, and well-manicured garden paths. This was a marked difference from the overcrowded church-run medieval graveyards that barely covered the corpses of the newly-interred.

99 Peter Whitfield, London: A Life in Maps (London: The British Library, 2006), 145-148. 301

Figure 14 London’s first commercially-run cemeteries (VisualEyes)100

100 Bill Ferster, “VisualEyes,” Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technologies Initiatives, The University of Virginia, 2016. www.viseyes.org/visualeyes. 302

Removed from their original location and managed, in large part, by private companies or secular authorities, cemeteries were no longer under the exclusive control of the

Church. Religious authorities were reluctant to give up such control, however, as burying bodies was a lucrative business. According to Gilchrist, the right to bury bodies in England during the Middle Ages was not automatic, but only granted to certain churches, monasteries, cathedrals, and hospitals after a process of licensure. This created fierce competition among religious institutions to obtain burial rights.101

The process of closing down cemeteries in city centers began in England centuries earlier during the Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which caused a “major shift in religious thinking that decentered the dead in the physical world.

There was also a simultaneous disappearance of the idea of Purgatory.”102 Protestant polemicists who rejected the Doctrine of Purgatory argued the dead, who went immediately to either Heaven or Hell at the moment of death, could no longer benefit from the efforts of the living and would not concern themselves with their trivial earthly concerns. This marks the moment when “the boundaries of the human community had been redrawn.”103

Homilies and funeral sermons in the post-Reformation era reflected this significant shift by avoiding any mention of ameliorating the suffering of the dead and

101 Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, 56-57. 102 Whitfield, London: A Life in Maps, 25-27. 103 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 112. 303

focused instead on praying for reunification with the dead in heaven on the Day of

Judgment. Marshall points out that prayers for the dead were removed from services:

Appended to the prayer for the leaders and the community, is a prayer that the good Christian dead rest in heaven with all the prophets until the Day of Judgment. No mention of amelioration of the dead’s suffering or that they are not in heaven. That was the first concession by the protestant church toward those who wished to remember the dead in their prayers. The second came in the form of prayers at a funeral, where congregants may pray that the departed soul may not be imputed by his earthly sins that he may be met with all of the souls of good Christians at the resurrection.104

Wills, on the other hand, continued to include requests for masses and intercessory prayer for testators after the Reformation. In the reign of Henry VIII, however, the requests decreased and were half the rate in the 1540s as they had been in the 1520s.105

After the restoration of the Catholic Church in England under Mary I, the number of requests for masses for the dead increased, but never reached pre-Reformation numbers.106

The Dissolution, which began in 1536, “was from the outset identified by contemporaries as having vital consequences for the status of purgatory and intercession.”107 The change in view of Purgatory in England after the closure of monasteries provided an opportunity for the more zealous reformers, who were concerned that burial practices under the Catholic Church ascribed “too much meaning

104 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 109. 105 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 80. 106 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 116. According to Marshall, “The restoration of monasteries, pre-Reformation guilds, and fraternities was lukewarm under Mary. In the south-west, 18% of the Marian wills requested masses and prayers; in the Northern counties, 15% and in Gloucestershire, 4%. But as her reign went on, these numbers slowly rose—though never reached pre- Reformation levels” (116). 107 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 82. 304

to certain places,” to push for the abolition of churchyard burial.108 Other reformers, such as Bishop Pilkington under Elizabeth I, argued that there is biblical precedent for burying the dead outside of city walls.109 The English still saw close burials as a sort of memento mori, even if they no longer associated churchyards with Purgatory. The

Reformation had eliminated the religious rituals and practices surrounding the dead so that closing down or relocating cemeteries became easier to accept, especially as the

English faced the ever-growing problems of overcrowding and disease exacerbated by close burial.

According to James Riley, around the middle of the eighteenth century the

English were beginning to look at environmental causes of diseases and recognized that the unhealthy miasmas emitted by overcrowded cemeteries were contributing to a variety of health problems in the community. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Lewis published a work titled, Seasonable Considerations on the Indecent and Dangerous

Custom of Burying in Churches and Church-Yards, which argued that close burial was not only unsanitary and impractical, but associated with the old Catholic superstition of

Purgatory that had no scriptural basis.110 Many in this time period were in favor of continuing to eliminate close burial, especially those who complained of the unhealthy

“miasmas.” Accounts of the polution caused by dead bodies in overcrowded graveyards

108 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 297. 109 Bruno Barber, Christopher Thomas, and Bruce Watson, Religion in Medieval London: Archaeology and Belief (London: Museum of Archaeology, 2013), 44. 110 Thomas Lewis Seasonable Considerations on the Indecent and Dangerous Custom of Burying in Churches and Church-Yards, 1721, accessed April 9, 2018. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lewis, Thomas_(1689-1749%3F)_(DNB00). 305

appear all over Europe. In 1744 there was a report in Montpellier that when a burial vault was opened for a new burial, the poisonous gasses killed three bystanders and caused the priest to lose consciousness.111 In 1738, Voltaire complained that the dead were waging war on the living as the “odious and ridiculous custom of paving the churches with dead bodies every year occasions at Paris epidemical disease, and all the deceased contribute more or less to infect their country.”112 In England, a corrupt minister of Enon Chapel in London took money from parishioners to bury bodies at the low rate of fifteen shillings each. The bodies that were not thrown into the Thames were packed into a small twelve foot by fifty-nine foot pit over the course of seventeen years.

Parishioners were so overwhelmed by the stench that they became ill and often fainted during services.113 The Enon Chapel scandal was one of many incidents in England that led to the reforms that began with the Metropolitan Burial Act of 1852—the first in a series of Burial Acts that “established a national system of public cemeteries” and reformed burial practices in order to improve public health.”114 The elimination of close burial that began with the Dissolution culminated in a large push in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to restrict all burials to the outer districts.

111 Dickey Colin, “Necropolis: ‘The corpse has proved to be a bedeviling problem for the City how do we live with our dead?’” Lapham’s Quarterly, accessed October 15, 2016. http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/city/necropolis. 112 Voltaire (1738) quoted in Dickey Colin, “Necropolis: ‘The corpse has proved to be a bedeviling problem for the City how do we live with our dead?’” Lapham’s Quarterly, accessed October 15, 2016. http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/city/necropolis. 113 H. Bonney, “Death, Corruption, and Sanitation: London’s Graveyards in the 19th Century | Human Anthropology,” Natural History Museum (blog), May 31, 2017. https://blog.nhm.ac.uk/2017/05/31/death- corruption-and-sanitation-londons-graveyards-in-the-19th-century-human-anthropology/. 114 “The Historic Development of Cemeteries in England,” The Darlington Historical Society (blog), November 17, 2016, https://darlingtonhistoricalsociety.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/paper-bags-darlington- shops/comment-page-1/#comment-237. 306

Changing attitudes toward the dead following the Reformation led to a reimagining of ghosts as either a sign of mental illness—or “melancholy”—or a product of witchcraft.115 In most cases ghosts were dismissed as relics of a corrupt system of indulgences invented by the Catholic Church. According to Peter Marshall, “‘popular’ and ‘official’ notions about the nature and motivation of revenants in the later middle

Ages existed in uneasy, and sometimes, crooked alignment.”116 He points out that

Hamlet struggles to discern the true nature of the ghost that claims to be his father, King

Hamlet. When he is not questioning his sanity, he wonders whether the ghost is a “spirit of health or goblin damn’d”117 King Hamlet’s ghost is a composite figure, embodying old notions of Purgatory promulgated by the Catholic Church as well as newer ideas about ghosts promoted by the Reformed Church. The ghost’s description of Purgatory aligns perfectly with the teachings of the Catholic Church; however, his actions are inconsistent with medieval purgatorial apparitions. Instead of asking Hamlet to pray for his soul in order to mitigate his suffering in Purgatory, King Hamlet asks his son to avenge his murder by killing his uncle, Claudius. Marshall states that in the Early

Modern period, there was a “cultural patterning of the ghost” that reflected “ideas of the

Reformation, and generally contained no hint (Hamlet is a possible exception) of

Catholic notions of purgatory and intercession.”118 Ghosts were reimagined as figures

115 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 240. 116 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 224. 117 William Shakespeare, Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, eds. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012), 1.4.57 quoted in in Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 245. 118 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 258. 307

that, in many ways, resemble their pre-Gregorian predecessors, who appeared to the living in order to predict the future, comfort loved ones, seek revenge, or frighten the living, rather than ask for help and relief in their spaces of punishment.119

As the dead were displaced from the center to margin, so too were prisoners following the construction of larger and more sanitary institutions in the outskirts.120

Prisons were institutionalized and became publicly-funded so that the financial burden was lifted from smaller individual communities. And with the death of Purgatory, the incentive to spiritually rehabilitate the prisoners disappeared. There remained no reason to contest the relocation of prisons once practical reasons were established for doing so.

From the time of the Reformation, shifting religious values, the disappearance of

Purgatory, the elimination of prayers for the dead, and increased secularization through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made the move from center to periphery of the marginal dead in England easier to accept. The emphasis on rehabilitation through prayer and intercession by living communities on behalf of sinful souls trapped in a liminal state of purgative punishment began to disappear during the Reformation in the sixteenth century. And all traces of that practice were completely eliminated by the time cemeteries were relocated in the years that followed. Likewise, communal responsibility

119 Roman Catholic countries, which maintained their belief in Purgatory, were slower to adopt the practice of extramural burials, but eventually did so due to pressures of space and disease. The Catholic Church still promotes the belief in Purgatory and Limbo, but has done its best to distance itself from the more controversial aspects connected with both spaces. For example, the Church discontinued the system of indulgences connected with Purgatory in the Middle Ages. The Reformation caused a shift in thinking in Catholicism with respect to Purgatory so that it is no longer of central importance. 120 James Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (London: MacMillan Press LTD, 1987), 130. 308

for the rehabilitation for the marginal living was attenuated when prisons were relocated to the outskirts and the concept of punitive incarceration as an opportunity for the community to participate in the correction and reintegration of its marginalized members has been lost. And attempts to reform prisons or change negative Western attitudes toward prisoners have been and continue to be largely unsuccessful.

309

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315

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSIONS

“Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me” (1.5.98).1 The ghost of Hamlet’s father utters these words to his son as he fades away in the last moments of darkness before the dawn. The Ghost in Hamlet (c.1603) is an admixture of old Catholic beliefs about

Purgatory and new ideas about ghosts and the afterlife promulgated by the Reformed

Church. He is both a purgatorial apparition, fixated on the afterlife, and a revenge ghost, obsessed with his legacy in the world of the living. What little the Ghost is allowed to reveal about his miserable post-mortem existence in Purgatory is consistent with

Catholic conceptions of the afterlife. Hamlet learns that his deceased father is doomed to walk the earth at night and is trapped in his “prison house” during the day, where his earthly sins “Are burnt and purged away” (1.5.15-19). With a couple of exceptions, the

Ghost is subject to the same time constraints as medieval purgatorial apparitions, as he must leave each night when the “cock crows” (1.5.151) as “the glowworm shows the matin to be near” (1.5.96). This supernatural scene departs from medieval ghost stories in three ways. Medieval purgatorial apparitions were generally restricted in their earthly peregrinations to the Sunday period; and the liturgical hour that banished ghosts from the living world was called Lauds in the Middle Ages, not Matins. The name of the office

1 All citations from Hamlet are taken from William Shakespeare, Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, Rebecca Niles, eds., Hamlet (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.), accessed April 15, 2018. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. 316

was changed to Matins after Lauds was combined with Prime and Matins in the post-

Reformation period. A third and far more important departure is the Ghost’s desire for revenge instead of relief. His last words to Hamlet after he asks him to kill Claudius is

“remember me” (1.5.98).

The Ghost’s wish to be remembered in the world of the living is a desire to be made whole—a legal term that involves restoring a wronged party to their original, undamaged state. His plea to be remembered—or re-membered—is a request for restitution and memorialization through revenge. Hamlet’s father wishes to undo the almost complete erasure he underwent when his murderous brother replaced him on the throne and in the marriage bed. As a ghost he is mostly silent and largely invisible as he appears in only three scenes to a handful of people, speaks to three men, and is addressed only by Horatio and Hamlet. The former King Hamlet has been silenced, displaced, and decentered in a world that has forgotten his death and joyfully embraces the new king and his new bride. Figure 15 below visualizes the Ghost’s isolation.

317

Figure 15 Network Graph Generated for Hamlet Using Gephi2

2 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 318

In the above network graph all of the speech instances among the characters in Hamlet have been mapped out using Gephi.3 Each time a character speaks to another character it is counted as one speech instance. As stated in chapter three, the larger and darker the node, the more the character speaks; and the thicker the edges connecting the nodes, the greater the number of verbal interactions between the characters. The above network graph does not account for any non-verbal interaction. What is immediately apparent in the network map above is how connected the main characters are to one another.

Gertrude, Ophelia, Claudius, Hamlet, Horatio, Polonius, and Laertes are connected by numerous edges that represent multiple speech instances. There are only a few outliers in this network that comprise a small group of minor characters as well as the ghost of

King Hamlet. The Ghost’s node hovers in the periphery and is one of the smallest and palest in the network because he only interacts with three other characters. Hamlet speaks to the Ghost nineteen times and the Ghost speaks to Hamlet eleven times in the three scenes they share. The Ghost addresses Marcellus and Horatio a total of four times, in each instance imploring them to “swear” by Hamlet’s sword to keep his meeting with

Hamlet a secret from the rest of the Court (1.5.168, 175, 182, and 203). Figure 16 illustrates how the Ghost is connected by three very thin lines to Marcellus, Horatio, and

Hamlet. Without knowing it, the Ghost brings about his own obsolescence in this moment by forcing the few people who can still see and interact with him to take a vow

3 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/.

319

of silence about his existence, and by setting his only son on a bloody path of revenge that not only results in Hamlet’s death, but in the deaths of all of those who still remember him. This ensures his complete erasure by the end of the play.

Figure 16 The Ghost’s Network in Hamlet Generated Using Gephi4

4 M. Bastian, S. Heymann, M. Jacomy, M., Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating network, International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2009, https://gephi.org/. 320

The Ghost’s desire for revenge blinds him to its consequences because he believes that a revenge killing will balance the cosmic scales, reestablish family honor, allow his son to take his rightful place on the throne, and restore him to the living memory of his widow and the rest of the Court once they realize that he has been murdered. The revenge killing will allow King Hamlet to be properly mourned, or so he hopes. During the mourning period, which should have taken place over the course of a year for a monarch,

King Hamlet will be restored to his rightful place at the center of the living nexus of family, friends, and courtiers.

King Hamlet is both a revenge ghost and a purgatorial apparition without a proper Purgatory. Although he serves his time in a post-mortem “prison house,” and suffers in the fires of purgation, the living belong to a world that no longer acknowledges such a place and have forgotten how to mourn and remember their dead.

In this way, the Ghost represents the post-Reformation dead who have essentially been decentered by the loss of Purgatory. The “death” of Purgatory at the end of the Middle

Ages temporarily created a kind of vacuum when it came to remembering the dead.

People had to figure out how to memorialize the dead in ways that no longer involved

Purgatory or the belief that recently-deceased loved ones maintained a connection to the living. Peter Marshall states that the Dissolution closed hundreds of cemeteries, which

“involved the dispersal of dead as well as living inmates from the religious houses, and just as some families took in their relatives among the latter, a few made efforts to

321

rehouse the former as well.”5 The Dissolution began the process of disbursement and decentering of the dead that continued through the centuries that followed.

James C. Riley states that by the 1700s Catholic countries as well as Reformed countries were pushing for extramural burials and by the

1770s burials were extramural in Prussia, German states, Sweden, Modena, Dutch Netherlands, and even in France. In 1763, the Parliament of Paris ‘ordered that burial sites within th city be closed, to be replaced by eight large cemeteries outside of Paris’…Philippe Aries links the shifting of old remains and the interment of the dead outside the city to profound changes in attitudes toward death in the Christian West. 6

Although Riley attributes the relocation of burial sites to a desire among the living in the eighteenth century to disassociate themselves from the dead, I argue that changes in the attitude toward death began during the Dissolution with the disappearance of Purgatory, rather than in the eighteenth century. The removal of the dead from the center to the periphery began in in the sixteenth century and continued in the centuries that followed.

In the eithteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a large push not only to relocate the dead, but also to open commercially-run and municipally-regulated cemeteries in the outskirts of town. This great push for change in burial practices occurred once the problem of overcrowding and disease made the continuation of close burial on a large scale too dangerous and expensive to justify.7

5 Peter, Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 86. 6 James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (London: MacMillan Press LTD, 1987), 108. 7According to Riley, “the population of Europe had arrived at its highest historical density – some 110 million around 1700 and some 140 million around 1750” (xi). The population growth was exponential and was one of the major factors in the final shift toward extramural burial. 322

Several events occurred that changed the ways in which the living articulated their relationship to the dead after the disappearance of Purgatory in the post-

Reformation period. Protestant Reformers believed that Purgatory had no scriptural basis and was, therefore, a fiction invented by the Catholic Church to control and extort its congregants. In 1549, Bishop Cranmer reasoned that if Christ purged the world of its sins by the shedding of his blood, then what need had baptized Christians for Purgatory in the afterlife?8 Limbo was similarly dismissed as an invention of the Catholics, as it had no scriptural basis. The Reformed Church shifted focus from Purgatory to the

Resurrection and encouraged the belief that the dead immediately went to either Heaven or Hell.9 Marshall points out that in 1549, “Appended to the prayer for the leaders and the community, is a prayer that the good Christian dead rest in heaven with all the prophets until the Day of Judgment. No mention of amelioration of the dead’s suffering or that they are not in heaven. That was the first concession by the protestant church toward those who wished to remember the dead in their prayers. The second came in the form of prayers at a funeral, where congregants may pray that the departed soul may not be imputed by his earthly sins that that he may be met with all of the souls of good

Christians at the resurrection.”10 Prayer for dead souls in Purgatory was eventually eliminated from the Book of Common Prayer in the Elizabethan church and prayers for the dead during burial services were also considerably revised during this time.11

8 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 99. 9 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 187. 10 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 109. 11 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 111, 124. 323

Other changes occurred in the post-Reformation period that helped marginalize the dead, such as the destruction of old Catholic funeral monuments and the decline of posthumous requests for intercessory prayer. The requests in wills for intercessory prayers and masses declined sharply under Henry VIII and Edward VII, recovering only slightly under Mary I, and continued to fall again under Elizabeth I.12 The disappearance of the dead from the liturgy, wills, sermons, and intermural cemeteries created a temporary vacuum until new ways of memorializing the dead were established, such as publishing elegies, writing memorials, printing funeral sermons that lauded charitable donations made by the decedent, and erecting new monuments that inscribed the decedent’s lifetime accomplishments onto their surfaces. Whereas old monuments “had an intercessory function, post-Reformation monuments tended to assert that the dead’s soul is already in heaven…This was to exalt the living, and to comfort the living, not the dead. Memorial discourses reified the remembrance of the dead. This was retrospective, focusing on past achievements, rather than looking to the afterlife.” 13 The Reformers criticized Catholics for privileging the rich and powerful in their memorial rituals; however, under this new system of remembering and commemorating the dead, only the wealthy could afford to erect wordy monuments, or to publish elegies and sermons lauding their achievements. This left the poor with no way of honoring their deceased

12 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 88, 116. 13 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 265, 270-272. 324

loved ones until the Reformed Church made a concession by listing the dead in parish registers.14

Whereas Catholic methods of remembering and commemorating the dead were focused on the afterlife (preparing for death by doing good works and relieving the pain of those already in Purgatory), post-Reformation practices were very life-focused

(emphasizing what the deceased accomplished during their lifetime and focusing on the reunification of bodies and souls of the deceased in Heaven on Judgment Day). In the absence of Purgatory and the belief that the dead lingered in the world near their bodies, close burial was no longer necessary. The dead were gradually moved from center to margin. Likewise, communal responsibility for the correction of the marginal living was attenuated when the association between purgation and incarceration disappeared.

Prisons were relocated to the outskirts as the model of incarceration shifted from correction and rehabilitation to containment, isolation, and punishment.

The genre of prison writing also underwent changes in the sixteenth century.

Prison writing which began to flourish with the rise of the prison system around the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, continued to develop in new directions in the post-Conquest period. Joanna Summers points out that “Throughout literary history there is a tradition that has joined imprisonment and writing. Ovid, Seneca, St. Paul,

Boethius, St. Perpetua, even Marco Polo, turned to written expression during

14 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 287-291. 325

incarceration or exile.”15 As discussed in chapter three, the tradition continued with

Thomas Usk’s (c. 1354-1388) The Testament of Love, James I of Scotland’s (1394-1437)

The Kingis Quair, Charles d’Orléans’s (1394–1465) the English Book of Love, George

Ashby’s (d. 1475) the Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463, the anonymous

Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune (c. 1461), and the prison tracts of Thomas

Wyatt (1503-1542).16 Prison writing in the Middle Ages is characterized by its emphasis on treating punitive confinement as a means of purgation through introspection, penance, and self-denial. This genre was informed by beliefs about penance and salvation inspired by Purgatory. After the disappearance of Purgatory, the genre continued to flourish, but had an entirely different focus.

Ruth Ahnert states that whereas medieval Catholic prisoners’ work focused inward on death and their religious devotions, “Protestant prisoners sought to encourage their co-religionists at home and in exile, to teach and guide them on doctrinal issues, and to ensure unity of belief.”17 Prison writing in the sixteenth century responded to the religious, political, and social instability during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VII,

Mary I, and the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign. Prisoners in the early modern period—

Catholic and Protestant—were “writing to vindicate themselves, or elicit sympathy and support from influential parties; public figures recognized that their reputations must be

15 Joanna Summers, Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 1. 16 Bale, “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 91, no. 1 (2016): 5. 17 Ruth, Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3. 326

maintained, even when facing the scaffold.”18 Medieval prisoners’ writing in the Middle

Ages was heavily influenced by the concept of Purgatory and was, therefore, introspective, penitent, and inwardly focused; whereas prison writing in the sixteenth century had an outward focus, concerned with establishing and maintaining one’s reputation, building a legacy, and striving for justice in the world.19

Prison writing and supernatural narratives continued to grow in popularity in the post-Reformation period. Although each genre borrowed certain conventions and associations from the previous age, they were shaped by new contexts and served entirely new purposes. It appears that once the association between purgation and incarceration was lost with the disappearance of Purgatory, earthly prisoners and otherworldly figures parted ways and evolved in different directions. King Hamlet’s ghost begins to show that evolution as he is a composite figure who embodies elements of both the old Catholic system of penance and purgation and the new Protestant system that was concerned with “self-presentation and self-justification.”20 He uses his liminal status as a pathetic purgatorial apparition and as a terrifying revenge ghost to elicit pity and terrify his son by turns until Hamlet agrees to carry out the revenge killing for his father. Ultimately the ghost who tries to bridge the ideological divide between pre- and post-Reformation England fails miserably at both and disappears half way through the play, leaving the other characters to work out the bloody mess he has set in motion. The

18 Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 3. 19 Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 3-6. 20 Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 3. 327

ghost falls completely silent after he sees what he has started and is only able to communicate to his son with pleading looks as Hamlet harasses his mother against the ghost’s wishes (3.4.141-145). The last lines before the ghost fades out of the scene are spoken by his doomed son: “Why, look you there, look how it steals away! / My father, in his habit as he lived! / Look where he goes even now out at the portal!” (3.4.154-156).

The ghost disappears and is seen no more.

The Ghost in Hamlet left me with additional questions about Shakespeare’s treatment of apparitions in particular and post-Reformation ghosts in general.21 For instance, is the Ghost in Hamlet unique as a composite figure in Shakespeare’s corpus or are all of his ghosts similarly patterned? There are four other plays that feature ghosts:

Macbeth (the ghost of Banquo), Julius Caesar (the ghost of Caesar), Richard III (the ghosts of Henry VI and Edward IV), and Cymbeline (the ghosts of Posthumus

Leonatus’s mother and brothers). What are the ghosts’ powers in these plays? With whom do they communicate and why? Who can see them and who cannot? How do these supernatural depictions either challenge or support the dominant ideology in this time period? Jean-Claude Schmitt called purgatorial apparitions “cogs” in an economic machine fueled by the fear of Purgatory in late Middle Ages.22 Are post-Reformation apparitions, like their purgatorial predecessors, patterned on the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Reformed Church? If so, are they a form of propaganda? If not, have post-

21 Sara Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 22 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998), 179. 328

Reformation ghosts reverted to their pre-Gregorian form, where they served a purely diversionary function by inspiring fear, curiosity, and delight? These questions may seed a new project in the future—one that examines ghosts and visionary narratives written in

England in the period immediately following the disappearance of Purgatory at the end of the Middle Ages. The Ghost in Hamlet offers tantalizing glimpses of a world in a state of flux and change as it transitions into the early modern era, ultimately leaving its readers—or at least this one—with more questions than answers and, like Hamlet, I am willing to follow it wherever it takes me.

329

References

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Bale, Anthony. “God’s Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ.”

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manipulating networks. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social

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Beckwith, Beckwith. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2011.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Marshall, Peter. Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England. Oxford: Oxford

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Riley, James C. The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease. London:

MacMillan Press LTD., 1987.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet from Folger Digital Texts, ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul

Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Accessed on April 15, 2018. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. Ghosts in the Middle Ages. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan.

Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998.

Summers, Joanna. Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.

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