Medieval Death Trip
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MEDIEVAL DEATH TRIP _______________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri–Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________________________ by PATRICK LANE Dr. Trudy Lewis, Dissertation Supervisor MAY 2016 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled MEDIEVAL DEATH TRIP presented by Patrick Lane, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Trudy Lewis Professor Emma Lipton Professor Johanna Kramer Professor Lois Huneycutt For my parents, who deserve a traditional medieval dedicatory letter of many pages and exuberant phrases of praise, but will, with their great understanding, indulge my exhaustion and accept this simple token: Mom and Dad, thank you. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor and dissertation supervisor, Trudy Lewis, not only for her help and advice as I made my way through this program of study, but also for her great patience and understanding. I must also thank my other committee members — Emma Lipton, Johanna Kramer, and Lois Huneycutt — for their guidance and advice, as well as their willingness to wrestle with a series of unusual projects and approaches with enthusiasm and generosity. I must also give credit to the late John Foley for helping to shape the early phases of my studies. And looking back into the past, I should also like to acknowledge the medievalists at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who started me off into medieval studies, Marianne E. Kalinke, Martin Camargo, and Charles Wright. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ ii INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 PART I (WIT): MEDIEVAL DEATH TRIP ...................................................................... 27 Episode 0: Prologue ...................................................................................................... 28 Episode 1: Concerning Poisoning by Toad ................................................................... 38 Episode 2: Concerning Another Miracle Cure for Extreme Swelling, a Sinful Clerk, and Some Lightning Bolts ............................................................................................ 52 Episode 3: Concerning a Vision of Heaven and Hell and a Bad Outlook for the Bishop ....................................................................................................................................... 63 Episode 4: The Violent Death of Bishop Walcher ........................................................ 72 Episode 5: Concerning the Burning of Croyland Abbey .............................................. 80 Episode 6: Concerning the Year Something-Fourteen ................................................. 91 Episode 7: Concerning Some Divine Dentistry .......................................................... 106 Episode 8: Concerning a Devil Pig, a Death Prophecy, and St. William’s Candles .. 119 Episode 9: Concerning the Wretched Fate of a Grammar Teacher ............................ 132 Episode 10: Concerning the Milk of Grammar ........................................................... 146 Episode 11: How a Blood Libel Takes Root .............................................................. 163 PART II (WEIRDNESS): LIBELLUS DE MUTATIONIS ............................................. 184 Here begins the Libellus de Mutationis ...................................................................... 185 The Dream of the Maid of the Mount ......................................................................... 188 Concerning the Form of Bears .................................................................................... 192 The Robber and the Bearskin ...................................................................................... 194 The Plague of Mice ..................................................................................................... 205 An Inquisitive Monk ................................................................................................... 228 The Troublesome Thane ............................................................................................. 230 Concerning the Forms of Truth................................................................................... 251 The Dead Man’s Vision .............................................................................................. 253 The Legend of the Anchorite ...................................................................................... 267 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 277 VITA ............................................................................................................................... 286 1 INTRODUCTION The two projects presented here represent fruits from two vines branching out from the same furrow of inquiry. That furrow has been an exploratory trench cut into medieval narrative, and one of the vines is that of fiction, and the other is that of exposition, twining together like the balladeer’s briar and rose. The first seeds I sowed were those of fiction, and initially my work was all in the service of devising a novel. What seemed ancillary to this — a commonplace book of weedy pressings and clippings — has, however, flourished as a second crop, equal to the first in both creative expression and engagement with medieval literature. To flense this figure of its allegorical integument, let me say that what I’ve assembled here is a work of fiction imitating monastic prose discourse called the Libellus de Mutationis, or “little book of changes,” and transcripts of the first twelve episodes of my educational podcast, Medieval Death Trip, which function as a series of short essays on a selection of medieval texts. Both are the direct products of a course of reading in hagiography and historiography of the 11th through 14th centuries. This reading began as research for a novel-writing project. Though I was reading medieval literature as my scholarly field, I did not actually intend to write medieval historical fiction. As an undergraduate, I had worked through three or four start-from- scratch attempts to tell a story of the Black Death hitting a monastery, and my dissatisfaction with my ability to tell that story in a way that true to the time had rather soured me on medieval settings for modern fiction. But in 2007, I had the idea for a singular short fable involving an anchorite, and the writing of that tale (a version of 2 which concludes the Libellus de Mutationis) in an intentionally medieval monastic voice proved to be such a pleasure that I began to seriously consider developing a long-form work with a similar narrator as my creative project at Mizzou. Part of the difficulty with my plague story had always been a tendency for the third-person, rich novelistic description to drift into the excessively gruesome. In my imagination of the scenes, the sensory detail was overwhelming — and what it ultimately overwhelmed was the prose. But rendering such a world in the stripped down prose of a chronicler — bare of lyrical description, but not necessarily unornamented or minimalist — freed the story from the crushing burden of realistically and immersively rendering that world which is so distant from us. But while the material medieval world is distant and perceivable only dimly through bits stained glass not shattered by the New Model Army, the voices of its narrators are not. Because my initial plan for my project was to write a fictional abbey chronicle — specifically, the chronicle of the backwater Peacock Abbey in the High Peak (the conceit being that at its 9th-century foundation, it was peac ac or “Peak Oak” abbey, corrupted over time and over multiple refoundations) — my first course of action was to read a large selection of monastic chronicles and local histories. My entry point was Jocelin of Brakelond’s Chronicle of Bury-St. Edmunds, but the one-two punch of Guibert of Nogent’s Monodiae (published in English translation under the title A Monk’s Confession) and Herman of Tournai’s The Restoration of the Monastery of Saint Martin of Tournai thoroughly captured my attention with their surprising depths of detail and candidness, and I began to collect one local institutional history after another, working through them voraciously. 3 The novel writing proceeded only in fits and starts, with the project initially suffering from an overload of stories stratified across nested time periods, legends within histories within secondhand retellings all framed within one character’s memory. Characters became fragmented across these layers, as well, as a plot for one suddenly worked much better as an incident in the Anarchy under King Stephen and thus no longer fit a character who was meant to be alive during the Conquest, or a pivotal experience for a narrator involving an encounter with pagan Viking raiders became increasingly anachronistic as that character’s temporal position was pushed later and later. But these are simply logistical problems that could be overcome with a combination