The Tempest

I really enjoyed The Tempest. I don't really like to just read Shakespeare, I feel like I have to watch his plays with the book in front of me to really get the most out of them. When I saw this was assigned, I immediately went to Youtube and found a version of the play to watch, and I really enjoyed this performance.

The way the play portrays magic and wizards, or sorcerers, or whatever you'd call Prospero was very interesting. His powers seem limited - he needs his staff, his books, and possibly his "magic cloak" in order to do anything. Furthermore, when he DOES do something magical, it's through the use of a servant - usually Ariel. Ariel seems fairly powerful, able to turn into wind and fire, appear as a harpy, mimic voices, create sounds, etc. Prospero uses this to great effect, but it's still not really him doing it. The one thing Prospero does actually seem to be able to do, to which Caliban attests, is to give people cramps. Malicious, certainly, but not nearly as menacing as the baby-eating witches we've been studying.

I was a bit confused as to exactly what prompted Prospero to forgive Alonso and company of their misdeeds. It seemed to me, from both the text and the version of the play I watched, that the cause was Ariel saying that Gonzalo was crying into his beard. If that's the case, though, then Prospero's intricately-laid plans to bring them to the island alive, keeping the ship intact and all, don't make sense anymore. Eventually I decided it had been his plan all along to forgive Alonso. Then again, his blustering threats throughout the play suddenly don't carry much weight when he reveals his decision to renounce magic, which may just be the whole point. I think the reader/viewer ultimately has to decide that, which plays into the epilogue where he begs the audience for forgiveness.

The Universe is Nuts

So this is pretty late. Sorry! Break threw me off and I only just thought to check, I apologize to anyone who was looking to get their comments in early this weekend.

I found the readings on Julian of Norwich to be uplifting. As a person who's not at all religious, I still couldn't help but admire her devotion and the clarity of her beliefs. I can't imagine what would drive someone to live as an anchorite other than absolute, pure devotion to their religion. I mean I rarely ever come out of my room, but at least I have internet access. I do have to question whether the effects of borderline-solitary confinement on Julian's sanity may have been a factor in her experience of religious visions, but the contents of those visions and the way she presents them make it hard to argue that they don't have value.

Of all the visions we read about, my personal favorite is definitely the hazelnut metaphor. I really like the idea of representing the universe as something very small and precious. Having some knowledge of medieval cosmology, I think this is actually even more impactful to a modern reader, as our understanding of the scale of the universe is so different. The religious implication that it all exists by the love of God is secondary to me, but I still find it a heartwarming thought, and I appreciate the eloquent simplicity with which she presents it. Despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact that Julian's entire world was a small cell and she had no understanding of just how far away the stars were, she managed to present a philosophical perspective on existence that I somehow still find extremely relatable.

I also found Julian's use of Old English really interesting. It gives her a sort of common appeal that might be lost on modern readers unaware of the Norman Conquest (which is sad, but this is what public education does to people). While she was writing 300 years later, I'm going to assume that she was using this terminology in spite of the relatively recent influx of French and Latin words and phrases into the English language. I doubt it was political but it speaks to common English people possibly more than it would to the Norman-descended nobles. It was also fun running into new (or I should say old) words and trying to figure out what they meant. I'm a bit proud of myself for recognizing the word "sely" as being a cognate of "seelie," and Wiktionary even seems to back me up on it. Yay?

And suddenly everything gets really creepy

The excerpts in this week's readings from the Malleus Maleficarum are incredibly disturbing. To me, this witch-hunting handbook is clearly not just the insane rambling of two bloodthirsty religious fanatics (I mean it totally is, it just isn't ALL it is), it's an outline for a clearly defined, meticulously organized system that led to the deaths of countless innocents.

The basis for the Malleus is already established in the readings of the last few weeks. There's already a firm theological and legal basis for the persecution of witches, and people all over Europe, including popes, clearly believe there are untold legions of witches lurking everywhere, conspiring to corrupt Christian civilization. Kramer and Sprenger technically aren't saying anything new here, they're just codifying their own opinions of a fear that's already vastly widespread.

The text itself is full of examples from theologians and court officials from around Germany dealing with the subjects of women, who to the medieval mindset were inferior to men and especially prone to spiritual corruption, and witchcraft. It seems meticulously researched, and even if Kramer and Sprenger made some or all of their examples up, the Malleus presents to the medieval reader what appears to be a scholarly, authoritative, and more importantly, thanks to the Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, papally authorized method of obliterating the perceived scourge of witches from the face of Christian Europe.

Behind the scholarly veneer, though, the text is full of circular logic that provides very little in the way of justice for the falsely accused. For example, accused witches cannot be sentenced to death without a confession of guilt, no matter how much "evidence" is brought against them. Therefore, the accused must be kept imprisoned and tortured for up to a year in order to secure a confession. Even if the accused does not break under months of torture and imprisonment, they are then thrown to the proverbial wolves of the secular courts as an "impenitent heretic." They either confess and the church has them executed, or the secular courts get ahold of them, and, since the secular courts don't necessarily have to deal with the strictures of Church law, things might actually get even worse from there.

This circular logic, though, could easily have seemed sound to the medieval mind. Annihilating witches from this earth in the name of Almighty God was certainly more important than a few innocent human lives. After all, if an innocent was killed due to the system laid out in the Malleus, God would certainly save that person's soul... right?

I find the Malleus so disgusting because it starts on a foundation of pure madness and then proceeds with something a medieval person could easily see as logic and rationality from that point. Kramer and Sprenger didn't start the witch craze, but their contribution to it is so massive and thorough that it's hard not to see them as utterly dominating it.

Witches. Witches EVERYWHERE.

I noticed a few repeating themes in this week's readings. One in particular was the subject of "night rides" in which witches perceive themselves to go traveling across vast distances, accompanied by other witches and a pagan god, usually Diana. Regino of Prum, Burchard of Worms and even Aquinas reference these night rides in almost exactly the same terms. Regino and Burchard seem to refute the possibility, saying they're illusions cast on witches by demons, but Aquinas doesn't comment on whether or not such things actually happen. These texts are only a few centuries apart, with Regino writing first. I have to wonder whether these beliefs in night rides were so widespread, and Christian theological beliefs so consistently aligned against them, that all three writers would have addressed them separately in similar terms, or if they had in fact read each other's works and were committing some kind of theological plagiarism. That said, I doubt plagiarism actually mattered much to medieval theologians - what does a little copy and paste here and there matter so long as it's the word of God?
The other major theme I noticed was impotence. Medieval thinkers spent an awful lot of time dealing with the idea that the infliction of impotence was one of the foremost uses of magic. It's very easy to look at this and think that medieval people were just incapable of accepting that they were having their own set of problems and were trying to cast blame elsewhere, but the sheer amount of thought and argument put into "proving" that it was the work of witches and sorcerers and demons and whatever else suggests to me that there was a very strong belief in these powers. It wasn't that they were casting blame for impotence onto things they invented on the spot. Rather, belief in witches was already so strong that if someone was impotent, it MUST have been a witch's fault. I think this is something totally alien to most modern readers who haven't grown up with that kind of cultural paranoia. The closest thing I can compare it to in modern memory is the Red Scare in the '50s, but I don't think even that approaches the perceived pervasiveness of witchcraft in the medieval mindset.

As a side note, I thought it was funny how light most of Burchard of Worms' suggested punishments seemed to be - when he's specific, it's mostly just bread and water for a few weeks. That said, he's not specific very often. I'd be interested to know exactly when the "appointed days" for penance are, and what exactly that penance was supposed to entail.