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afatlotofchance · 1 year

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7 deadly sins: All about gluttony (2)

WARNING: I get quite darker with this post. Mentions of murder, rape, incest, and eating disorders await! Those who have a slob kink or a corruption kink will certainly be pleased

III) Some context and consequences, to better explain gluttony

We talked about what gluttony was in essence, we talked about the most commonly shared classification of gluttony and its implications, but there is still a lot to add to fully understand and comprehend gluttony as it was conceived and perceived for centuries and centuries. So here is a little selection of various points:

1) The sin of gluttony was a criticism of Roman society. If you do not know, before the Roman Empire became the first Christian Empire and helped spread the religion throughout Europe and Northern Africa, the Romans were the biggest persecutors of Christians, and they were perceived by the early Church as their number 1 enemy. Heck, it is thanks to the Romans that Jesus got crucified! And so, the early list of the seven deadly sins (which were eight before) was designed to actually criticize and condemn the Roman lifestyle and morals. Gluttony is the most obvious of these attacks, because the Christians were actually demonizing the Romans’ habit of lavish feast and banquets, regularly held in upper classes and as a typical social entertainment – the famous “orgies” we know today. The Romans had cultivated a true aesthetic of the excess, and this was what the original Roman orgy was about – to have the best party of all times, you need to eat a lot, and drink a lot, and have sex a lot. The Christians were especially shocked by one habit of the Romans, something that heavily influenced the “overeating” part of gluttony: the vomitorium. To keep having their orgies, the Romans invented this small room or area in mansions, where the guests of feasts and banquets, feelings too stuffed or too full, went to make themselves vomit, all so they could return to the table and keep eating with an empty stomach!

Small historical edit: I checked back and the “vomitorium” is actually a legend propagated by Christians themselves. Don’t get me wrong – Romans did purge themselves and forced themselves to vomit during their orgies and banquets so they could eat and drink more, this is historically attested. But the “vomitorium” wasn’t a room in the house dedicated to vomiting, unlike what the Christian historians said – in truth it was just an entryway of the house, metaphorically “vomiting” the guests in the main room.

2) Speaking of orgies, Christianity strongly believed that Gluttony and Lust were two deadly sins that went together hand in hand. For Christian thinkers, gluttony always led to lust – again the influence of the Roman orgies, that started as sickening banquets and often turned into sex parties, is felt. Christians classified both gluttony and lust into the “material” sins like greed, as opposed to spiritual ones like anger, pride or envy. But they sub-classified these two as the “sins of the flesh” since both were tied to the body. Even more, theologians and moralist had clearly noticed how these sins “seated” in parts next to each other: gluttony’s stomach and belly area being located right above the genitalia, the “underbelly”, the realm of lust. So it was thought that gluttony always led to lust – and remember when I said the Church had a thing against sauces and spices? Well they truly believed sauces and spices were one of the reasons gluttony turned into lust, since they were convinced (based on the aphrodisiac property of some spices) that sauces and spices were by nature designed to excite and inflame the sexual senses and desires.

3) Tying back into the previous topics: gluttony being related to the Roman orgies, gluttony being thought to lead to lustful and lecherous behavior, gluttony making a man into a beast walking on all fours and rolling under the table… This was being gluttony wasn’t just about food – it was also about alcohol! Drunkards were a type of gluttony sinners, and the excess of alcohol was just as condemned as the excess of food. In fact, it is quite interesting to see how gluttony “evolved” depending on which social class you wanted to mock or criticize: when you did a caricature of the glutton as a rich lord, wealthy merchant or fancy bourgeois, it was all about food (especially since the rich were accused of taking away the food of the poor and the needy below them), but when the peasant, the villager, the low-class man was accused of gluttony, it was him being a drunk – since they were too poor to have lavish feasts, and everybody knows the age-old stereotype of the lower class alcoholic.

4) Gluttony was thought to make you stupid. I talked before of the various “endings” of the “gluttony game”, ranging from bestial behavior to lustfulness. But one recurring belief was that gluttony actually destroyed or remove a person’s intelligence, and made them idiots. Saint Thomas of Aquinas (him again) listed the “five flaws” born out of gluttony as: witless joy, buffoonery, impurity, jabbering, and stupidity of mind. Beyond impurity, all these flaws were basically different ways to say: being a glutton will make you idiotic. Sure, eating and drinking will make you joyful and merry – but it will be the superficial joyful stupor of being full and drunk, not the true, deep, philosophical happiness of living and existing that Christianity keeps searching for. By spending your time eating and drinking, you remove time from more intellectual activities such as reading or studying. Only concerned with satisfying yourself through your body functions and through culinary pleasures, not developing any social existence or craft whatsoever, living in a superficial, temporary and instant happiness that is not true or lasting (since it stops by the next hunger pang), you slowly lose your wit, your caution, your prudence, you stop concerning yourself with higher subjects or topics, you get accustom to acting silly or stupidly due to the weight of all this food on your body and mind, or due to the drunkenness becoming your by-default state of being, and basically for the Christian theologian you become a brainless, smiling blob. A “cow-like stupor” to take back the words of a fellow kink writer. Eating too much and drinking too much makes your thoughts rusty, your movements clumsy, removes reasonable boundaries and cautions (think of the drunk who starts talking about things he shouldn’t talk or spill secrets he shouldn’t spill), and encourages a form of pure disorder – the “buffoonery”, where nobody waits for anything, nobody cares for anything, and everybody just act like drunk clowns and fools in a big sloppy feast.

A sloppy and dirty feast – because as I said, “impurity” is also there. And impurity is here to understand in the sense of “dirtying” and “soiling”. Thomas of Aquinas raises up the topic of making oneself vomit – either unconsciously, just as the result of eating or drinking too much, either purposefully, to have more room to eat afterward. For him this is the ultimate symbol of gluttony, as the glutton literally soils himself to be able to eat even more, abandoning his health and dignity in the process (as you can see, the early Church was actually an anti-bulimia militant). But more generally, it was all related to the “bestiality” of gluttony and gluttony as a “sin of the flesh” – theologians and moralists disliked gluttony because it reduced the human to a mere body, to a mere set of organ, to a digestive track. The glutton, by spending his time drinking and eating, turned himself into a poop-and-piss machine, because all this food had to come out one way or another. It reduced the man to the bodily functions of ingesting and expelling, and it multiplied all the dirty substances a body can produce: urine, feces, saliva… I hear all those who have a “slob” kink screaming in joy in the background, but yes, this was the horrible picture of gluttony for these moralists. I think the video game “Dante’s Inferno” translated this Christian vision of gluttony perfectly well, taking back the idea that this sin turned a human being into a walking digestive system to decorate the level of Hell of gluttony: their idea of the third circle of Hell was a gigantic stomach filled with gastric acid, hungry maws gnawing, tapeworms vomiting everywhere, puddles of feces and even anuses constantly expelling nauseous gazes and fiery farts…

5) While gluttony is a strong criticism of the Roman culture, its roots are to be found in the philosophies and morals of Ancient Greece, more specifically in the system of vices and virtues codified by Greek philosophers such as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. Aristotle had a system of virtues and vices in three parts: for each domain of the human existence (honor, social conduct, shame, fear) Aristotle considered that there were two vices corresponding to the two extremes of this domain (too much or too little), and one virtue that was the just middle. He considered what Christians called lust and gluttony to be part of the same field of action: the one of “pleasure”, where the first of the two vice was an excess of pleasure – licentiousness, and pure, undiluted self-interest. A selfish debauchery where you are only concerned with your earthly pleasures, such as eating, drinking, having sex… Its twin vice being a lack of pleasure, what is often translated as “indifference” or “insensibility”, a complete rejection and ignorance of the things that physically make life enjoyable and nice. The virtue, right in the middle of the twin vices, was temperance. [And it is very interesting because, as we will see in the next part, the Church itself while fighting licentiousness was often guilty of the vice of insensibility, at least by Ancient Greek ethics). Plato also had some things to say about gluttony: more precisely he explained that eating and drinking in itself was fine. Plato held in his belief that when a man ate a good meal, and drank some wine, it made him more sociable and more thoughtful – as in, it encouraged conversation, it encouraged sharing, discussing and debating, it allowed the thought to be sharper as you lost some of your shyness or inhibitions that wouldn’t have allowed you to say the truth or interesting things… But Plato also pointed out that when a man ate too much, and drank too much, this was where everything was spoiled – when a man made himself heavy, nauseous and drunk, his speech became disorganized and incoherent, his thoughts blurry and foggy, and all he did was fall under the table and roll there like a mindless beast. A bit of food and wine sharpens the wit ; too much food and wine blunts the mind.

6) Gluttony might be the worst of all the sins! At least according to some theologians. You see, there is an Original Sin in the Christian religion, the sin that introduced evil into the world and that doomed humanity: Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. And there is a VERY big debate in the Christian religion as to what exactly is the nature of this original sin. For some it is the sin of pride (which is classified as the king and roots of all other sins), for others the original sin was rather disobedience – but there is a firm position and a large group of theologians that rather claimed the Original Sin was the sin of gluttony, since it was about eating a fruit… This interpretation did not really stick, but it exists, and so if you ever want to include gluttony as a theme in whatever fiction you want to write, you can imagine it as the original sin that doomed humanity if you wish it so, or at the first and oldest of the seven deadly sins!

In fact, there is an English legend that does depict gluttony (in its drunkenness form) as one of the worst sins of all: it is an obscure medieval legend surrounding the figure of saint John of Beverley. According to this tale, before John was a saint, when he was still a regular man, he met the devil and the devil forced him to choose between three sins he offered him: drunkenness, rape and murder. John thought he could trick the devil and so instead of becoming a rapist or a murderer, he chose to be a drunkard, thinking it would be the lesser of the sins. But he didn’t know that gluttony always led to lust and rage… He ended up in such a drunk stupor and such a drunk state that one day, when returning to his bedroom, he entered the wrong room, and found in what he thought to be his bed a woman asleep… Overtaken by lust, John forced himself upon the woman, and when another man entered the room to stop him, John killed him in a drunken rage. Only once the fumes of alcohol had dissipated did he realize he had raped his mother and killed his father… There is a less Oedipian variation of this legend, where the victim of both John’s rape and murder is actually his own sister – but the message is the same. Gluttony might look like a lesser sin, but it always leads to darker and more dire consequences.

IV) Gluttony, through religion and society

As I said above, gluttony is a very social sin – and so to fully understand it, we must understand how it impacted or was influenced by the way Christianity lived and existed, and the way medieval society organized itself. Because back in those days, religion and society made one.

1) Medieval Christian society was suffering from a massive eating disorder. This tongue-in-cheek affirmation actually reflects something very true: the way the medieval European society had organized itself, based on the religious principles of Christianity (Catholicism to be precise), created a cycle of under-eating and over-eating which, in light of the theologians’ view of gluttony, allows one to understand the particular relationship these people had towards food.

The Christian year had two big forty-days period during it, that were fasting periods, where all the Christians had to abandon meat, eggs and other rich products, limit their food intake, reduce their meals, and live a very dry and hungry life. The most famous of those two periods, because it is still practiced today, is of course Lent, which is still known as the “grim and sad part of the Christian year”, and the other is, quite surprisingly, the Advent. Today we think of the Advent calendar with its chocolates, but in older times, the Advent was just a wintery Lent. Officially, these forty-days of fasting existed to commemorate the sacrifice and suffering of Christ and affiliated characters, and to prepare the Christians for the big religious holidays that came afterward (Christmas for the Advent, the Holy Week/Easter for Lent) – but historians and sociologist know today that unofficially, these two-fasting corresponded to the most infertile and hungrier part of the year, where food was very scarce and famines were most likely to explode. So it was actually kind of a religious excuse for the lack of food due to the poor climate and bad harvests.

But in return, each of these fasting periods was cornered by celebrations of overeating, where everybody stuffed their face as much as they could – people stuffed their gut before undergoing the fasting because they knew it was their last time eating good things, and then people busted their bellies once the restrictions were over to celebrate the return to “normal”. The Church of course heavily criticized and complained about these explosions of gluttony, but they realized it was kind of needed for people to swallow the pills of Lent and Advent. As a result, we had the apparition of Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”, the last day of eating meat and fat before Lent, where people guzzled down as much meat and butter and fried stuff as they could, while Easter at the end of Lent was all about a large meal with multiple course, beautiful roasts, and lots of eggs and chocolate. Similarly, the fasting of the Advent was part of why Christmas became a jolly and merry feast where people stuffed themselves as much as the animals they ate, and got severely drunk. As for the last of the “four corners”, it would be Saint Martin’s Day, a Christian feast day that fell in the days preceding the beginning of the Advent and which was known as “The Day of the Pig”, since each farm and household had a pig they had fattened up throughout the year, and on Martin’s Day it was time to kill the pig and turn him into all sorts of meats and delicatessen – a killing that was celebrated by enormous banquets and large meals of ribs, sausages, and other forms of pig meat. So, to summarize it all, the Christian medieval society kept oscillating between belly-bursting festivals and monthly strict diets, switching very brutally between gluttony and hunger.

2) Beyond these big events of the calendar, the regular Christian medieval life was very… problematic when it came to food, and encouraged some strange behaviors.

Many people think that of the three Religions of the Book, Christianity is the easiest when it comes to food, due to lacking the strict alimentary restrictions of Judaism and Islam. But it wasn’t always like that, and Christianity used to be very big on limiting and forbidding food. As you might or might not know, since Christianity demonized gluttony and made of temperance a virtue, for it the practice of fasting was a good and holy thing. Before great religious rituals or important holidays, people underwent some fasting to purify themselves. You were forbidden to eat or drink before mass, so that the ritual wouldn’t be “soiled”. Priests and monks and men of the Church limited their food intake, regularized their meals and did frequent fasting to keep their mind clear and their thoughts sharp. Fasting was also a common penance after confessing a sin – it was a way to clean one’s soul for whatever petty or venial evil you committed. This was tied to specific religious bans on certain foods – you might have heard of how up until a very recent day, Christians did not eat meat on Fridays, rather going for fish due to religious reasons. The ban of meat on Fridays was a very big thing in medieval societies, so much that there were big religious debates about what kind of animal you could and could not eat in Fridays (for example, powerful lords managed to tweak the religious rule by convincing churchmen to claim that swans were not actually true birds, and rather counted as fishes due to living in the water – so that Christians could still eat some meat on Friday). During the Renaissance, as cooking became an art and chefs were recognized as artists, a new trick developed itself: the disguising and sculpting of food. For example, some chefs cooked and reshaped fishes into the shape of a ham or a roast, so that nobles and aristocrats could still have the illusion of eating meat on Fridays.

I know, I know – all these peculiar food obsessions and picky eating are literally the kind of gluttony I described at the very beginning of my last post, the people who are obsessed with limiting their quantities and measuring their portions… It was! But in the Middle Ages it was thought to be a good and virtuous behavior, and we had to wait for our modern times for people to realize that maybe it was just as obsessive and unhealthy as the overeating gluttony. And this unhealthiness notably showed up in the Church itself…

3) You see, originally monks and priests, in the early Church, were really, REALLY hating gluttony’s guts. Being a man of the Church was basically starving yourself constantly.

The first monk who created the list of the seven deadly sins, Evagrius Ponticus, was part of a community that lived in the desert, far away from fields, farms or cities, isolating themselves in a dry and arid land purposefully to find God. This reduced them to a very poor and lacking life – and Evagrius based his original list of vices based on the flaws he noticed among his fellow desert-monks. Gluttony was then a big problem because these communities purposefully secluded themselves in a life with limited rations of food, and so whenever one monk hogged it all to himself, he condemned the others to starve.

For a very long time, the Church was so intensely decided to fight off gluttony they want to the extreme of declaring that merely enjoying food was bad! Yep, they were convinced that (just like with sex) if you felt the slightest pleasure or joy when eating, you were a sinner doomed to hell. Eating (again, just like sex) was supposed to be a body function like breathing, and thus not supposed to be enjoyed. Eating was supposed to be merely to survive, it wasn’t supposed to be a game, an entertainment or a passion. For these fanatics, the pleasure of eating was in itself a sin of gluttony, and food had to be swallowed, not tasted, eaten but not enjoyed. Saint Augustin for example (yet another big authority on the deadly sins) held this belief, that finding pleasure in food was an insult or offense to God since (in his very warped view), one should only find pleasure in God and nothing else.

This resulted in extremely strict table etiquette in monasteries – for example in some places you were ordered to chew your food a given amount of time before swallowing it to avoid yourself becoming too “fancy” when eating. In many orders you only had two meals a day, in the morning and evening, with a ban on all meat (or just the meat of four-legged animals), and an interdiction to speak during the mealtime. In order to avoid those harsh restrictions, monks found a ruse, especially those of the Saint Benedict order, that created in their monasteries a special room called the “misericord”, a room inside the religious building that was thought to represent and embody, the outside, secular, non-religious world. As a result, since the food restrictions were only supposed to be applied INSIDE the monastery, the monks could go in this room to stuff their face and eat the forbidden food, since this room was technically “outside” of the building.

Of course this rejection of food did cause a problem to all those church men and friars when they were invited to a feast or a banquet by a lord, king or nobleman, since they were forced to eat, it was the rule of hospitality – if you rejected your host’s food, you insulted him… Saint Francis of Assisi, who founded the mendicant order (begging friars) of the Franciscan, was especially concerned with this, since his entire religious model was based on depending on the charity and generosity of others, and when the others wanted to thank you with large, fatty, heavy meals, it was the road to gluttony… So he invented the solution of carrying with him a bag of ash everywhere, so that when he (or his brothers) were given a meal too rich for them, they would sprinkle the ashes on top. Like that they could eat everything… But without enjoying it! Because again, the Church has a massive obsession with just not enjoying food. This was the early times of the Church and the Middle Ages, when monks and priest were basically walking colorless skeletons… The perfect image of Lent. In fact, this was something very specific to monks: “the perpetual Lent”. Monks were forced into an eternal state of Lent, which meant they could never in their life eat things such as meat or butter.

Things changed when we reached the late Middle Ages! Things changed a LOT. On one side, the Church became more lenient towards food stuff. The eternal Lent vow was removed, so that monks and priests could eat meat and fatty products. The Pope Innocent XI asserted that no, enjoying food was NOT a sin, that it was natural to enjoy food, and that it was impossible to eat without some sort of pleasure – and that saints like Augustin might have been a bit too fanatical. Plus, if food was placed on Earth by God, and if God created our bodies so we had to eat, and if God organized things so that we would enjoy food, it doesn’t make sense – and is almost heretical – to believe enjoying food as God planned would be insulting God… Innocent clarified that it was normal to feel pleasure and joy when eating good and tasty food, and that the real sin derived from when people enjoyed food that was not good, pleasant or morally acceptable – and that similarly, meals were to be enjoyed, and only became a sin if you partake with enthusiasm in a “wrong” meal (organized for the wrong reasons, at indecent times, etc…).

Finally, the Church became filthy rich, as they became vast land-owners, turned into merchants (since monasteries were farms and craftsmen shop), seated with lords and noblemen in their castle, and imposed taxes left and right. So, less food restrictions, their boss telling them it as okay to enjoy eating, and a new wave of riches… The “fat monk” comes in. This very famous and widespread cliché of the monk as a fat drunkard was a stereotype spread by the very literature and arts of the late Middle Ages, but it was because indeed monasteries started to become embodiments of gluttony, as the monks started to feast and party on all the good food they had, and since all they did all long was sit around, pray and read, all this excess of wine and food quickly went to their waistline. It was actually part of a wider phenomenon where the Church through corruption became its own antithesis, since monasteries also started to have monks inviting women or prostitutes in, and the higher-ups of the Church being bought with money. In fact, it was this burst of gluttony, lust and greed that was part of the Reformation and the Protestants splitting from the decadent Catholic church: Luther criticized the theologians that had turned into “theologastrists”, worshippers of their own belly who wouldn’t recognize Lent even if it hit them in the face, and who celebrated masses in their kitchen.

4) Another example of how the early extremes of “sacred starvation” were VERY unhealthy, and it is a good thing they changed, is the case of a few saints, female saints, known today as the “Holy Anorexics”. Back then, these women were heralded as saints for taking asceticism to its most extreme, but today we can look back and identify all the symptoms of anorexia, that religion wrongfully glorified. You can find it under the term “Anorexia mirabilis”: it was this firm belief by young girls and women that by starving themselves they could share and honor the suffering of the Christ, and the practice of creating hunger-induced hallucinations to have visions of the “glory of God”. The most famous of those “anorexic saints” was Catherine of Siena, who rejected all forms of food to stay pure, only ate what was given to her at the Eucharist, refused to obey her superior’s orders to eat (since they saw she was getting ill and told her she was going too far), and even induced vomiting with a twig. This was the extremes the fear of gluttony could bring one to.

And this allows me to fall back on a fascinating parallel: the destruction of one’s body. This is one of the argument that the Church raised against the sin of gluttony, that one of its nasty effects was the sickening, soiling and destruction of the body, which is supposed to be a gift of God and a thing one should take care of. Nausea, digestive problems, diarrhea, gout, obesity, indigestions, heartburns, heart and liver diseases, were all condemned as the “evils” and “diseases” of gluttony by religious men and doctors alike. This was one of the warnings against gluttony: do not keep on this path, or you’ll end up in a bloated, sick and painful body. But in a paradoxical way, the destruction of the body was also the argument that served to destroy and oppose the opposite extreme the Church went to. Continuing with the topic of the “holy anorexics”, they were very divisive cases because very often they became very obviously sick, and by their stern refusal of eating they doomed themselves to die. While some glorified them as “saints”, another part of the Church rather condemned them as doing the exact same thing gluttons did with their body, ruining it and self-harming it due to an obsession with food. In fact, in the Renaissance, there was a group of theologians that created a specific sub-type of gluttony focused on phenomena such as this “holy anorexia”.

It is a lesser, not-well-known type of gluttony known as “spiritual gluttony”. It might seem very abstract for non-religious people, because its official definition is “seeking in exaggerated and obsessive ways the pleasure of God and the comforts of God, the same way gluttons seek obsessively and exaggeratedly the pleasures of food and the comforts of meals”. What does it mean? In practice it means for example – accumulating fasts and keep fasting despite your religious superior or religious authority’s orders of stopping, because it is clearly bad for your body. It can also mean, keep accumulating penances, even when you don’t need it anymore, just for the perceived pleasure of “purifying” yourself through them. It can also be translated as, for example, continuously praying and praying so much you start ignoring your actual job or your other duties; or, reading so much religious texts and studying so much religious topics you neglect your family, your friends or the human/social aspect of your life. Or growing an addiction to things such as confession, never getting enough and constantly getting confessed. This is very interesting because it shows that the Church itself, through time, ended up recognizing that gluttony could exist outside of food and drinks, under the shape of forceful and obsessive accumulations and addictions to pleasurable and comforting things. Because it is the very essence of gluttony: self-pleasure, self-comfort, but taken to such a point, such an extreme, that the pleasure becomes nauseating and the comfort harmful or wasteful.

5) More of a trivia than anything else, despite the early Church’s hatred of food and eating, the New Testament (aka the purely Christian part of the Bible) is notorious for being filled with banquets scenes and descriptions. Some people go as far as call the Gospels “the books where people eat all the time”, and Jesus himself is noted to take part in a lot of those feasts. There’s the Wedding at Cana where the Christ turns the water into wine, there’s the feast at Zaccheus’ house to which the Christ participates, and there’s of course the miracle of the multiplication of breads and fishes to feed the crowd… But, as theologians observed, in the last example, despite Jesus summoning enough food to leave an entire crowd satisfied, there are still leftovers once everyone’s hunger is satisfied, and people do not force themselves to continue eating. The crowd eats its fill, enough to not be hungry anymore, but doesn’t just devour everything gluttonously. Heck, the first temptation Satan uses against the Christ when he spends forty days in the desert (the forty days commemorated by Lent), is the temptation of food, as Satan suggests Jesus could just turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger – showing that Jesus was a guy who could be won over by food.

Theologians did use stories and tales from the Bible to illustrate the sin of gluttony – but they usually did so by taking elements of the Ancient Testament, not the New one. The most famous “gluttony stories” of the Bible are Esau selling his birthright for a dish of lentils, Holofernes’s love for drinking being used against him by Judith, and the drunkenness of Noah which led to him humiliating himself and then cursing his own children. Given we are on a kink topic, I will also mention a fascinating secondary character of the Ancient Testament, which also embodies gluttony: king Eglon, who was a notorious glutton only living for eating, shitting, and then eating some more, and renowned as massively obese. When he was killed by a murderer who plunged his sword inside his belly, the sword was literally sucked up in the fat of the king, his murderer unable to retrieve it – but this also made the weapon of the crime disappear. And the death of the king wasn’t even noticed for some times, as his servants mistook the position and behavior of his dead body, hunched over his chair, for their king relieving himself as he so often did…

#seven deadly sins #gluttony #christianity #history of christian #christian theology #medieval society #medieval calendar #greek philosophy #biblical stories #eating disorders #vices

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peacemore-springs · 2 months

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What Is A Bandit From The Perspective of A Medieval Church Epoch?

Let’s delve into the intriguing figures of Conrad Torso and Johannes:

Conrad Torso:

Conrad Torso was a self-appointed inquisitor in thirteenth-century Germany.

He gained notoriety for his role in identifying heretics based on their appearance.

His methods were unconventional, as he claimed to detect heretics solely by how they looked.

The term “Torso” suggests that he may have had a physical or mental deformity or missing limb himself.

His actions were part of the broader struggle against heresy during the Hussite wars.

Conrad’s approach was far from evangelization; it was a war to the death, with no attempts at conversion.

Johannes:

Johannes, also operating in thirteenth-century Germany, was another self-proclaimed inquisitor.

Unlike Conrad, Johannes was one-eyed and one-armed.

He boasted that he could identify heretics based on their appearance, much like Conrad.

Johannes and Conrad both played a role in identifying and punishing those deemed heretical.

Their actions highlight the ritualistic significance of stripping people of their clothing as a form of public shaming and punishment.

In the case of heretics, this process was deliberate, intentional, and public, emphasizing exclusion from the community of the faithful.

These historical figures exemplify the complexities of medieval society, religious conflict, and the use of physical appearance as a marker of identity and punishment.

#medieval society #present day significance #acknowledgement #life #buddha dharma #compassion #society

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fantasyview · 5 months

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Impact of the Undead on the Medieval Society

Majority of fantasy settings have their share of the undead creatures. And it is not hard to see why, as the medieval mythology also has a very extensive list of the walking corpses. Zombies, liches, vampires, and so on, are all very prominent in the mythology and thus the fantasy. In many settings, the undead roam the land, attacking any traveller unlucky to come across their path. They seem to…

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#medieval society #undead #worldbuilding

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sca-nerd · 2 years

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#meme #society for creative anachronism #sca #MySCA #medieval hobbies #inkle loom

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spoldhamauthor · 2 years

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The Penniless Porch

I found this intriguing. The Penniless Porch, in Wells. As the plaque tells us, it was built to shelter the poor as they begged for alms, presumably from the Cathedral and perhaps from the Bishop himself. While we know that social welfare, for want of a better phrase, was not the best back in the day, isn't it interesting that in circa 1450 a place was built specifically to allow the neediest in society to plea for help? Meanwhile, in modern Britain, some benches are made deliberately 'anti-homeless' so the poor souls in those areas don't even have a place to rest. In researching this little post I discovered that 'anti-homeless architecture' is a thing. Wow.

Just goes to prove that there is potential to learn from the past, in my view. I know modern problems are bigger, wider and perhaps more difficult to address, but when did society lose its compassion? Makes me sad.

Anyway, on an entirely different note, this is making me think that there might be a story here, somewhere...

Penniless Porch photos are mine (I know they are not very good!)

Spiked bench image: Image: Kent Williams / Flickr

Want to know more about anti-homeless architecture? Click the Big Issue link above.

#penniless porch #penniless #alms #poor #homeless #needy #modern society #medieval society

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occultesotericart · 1 month

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The Wishing Well | engraving print from an old arcane book

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anamelessfool · 2 months

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I finished some projects today!

A leather stein and the new sheet wall for my household. It's going to be a wall for a royal encampment. I drew, painted and designed it based on our arms. It's about 8ft by 5ft.

The stein has my design of Terzo as a cephalophore based on a real 15th cent. German woodcut. I bought the stein last year and uhhh yeah I procrastinated a lot. Angelus Leather Paint and a lot of patience.

#fools pennsic #papa emeritus iii #medievalism #society for creative anachronism #my art

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knavetheodore · 4 months

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super special find at the second hand bookstore today! a copy of the 2008 Folio Society edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight illustrated by Diana Sudyka and translated by Simon Armitage!

very glad to have this in my ever-growing collection of green knight editions. Only gripe is that it is too tall to put on even the biggest of my book shelves...

#sir gawain and the green knight #sgatgk #medieval literature #folio society #gawain #the green knight #arthuriana #books #knave reads

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coochiequeens · 2 years

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This is why we still need Women’s History Month.

By Martha Gill

What was life like for women in medieval times? “Awful” is the vague if definite answer that tends to spring to mind – but this is an assumption, and authors have been tackling it with new vigour.

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society by Eleanor Janega, and The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner both contend that women were not only bawdier but busier than we thought: they were brewers, blacksmiths, court poets, teachers, merchants, and master craftsmen, and they owned land too. A woman’s dowry, Janega writes, was often accompanied with firm instructions that property stay with her, regardless of what her husband wanted.

This feels like a new discovery. It isn’t, of course. Chaucer depicted many such cheerfully domineering women. The vellum letter-books of the City of London, in which the doings of the capital from 1275 to 1509 were scribbled, detail female barbers, apothecaries, armourers, shipwrights and tailors as a matter of course. While it is true that aristocratic women were considered drastically inferior to their male equivalents – traded as property and kept as ornaments – women of the lower orders lived, relatively, in a sort of rough and ready empowerment.

It was the Renaissance that vastly rolled back the rights of women. As economic power shifted, the emerging middle classes began aping their betters. They confined their women to the home, putting them at the financial mercy of men. Female religious power also dwindled. In the 13th century seeing visions and hearing voices might get a woman sainted; a hundred years later she’d more likely be burned at the stake.

“When it comes to the history of gender relations, storytellers portray women as more oppressed than they actually were”

Why does this feel like new information? Much of what we think we know about medieval times was invented by the Victorians, who had an artistic obsession with the period, and through poetry and endless retellings of the myth of King Arthur managed somehow to permanently infuse their own sexual politics into it. (Victorian women were in many respects more socially repressed than their 12th-century forebears.)

But modern storytellers are also guilty of sexist revisionism. We endlessly retread the lives of oppressed noblewomen, and ignore their secretly empowered lower-order sisters. Where poorer women are mentioned, glancingly, they are pitied as prostitutes or rape victims. Even writers who seem desperate for a “feminist take” on the period tend to ignore the angle staring them right in the face. In her 2022 cinematic romp, Catherine called Birdy, for example, Lena Dunham puts Sylvia Pankhurst-esque speeches into the mouth of her 13th-century protagonist, while portraying her impending marriage – at 14 – as normal for the period. (In fact the average 13th-century woman got married somewhere between the ages of 22 and 25.)

But we cling tight to these ideas. It is often those who push back against them who get accused of “historical revisionism”. This applies particularly to the fantasy genre, which aside from the odd preternaturally “feisty” female character, tends to portray the period as, well, a misogynistic fantasy. The Game of Thrones author George RR Martin once defended the TV series’ burlesque maltreatment of women on the grounds of realism. “I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like.” Oddly enough, this didn’t apply to female body hair (or the dragons).

This is interesting. Most of our historical biases tend to run in the other direction: we assume the past was like the present. But when it comes to the history of gender relations, the opposite is true: storytellers insist on portraying women as more oppressed than they actually were.

“The history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes”

The casual reader of history is left with the dim impression that between the Palaeolithic era and the 19th century women suffered a sort of dark age of oppression. This is assumed to have ended some time around the invention of the lightbulb, when the idea of “gender equality” sprang into our heads and right-thinking societies set about “discovering” female competencies: women – astonishingly – could do

things men could do!

In fact the history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes, with women sometimes gaining and sometimes losing power – and the stronger sex opportunistically seizing control whenever it had the means.

In Minoan Crete, for example, women had similar rights and freedoms to men, taking equal part in hunting, competitions, and celebrations.

But that era ushered in one of the most patriarchal societies the planet has ever known – classical Greece, where women had no political rights and were considered “minors”.

Or take hunter-gatherer societies, the source of endless cod-evolutionary theories about female inferiority. The discovery of female skeletons with hunting paraphernalia has disproved the idea that men only hunted and women only gathered – and more recently anthropologists have challenged the idea that men had higher status too: women, studies contend, had equal sway over group decisions.

This general bias has had two unfortunate consequences. One is to impress upon us the idea that inequality is “natural”. The other is to give us a certain complacency about our own age: that feminist progress is an inevitable consequence of passing time. “She was ahead of her time,” we say, when a woman seems unusually empowered. Not necessarily.

Two years ago, remember, sprang up one of the most vicious patriarchies in history – women were removed from their schools and places of work and battoned into homes and hijabs. And last year in the US many women lost one of their fundamental rights: abortion. (Turns out it was pro-lifers, not feminists, who were ahead of their time there.)

Both these events were greeted with shock from liberal quarters: how could women’s rights be going backwards? But that only shows we should brush up on our history. Another look at medieval women is as good a place to start as any.

Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobby correspondent

#Women’s History #books for women #The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society #Eleanor Janega #The Wife of Bath: A Biography #Marion Turner

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horizon-verizon · 2 years

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You are convinced that Aemond raped Alys and your reasoning is "Alys Rivers was a war prize “proving” Aemond’s power and military prowess. If you are taken as a war prize, you are an object, a literal reward or prize. You have no ability to even give consent because your other option is violence/death. Aemond raped her and this son is a rape baby." Your words not mine. Then I click on your blog and you ship Rhaegar and Lyanna lol lets apply that logic to them now! The Greens suck but come on.

Disclaimer: I might edit this post a lot because I might realize some things to add.

Did you know, anon, that the word “rape” in medieval society could either mean the sexual attack or just straight up taking a woman/girl away from her father/brother/husband’s control and authority? Or whenever a female laborer of a household has been taken out of her previous household, unlicensed by her lord?

Its roots come from the Latin word, “rapere” and its past participle “raptus”:

“the usual Latin word being stuprare "to defile, ravish, violate," which is related to stuprum (n.) "illicit sexual intercourse," literally "disgrace," stupere "to be stunned, stupefied" (see stupid). Latin raptus, past participle of rapere, used as a noun meant "a seizure, plundering, abduction”

Rape had the legal and cultural meaning of “property-taking”, sometimes more than when a someone forced a woman into sex. And it comes from ancient Roman culture, literature, and ideas medieval societies would be adopting into their own systems (Ovid's Fasti and Livy's History of Rome): The Rape of Lucrece.

Of which medieval or Reniassance writers have made use to create doubt and suspicion for the state of their various female character’s chastity. Why does such matter in those stories? A woman’s chastity is linked to nation building and male-alliances. Marriages were for alliance, resources and power -- not love. Lyanna was arranged to marry Robert because of power and resources and to strengthen/solidify the alliance already set up by Ned and Robert’s friendship before.

So when we go back to A World of Ice and Fire, which says:

“Brandon Stark, the heir to Winterfell, had to be restrained from confronting Rhaegar at what he took as a slight upon his sister's honor, for Lyanna Stark had long been betrothed to Robert Baratheon, Lord of Storm's End. Eddard Stark, Brandon's younger brother and a close friend to Lord Robert, was calmer but no more pleased. As for Robert Baratheon himself, some say he laughed at the prince's gesture, claiming that Rhaegar had done no more than pay Lyanna her due...but those who knew him better say the young lord brooded on the insult, and that his heart hardened toward the Prince of Dragonstone from that day forth.” (pg. 127)

We get the sense that the Starks percieved Rhaegar taking Lyanna and even just gifting her the crown of blue roses as defiling her female chastity. It wasn’t about her and what she wanted it was about Robert’s claim over her. And it was more about Ned’s ties to Robert and why he was sent to the Eyrie to be fostered in the first place, where he befriended Robert -- to create alliances amongst various families.

By contrast, Lyanna clearly did not want, respect, nor love Robert. When we read AGoT and keep track of Lyanna and Rhaegar (not their families, but themselves), we see that Lyanna wanted Rhaegar over Robert and they formed a genuine relationship.

She expressed to Ned:

"Robert will never keep to one bed,” Lyanna had told him at Winterfell, on the night long ago when their father had promised her hand to the young Lord of Storm's End. "I hear he has gotten a child on some girl in the Vale." Ned had held the babe in his arms; he could scarcely deny her, nor would he lie to his sister, but he had assured her that what Robert did before their betrothal was of no matter, that he was a good man and true who would love her with all his heart. Lyanna had only smiled. "Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man's nature.”

(A Game of Thrones; Eddard IX )

AND

"You never knew Lyanna as I did, Robert," Ned told him. "You saw her beauty, but not the iron underneath. She would have told you that you have no business in the melee."

(A Game of Thrones; Eddard VII)

AND

Robert reached for the flagon and refilled his cup. "You see what she does to me, Ned." The king seated himself, cradling his wine cup. "My loving wife. The mother of my children." The rage was gone from him now; in his eyes Ned saw something sad and scared. "I should not have hit her. That was not … that was not kingly." He stared down at his hands, as if he did not quite know what they were. “I was always strong … no one could stand before me, no one. How do you fight someone if you can’t hit them?” Confused, the king shook his head. “Rhaegar … Rhaegar won, damn him. I killed him, Ned, I drove the spike right through that black armor into his black heart, and he died at my feet. They made up songs about it. Yet somehow he still won. He has Lyanna now, and I have her.” The king drained his cup.”

(A Game of Thrones; Eddard X)

So, if Robert, a canon and confirmed serial rapist (Cersei) and sexual abuser of children (that 14 year old sex worker that even Ned was like “...bro”) by the time he was 40ish, could not see that Lyanna did not want him and only thought of how pretty she was....while Rhaegar gifted her the crown of roses for her participation and victories at the Harrenhal tourney (however politically stupid it was)...who’s the true rapist here? Would Robert have respected Lyanna’s indifference to him if they did get married? Fuck no.

So if there were any persons defining and saying Lyanna was raped, it was never her or about sexual rape but those who would have benefited more from Lyanna marrying Robert & about “stealing” virginity.

And if you wonder why I bother to introduce medieval society when this is a fictional story with European medieval-inspired and not-so-differently modeled infrastructures and ideologies.....I can’t help you.

Lyanna was 16 when they left for the Tower of Joy and had Rhaegar’s child, and they met when she was 15 at the Harrenhal tourney.

We remember that she was betrothed to Robert before she turned 16, and Robert was 19/20 at the Harrenhal tourney.

Rhaegar was 22/23 at the tourney and 23/24 when he went with Lyanna to the Tower of Joy.

Lyanna, by real, American, modern standards, is a minor/child by the time she’s pregnant with Rhaegar’s kid, but she’s an adult by the Westerosi age of majority. And she’s past marriageable age.

To totally ignore that noble women of both real life and Westeros actively were treated as adults and like Rhaenyra Targaryen, and participated in politics as if they were adults is to:

deny any reality of their political and psychological autonomy and ability to reason

suppose that the man she chose broke a law or principle that is then recognized as a crime

....but if you go back to how I bring up the definition of “rape” and what that means for male-alliances, then you should realize that the crime that anyone would have thought what happened was that Lyanna was not passed into Robert’s authority (and out of her father and brothers’) and Rhaegar intercepted that licensed transfer.

Robert is Rhaegar’s foil. Rhaegar displays an sense of responsibility and emotional intelligence (if not always a political one) that Robert simply lacks and never bothers to develop.

A foil is:

a literary device designed to illustrate or reveal information, traits, values, or motivations of one character through the comparison and contrast of another character. A literary foil character serves the purpose of drawing attention to the qualities of another character, frequently the protagonist. This is effective as a means of developing a deeper understanding of a character by emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses. In addition, a literary foil allows writers to create a counterpart for the protagonist that puts their actions and choices in context.

And you can look up Rhaegar’s characterization by clicking HERE (of what I collected). But the universal consensus (except for Robert, but fuck him) is that Rhaegae was generally both a good and impressive person. He was loved by most and even Robert didn't dislike him until he gave Lyanna the crown and stepped on his "turf".

It is actually more in Robert’s than Rhaegar’s character to rape. Robert thinks Rhaegar raped Lyanna (the other meaning) because he would have raped her. Because to him, "rape" is unallowed transfer of a woman's body, not about her consent. He feels every man naturally thinks and would treat Cersei/Lyanna as he does/would have. (Meanwhile, can we say that his own friend, Ned, that he would do that to a woman?)

Rhaegar was a gloomy person and mimics the Byronic Hero trope; Lyanna was a lot more positive and vibrant, mimicking the Rebellious Princess or Spirited Young Lady tropes:

The Rebellious Princess is usually a teenager, typically brash (since it goes hand in hand with being rebellious). If she's not the hero, quite often she's the hero's love interest. This will sometimes invoke Marry for Love not only as another way for her to rebel, but to also get out of an Arranged Marriage. She usually qualifies as a Royal Who Actually Does Something.

Thus these two embody Forbidden Love, Opposites Attract, and dabble into Good, Bad Adultery.

Edit: I just realized that Rhaegar also fits into the Royal Who Actually Does Something Trope. Also, he and Lyanna are the inversed versions of their traditional gendered roles: Rhaegar becomes the musical, singing quieter lady imbued with remembrances for a time past while Lyanna actively participates in tourneys and masculinized quests/journeys like the Prince Charming/Knight in Shining Armor. Subversion of narrative and gender tropes!

Rhaegar loved Lyanna for:

her bravery and passion

protecting those needing to protecting

her determination to stand up for what she thinks is right despite constrictions placed on her bc of youth and gender

positivity

Lyanna loved Rhaegar because:

he had much more of a sense of responsibility and the sense of grief that comes with his need to "fix" certain wrongs in their current society (thus was more...he cared more than any other person, regardless of gender, about what it means to rule apart from having power)

that that responsibility went even beyond her

that that sense of responsibility went further than most noblemen’s while not trying to change or repress her, nor disregard her entire personality for his own sense of power or (for him, nonexistent) fantasies of her person

his passion

And tropes =/= “trite” or cliche. You can think of them as building blocks for themes, storylines, and characterizations.

Martin has painstakingly made sure to convey that their story and deaths are tragic not just for them and their families, but for Rhaegar’s ambition to remodel and begin to reverse the damages done in Westerosi history after having learned of the prophecy.

What defines a war prize, anon? Assuming you’ve read the post you seem to be referring to (this ONE), you should know that they are people or things that a warrior claims or is given as a reward for victory or conquest during/after a war/a battle.

Lyanna and Rhaegar form a romantic bond and they go off together before Rhaegar ever actually battles anyone or there was a war happening. Before Robert rebels and lords begin to gather weapons and troops.

It begins with him giving her the crown for Queen of Love and Beauty at the Harrenhal tourney, passing his own wife. You can look at all the posts I have tagged “lyanna and rhaegar”, or click HERE for more.

So just by definition of a war prize, Lyanna was never a war prize.