For a long time I had no understanding of memes. I still don’t, really, but possibly a bit more than I used to. Whereas before I had a grumpy old man reaction (“Kids these days and their crazy pictures), now I see them as highly condensed, symbolic, quasi-mythic kinds of communication. They contain multiple layers. Archaeologists of the future would almost certainly make many mistakes regarding memes. They would likely begin too literally, but even if they did not, they would lack the immediate cultural context necessary for interpretation.

I have always had great students and occasionally they invite me into their world. One such time, I played Apples to Apples with 5-6 other students. It was both bizarre and enlightening all at once. If the card was “Joyful” and you had an “Ice Cream Sundae” card yourself to put in the pile, one might think that would have a shot at getting picked. Wrong. Something so “straight,” so obviously 1-1 in connection, had no chance.

But neither did pure irony or sarcasm work either. Rather, the answer might be something that had an angular or parallel relationship to the subject. Something like “Ham Sandwich” might work, but not because it was joyful or its opposite, but because it had a very particular association for that particular group. “Ham Sandwich” got chosen because

• One day Bill took a final exam, in which he thought he did ok/meh.
• For lunch after the exam he had a ham sandwich with no mayo or mustard or anything. It was not terrible, but a bit blah, like the exam.
• Linking the exam, which was not joyful, and the sandwich together, well–two negatives make a positive, and people during lunch laughed at the connection.
• Now, 5 months later, “Ham Sandwich” became a phrase, or even a meme, associated with a double-whammy kind of blah, but that makes everyone laugh when said in the right way at the right time.

In other words, their associations were entirely their own, entirely understandable to them all, even with the layers of compressed meaning. When “Ham Sandwich” came up, everyone agreed that card would win. Again, a literal minded future archaeologist might see this and assume we thought ham sandwiches the greatest things around.

My students’ thinking no doubt appears to many of us old folk as odd or newfangled. Actually, their method resembles a lot of traditional thinking, with its layers of meaning not exactly verifiable for the modern mind. Future historians, take note.

Many historians today should take similar note with the past.

One of the more intriguing side cars of medieval history is the legend of Prester John. Otto of Friesing included a letter in his history supposedly from fabulously wealthy Christian king in in India, or perhaps Africa. It begins

1. Prester John, by the power and virtue of God and our lord Jesus Christ, lord of lords, to Emmanuel, governor of the Romans, wishing him health and the extended enjoyment of divine favour.
2. It has been reported to our majesty that you esteem our excellency and that mention [knowledge] of our High One has reached you. And we have learned through our delegate that you should wish to send us some entertainments and trifles [ludicra et iocunda], which would satisfy our righteousness.
3. Of course we are only human, and take it in good faith, and through our delegate we transmit to you some things, for we wish and long to know if, as with us, you hold the true faith and if you, through all things, believe our lord Jesus Christ.
4. While we know ourselves to be mortal, the little Greeks regard you as a god, while we know that you are mortal and subject to human infirmities.
5. Because of the usual munificence of our liberality, if there is anything you should desire for your pleasure, make it known to us through our delegate through a small note of your esteem, and you shall have it for the asking.
6. Receive the hawkweed in our own name and use it for your own sake, because we gladly use your jar of unguent in order that we mutually strengthen and corroborate our bodily strength. And, on account of (our) art, respect and consider our gift.
7. If you should desire to come to our kingdom, we will place you in the greatest and most dignified place in our house, and you will be able to enjoy our abundance, from that which overflows with us, and you should wish to return, you will return possessing riches.
8. Remember your end and you will not sin forever.
9. If you truly wish to know the magnitude and excellence of our Highness and over what lands our power dominates, then know and believe without hesitation that I, Prester John, am lord of lords and surpass, in all riches which are under the heaven, in virtue and in power, all the kings of the wide world. Seventy-two kings are tributaries to us.
10. I am a devout Christian, and everywhere do we defend poor Christians, whom the empire of our clemency rules, and we sustain them with alms.
11. We have vowed to visit the Sepulchre of the Lord with the greatest army, just as it is befitting the glory of our majesty, in order to humble and defeat the enemies of the cross of Christ and to exalt his blessed name.
12. Our magnificence dominates the three Indians, and our land extends from farthest India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests, to the place where the sun rises, and returns by the slopes of the Babylonian desert near the tower of Babel.
13. Seventy-two provinces serve us, of which a few are Christian, and each one of them has its own king, who all are our tributaries.
14. In our country are born and raised elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotami, crocodiles, methagallianarii, cametheternis, thinsieretae, panthers, aurochs, white and red lions, white bears, white merlins, silent cicadas, griffins, tigers, lamas, hyenas, wild oxen, archers, wild men, horned men, fauns satyrs and women of the same kind, pigmies, dog-headed men, giants whose height is forty cubits, one-eyed men, cyclopes, and a bird, which is called the phoenix, and almost all kinds of animals that are under heaven.

It continues past this, including a variety of specific details. Prester John’s pledge to help the west win back Jerusalem from the Turks interests historians particularly. In the early-mid 20th century historians reacted in a silly and superficial way, i.e., look at those dumb, credulous medieval people. Recently some have attempted more understanding, with one such effort surmising that “Prester John” was a well crafted (for medieval times at least) hoax of sorts perpetrated by Nestorian Christian heretics upon the orthodox west in an attempt to weaken them. In an era of fake news, this should make sense to us.

But it seems obvious that more exists to the story. Sir John Mandeville writes of Prester John in his famous travelogue, declaring,

This emperor, Prester John, holds full great land, and hath many full noble cities and good towns in his realm and many great diverse isles and large. For all the country of Ind is devised in isles for the great floods that come from Paradise, that depart all the land in many parts. And also in the sea he hath full many isles. And the best city in the Isle of Pentexoire is Nyse, that is a full royal city and a noble, and full rich.

This Prester John hath under him many kings and many isles and many diverse folk of diverse conditions. And this land is full good and rich, but not so rich as is the land of the great Chan. For the merchants come not thither so commonly for to buy merchandises, as they do in the land of the great Chan, for it is too far to travel to. And on that other part, in the Isle of Cathay, men find all manner thing that is need to man–cloths of gold, of silk, of spicery and all manner avoirdupois. And therefore, albeit that men have greater cheap in the Isle of Prester John, natheles, men dread the long way and the great perils m the sea in those parts.

Mandeville’s account mashes up a variety of details and motifs, and one can’t easily tell always what he seeks to communicate. But surely Mandeville had enough smarts to know that the Prester John of Friesing could not still live, and surely he knew that his readers would know this as well. Maybe he simply tells the story for fun, or we can assume that his Prester John is the heir of the original. More likely, the name “Prester John” served consciously as a stand-in for something, a meme of sorts.

But if one reads a bit more about medieval references to Prester John, we see that they at times referenced him in very specific and concrete ways. Suddenly, for example, “Prester John” nearly morphs into Ghengis Khan:

“…from ancient times, Tartaria was subject to the King of India, and up till that time calmly and peacefully paid him the tribute that was due. When the aforesaid king asked for the customary tribute from them, he also ordered that some of them submit themselves to compulsory service, either in the armies or in work; they began complaining at this offence from the hand of their lord, and [took] counsel whether to simply obey him or to withstand him as much as possible.”

That was when Genghis Khan entered the story, and he, “who seemed [most] sagacious and venerable, gave counsel that they oppose their king’s order.” Then, quote:

“…they conspired against their lord King David, namely the son of once lord and emperor of India, Prester John, and, cunningly plot….”

“…roused by the possibility of shaking off their servitude and obtaining triumph, with a huge number of them departing their own land with bows and arrows and clubs or staffs, strengthened by their more powerful weapons, … they invaded the land of their lord simultaneously from two directions and completely saturated it with an effusion of blood. But King David, hearing of their unexpected coming, and being in no way strong enough to resist them, when he tried to flee from one section of the army, he was prevented and besieged by the other, and at length he was cut to pieces limb by limb, along with his whole family except for one daughter, namely the surviving daughter which Genghis Khan took to wife, and from whom, so it is said, he produced sons.”

We have here a mixing of the precise and contemporary, and perhaps Biblical history, though I make no claim to know whom he meant by King David. But everyone knew Ghengis Khan, who suddenly has become “Prester John.”

I am not sure why they made such associations. But I venture that

• Some may have believed Prester John (PJ) to be an actual, particular person, but many probably did not

• In the various references PJ occupied a place on the fringe geographically, and the fringe is always a slippery place. Hence, sometimes PJ gets described as a Christian, and other times he seems something less than a Christian (and here the interesting link to PJ as an invention of Nestorian heretics takes on an intriguing hue).

• We can speculate, therefore, that PJ served as something of a stand-in for a “Garment of Skin” (Gen. 3:24). Originally God granted these “garments” to Adam and Eve, but they come as a result of sin. A garment of skin functions as something one could use to make one’s way in the world, something powerful, but one must show caution. Such things easily get out of hand.

The concept of “Garments of Skin” has a more theological complexity than I could discuss on this post, or any other post, for that matter. I lack the dexterity and the depth of knowledge. As a start, we can consider these garments buffers between us and the world, as well as a tool to help us deal with the world. It amounts mostly to the same thing. For example, we can consider the internet as one form of such garment. It connects to the world in a way, and.shields from the world in another. Many have noted that conservatives have seemingly made better use of YouTube and other mediums to advance their worldviews than liberals. I would agree, and to the extent that I care about such things, am glad of the fact. But I would urge caution–any medium that subverts so many barriers is inherently not an ally of tradition. One day, the internet will likely turn against conservatives, though for now (Twitter aside), conservatives have their moment.

It seems that medievals thought of Prester John just in this way. The Mongols had tremendous power, and this power, properly directed, might help Christians. But one must ask oneself with a garment of skin . . . “Do you feel in charge?”

I have digressed from my main point, that of how the medievals wrote their histories. To me, Prester John seems something akin to a Ham Sandwich meme, sometimes as a stand-in for something specific, other times as a larger intertextual construct for a particular hope of an outside buffer against the encroaching Moslem world.* Whether I am right or not, I remain convinced that we have to adopt an approach like this if wish to understand medieval histories and texts.

To me we find the key in the idea of elasticity of specificity. Even when talking about Prester John as someone on the fringe of observable reality, the anchor is not a concept but a particular person. “Ham sandwich” can mean many things, but first, it was a ham sandwich.

In his Reflections on the Psalms C.S. Lewis writes,

If Man is finally to know the bodiless, timeless, transcendent Ground of the whole universe not as a mere philosophical abstraction but as the Lord who, despite his transcendence, “is not far from any one of us,” as a an utterly concrete Being (far more concrete than you and I) whom Man can fear, love, address, and “taste,” he must begin far more humbly, far more near to home.  Begin with the local altar, the traditional feast . . . . It is possible that a certain kind of enlightenment can come too soon and too easily.  At that early stage it may not be fruitful to talk of God as a featureless being, a disc like the sun.   

 Since in the end we must come to baptism, the Eucharist, the stable at Bethlehem, the hill at Calvary, and the empty rock tomb, perhaps it is better to begin with circumcision, the Ark, and the Temple.  For “the highest does not exist without the lowest.”   It will not stand, it will not stay.  It will rise, and expand, and finally we lose it in an endless space.  God turns into a remote abstraction.  Rather, the entrance is low, and we must stoop to enter. 

Some look at traditional religion in general, or perhaps Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the Christian world in particular, and see a confusing multiplicity. The Church calendar gets overlaid with the civic calendar, various different feasts, saints, and so on. At one glance it seems unnecessarily complicated, and a threat to true worship. Of course practitioners then and now would not see it that way. For them, as Lewis indicates, without these particular roots, and perhaps even (to the outsider at least) idiosyncrasies, one cannot scale up to the Highest Good, and the Highest Good cannot scale down. Absent all of the particulars, we get left with abstractions, and ultimately, the end of belief. Surely the west gives ample evidence of this over the last few centuries.**

One can start with the mythic Prester John of Friesing and work your way back down to Ghenis Khan, or start with a ham sandwich and work up to something grand about the flip that happens at the end of the world–i.e., two negatives becoming a positive. Either up or down works as a starting point, provided that you can complete the scale.

Dave

*The history of the Mongols bears out the unpredictable, powerful nature of Garments of Skin. Yes, on the one hand they did break Moslem power, in part through a horrifying massacre at Baghdad in 1258. Yet, many Mongols in fact became Moslems and not Christians, and this Mongol “Golden Horde” wrecked havoc on Christian Russia in the 15th century. Handle such garments with extreme care.

**The way I saw the students play Apples to Apples makes me wonder if the west is becoming more medieval, more symbolic or traditional in how it views the world. Of course this alone would say nothing, but other factors seem at work, such as a trend away from liberal transnationalism, the importance of images over text, and so on.

Just like the double-negative flipping things the other way, so too the quick advancement of technology might bring back certain aspects of traditional cultures. Back in ye olden days, a written document had no authority in itself. Its contents needed incarnated, spoken, proclaimed, to be made “real.” Hence, the job of town crier. With AI video deep fakes getting more and more sophisticated, we may stop trusting anything except the actual person physically present.

As often as we may try and manage and control our experience of the world around us, we cannot avoid reality breaking into our lives from time to time.  Our secular age orients itself almost entirely around making our day to day lives workable and enjoyable on a strictly horizontal level.  We have long since abandoned ultimate “vertical” questions as unwieldy and unhelpful towards this end.  But then, the fact of death itself strikes us occasionally with great force.  As we have no common liturgies surrounding death, and no common way to experience loss, death lingers among us like a fog.  So too, the 2016 election in some ways exposed the thin veneer of our “horizontal” happiness, and ever since we have had to try and deal with the unconscious, sometimes darker Jungian aspects of our selves and our body politic.

Like life, history sometimes breaks in on us with sudden and unusual force.

One begins Henry of Huntingdon’s History of the English People:1000-1154 like any other medieval history book, and it reads similarly to other works in this genre.  Henry was nobleman with a good education in the Latin classics and knew Scripture well, and it shows.  He describes the political scene of his time with care and skill, and dances around enough hot-button issues of the day to make scholars wonder about his motives from time to time.  All of this falls well within the range of “normal” history.

But then . . .

On page 48 (Oxford Classics Edition) he drops in this comment when discussing the abrupt death of the rogue King William:

In the year 1100 King William ended his cruel life in a wretched death.  For when he had gloriously, and with historic pomp, held his court at Gloucester at Christmas, at Winchester at Easter [April 1], and in London on Whitsun [Pentecost], he went to hunt in the New Forest on 2 August. There Walter Tirel, aiming at a stag, accidentally hit the king with an arrow.  The king was struck in the heart, and fell without uttering a word.  A little earlier blood was seen to bubble up from the ground in Berkshire.

William was rightly cut off in the midst of his injustice.  For in himself, and because of the counsels of wicked men, whom he invariably chose, he was more evil to his people than any man, and most evil to himself . . .

“A little earlier blood was seen to bubble up . . . ”  What are we to make of this?  Yes, Henry wants to make a theological point, and some may feel the temptation to explain it away as allegorizing.  But he also carefully mentions specific dates and specific places, and he does not write in a “Once upon a time,” fashion. Well, perhaps we could sweep this oddity under the rug as scribal error or flight of fancy.  The casual, offhand nature of his remark, however, makes this an unlikely choice.

And then, a bit later in the book (p. 83):

In this year [1144], Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville harassed the king exceedingly, and in everything he did basked in vainglory.  But in the month of August the splendor of God showed forth a miracle worthy of His justice.  For He inflicted similar punishments on men who forcibly removed two monks and turned God’s churches into castles.  Robert Marmion–a warlike and evil man–had carried this out in the church of Coventry, and Geoffrey, as I have already said, perpetrated the same crime in Ramsey.  Robert Marmion, attacking his enemies in front of the monastery itself, was the only man killed, although he stood in the midst of a huge squadron.  As an excommunicate, he is being devoured by eternal death.

In the same way Earl Geoffrey, among the ranks of his own . . . was struck by an arrow from a foot-soldier.  He scoffed at the wound, but after a few days died of this injury, excommunicate.  See how the vengeance of God . . . is made known throughout the ages, and is executed in the same way for the same crime!  While the church in Ramsey was being held as a castle [by the Earl] blood bubbled out of the walls of the church and the adjoining cloister, clearly demonstrating the divine wrath and prophesying the destruction of the wrong-doers.  Many witnessed this, and I myself saw it with my own eyes.

Though Henry has theological points to make, this in no way should blunt the force of his report.  He mentions himself along with others as eyewitnesses to this additional sighting of blood.  Unless we wish to say he lied outright twice, we must consider whether our conception of how God, man, and nature interact needs abruptly altered.

Marc Bloch rightly deserves his reputation as one of the great scholars of the feudal era.  He has a rare knack for simply dealing with the texts before him without much evident preconception.   His book, The Royal Touch offers just such another slap of cold water, as he reminds us of the copious textual evidence for the power medieval kings possessed, at least at certain times, to heal their subjects.  Bloch’s Wikipedia page describes him as a “thoroughly modern” historian in outlook, and as he was Jewish, we would assume he has no particular theological axe to grind.  This makes his presentation all the more striking.

We may surmise that the medievals lived in an “age of faith” which made them credulous.*  Bloch will not allow this.  Medieval people may have had different standards of what constituted proof, but they argued over the evidence.  He cites William of Malmsbury’s (a respected historian in his own right) account of the miracles of St. Edward the Confessor:

But now to speak of the miracles of St. Edward.  A young woman had married a man but had no children, and the humors gathered about her neck, she contracted a sore disorder.  Admonished in a dream to the have the affected parts washed by King Edward himself, she entered the palace and the king did as she wished.  Joyous health followed his healing hand–the lurid skin opened so that worms flowed out with the putrid matter, so that the tumor subsided.  Nothing of the original wound could be found after many weeks, and she soon gave birth to twins. She increased the admiration of Edward’s holiness.

A certain man, blind, persisted in walking around the palace, certain that he should be cured if he could touch his eyes with water in which Edward had washed.  This was related to Edward, who looked angrily upon the man, confessing himself sinner, and that the works of holy men did not belong to him.

But his servants tried the experiment when he was ignorant of it, praying in church.  They gave some water to the blind man, upon which the darkness fled from him and his eyes filled with light.  

That you may know the perfect virtue of this prince, I will excite your wonder still more.  Wulwin, surnamed Spillecorn, one day cut wood and fell blind as a result, perhaps because of his excessive sleep after his labors.  He was admonished in a dream to go round to 87 churches, and earnestly entreat relief from his blindness from the saints.

At last he came to the king’s court, where he remained for a long time, being held back by the king’s men.  Finally he received admittance, whom after he had heard the dream, answered mildly, “By my lady St. Mary, I shall be truly grateful, if God, through my means, shall choose to take pity upon you.”  Though with no confidence in himself with respect to miracles, yet he placed his hand, dipped in water, on the blind man.

In a moment blood flowed from his eyes and the man restored to sight, cried, “I see you O king, I see you!”  In this recovered state he was given charge of the royal castle at Windsor, for that is where his cure was effected.  He held this job many years, having outlived his restorer.

In our day, some have used the miracles of King Edward to support a false idea.  They have claimed that the king possessed this power to heal illness, not by virtue of his holiness, but by hereditary title, as a privilege of the royal line.

Bloch comments, that

This is a doubly valuable observation, because it informs us of both William’s ideas and of the very different ones held by his contemporaries.  They disagreed about why he had power to heal, but not about the fact that he did heal.

So this text (and there are others like it) will not leave us the “out” they lacked critical thought.

Eyewitness accounts to miracles like this date back many centuries, with Gregory of Tours (another respected historian) perhaps with the first written account of this phenomena in ca. A.D. 540:

It was commonly related among the faithful that a certain woman whose son lay stretched out upon a bed of pain, suffering from fever, made her way through the crowd from behind the king, and without his noticing it, managed to pull off part of the fringe of the royal cloak.  She soaked it in water, and then gave this water to her son to drink.

The fever immediately abated, and the disease was cured.  

For my part, I do not doubt this matter.  For indeed I have often seen demons who inhabit the bodies of those possessed cry out in the name of the king, and being unmasked by the virtue proceeding from him, confess their crimes.

Bloch considers many important questions in the book.  One major topic of discussion and disagreement among medieval chroniclers had to do with whether or not

• The power to heal came exclusively from the dignity and chrism of the office itself, or
• If such grace to heal required personal sanctity in addition to the chrism of kingship.

But again, no debate existed as to whether or not such healings in fact took place.

Bloch also wonders why such miracles seem mostly confined the French and English monarchies.  Perhaps it happened elsewhere, but we have little textual evidence to support it.  We might also plausibly wonder why it reports of such miracles slowed considerably during the 17th century and cease practically altogether in the 18th.

For that matter, we not see blood bubble up from the ground anymore either.

Such questions are certainly uncomfortable, but we should not ignore them.  Amidst its sometime “one thing after another” tedium, History can occasionally wake us up and show us a different world.

Dave

*”Stupid” is a less polite, but more accurate description of what those that use this word really mean in such contexts.