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Andrew McCall

Auteur de The Medieval Underworld

6 oeuvres 481 utilisateurs 3 critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Andrew McCall is a writer of popular history who also writes for the advertising industry and television

Œuvres de Andrew McCall

The Medieval Underworld (1979) 463 exemplaires
The French boy (1968) 14 exemplaires
The Mistress (1972) 1 exemplaire
The Ghastly Guest Book (1982) 1 exemplaire

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Godspeed the scofflaws.

The Medieval Underworld is richly sourced and fantastically illustrated (as in fantastical), with woodcuts, details from illuminated manuscripts and ephemera depicting demonic perversion, cleansing conflagrations, terror, wretchedness and debauchery that look like the wellspring of Romanticism and Decadence and all the great Horror motifs.

The view of the Middle Ages as Dark, with no room for doubt, skepticism or innovation, is an enduring fallacy. Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire is still taught in high schools, and Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve won numerous awards. Both books are bullshit. Medieval Catholic totalitarianism is a Renaissance myth. In his introduction, McCall sets the tone for his book:

“But what of course Renaissance man could not see, considering himself a revolutionary, the savior of civilization and of Man’s faith in his own humanity from over a thousand years of retrogression, was that the Middle Ages had in fact been, for all the talk of an Immutable Order, an age of evolution and flux; an age during which ideas and institutions, secular and ecclesiastical, had been developed, adapted and amended—initiated, even, and discarded; an age during which the whole fabric of Western European civilization had, in short, been in a state of continual metamorphosis.”

McCall then sets out to provide the evidence for his assertion. He begins by describing the changing nature of the law (ecclesiastical and secular), struggles over sovereignty and jurisdiction, and the evolution of crime and punishment during the Middle Ages. The power of the Church was never absolute, and the cruelties committed by Christian authorities (no more numerous than abuses by secular authorities) were more the consequences of politics and the administration of increasingly complex societies than they were an expression of the foundational principles of religious doctrine. During the early medieval period, the actual power of the Church in any given barbarian kingdom depended not so much on the claims made at Rome, but on the policy and generosity of the local monarch. Medieval secular law was a mixture of Roman law and Germanic barbarian law, interwoven with Christian dogma. With the help of their Christian advisors, the barbarian rulers came to understand the deeper implications of Roman law both for themselves, as Christian kings, and for their tribesmen, henceforth to be thought of as their subjects (so that gradually the idea of the sovereignty of the law took root). Penitentials, usually composed by monks, had a civilizing influence: not so much as punishment, but as presentation of an example of a force working towards the suppression of violence and the establishment of law and order (rather than eye-for-an-eye tribal rules). By insisting on an obligation of penance, they drew attention to the obligatory nature of secular law; advocating restitution rather than retribution helped promote the idea of an alternative to revenge and reprisals.

In the early medieval period, the Church insinuated itself into pagan practices of determining guilt, from compurgation to ordeal by boiling water, cold water and fire, to judicial duel—all forms of supernatural appeal. Canon law then began to evolve away from ordeal toward inquisitorial procedure (evidence, witnesses, cross-examination) and a reliance on human rather than Divine Judgment. Secular authorities followed suit. If the Church can claim credit for persuading medieval lawyers to put more trust in purely human evidence, however, it must also share the blame for having encouraged the secular use of torture to extract it, writes McCall. Secular authorities, having given up the practice of ordeal once the Church banned priests from participating, pointed to examples of the Holy Office (Inquisition) as a means of justifying torture—fire, garroting, beheadings, breaking on racks and wheels—to obtain confessions and to elicit evidence from witnesses.

By the 12th & 13th c., the royal thirst for money meant that judges were more often inclined to exact fines than to insist on physical penalties laid down by the law. The real watershed, says McCall, came in the latter half of the 13th c., when more and more statutes began to address new offences arising out of the growth of mercantile and manufacturing activities or offences that interfered with the effective maintenance of public order. Convicted persons were then to be imprisoned, though by the late medieval period it was not uncommon to allow people to buy their way out of actually being jailed. (McCall writes that it was seldom difficult for suspected criminals to evade arrest, and there was little to be gained by submitting to the due process of law. An accused person was usually convicted.)

The constant challenge of maintaining public order indicates something besides a submissive public cowering before the awesome power of medieval authority. Once the threat from Muslims, Magyars and Viking had passed, rulers demobilized armies, but let loose the lower ranks of fighting men and the miscellaneous rabble of cooks, foragers, horse-dealers, pimps and other camp followers who had catered to the wants and needs of the military. Inevitably, writes McCall, the reduced demand for these people’s various services led many of them to turn whatever advantages or skills they had to illegal purposes. The growth of commerce stimulated the circulation of more money and made apparent to town dwellers and countrymen alike the enormous wealth that divided poor men from rich men, and the enormous wealth of the Church. Brigands, outlaws and bandits and not a few motley monks and mercenaries turned to the most ready means of survival; disorganized hordes meted out vernacular justice. Chapbook tales and ballads reveal popular assumptions that the troubles of the people were due not to the inadequacy of the system but to the wickedness of the people who were appointed to run it. For those convinced that the Church was more intent upon accumulating riches than it was in fulfilling its spiritual duties or its obligations toward the needy, there was no shortage of populist leaders ranting against the ecclesiastical establishment. Popular movements in 1096, 1183, 1251 and 1348 attracted hysterical religious fanatics, outlaws and criminals; attacked enemies of God and the people, massacred Jews, seized Church property and stoned churchmen who tried to argue with them.

In McCall’s telling, the spread of heresy during the Middle Ages sprang from the efforts of authorities to respond to the dangers of popular revolt and anti-clericalism. The ambitious reform schemes of popes like Gregory VII called for a purified and spiritually revitalized ecclesiastical establishment, but instead awakened expectations which the Church proved incapable of fulfilling. Some local leaders aimed at peacefully reforming the Church, usually by urging clergy and laypeople to follow more closely the examples of the Apostles and the actual words of Scripture. When would-be reformers were rejected by the ecclesiastical establishment, many began to preach against it; McCall provides an excellent review of the Arrians, Montanists, Marcionites, Manicheeans, Cathars, Paulicans, Bogomils, and Waldensians. Some claimed that, since there was no authority in the Gospels for either the sacraments or the existence of Purgatory, then the Church which had invented these lies must be the Congregation of the Devil. The efforts of Pope Urban II to promote peace by encouraging the most restless, unruly and fanatical elements in Western Europe to go East and fight a Holy War against the Infidel had the ironic effect of further disseminating heterodox beliefs, as Crusade survivors returned home under the influence of ideas encountered during the sojourn abroad. Antinomian gnosticism seems to have been transmitted to Western Europe by Sufis active in 12th c. Spain, and Arab commentaries on Aristotle and Plato were behind the mystical neo-Platonist pantheism of Amoury de Bene and his followers at the University of Paris, who were interrogated and forced to recant in 1209 (though their influence lasted decades after). The influx of classical learning from the East also stimulated the production of ‘wicked books’ on subjects such as astrology and alchemy.

The panic of Church officials in the face of heterodox challenges and the subsequent hysteria over witchcraft and sorcery belies the strong reciprocal influence that pantheistic paganism had on the development of medieval Christianity, writes McCall. Not until the late Middle Ages, after a long series of doctrinal skirmishes between the Eastern and Western Churches and the spread of various apostasies did people routinely associate witchcraft and sorcery with heresy and ascribe to heretics the sort of behavior which popular superstition credited to witches (flying through the air at night, consumption of human flesh, orgies, baking the ashes of babies into blasphemous communion bread, kissing the arse of a black cat, etc). And, although both Augustine and Aquinas dwelled at length on the nature of demons (and belief in their existence was a requirement of all Christians), the vernacular sources reveal a healthy cynicism towards official charges of diabolism in the Middle Ages. Many people recognized that charges of devil-worship were frequently made for political purposes, and were skeptical about the part that evil spirits played in day-to-day life. The divergence between official and popular attitudes suggests that the idea of a monolithic Medieval Mind is mostly mythical.

McCall reminds us that people are at their most creative when resisting constraints. The practice of delinquency and dissent is an assertion of liberty against the restrictive energies (Church, State, Men in Suits) that would to suppress the human spirit. The human condition during the European Middle Ages was no different than the human condition anywhere in any other era, though the European imagination took flight in forms and directions peculiar to the times.

In addition to a robust presentation of his theme, McCall mines a trove of fascinating sources. A few highlights:

The 7th c. Irish Canons stipulated that if a man pulled hairs out of a Bishop’s venerable head, then hairs were to be plucked from his own head at a ratio of 12 to 1.

An 8th c. Celtic penitential listed among the capital sins committed by clergy those of pride, envy, vainglory, fornication, anger of longstanding, gluttony, theft, continual drunkenness, effeminacy, sodomy, and worldly sadness.

Just as every object had its allotted place in the Divine Hierarchy, so did all things come to have their own legal status, as a result of which they might be made to answer for their actions in court. Thus were swords or cooking pots which fell from their shelves or hooks, causing damage, brought to trial, and, in 1478, some cockchafer grubs which had wrought havoc in the fields were tried before a court at Basel.

When Henry I began to suspect that his own officials had been issuing clipped coin, he gave the order that all moneyers in the country should, in the 12 days following Christmas 1134, lose their right hand and their testicles.

A celebrated clash between the city police and University of Paris has come to be known as the affair of the Pet-au-Deable (Devil’s Turd), a name it takes from a colossal boundary stone, which, on an autumn day in 1451, some University students dragged away from outside the house of the widow of one of Charles VI’s notaries and re-erected, as a sort of totem around which to frolic and roister, on the Mont St. Hilaire.

When the people of Aquitane complained to Henry V of England that one of his captains had set fire to fields of ripe corn for no other reason than to illuminate a path through the night for his men, the King replied that war without fire was worth nothing, like sausages without mustard.

The revival of trade and towns in the aftermath of the first Crusades also revived organized prostitution. The names of medieval brothel areas were often explicit: in 14th c. London there were Gropencuntlane and Codpiece Alley, which persist today as Grape Street and Coppice Alley. In Paris were rue Trousse-Puteyne, rue Grattecon, and, just outside the town limits, a rue du Poil au Con, where there were to be found prostitutes who refused to comply with a city regulation requiring them to shave their private parts.

In his account of the Black Death of 1348-9, the chronicler Knighton reports that while many Englishmen thought sexual intercourse prevented catching the plague, others actually believed that that the contraction of a venereal disease would work as an antidote: with the result that, once the general terror of the epidemic had subsided, the greater part of the population, from the highest-born noble to the meanest laborer, abandoned itself to wanton and utterly reckless promiscuity.

Even at Venice, a city much criticized for her toleration of the Jews, the fattest citizens of the ghetto were once a year compelled to strip naked and entertain the citizens of the Serene Republic by running a race.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
HectorSwell | 2 autres critiques | May 6, 2018 |
Interesting and horrifying and all in the name of "god". Cool section on sorcery and homosexuals.
 
Signalé
ragwaine | 2 autres critiques | Dec 12, 2006 |
The book explores a way of life which is both extraordinarily modern and yet totally of its period. It looks at medieval times from the point of view of those men and women who either would not or could not conform to the conventions of a society whose insistence upon conformity was obsessive.
 
Signalé
antimuzak | 2 autres critiques | Jun 16, 2006 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
6
Membres
481
Popularité
#51,317
Évaluation
½ 3.4
Critiques
3
ISBN
10
Langues
1

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