The medieval cosmos was simultaneously smaller and larger than ours. Smaller in the sense that the space beyond the earth was perceived as finite. The starry heaven (the firmament) occupied a fixed place within God's creation. But the medieval cosmos was larger in the sense that the boundaries between living and dead, this world and the next were drawn in such a way that the cosmos extended beyond what we would call "the natural world." Heaven, hell, and purgatory occupied actual space, and visions of the afterlife (whether ghosts communing with the living, or travels to the afterlife) highlight the intersection between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Read through Lynch to get an understanding of the medieval Christian view of the world, a narrative of salvation extending from God's creation as described in Genesis to the end of the world and final judgment as described in Revelation. Everything that happens in human history exists on this path from creation to the end of time. Two intertwined cycles of judgment/salvation consumed the medieval imagination. The first was collective: at the end of time, all humanity, the living and the dead, would experience final judgment. At various moments in time, apocalyptic expectation was heightened and is evident in literature, art, and social behavior. If you've never read the Book of Revelation, I recommend that you do so. The second cycle of judgment/salvation was personal: at death, each individual soul would be judged immediately and would receive an appropriate type of punishment or reward, until the final judgment that would come with the second coming of Christ and the end of time.
The fate of the individual soul is the subject of our primary source reading for this week, "Tundale's vision." From a Latin text written by an Irish monk in 1149, the work was translated into over a dozen vernacular languages and was enormously popular for centuries after its composition. For more information on the text, read from p. 252 at the back of the pdf document. If you find the beginning rather shapeless and repetitive, you won't be the first modern reader to think so. What I want you to try to figure out is why this text was so compelling to medieval readers all over Europe. What assumptions about human nature, life, death, and the afterlife can be teased out of the work?
If your eyes start to glaze over during the first part of the text, you can look forward to Chapter 12's descent into the depths, where things take a really dark turn. Near the pit of Satan himself, this evil is so bad, it sucks life out of whatever comes near. But compared to the detailed depiction of the torments of purgatory, relatively little time is spent in hell, and then our soul gradually makes his way toward heaven.
Paper Topic: (For instructions on writing the short papers, click here.) Tundale's vision must have struck a chord with medieval readers/listeners to acheive the longstanding popularity that it did. What do you think made the text so compelling? Do you think the narrative focus of the story is on this world or the next? |