- additional to "The longevity of violence"

As a bit of a an addendum to my blog a couple of weeks back lamenting the destruction of medieval buildings, here is a snippet I came across in my research this week:

 "The pulling down and desecrating of which was the chief Blemish of the Reformation, and what our Nations stands greatly censur'd for, even by our own Authors, to give only the Words of a Poet (Denham, in his Coopers-Hill), on this Subject, who thus expresses himself.

Who sees these dismal Heaps, but would demand,

What barbarous Invade sackt this Land?

But when he heads no Goth, not Turk did bring

This Desolation, but a Christian King;

Whrn nothing but the name of Zeal appears

'Twixt our best Actions, and the worst of theirs;

What does he thing our Sacrilege would spare,

When such th' Effects of our Devotion are?

But I shall forbear speaking farther  of this Matter, lest I render my self traduc'd and suspected of retaining too superstitious an Aggection for these Buildings; tho' I cannot avoid concluding, that it would have been much for the Honour of our Nation, if the great and noble Churches had been left standing and made Parochial, and the Ashes of the Dead been suffer'd to have remained undisturbed, the Violation of which our Nobility cannot reflect on without the utmost Concern, when they read of so many stately Monuments of the Ancestors thus barbarously defac'd, as well as divers others by this means bury'd in Oblivion, of which there remains no Tradition; as we may experimentally speak in relaton to this place we are now treating of; whole only Remains is a Gate-house"

Abingdon Abbey Gatehouse

I've transcribed it exactly so the odd spellings are in the original 18th century text. John Stevens was an interesting man who held a variety of posts and took it upon himself to finish and make more accessible the work of John Leland who wrote the 16th century equivalent of a travel blog around England. The above extract is taken from Stevens's entry for Abingdon Abbey.

Notes

Stevens, J., The History of the Antient Abbeys, Monasteries, Hospitals, Catherdral and Collegiate Churches being two additional volumes to William Dugdale's Monasticon Anglicanum, Vol. 1 (London: Tho. Taylor et. al., 1722)

A priest of very ill repute

Ely Cathedral

The Liber Eliensis is an historical account of the Isle of Ely written/compiled by a late twelfth century monk using a combination of Ely’s archives along with its chronicle.

This extract comes from the third book which covers Ely’s ascent to bishop’s seat until the martyrdom of Archbishop Becket and illustrates the human love of scandal. 

It begins with a man called Gervase who becomes a parish priest in order “to exact worldly profit and the mammon of wickedness. For the wickedness of that man arose seemingly from his fat; it transferred itself into the sensibility of his heart; he thought and spoke evil; he spoke wickedness on high”

As you can see, the monastic author is none too keen on this chap Gervase. Gervase is so bad that he even abolishes various the religious feasts of lady saints in the parish and the author laments that this meant that these female saints’ names would be forgotten. As a result, God raises his “right hand to avenge the aforesaid sainted ladies by punishing their abominable enemy”.

Within a week, with an unrepentant heart, Gervase is attending a banquet and eats and drinks a great

deal before becoming “enslaved to unchastity and drunkenness”. After a week of this, and in a “state of semi-consciousness, he vomited up food as yet undigested” and “He made everyone laugh by not knowing how to keep to a straight path”.

Undeterred, Gervase makes his way to the altar of his church and dresses in his holy vestments “and stood ready in all his priestly array until the introit of the mass, when, fittingly, in accordance with his deserts, as a result of the lord’s punishment in vengeance of His lady saints, before the eyes of the whole congregation, there came upon him a state of helplessness and shame. For, up above, because of nausea, he  vomited profusely from the mouth, and down below, he emitted excrement from his privy orifice with a loud noise and let it fall to the ground!”

It ends alright for Gervase however. His congregation take pity on him and carry him away and remove his soiled clothing before he makes public confession and repents for his sins. 

Notes

Liber Eliensis, a history of the Isle of Ely from the seventh century to the twelfth, trans. by J. Fairweather (Woodbridge, Boydell Press: 2005) Book III, 121, pp. 458-460

Storytime - Pitas Payas, the Breton Painter

I’ll tell you a story about a man who neglected his wife, and if you think it’s a good joke you can tell me another as good. Pitas Payas, a Breton painter, married a young girl and enjoyed it, but in less than a month he said: ‘Look, love, I’ve got to go to Flanders, but I’ll bring you back lots of presents.’

‘Right,’ she said, ‘off you go, but don’t forget your home and don’t forget me.’

Then Pitas Payas said: ‘Darling, I want to paint a pretty picture on you that will keep you from getting up to anything while I’m away.’

‘If you want to, that’s all right.’

He painted a little lamb on her belly, and went off on his first business trip. He took a long time over it, and was away two years; each month of his absence seemed like a year to his wife.

Since the girl was newly married, and had only lived with her husband for a short time, she took a love to fill the empty house. The lamb was rubbed away, and soon nothing was left of it. When she heard that her husband was coming back, she hastily sent for her lover and told him to paint a little lamb as best he could in that same place. In his haste, he painted a fully-endowed ram, with a fine head of horns. The same day a messenger announced that Pitas Payas was about to arrive.

When the painter, back from Flanders, reached home his wife greeted him coldly. Indoors, alone with her, he remembered the picture he had painted, saying: ‘Now, love, show me that picture and we can have some fun.’

‘See for yourself where it is,’ his wife said, ‘and do whatever you fancy there, but do it with a will.’

Pitas Payas looked at her belly and saw a great horned ram. 

‘What’s all this, love? How is it that I painted a lamb and find this plate of meat instead?’

Since women are always crafty and cunning in this kind of situation, she replied: ‘What, love, you don’t want a lamb to grow into a ram in two years? If you’d come home sooner you’d have found your lamb.’

Notes

Taken from Medieval Comic Tales, ed. D. Brewer (Cambridge, Boydell & Brewer Press: 1973) p. 39 and originally from Libro de Buen Amor, by Juan Ruiz (Archpriest of Hita, c. 1330)

Lamb image: http://camartin.deviantart.com/art/Lamb-56005685

Ram image: Taken fro a woodcut in Sebastian Münster's (1489 - 1552) The Cosmographia via http://www.tablespace.net/maps/munsterimages.html

The act of remembrance: Mnemonic systems

Part of some current research into the use of architecture in allegories has led me to Christiania Whitehead’s book Castles of the Mind. It is a brilliant book but one chapter was particularly interesting as it discussed the role of memory. 

Memory techniques are drummed into us from early age now. What I’d never really considered however was how these techniques were developed. 

Whitehead begins with Plato and Aristotle. 

Plato was of the opinion that the act of remembering was where an “immutable structure of truth” already within us was brought to the surface of our conscious. As a result, he felt that “artificial memory techniques” encouraged memory without understanding and should thus be discouraged. Anyone who has heard a young child sing the alphabet song and recite the letters “aich, eye, jay, kay, ello, menno, pee” might agree with Plato at this point. 

Aristotle on the other hand believed that the very act of memorising followed the comprehension of something by the senses and that to remember a copy had to be made within your memory. He also differentiated between remembering and recalling. The former was involuntarily while the latter was “a reasoned search, journeying through a succession of associated ideas to reach a desired destination”. Logically following this description of recollection, memory techniques were of use (in Aristotle’s mind) as they allowed one to associate the memory within and amongst associated ones.

The concern with remembering stems from the Greek and Roman oratory traditions and the development of rhetoric and speech giving in general. 

The variety of artificial memory techniques developed over time and the first associations between memory and recollection occur in 86-82 BC in Rhetorica ad herennium which argues that recall can be enhanced through the use of a imaginary environment which linked objects with topics (i.e. a spade with agriculture). 

Interest then peters off until the 13^th C. with the exception of the writings of St Augustine who used classical techniques to aid Christian goals rather speech making. This dip in interest, Whitehead argues, is due to the academics of the time (churchmen) actually taking a greater interest in forgetting as this allowed them to focus on salvation rather than secular matters. 

 

The 13^th C. however did see a resurgence, possibly due to the increase in preaching and thus a need for better memory and works of antiquity were also becoming more widely disseminated.

This new interest coalesces again in the use of mental architecture and Boncompagno da Signa (Professor of Rhetoric in the 1230s at the University of Bologna) advocated the use of a monastery of school as a mental environment for recollection; detailing the size of the mental building but also the details of it including its distance in the mind down to the colouring. 

This memory technique is one I was already familiar with and have used myself as the process of mentally ‘placing’ a number of thoughts in a specific mental location allowed me to better recall them through the journey to that spot. It even made it into mainstream pop-culture recently through the BBC’s new Sherlock Holmes’s ‘mind palace’.

Memory, or the lack thereof, has been a preoccupation for centuries and if there’s one thing that history can teach us, it’s that very few things are actually new and cutting edge. Instead, they are often simply re-discovered, re-branded or re-fined. 

Notes

Whitehead, C. Castles of the Mind (Cardiff, University of Wales: 2003) pp. 28-38

http://www.independent.co.uk/student/student-life/how-to-sherlock-your-degree-the-art-of-building-a-memory-palace-9087779.html

http://www.mindtools.com/memory.html