Vengeance in the Middle Ages

Emotion, Religion and Feud

Paul R. Hyams, Susanna A. Throop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754664215
• eBook ISBN: 9781317002468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume aims to balance the traditional literature available on medieval feuding with an exploration of other aspects of vengeance and culture in the Middle Ages. A diverse assortment of interdisciplinary essays from scholars in Europe and North America contest or enlarge traditional approaches to and interpretations of vengeance in the Middle Ages. Each essay attempts to clarify the multifaceted experience of vengeance within a specific medieval context"a particular region, a particular text, a particular social movement. By asking what relationship a distinct factor like authorship or religion has with the concept of vengeance, each author points towards the breadth of meanings of medieval vengeance, and to the heart of the deeper and broader questions that spur scholarly interest in the subject. Geographically, the essays in the volume highlight Western Europe (particularly the Anglo-Norman world), Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. Thematically, the essays are concerned with heroic cultures of vengeance, vengeance as a legal and political tool, Christian justification and expression of vengeance, literature and the distinction between discourse and reality, and the emotions of vengeance. Methodologically, these interdisciplinary studies incorporate tools borrowed from anthropology, the study of emotion, and modern social and literary theories. This volume is aimed at professional scholars and graduate students within the broad field of medieval studies, including the subfields of history, literature, and religious studies, and is intended to inspire further research on medieval vengeance. However, this collection will also prove interesting to non-medievalists interested in the history of emotion, the justification of human conflict, and the concept of feud and its applicability to specific historical periods.

1 “Vengeance is Mine”: Saintly Retribution in Medieval Ireland¹

¹ The quotation in the title is from Deut. 32:35, which begins Mea est ultio et ego retribuam [Vengeance is mine, and I shall exact retribution]. The version of the Biblia Sacra I have used is that available through the University of Chicago’s ARTFL Project Online, at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/public/bibles. Latin translations in this chapter are my own; translations from the vernacular rely in part on those of other scholars. My thanks are owed to the editors of this project, as well as to Ann Dooley, Michael Herren, Andy Orchard, David Klausner, Nicole Lopez-Jantzen and Mark Kowitt for their helpful comments. Any remaining errors are my own.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315548388-2

Máire Johnson

Gerald of Wales, in one of the earliest extant observations concerning the character of Ireland’s saints, wrote in the late twelfth century that Irish holy men and women had a greater penchant for vindictive behavior than their foreign colleagues, a viewpoint that has survived even to the present day.² Lester Little, for example, has stated that Ireland’s saints are often depicted as “matchless champions of the spontaneous, hostile, and efficacious curse” delivered through the vehicle of divinely sanctioned rage.³ The hagiographical dossiers of such icons of Irish Christianity as Patrick, Brigit and Columba certainly portray their holy subjects bringing all manner of punishments down upon those who challenge their authority, sometimes with deadly results. But is the dire quality of their reputation as straightforward as has been assumed? Do the punitive episodes merely represent holy temper tantrums, or is there something more significant at work?

² Topographia Hiberniae 2.83, ed. John J. O’Meara, “Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographia Hibernie: Text of the First Recension,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (hereafter PRIA), 52C (1949), p. 156. For dating, see The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. John O’Meara (Portlaoise, 1952), pp. 14–15. ³ “Anger in Monastic Curses,” in Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998), pp. 28–9.

Numerous approaches have been employed in the study of Ireland’s hagiography, a corpus of surviving texts that span the seventh through fourteenth centuries and are written both in Latin (vitae) and in Irish (bethada). Academic opinion originally saw the genre as the descendant of pagan vernacular lore and saints the inheritors of traits once ascribed to deities or druids, attributing unusual or apparently non-ecclesiastical acts to that same lineage.⁴ Since that time, it has been recognized that a strict definition of Ireland’s literary tradition as “secular” or “ecclesiastical” is misleading at best; the two branches grew side by side in the same monastic medium, and influence between them must be understood as reciprocal rather than unidirectional. Saints are not, then, merely the offspring of saga literature and heirs of whitewashed pagan traditions, but the siblings of those same heroic protagonists with whom they share characteristics.⁵

⁴ Scholars using this approach include Charles Plummer (ed.), Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, 1 (Oxford, 1910), pp. cxxix–clxxxviii, especially xcccii–cxlix, clxiv–vi; Felim Ó Briain, “Saga Themes in Irish Hagiography,” in Séamus Pender (ed.), Essays and Studies Presented to Professor Tadhg Ua Donnchadha (Torna) (Cork, 1947), pp. 33–42; William W. Heist, “Myth and Folklore in the Lives of Irish Saints,” The Centennial Review, 12 (Spring 1968): 181–93; also Heist, “Irish Saints’ Lives, Romance, and Cultural History,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., 6 (1975): 25–40. ⁵ See, for example, Ludwig Bieler, “Hagiography and Romance in Medieval Ireland,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., 6 (1975): 13–24; Joseph Falaky Nagy, “Close Encounters of the Traditional Kind in Medieval Irish Literature,” in Patrick K. Ford (ed.), Celtic Folklore and Christianity (Santa Barbara, 1983), pp. 129–49; Joseph Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (Ithaca, 1997); Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Maynooth, 1990). McCone particularly emphasizes the scriptural roots of vernacular Irish saga.

Many studies of Ireland’s hagiography focus on the abundant wonder-workings of its subjects, and it is among these tales that representations of vengeance are found. The strong roots of Irish miracle stories in both continental and native sources have been demonstrated by several scholars.⁶ Irish hagiographers’ influence has also been shown to have extended outward from Ireland, as their portrayals of cursing Irish saints seemingly altered religious expression in areas settled by Irish missionaries.⁷ Examinations of links between malediction and anger suggest that act and emotion are disconnected in most instances, a separation that defies the assertions of Gerald of Wales that Irish saints were impatient and hasty to pursue retribution.⁸ Furthermore, most curses are theorized to be responses to insult or dishonor, which constitute challenges both to the saint’s authority and to the authority of God himself. Thus curses not only coerce malefactors to turn from sin toward redemption, but also reinforce ecclesiastical rights and define the political relationship between church and secular powers.⁹

⁶ Jean-Michel Picard, “The Marvelous in Irish and Continental Saints’ Lives of the Merovingian Period,” in H.B. Clarke and Mary Brennan (eds), Columbanus and Merovingian Monasticism (Oxford, 1981), pp. 91–103; Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, “Curse and Satire,” Éigse, 21 (1986): 10–15; Dorothy Ann Bray, “Heroic Tradition in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints: A Study in Hagio-Biographical Patterning,” in George MacLennon (ed.), Proceedings of the First North American Congress of Celtic Studies (Ottawa, 1988), pp. 261–71; Clare Stancliffe, “The Miracle Stories in Seventh-Century Irish Saints’ Lives,” in Jacques Fontaine and J.N. Hillgarth (eds), Le Septième Siècle: Changements et Continuités (London, 1992), pp. 87–115; Dorothy Ann Bray, A List of Motifs in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints (Helsinki, 1992); Lisa M. Bitel, “Saints and Angry Neighbors: The Politics of Cursing in Irish Hagiography,” in Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (eds), Monks & Nuns, Saints & Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Ithaca, 2000), pp. 123–50; Dorothy Ann Bray, “Miracles and Wonders in the Composition of the Lives of the Early Irish Saints,” in Jane Cartwright (ed.), Celtic Hagiography and Saints’ Cults (Cardiff, 2003), pp. 136–47. ⁷ Lester K. Little, Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (Ithaca, 1993); see also Little, “Anger in Monastic Curses,” and Bitel, “Saints and Angry Neighbors.” ⁸ Topographia Hiberniae 2.83, O’Meara, “Giraldus Cambrensis in Topographia Hibernie,” p. 156. Note, however, that Little (“Anger in Monastic Curses”) disagrees with the separation of emotion from cursing only in Ireland’s hagiography. ⁹ See Wendy Davies, “Anger and the Celtic Saint,” in Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past, pp. 191–202; Bitel, “Saints and Angry Neighbors”; and Dorothy Ann Bray, “Malediction and Benediction in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints,” Studia Celtica, 36 (2002): 47–58.

The body of scholarship on miracula and maledictions in the saintly biographies of medieval Ireland provides considerable material for scholastic discussion. Despite the attention devoted to cursing, however, light has not been shed on the wider field of hagiographical retribution, of which curses comprise but one element. Moreover, the question of the relationship between holiness and saints’ reprisals has yet to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Study of Vengeance in the Middle Ages
• 1 “Vengeance is Mine”: Saintly Retribution in Medieval Ireland
• 2 The “Fyre of Ire Kyndild” in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches
• 3 Living in Fear of Revenge: Religious Minorities and the Right to Bear Arms in Fifteenth-Century Portugal
• 4 Feudal War in Tenth-Century France
• 5 The Way Vengeance Comes: Rancorous Deeds and Words in the World of Orderic Vitalis
• 6 Verbal and Physical Violence in the Historie of Aurelio and Iabell
• 7 Was There Really Such a Thing as Feud in the High Middle Ages?
• 8 Zeal, Anger and Vengeance: The Emotional Rhetoric of Crusading
• Afterword: Neither Unnatural nor Wholly Negative: The Future of Medieval Vengeance
• Index