The longevity of violence

All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.  

~Marshall Rosenberg

If, like me, you live in England and are interested in the Middle Ages you will now be very familiar with the ruinous state of most monastic sites and will immediately attribute their state to Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries; if in Scotland, the blame rests with the tumultuous reformation. 

It is something that is initially met with anger at the destruction of the buildings, then sadness at the loss, and finally acceptance that at least something remains and that the reason for the destruction is known.

Last week I visited the Longpont Abbey, a Cistercian monastery originally founded by Bernard of Clairvaux 1131 and nestled in the centre of a lovely little French village today. 

England has the destructive dissolution, France has the French revolution. The majority of the abbey was destroyed in the flight of the monks before the onslaught of the revolutionaries but see if you can guess what happened a little later by looking at these photos of the external west end, and a close up of the interior view of the little door on the right.

 

Yes, those are pock marks from artillery, shrapnel and goodness knows what else. WWI came to Longpont’s doorstep to make its mark on the abbey as well and an informative noticeboard behind the ticket kiosk displays photos taken in the aftermath.

I started this post with a quote to highlight a particular viewpoint. The buildings used as examples here were destroyed and damaged as the result of violence between humans. The buildings were the ‘innocent’ bystanders if you will, merely infused with the identity of the people one side wanted to destroy.

 

I’m no philosopher (you guessed right) so I have nothing profound to state on this matter yet when I’m faced with the evidence of past events scarring the present it does make me question whether it is fair that these buildings suffered too; The legacy of creators’ art, energy and skill destroyed by enemies of the creators’ successors. 

 

Equally, it is perhaps that I ascribe too much value to stone and mortar and that the human suffering should outweigh the architectural damage. Yet the things we make last far longer than our own lives so perhaps…

 

Round and round the argument it goes – where it stops, nobody knows!

Notes
Pinard, T. "L'eglise ci-devant abbatiale de Longpont (Seine-et-Oise)", Revue Archéologique, 8e Année, No. 1 (April-September, 1851), pp. 261-264

http://en.infotourisme.net/monument/longpont/5997/abbaye-notre-dame

Of the importance of horseradish

Delving into some medical history today with an excerpt from Henry of Huntingdon's herbal (an old fashioned medical dictionary....sort of)

Henry (c.1088–c.1157), son of a clerk and archdeacon of Huntingdon, is commonly called Henry of Huntingdon and his title appears to have come from the title of the archdeaconry of his father to which he eventually succeeded.

He was a great writer and well known politically nationally and locally which left him well placed to write his Historia Anglorum (The history of the English people) which was eventually 10 books long and covered Caesar’s invasion up to the coronation of Henry II in 1154. According to the Oxford DNB, “The Historia Anglorum has a moral purpose, presenting a strongly thematic narrative in which the five invasions of Britain—by the Romans, the Picts and Scots, the Angles and Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans—are seen as five punishments or plagues inflicted by God on a faithless people. The account of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is focused on the setting up of seven kingdoms, a concept—the heptarchy—which was adopted by later historians, and survived until it was discredited in the 1980s”

An important chap I'm sure you’ll agree.

In addition to his history book, he wrote many others including a 6 book long series (Anglicanus Ortus - The English Garden) on various plants set out as though the narrator is considering the contents of a flowerbed. The following extract caught my eye. Horseradish - not just for beef and fish!

 

3.13 Horseradish, Armoracia rusticana Gaertn. Mey & Scherb

Do you want to remove a tumour? Take a frog and tie it to the tumour; the tumour will drink up the whole frog so that you'll marvel that just a dry skin remains in the morning. After this is removed, a Horseradish root, the urine of a cow, and the flower of wheat will kill all the tumour's strength.You'll thus clean out a wound as you clean other wounds, just as red Cabbage and the rose madder which they call varenca will do. Add cannabis and also yrigeron, which is called Groundsel, and the leaves of Wormwood; this is called the Five-Herb Medicine.






Taken from - Henry of Huntingdon, Anglicanus Ortus, A verse herbal of the twelfth century, ed. by W. Black (Oxford, Bodleian Library: 2012)

Henry of Huntingdon bio:
D. E. Greenway, ‘Henry (c.1088–c.1157)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12970, accessed 12 Sept 2014]

Storytime - The Reluctant Monk

A woman was leading an unhappy life with her husband, and came  to dislike him intensely. Therefore she thought up a wicked trick to play on him, putting into his wine the juice of certain herbs. He was not merely drunk, but lay there on his bed, acting like a madman, twisting and turning, foaming at the mouth, and unable to speak. His wife hurried off to the nearby monastery, weeping.

She said to the monks: "For the love of God, come to my house, for my husband seems to be dying. He can't speak, but  before he lost the power of speech he told me that above all else he wanted to become a monk, or if, through this illness, God took him, he must be dressed in monk's habit  before  he was buried. I don't want to stand in the way of his wishes, so I'll swear to give up sex for as long as I live, even if God restores him to health. But for God's sake hurry, and dress my poor husband in a monk's habit, for he's at the point of death."

She pressed them so much that they had to go. They shaved her husband, gave him a large tonsure, and dressed him in the habit of their order. The next morning he got up, sober again, and was astonished to find himself with shaved head and dressed as a monk, so he asked his wife what had ben happening who had done that to him.

She, pretending to weep, said: "Oh, my dearly-beloved husband! Don't you remember that last night you were made a monk, and that when you were in agony from your illness that was the only thing you wanted? And for your soul's sake I promised perpetual chastity, so no I must live alone and like an inconsolable widow."

He husband protested that he certainly didn't want to become a monk, and that he wanted to live a normal married life with her, just as before, but she said that she couldn't go against the oath she had sworn, for he most assuredly was a monk, and God would never permit her to sleep with a monk.

"Oh you wretch," she added, "wouldn't you even be ashamed  if you broke your vow? If you became a layman again, everyone would call you an apostate, a renegade monk."

She spoke so persuasively, and shed so many false tears, that the unhappy man, through shame and because of all the things she had said to him, took holy orders. He became a monk, and entered the monastery, leaving her in possession of their house and of all the jewels and other goods.
______________________________

Taken from Medieval Comic Tales, ed. D. Brewer (Cambridge, Boydell & Brewer Press: 1973) and originally from the 15th century Spanish MS,  Libro de los exenplos por a.b.c., a collection written by Clemente Sánchez (Archdeacon of Valderas)

Of Gardens and Ladies

So...

Today's title is fairly indicative of my sense of humour if I'm perfectly honest, but I will be leading you down a vaguely scholarly thought path today.

Recently, I was searching for references to the "Hortus Conclusus" (enclosed garden) in the Patrologia Latina in Oxford. It is essentially a printed compendium of early latin documents written by Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD, up to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216.

It's a massive work of untranslated latin, but it does give you the opportunity to try and wheedle out the opinions and personal views of contemporary 'big wigs' and their views on the church and passages in the bible.

My tedious index skimming brought me eventually to discussions on this passage of the Song of Solomon:

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse: a spring shut up, a fountaine sealed.

Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits, Camphire, with Spikenaed,

Spikenard and Saffron, Calamus and Cynamom, with all trees of Frankincense, Mirrhe and Aloes, with all the chiefe spices.

A fountaine of gardens, a well of liuing waters, and streames from Lebanon.

Awake, O Northwinde, and come thou South, blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out: let my beloved come into his garden, and eate his pleasant fruits.

 - Chapter 4, 12-16

I was reading for something else so I'm afraid I do not have the specific commentaries to hand, but several of the commentaries compared the enclosed garden/shut spring/sealed fountain of this passage to Mary and her immaculate conception -  the connotations are fairly obvious. The pomegranates come in too with their associations with fertility. 

Now, some of these biblical commentators were not content with leaving this comparison there. 

Oh no. 

By comparing Mary's state to this enclosed garden/fountain etc. they extrapolated that it was in fact the enclosed/shut nature of her....garden/fountain....which led to her painless childbirth. After all,  it was argued by some that women suffer during childbirth because of Eve's sin, and a women such as Mary who is able to get pregnant while remaining a virgin is thus absolved of Eve's sins and blessed to be pain free.

This was all terribly interesting as I love discussions like this but I'm resisting the urge to dabble in a wholly new area of research so my curiosity has to stop here.

What has caught my attention though, as a half formed thought, is whether there is any connection between the modern slang "lady garden" and these early comparisons between women, reproductivity and this holy garden. A Lady Chapel  for example is a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary so I'm not completely out on a limb here.

I have no idea as I'm not a biblical scholar, or expert in the history of the English language, but I thought I'd share my academic musing for the week.