A tufayli (
) was a sponger and a cheeky glutton. Appearing across many stories in medieval Arabic literature, this stock character was a gatecrasher extraordinaire. Using a whole range of cunning comic strategies, he could ingratiate himself uninvited into any feast or party, posing as a guest to fool the doorman, jumping gates from nearby balconies or convincing party-goers to smuggle him in with gentlemanly good humour. One of the tufayli’s goals was to extract as much from his host as possible, drinking the wine and helping himself to food. Sometimes discovered and ejected, other times embraced for his ballsy wit and allowed to stay, a tufayli never left a party without filling his stomach to the brim.
This sort of comedic, exaggerated gluttony was a recurrent trope in writing across the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The Land of Cokaygne, a poem probably written in Ireland in the early fourteenth century, tells of a fictional monastery inhabited by sexually deviant monks whose surroundings were so abundant with food that their very buildings were constructed from delicious treats for them to eat:
Þer beþ bowris and halles
Al of pasteiis beþ þe walles,
Of fleis, of fisse and rich met,
Þe likfullist þat man mai et.
Fluren cakes beþ þe schingles alle
Of cherche, cloister, boure and halle.
Þe pinnes beþ fat podinges,
Rich met to princez and kinges.
There are private rooms and large halls
All made of pies and pastries are the walls,
Of rich food, fish and meat,
The most pleasing that a person can eat.
Of flour cakes are the roof tiles all,
On the church, cloister, chamber and hall.
Their wooden beams of fat puddings,
Rich food fit for princes and kings.
Written at around the same time, an Old French fabliau – a popular type of bawdy, secular poem – follows the similarly gluttonous tale of Les Trois Dames de Paris, ‘The Three Women of Paris’, Margue Clouue, Maroie Clippe and their friend Dame Tifaigne. One fateful night in 1320, on the feast of the Epiphany, the three women visit a tavern to overindulge. After gorging themselves on food and ale they take their revelry to the streets, where they strip naked and dance, before promptly collapsing in a heap. Mistaken for corpses, the trio are dragged to the nearby cemetery at Les Innocents for burial, only to awake from their drunken comas to demand more food. Framed against the skulls of the charnel houses, we can imagine the terrified surprise of a nearby gravedigger who discovers them, blaming their reanimation surely as the work of ‘dyables’, the devil.
Gluttony here is not only depicted as shamefully uncouth but is also aligned with more sinister devilish work. It was, after all, one of the seven cardinal Christian sins, and descriptions like that of Les Trois Dames drew on a conflation – common since Genesis – of an uncontrollable passion for food with predatory desire for all things, especially an insatiable sexual lust. Dante, describing hell in the opening book of his epic fourteenth-century poem the Divina Commedia, recounts a circle of reckoning reserved specifically for gluttons of all types. It is a reeking, muddy place where the congenitally greedy are punished for their sins for all eternity by being constantly pelleted with polluted rain and hail, each one constantly tossing and turning in a vain attempt to stay dry. There they are watched over by Cerberus – ‘il gran vermo’, in Dante’s words, ‘the great worm’ – a fearsome three-headed, mud-eating beast with an enormous belly and unquenchable appetite.
The Latin for glutton, gula, was also the anatomical term used to describe the gullet, which along with the stomach and intestines made up the fundamental elements of the medieval digestive system. After swallowing, food was understood to travel down the throat via the actions of villi, strips of muscle that banded the oesophagus, from where it reached the os stomachi, literally the mouth of the stomach. Thereafter food gathered in the stomach itself, which some authors postulated was round in shape, in order to withstand its own inward stresses and strains.
As a process, digestion was understood to happen through a triumvirate of actions occurring at three different bodily points. The first began in the belly. As food passed through the stomach and gut, it was refined by the body’s digestive faculties, removing faecal matter, later to be expelled by excretion, and leaving behind a pale white liquid substance known as chyle. This liquid was in turn passed on to the second stage of digestion, which happened in the liver. There the chyle was heated by the organ’s warm confines, a process Galen described as like the baking of bread or the fermentation of wine. Cooking the chyle produced blood and other humours, which, in the third and final stage of digestion, were pumped outwards by the heart to the extremities. Here they were assimilated from the veins into the rest of the body, the broader human form being fuelled by the transformation of swallowed food into a constant outward flow of moisture and heat.
For medical practitioners digestion was at once a natural process of imbibing nutrients from food and an important route for intervention and cure. Given that the humours were themselves produced during digestion in different quantities and combinations, depending on what had been consumed, ingested medicines were an obvious way to try to balance the inner processes of the sick. This would have been one of the only practical means of treating conditions open to most ordinary people in the Middle Ages, who we presume would have had their own litany of useful humoral concoctions to be taken in accordance with the advice of unrecorded local healers, trained or untrained. Certainly, in the better-documented professional realm many texts written and read by master physicians and surgeons discuss in detail the varied curative properties of different medicinal raw materials to be prescribed for consumption. Books of this nature were normally known as herbals, a catch-all term for treatises listing curative plants that can be traced back to classical precursors. The earliest to survive is a sixth-century manuscript that preserves a text first written around the year 70 by the Greek surgeon Dioscorides on what was to become known as materia medica, material medicine. It records the detailed characteristics of several hundred plants alongside hundreds of small illustrations of these individual specimens. It is unclear whether these pictures were original to Dioscorides’ first-century work or in fact represented a newer, medieval method of presenting herbal and botanical material. Either way, by the early Middle Ages these books were some of the few to be singled out for particularly exciting decorative treatment, a marker of their serious value among the typically plain medical literature of the day.
One group of texts, bundled together and communally entitled the Pseudo-Apuleius Complex, showcases the breadth and seeming eclecticism of subjects that could be included in these broad-minded manuscripts. At the heart of this group was a herbal by the eponymous Roman author Pseudo-Apuleius, which, like Dioscorides’ work, lists the nomenclature and medical uses of different plants. But the Complex also contained far more disparate yet intriguing material, often including a text on the plant betony (modern-day stachys officinalis, or hedge-nettle), another on the mulberry plant (thought especially good for dysentery, toothache and menstrual pain), and a third treatise on the use of the badger in medical treatment (a beast with broad magical properties and which, dried and pulverised, was considered a potent cure-all wonder drug).
63. The entries for brassica silvatica (wild cabbage or wild cole), basilisca (sweet basil) and mandragora (mandrake), from a twelfth-century English copy of the Pseudo-Apuleius Complex, a wide-ranging work on pharmacy and medicines.
An early medieval copy of the Complex from the twelfth century shows just how easily these vastly disparate themes could intermingle when presented on the page. Each section is accompanied by illustrations of herbs, roots and plants, as well as miniatures of mammals, insects and more fantastical creatures. One page shows in its upper left an entry for brassica silvatica, wild cabbage or perhaps wild cole, accompanied by an image of the herb. This is a carefully considered but not photorealistic rendering, one clearly not designed to be brought out while combing the forest floor in search of particular specimens. After all, this was a large and extremely expensive book, far too bulky and valuable for carrying around in such a manner. Rather, the image has a deliberately schematic quality to it: the plant’s main features are enlarged for taxonomic effect – dark green horizontal leaves, tripartite purple flowers, yellowing roots and a fat, pinkish sprouting tuber beneath – all exaggerated shapes intended to form a visual touchstone for finding the brassica among the busy book’s myriad herbs.
Real plants, though, also jostle on the page with more folkloric elements. Below the brassica writhe three spine-tongued basilisks, mythical serpent-like creatures that nested in the roots of the depicted basilisca plant, sweet basil, to which they lent their name. To their right is the deadly mandragora, or mandrake, a plant whose chunky, flesh-like twisted roots lent it the fairy-tale reputation of being half-plant and half-person. Upon being unearthed, it was said to scream so loud that the plant could deafen any man who heard its cry: hence two men are here using their dog to harvest it from the ground by a chain, the beasts unaffected by the mandrake’s ear-shattering shriek.
These extraordinary additions are a reminder once again that conceptions of medicine and the body in the Middle Ages were always fluctuating between the tangible and the fantastic. On the one hand, they are discussed in their herbal’s accompanying text as real, usable ingredients, happily recommended for the healing of numerous diseases. Sweet basil is enumerated as having three different varieties of three different colours, each with different medical properties to help nerve pain and swellings. The mandrake too is treated like any other tuber, its dried bark, roots and leaves making a serviceable headache cure and particularly good sleeping powder. Yet, on the other hand, even in its discussion of these most fundamental raw ingredients, medieval healing seems caught between what we would view as clearly defined science and something far more abstract. It happily conflates thinking from the philosophical and religious realms with input from the artistic imagination, an infinitely more creative and fluid world of health than our own.
Feast and Fast
As well as medical treatises that relayed edible plants and cures, about fifty complete cookbooks survive from the Middle Ages. These take various forms: some present lavish outlines of grand meals, recorded with as much care as these luxurious illustrated herbals, while others offer only more fragmentary recipe lists or basic kitchen records of noble households. In both cases their contents can be pretty cryptic. The Liber de coquina, written in Latin in early fourteenth-century Naples, draws on a whole host of regional cuisines for its dishes, listing Italian recipes from Lombardy to Campania to Sicily, and even others marked ‘ad usum Anglie’ (English) or ‘ad usum Francie’ (French). Clearly, local culinary fashions had long been formed by this point in the 1300s, yet their recipe details are still rather vague. Take one for limonia, a chicken dish with lemons:
Ad limoniam faciendam, suffrigantur pulli cum lardo et cepis. Et amigdale mundate terantur, distemperentur cum brodio carnis et colentur. Que coquantur cum dictis pullis et speciebus. Et si non habentur amigdale, spissetur brodium cum uitellis ouorum. Et si fuerit prope horam scutellandi, pone ibi succum limonum uel limiarum uel citrangulorum.
To make limonia, fry chickens with fat and onions. And crush washed almonds, moisten with meat broth, and strain. Cook this with the chickens and spices. And if you have no almonds, thicken the broth with egg yolk. When it is almost time to serve, pour on it the juice of lemons or limes or oranges.
A modern cook used to modern cookbooks might run into trouble here. How many chickens? How much fat, and what type? What is ‘meat broth’? How long until the chicken is cooked? These medieval recipes, though, rarely list quantities or measures, techniques or timings, suggesting that they were mostly prompts for methods and dishes already well known among chefs. Whether a trained professional in the pay of a wealthy lord or just the head of a small farmhouse kitchen, a cook wanting to follow these recipes would have had to build on their bare bones, improvising according to the ingredients available. Whether this recipe turned out to be lemon chicken, lime chicken, orange chicken or, for that matter, garlic chicken or onion chicken depended on both what was at hand and, of course, the tastes of those eating.
In some cases, we can still read between the lines to find faint traces of the culinary craft itself. Take a recipe for crêpes found in a French house guide from 1393 titled Le Ménagier de Paris, ‘The Parisian Household Book’:
Crespes.
Prenez de la fleur et destrempez d’œufs tant moyeux comme aubuns, et y mettez du sel et du vin, et batez longuement ensemble: puis mettez du sain sur le feu en une petite paelle de fer, ou moitié sain ou moitié beurre frais, et faites fremier; et adonc aiez une escuelle percée d’un pertuis gros comme vostre petit doit, et adonc mettez de celle boulie dedans l’escuelle en commençant ou milieu, et laissez filer tout autour de la paelle; puis mettez en un plat, et de la pouldre de succre dessus. Et que la paelle dessusdite de fer ou d’arain tiengne trois choppines, et ait le bort demy doy de hault.
Crêpes.
Take flour and mix with eggs, both yolks and whites, and add salt and wine, and beat together for a long time: then put some oil on the fire in a small iron skillet, or half oil and half fresh butter, and make it sizzle; and then have a bowl pierced with a hole about the size of your little finger, and then put some of the batter in the bowl beginning in the middle, and let it run out all around the pan; then put on a plate, and sprinkle powdered sugar on it. And let the iron or brass skillet hold three measures, and the sides be half a finger tall.
Like a French crêpe today, this recipe contains both flour and eggs, while wine – which would have been more diluted than modern vintages – acts as a sterilised substitute for water or milk. But we also here pick up a sense of the medieval kitchen in action, from the varied warmths of the cooking fire to specialised bowls and skillets, and even a sense of the chef themselves, whose fingers form a basic measure and whose ears and nose are relied on to pick up the precise moment the cooking butter sizzles.
Most of these early books inevitably present the more exclusive of medieval cuisines, recording a pan-European culinary style intended largely for the upper classes. After all, to follow such recipes the user would have needed to be able to read, not often an option for lower-class cooks. And many of these dishes would have required substantial funds and a sizeable kitchen staff to recreate. One English manual, A Boke of Kokery, lists the contents of an elaborate feast held to celebrate the ordination of John Stafford as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1443. The dishes are extensive, to say the least. For the first course: venison, beef, capons, pheasant, swan, heron, bream and custards. A second followed: more capons, crane, more venison, rabbit, partridge, curlew, carp and fritters. And then a third: flavoured cream, jelly, broth, melon, plover, marrow cakes, rail bird, quail, dove, more rabbits and even more fritters. To top it all off, each of these gut-busting courses was followed by an intricate sugar sculpture known as a sotelte. The first was formed into a large throned Saint Andrew, the second a Trinity with Saints Thomas and Austin, and finally, to finish with a flourish, another Trinity, this time adorned with a semi-decapitated Saint Thomas, John the Baptist and four surrounding angels. For the Archbishop’s guests consumption was intended to be as ornate as it was conspicuous.
Food habits of the lower classes are almost entirely omitted from these official narratives and therefore somewhat harder to puzzle out. Imported products such as luxury fruits, expensive spices and sugar would have been beyond the means of most tables, and meals instead revolved around more immediately available ingredients. Grains were a prime staple, used in soups or processed into flours of varying quality. Preserves also provided an inexpensive way of counteracting the rise and fall of seasonal produce, especially in times of famine. Meat and fish could be smoked or salted, and fruit and vegetables could be pickled, although it is unclear whether recipes like that for a German pickle from the 1350s, found in Das Buoch von guoter Spise (‘The Book of Good Food’) – which suggests preserving beetroot with caraway, anise, vinegar and honey – would have ended up as a thick preserved souse or a smoother, silky style of condiment. Ultimately, standards of living would have varied widely, but even so a peasant might still occasionally be able to feast on the same type of partridge found at Archbishop John’s table. Living near a forest would have meant a more regular supply of fresh game for many, likewise with the sea and fresh fish. And by the same token a lord could perfectly well have enjoyed a chunky chutney, should he ever have wished for the lowly stuff to be served at his table.
That said, crossing these culinary class lines was not without a degree of risk, at least in the view of medieval medicine. The quality of food and drink had long been listed as one of the so-called six ‘non-naturals’, external factors that held sway over standards of human health, and which also included air and atmosphere, motion and rest, sleep, the retention and elimination of the humours via excretion, and movements of the spirit, one’s emotional or mental state. From the eleventh century, dietary treatises began to collect and codify information on healthy living according to these principles, in particular the ways that food related to the body’s overall humoral balance. Given that different types of people were thought to have different humoral dispositions and temperaments, each man and woman was thought to have a fundamentally different gustative capability and constitution, which were also linked to their position in society. Workers of the land – caricatured by their profession as earthbound, the feet in John of Salisbury’s Body Politic – would find diets of humorally cold and wet foods more balancing and appropriate: fish, cabbage, rosewater, leeks and so on. On the other hand, different physiologically distinct individuals needed warming up, such as the aged or the congenitally cowardly, as well as the furnace-like bodies of important royalty, whose constantly stoked heat reflected and maintained their high social rank. These people should instead seek nourishment from humorally warming and dry foods: nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon, venison and red wine, among many others.
64. A page from a fourteenth-century Spanish Haggaddah showing the Seder meal, the central event in the Jewish celebration of Passover. Above, a lamb is slaughtered and roasted, while the herb hyssop is used to paint the symbolic mark of blood on the lintel of the house. Below, the meal is celebrated.
Equally important, especially spiritually speaking, was what one did not eat. As today, the Jewish laws of kashrut (
) or the Islamic designation of certain foods as halal (
) allowed individual religious denominations to cultivate a sense of community through shared diets. And the act of fasting was also interpreted as a way of directly encountering the divine, what the thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist and mystic Moshe ben Shem-Tov referred to as the ultim ate way ‘to know one’s Creator’. This was thought especially potent in matters of penance or remembrance and, due to the strict segrega tion of the genders in most religious roles, it was one of the only routes of spirituality open to women in the strongly patriarchal faiths of the Middle Ages. In Christianity fasting was at the heart of monastic living, with both monks and nuns regularly breaking off from eating to focus their human desire away from matters of earthly contentment and towards spiritual contemplation. These were restrict ive social surroundings for women: although female mystics from these communities might gain significant spiritual renown and their abbesses could rise to positions of real political power, nuns still relied on male priests to undertake the Mass, which they could only observe. Food, therefore, was a valuable means through which to take more im mediate control of their environment, and in particular, these women found an extreme spiritual reflection in the complete denial of the appetite.
In these cases medical concepts of rounded good health and balanced diet were jettisoned in favour of the obsessive extremes of religious life, something again best exemplified in the dramatic lives and deaths of the saints. Margaret of Hungary (1242–1270), daughter of the Hungarian king Béla IV, fasted so intensely throughout her life that she is recorded as looking desperately thin and pale. Yet, rather than being frowned on, this practised devotion saw her canonised almost immediately after her death. The Frenchwoman Colette of Corbie (1381–1447) similarly fasted from an extremely young age, preferring to fall into ecstatic spells enraptured by thoughts of Christ than to eat a meal, yet her kiss was rumoured to miraculously cure the sick. The foundational and perhaps most extreme story of religious starvation was that of the early saint Mary of Egypt (c.344–421). We are told in narratives of Mary’s life that she was a prostitute in Alexandria for nearly two decades before a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem made her see the error of her moral ways and convert to Christianity. Wanting to repent these former sins, Mary crossed the River Jordan to live in the desert as an ascetic hermit dedicating her life only to God. She took with her nothing but three loaves of bread, and her vita goes on to tell us she lived this way for forty-seven years, fasting throughout much of this time to the point of total emaciation. Images of Mary were made throughout the Middle Ages, from wooden carvings to painted decorations on the walls of churches, all of which show her with wild long hair. Her tiny frame is often angular and gaunt, her chest, back and cheeks all rendered hollow, with her skin stretched impossibly tight over a visible skeleton beneath, almost a living version of Alice Chaucer’s alabaster corpse. Yet for those who might wish to pray to Mary, this was a sign not of mania but of dedication: good Christian thoughts were sustenance enough for this stick-thin figure, who wandered hungry throughout the Levant for half a century.
65. A wall-painting showing the emaciated Saint Mary of Egypt, made to decorate the church of Panagia Phorbiotissa at Asinou in Cyprus in the early 1100s.
Entrails
In January 1475 a notary in Paris named Jean de Roye recorded that an archer had been found guilty of larceny. After being detained in the city’s prison, the man had been sentenced to hang at a large gibbet erected outside the capital’s walls, but on the day of his proposed punish ment a petition had been submitted to King Louis XI by a group of physicians and surgeons of the city. These professionals, Jean testified, believed that the body of the condemned was of some greater use. Invoking various common conditions – bladder stones, burning colic and other painful internal maladies – the practitioners suggested it would be of great help for them in their diagnoses to see the very sites where these diseases were formed inside the human body, and that the best way of doing this was to cut open a living man. The petition was successful, and Jean goes on to record the opening of the man’s stomach, the inspection of his insides by the doctors and, amazingly, that afterwards his entrails were happily returned back into his belly before being sewn up again. Given the finest recuperative care, at the king’s expense no less, Jean writes that the archer made a full recovery within a fortnight, had his sentence of death pardoned and was compensated handsomely for his troubles.
Much of this account seems bizarre to a modern reader: the royal petition by an interrogative band of physicians and surgeons, the archer’s speedy and seemingly untroubled recuperation from a stomach trauma that should surely have killed him and, especially, his gruesome public vivisection. Such violent invasion of the body was certainly not the norm in Jean’s Paris. Unlike in the Italy of Mondino, who by 1316 had begun to make examinations of the body beneath the skin, in France religious and social restrictions still tightly controlled anatomies, so much so that it was not until the 1500s that observational dissections were regularly undertaken by Paris’s medical faculty. Perhaps, though, turning to historical context to understand Jean’s strange story is only half the answer. We know by now that tales of the medieval body often had all sorts of meanings and metaphors at work under the surface. Could the archer opened at the stomach be a way of expressing something else, a broader French fascination with the body’s interior?
Today, technology has afforded us a real familiarity with our deepest innards in ways that pre-modern peoples would never have thought achievable. For most medieval men and women the sight of one’s own entrails was the clearest possible sign that something had gone very wrong indeed and that death was imminent. Such fears, however, did not stop them from imagining what the interior of the body looked like. This certainly seems to be what is happening in a page from a fourteenth-century philosophical manuscript also from Paris. Pretty typically for a relatively large and luxurious edition of a popular text – a commentary on Aristotle’s classic zoological treatise De animalibus (‘On Animals’) – the parchment is thoroughly embellished with pen flourishes, illuminated initials and even occasional marginal scenes, framed with floral motifs and inhabited by the text’s eponymous creatures feeding, fighting and rutting. But on one folio, beneath the introduction to a chapter on the internal parts of living creatures, sits an enlarged gathering of internal organs arranged as if within a living human form. We are able to follow the long trachea downwards towards the lungs and intestines, atop of which sit the liver, heart, stomach, bladder and kidneys, while at the base of the entire system a tubular colon and anus morph seamlessly into twin branches of floral decoration. There is a real sense of revelation here, in which, like Jean’s archer, the skin has disappeared, allowing us to look directly at what lies beneath. The body is even flanked by a crowd of six physicians, deliberately identifiable by their doctoral gowns and bonnets, all staring up at the gigantic innards with frantic and awed gesticulations. The scene seems to show what the poet Francesco Petrarca – that godfather of the term ‘medieval’ – once described as physicians’ ‘obsessive seeing’, always straining ‘to see that which lies within, the viscera and tissues’.
66. A group of physicians examining a large accumulation of guts, from an illustration in a commentary on Aristotle’s zoological treatise De animalibus made in Paris in the late fourteenth century.
Contemporary events just outside Paris show just how obsessive this interest in innards could become. Take the medieval abbey of Maubuisson, just a few hours’ ride north of the capital. By the thirteenth century the area had come some way from the bandit hideaway which had earned it a name derived from buisson maudit, literally ‘bad bush’. The Queen of France, Blanche of Castile (1188–1252), and her son King Louis IX (1214–1270) had built a substantial royal complex here, complete with outbuildings, nuns’ quarters and a large church to serve as a necropolis for their Capetian dynasty. Yet unlike the English tombs at Westminster or the caliphs’ memorials in Cairo, this was not a space for the burial of French royal bodies in their entirety. Well aware that prayer at the site of the corpse could act as a conduit to end purgatorial suffering, the Cape-tians alighted on the idea of splitting their bodies in two in order to double their spiritual potential. Alphonse of Poitiers, King Louis’s brother, died in 1271 en route to France while returning from the Crusades, but had strictly stipulated that in such an event his entrails should be separated from his body and sent to Maubuisson for individual burial. Robert II of Artois, another prominent royal nobleman, followed suit, asking for his innards to be removed and interred in the foundation’s church, placed there on his death in 1302. Nearly thirty years later, Blanche’s great-great-grandson, and by then king of France, Charles IV (1294–1328), earned specific permission from the pope to have his body split into easily venerated pieces, his entrails sent to Maubuisson for burial. And fifty years after that, Charles’s wife and long-time widow, Jeanne d’Évreux, requested identical treatment to that of her husband on her death in 1371, as did one of Charles’s successors as king, Charles V, in 1380. Over the course of a century Maubuisson had become a dynastic memorial built on coils and coils of intestine.
67. Effigies of Charles IV and Jeanne d’Évreux holding bags filled with their entrails, sculpted in marble by Jean de Liège around 1370 for Maubuisson Abbey.
The interred entrails of these French royals were given a leading role in their tombs at the abbey. Shortly before her death Jeanne d’Évreux commissioned the famed Flemish sculptor Jean de Liège to create a double tomb for the entrails of herself and her husband, King Charles, the upper sections of which still survive intact. They show two small marble effigies of the couple, around half life-size, both crowned and dressed in delicately sculpted royal robes. They would look perfectly normal were it not for the small leather bags they each clutch to their chest, the soft curves of the pouches betraying neat shapes of intestine spiralled within. Carved in unsettling detail, they appear winding and twisted as if alive inside a sculpted stomach, curled up like links of miniature sausages. Charles V seems to have liked them so much that he commissioned Jean de Liège to make him an entrail tomb as well, yet another bundle of French guts set in stone at Maubuisson.
These burials were particularly cherished by the foundation’s nuns, who saw the remains as a marker of their abbey’s continuing importance to the crown. They prayed beside them in their church, wishing for the safe purgatorial repose of their queens, princes and kings beyond the grave. And, as time went by, the royal stomachs occasionally offered back heavenly responses of their own. Abbey records from May 1652 show major renovations to Maubuisson’s church, during which a wall was breached by builders to reveal unexpectedly an unmarked, lead-lined box. Upon opening, it was found to contain Robert II of Artois’s 300-year-old viscera. Witnesses described the innards as totally undecayed, ‘fresh, vermilion and full-bloodied’, despite not appearing to have been specially preserved or embalmed. To mark the occasion they were displayed fully exposed for ten weeks, all the while never dulling in colour and exuding a soft, sweet perfume throughout the church, miraculous entrails gutted from the abbey’s very walls.
Anal Arts
Maubuisson’s venerated intestines were an exception. Far from sweet smells and holy remembrance, when arriving at the stomach on their head-to-toe narratives of the medieval body, medical authors knew they were in fact poised to encounter some of the body’s basest and most unpleasant parts. Far from the primacy of the head and the second important group of organs clustered around the heart in the chest, the belly and the gut were ranked an unpleasant third. This lowly stomach was made even more off-putting by its occasional unfortunate bi-products, a whole host of spontaneous rumblings and grumblings, hiccups and belches. For all its links to pharmacy, diet and spiritual nourishment, the process of digestion had a tendency, when malfunctioning, to reverse itself awkwardly. Vomiting, when not being induced by a doctor with purgatives to balance the humours, was to be taken as a sign of serious abdominal issues and could even be a physical manifest ation of intellectual or moral repulsion. Take Egill, the tenth-century heroic protagonist of one of the oldest medieval Scandinavian sagas, who in a scene of his story is presented as truly disgusted by the poor hospitality of a man he meets on his travels, Ármóðr; so much so in fact that, instead of speaking words of thanks to his host, Egill takes him by the shoulders and throws up violently in his face:
sé r spýju mikla, ok gaus í andlit Ármóði, í augun ok nasarnar ok í munninn; rann svá ofan um bringuna, en Ármóði varð við andhlaup
a huge vomit that gushed over Ármóðr’s face, and inside his eyes and nostrils, and into his mouth; it poured down over his breast so that Ármóðr approached suffocation.
Controlling these gut instincts was not always so easy, and perhaps this is why some of the more vilified figures in the medieval canon had something of the belly about them. Eve, harbinger of original sin, tempted Adam into an act of eating that was to cast all of mankind into perpetual repentance. The wolf Ysengrimus, always outwitted in medieval French poems by his nemesis, the cunning fox Renard, is driven in his villainous actions by his rapacious appetite and raging belly, not unlike the character of the cheeky Arabic tufayli. And, more seriously, in penance for the ultimate betrayal of Christ, Judas Iscariot not only hanged himself in shame – suicide itself a serious sin by Christian law – but, according to one biblical account, upon falling, his hanged body burst open at the stomach, his guts gushing out all over a field.
Even worse than this hazardous third zone was where the stomach was known to lead: the fourth and very lowest of the bodily quartet, comprising the genitals and the anus. Stereotypes of the medieval return time and time again to the period as a scatalogical moment, where people both lived in filth and relied on it as their one and only source of comedy. Perhaps this is because historical humour of the bottom resonates much more easily through time than the Middle Ages’ more complex satires, political caricatures and local lampoons, all of which relied on the subtleties of contemporary context, much of which is now inevitably lost. But to presume that all medieval humour therefore revolved around the bottom, or indeed that this humour could not in itself be sophisticated, again does the era a disservice. This Anglo-Saxon riddle, for instance, seems on the surface really to revel in the anus:
Question: How do you make an asshole see?
Answer: By adding an o.
Look closer though, and we realise this is not just a smutty joke about the sphincter, it is a pun. Add an ‘o’ to the Latin for ‘asshole’, culus, and you get oculus, the Latin for ‘eye’. Language, as well as the bottom, is the joke’s foundation.
The same was true of medieval performance, in which the bottom also sometimes reared its cheeks. The court of Henry II boasted one Roland the Farter, paid handsomely for amusing the royals with a dance that included a simultaneous jump, whistle and fart. Abbasid caliphs, too, kept such flatulists alongside singers and fighting dogs in their entourage. But keeping jesters in their pay to parp on command did not exclude aristocratic patrons from also appreciating more complex bottom-bound satire. One French play, the Farce Nouvelle et Fort Joyeuse du Pect, commonly translated as ‘The Farce of the Fart’, was performed in 1476 for the extremely wealthy Count René of Anjou. It stars a woman named Jehannette who is particularly prone to farting around her house, and in the play’s opening scene she lets forth so violently while doing the laundry – the fart picked out in loud sound effects from off-stage – that her aggrieved husband, Hubert, takes her to court. The device of putting a farter on trial, however, not only mocks the anus: it allows for a cutting pastiche of the courtroom, which duly chooses to take this whole affair extremely seriously. Mixing gross-out delight with legal satire, the leeching lawyer who persuades the couple to sue each other and the pompous judge who ultimately rules that Hubert simply has to put up with his gassy wife are both just as much the butt of the joke as Jehannette.
An object of simultaneous disgust and amusement, the anus could also be a lucrative arena for healers. This was the case for one surgeon in particular, the fourteenth-century Englishman John Arderne, who by the 1340s had built up an excellent reputation and successful practice in Wiltshire and Nottinghamshire. Arderne stands out from many English medical men of the era through both his high rate of successful cases and a series of popular surgical treatises that survive written under his name. Unlike his contemporaries, who tended to concern themselves with more generalised compendia of diseases and pharmaceuticals, Arderne achieved substantial renown through his publication of a single innovative surgical procedure: the treatment of anal fistulae.
Fistulae are abnormal tubular erosions of the flesh caused by unhealed abscesses, which form unhealthy connections between organs or simply holes that burrow themselves deeper and deeper into the body from the surface of the skin. They appear frequently in medieval texts, mentioned as often as kidney stones and haemorrhoids, and they were a common complaint among the horse-riding knights and nobles of the period, for whom perianal abscesses could easily appear during long days riding in a wet saddle. Fistulae presenting this way were notoriously difficult to treat, often with tragic results: before Arderne it is estimated that more than half of the patients who sought such treatment died during the aggressive surgical procedures designed to cure them, which often prescribed etching away at the problem with acidic substances and had a relatively poor level of aftercare. His new treatment was a serious departure for the condition, recommending that the fistula instead be carefully cut into before being repeatedly cleaned and dressed. Comparatively efficacious and highly sought-after, the technical elements of this surgery remain in their essence the same today. Arderne’s writings boast both raised survival rates and famous patients, who doubtless lined his pockets in the process.
68. Four images of an operation to close an anal fistula, from a copy of John Arderne’s Practice of Anal Fistula, written and illustrated in England in the early fifteenth century. We see in turn the surgeon probing, threading and closing the fistula.
Not only was Arderne an innovator in the surgical treatment of the condition, but he also pioneered new ways of presenting his anal advances on the page. These are the very first medieval books actually to illustrate the individual stages of a surgical operation, unfolding for the reader alongside the text of the treatment’s detail. It was a novel illustrative scheme: across four small figures we are taken through the narrative of the surgical action step by step, each freeze-frame showing the disembodied hand of the healer working through a different major moment in the process for which Arderne was famed, probing, cutting and then closing the fistula. Like the entirety of the medieval digestive system, these anuses seem to hold something of a contradiction within them. On the one hand, they are deeply serious and rather disgusting things, naked, scatalogical, uncontrollable, the subjects of dangerous, embarrassing, probing operations. But on the other, for all the earnestness of the operation on display they still have something of the carnivalesque about them. Their manipulated lower halves create a real visual spectacle, whirly-gigging in cartwheels as they flip and spin across the page, all the while dressed in the long stockings and expensive shoes of Arderne’s high-class patients. However mucky the route from throat and stomach down to intestines and backside may have seemed, it was still praised as the site of carefully balanced class-based diets, sacred self-abnegation, venerable entrails and transformative moments of surgical intervention like this one. This is the medieval body at its most topsy-turvy, pivoting between extremes. It is as if, in the words of the poet John Lydgate when once describing his own stomach, we are being presented with a world refreshingly ‘tournyd vp-so-doun’.
69. A German Shrine Madonna, sculpted around 1300 in the Rhine region.