Are We More Tolerant than Medieval Europe?

While I was reading the Nederman exerts, I kept wondering if we (by which I mean Americans in 2010) are more tolerant than the peoples of medieval Europe. Are we so far removed from the "monolithic persecuting society" of the Middle Ages to which Nederman refers? As a believer that history repeats itself, I would suggest that we are not, though our intolerance in more subtle and unspoken. We don't make polemical statements such as Roland's "Christians are right and pagans are wrong". We don't care for people who show outright and malicious intolerance (such as the Arian Brotherhood, the Ku Klux Klan, and the West Borough Baptist Church. We pride ourselves on our tolerance of beliefs and lifestyles different from our own. After all, we tell ourselves, America is a place founded on the idea of equality and freedom for all. Americanism, then, is the binding element of our culture, much as Christianity was for medieval Europe. But, we tell ourselves, Americanism holds tolerance as a central tenant, unlike medieval Christianity.

However, the history of this country has shown we have been anything but tolerant. Racism has and continues to have a volatile presence in America and has shaped much of its history, culture, and law. Some modern wars might be labeled holy wars and be compared to the crusades. Gender and gender roles continue to be problematic, despite seeming advances of activist and suffrage movements. Christianity has been and is a domineering and influential force in both the private and public realms. Violence has and still is committed against deviant groups. Patriotism and nationalism still rides high, and while many may never say it, they believe the American way of life is superior to all others in the world. Aren't all of the attitudes, actions, and historical references I've just listed the very things we say made Medieval Europe intolerant? Are we really different from them? Is tolerance just something we give lip service to?

Of course, when I say "we" and "Americans" I am speaking of a collective and not of individuals. I am making generalizations without considering specifics. But this is also true of Medieval Europeans. As Nederman shows, medieval Europeans did conceive of tolerance and argued for it. Even within Christianity there was recognized diversity. And there were certainly individuals who rebelled against social norms. What might distinguish us from the medieval Europeans is the way we deal with intolerance. We are not burning heretics at the stake, executing sexual deviants, or confining women to the home. But we share the attitudes that caused the medieval Europeans to do these things. And who is to say we may not do these things some day? As long as these attitudes persist, intolerance will continue to grow and may become as brutal and deadly as it was in the past.

The Middle Ages as a Monstrous Other

Even taking the past on its own terms and not imposing our modern understanding, it is impossible not to look at the Middle Ages and be constantly aware of how different the world was six hundred and more years ago. There are moments where a reader of medieval literature can easily find familiarity, but those moments are greatly overshadowed by the largely overlooked differences.

The Middle Ages form an other simply in the fact that that era is past and no scholar of the present can identify with it fully. We are outsiders looking in, but there's a thick pane in the glass of time that we just can't get past. Does our interest make the Middle Ages less of an other, because we so often seek and find ourselves in the people of our past? Or does our fascination reverberate with a further othering, because we cannot fully understand? Perhaps we are intrigued by the Middle Ages the way the Roland poet or the Beowulf poet seem fascinated with a religious culture not their own, and yet fail to fully prevent their self-understanding from color how they understand that other.

I am constantly reminded by the people I know who aren't medieval scholars that this era that fascinates me has no hold on their interest. My peers in the theatre department were teasing me just this morning for knowing the meaning of the -wright in playwright as 'to make' or 'to build.' It seems every little thing I know has something to do with Middle English, which one friend jokingly imitates by mumbling through his beard incoherently. If I am in some small way othered by my study of the Middle Ages, then to the general population outside our small world of medievalists, how much of an other must the era itself be?

Perhaps in some ways it is monstrous too. Life was terrible then, people say. No indoor plumbing, no central heating, the plague, low life expectancy. Every child who wants to be a princess or a knight eventually grows up to realize that in the Middle Ages they probably would have been a peasant and dead in their twenties or thirties. It's frightening to imagine living then. The Middle Ages are monstrous to us indeed, even if those who study it are perhaps desensitized to it. Why else would we equate the Middle Ages positively as just the time between better eras, and negatively as the Dark Ages?

Taking the Past Seriously

I liked that Nederman ended his conclusion with a plea that we take the past seriously. Though his words immediately preceding this sentence indicate that he meant that Medieval Europe should be considered when we attempt to understand our current political and philosophical environment, I feel like his words could be used to address some of the recurring issues we have had in our class.

Taking the past seriously means that we must endeavor to understand the Europe of the Middle Ages on its own terms; instead of just imposing our current intellectual categories onto the literary figures of the past, we also should attempt to interpret them using the categories that were available at the time. I am not saying that there is not a valuable interpretation to be made of, for example, Sir Gawain as a homosexual or Margery Kempe as delusional, but that interpretation should be aware of the temporal imperialism that is enacted as a result. The attitude in much of those claims seems to be that the writers of the Middle Ages were children, unaware of the true meaning of their words and of their narratives, and that it is up to us, the adults of history, to tell them what they mean.

In terms of Nederman's broader discussion of toleration, I feel that this means that we should be wary of dismissing the tolerance that was present in medieval Europe, just because it does not look or sound like the tolerance we practice (or sometimes fail to practice) today. Expecting to see ourselves reflected back in the literature of centuries ago seems a much less satisfying intellectual pursuit than tracing the reflections of that same literature in our culture today.

Kempe and Christ

When we read the anti-semitic passages in class today, I was bothered when Kempe says to the Jews, "You cursed Jews, why slay you my Lord Jesus Christ? Slay me rather, and let me go" (140). Doubtless this plea is a strong emotional response to Christ's passion, but it perhaps betrays a serious misunderstanding of Christian theology for Kempe. According to Catholic doctrine and the Bible, Christ had to die for the salvation of the world, and only Christ's death could achieve this. God would only accept Christ's death because Christ lived a sinless life. Kempe, by her own frequent admission, is a sinner, and whatever special grace God has bestowed on her, she is not Christ. Yet, in this passage, she is offering herself as a substitute for Christ. She should know that Christ's death, as horrible as it was in her imagining, was absolutely necessary for salvation. If she really wants the Jews to crucify her instead, is she suggesting that her death will atone for the sins of the world or is she forgetting that if Christ doesn't die, there is no hope for her?

This is not the only place where Kempe tries to be a stand-in for Christ. Throughout the text, she mentions how people malign her, accuse her of being demon-possessed, and being a radical. Christ’s contemporaries spoke similarly of him. Kempe also challenges the religious authorities of her day, just as Christ did. She endured increasing hardships later in life, being abandoned by loved ones and her followers, just as Jesus was. Jesus called his disciples to be like him, and Kempe, like many aspiring saints, is striving to imitate her Lord. But at what point do they stop trying to be like Christ and think they have become equal with him or even surpass him? In Kempe’s case it is difficult to tell, but the fact that she went to such lengths to get her biography written done shows she wanted someone to know of her efforts.

Epileptic and Anorexic

Julius Cesar was an epileptic. There are many evidences about it and there is not any author I know who actually denies it. Of course the Romans did not say that he was epileptic, but said he had a sacred illness that put him in contact with the gods. Julius Cesar probably believed this himself, and it is very probably that epilepsy was one of the reasons to actually increase his self esteem. Nowadays, however, there is not any author who argues that he was actually touched by the gods and that epilepsy is just a modern interpretation of the phenomenon. Of course none of us actually believes in the Roman gods, they are just poetic figures used time to time as metaphors…

In the case of Margerie Kempe, however, her evident anorexia is read as some spiritual other thing. Of course she and her contemporaries read it as some religious fast and put much of spiritual content in it, but, even with its spiritual content, that was anorexia. Nowadays, anorexia is socially encouraged with the name of “diet” and actual diets really become alimentary disorders with enough similarities with Margerie’s disorders. Fasts were also socially encouraged during the Middle Ages, and the line that separated the pious fast from the alimentary disorder was equally thin.

Why we cannot say that Margerie had anorexia in a pious version, just as we say that Cesar had epilepsy in his own Roman version, but epilepsy on the bottom line?

Margery Kempe's Monstrous Otherness

At first I didn't find anything odd about reading a book by a woman in a class about the monstrous and the other. Femininity was a massive point of othering, so of course it makes sense to read something exploring that group. But the more I read of Margery's book, the more clear it becomes that Margery is not really a part of 'that group.' She is not othered just because she is a woman, she is othered even from women by being almost monstrously different.

A large part of what makes Margery 'not quite right' to those whom she writes as her contemporaries is the fact that she does not behave as a woman should. She screams in church, she refuses to sleep with her husband, she goes off traveling, she claims knowledge of God. Some of what she does may even be slightly less weird because she is a woman - we would all be raising our eyebrows a little higher if a man was writing about being wedded to the Godhead. But most of Margery's oddities would be a problem for a man as much as for a women. Pilgrims who want a jolly supper would probably have been just as unfriendly to a man trying to talk about solemn church things all the time, and they probably would have been even less gentle kicking him out of their company. If a man screamed in church, the parishioners would be just as annoyed. If a layman was claiming direct access to God, he would have been dubbed just as much a false Lollard as Margery was.

Margery's experience is not what anyone would call that of a normal or average woman in late medieval England. So if she is not part of an othered group, can she still be an other? Or is it when a definite other cannot be grouped in with others of its ilk that it becomes - as perhaps Margery does - a monster?

Margery the Loud

Something that we touched on in class yesterday was the volume of Margery's demonstrations of devotion through weeping, crying and roaring loudly during church services a dinners. Even though we addressed how this behavior would have seemed jarring in her church and her larger community, I feel like her loudness is especially interesting within the context of the silent Christian women we have encountered in our previous texts.

Silence seems to be a key characteristic of the literary Christian women, beginning with our encounter with Julianna of The Song of Roland. As a Saracen queen, she had a voice and used it to express her anger against her failed gods, but once she is converted, her voice is not heard again. Similarly, when Silence is publicly returned to the realm of women by marrying the king, we as readers are cut off from her thoughts and words. Margery, who seems to want everyone to hear her feelings, seems to be cut from an entirely different cloth.

In writing her autobiography, Margery is obviously speaking to her book's audience, but she is also implicitly arguing for the value of her voice among the faithful. We can think of this as just a "PR campaign for sainthood," which I am sure it at least partially is, but I think that is too narrow an interpretation. She, and many of the other women mystics at the time, are redressing the tradition of silence around their place in Christian discourse.

Even though, if I were part of her fellowship, I would probably also be put off by her constant weeping through dinner, her daring in publicly and with great volume expressing the truth of her connection to God should not be underestimated.