CHAPTER XVIII
THE FORMS OF THOUGHT AND PRACTICAL LIFE
The specific forms of the thought of an epoch should not only be studied as they reveal themselves in theological and philosophic speculations, or in the conceptions of creeds, but also as they appear in practical wisdom and everyday life. We may even say that the true character of the spirit of an age is better revealed in its mode of regarding and expressing trivial and commonplace things than in the high manifestations of philosophy and science. For all scholarly speculation, at least in Europe, is affiliated in a very complicated way to Greek, Hebrew, even Babylonian and Egyptian origins, whereas in everyday life the spirit of a race or of an epoch expresses itself naïvely and spontaneously.
The mental habits and forms characteristic of the high speculation of the Middle Ages nearly all reappear in the domain of ordinary life. Here, too, as we might expect, primitive idealism, which the schools called realism, is at the bottom of all mental activity. To take every idea by itself, to give it its formula, to treat it as an entity, next to combine the ideas, to classify them, to arrange them in hierarchic systems, always to build cathedrals with them, such, in practical life also, is the way in which the medieval mind proceeds.
All that acquires a fixed place in life is considered as having a reason for existence in the divine scheme. The most commonplace customs share this honour with the most exalted things. A very plain instance of this may be found in the treatment of rules of court etiquette, which we have touched upon already in another connection. Aliénor de Poitiers and Olivier de la Marche considered them wise laws, judiciously instituted by ancient kings and binding for all centuries to come. Aliénor speaks of them as of sacred monuments of the wisdom of ages: “And then I have heard it said by the ancients who knew ...” etc. She sees with sorrow signs of decline. For a good many years the ladies of Flanders have been putting the bed of a woman newly delivered of a child before the fire, “at which people mocked a good deal,” because formerly this was never done. What are we coming to? “But at present everybody does what he pleases: because of which we may well be afraid that all will go badly.”—La Marche gravely asks the following question: Why has the “fruit-master,” also the “wax-department” (le mestier de la cire), that is to say, illumination, among his attributes?—He answers, not less gravely: Because wax is extracted from flowers whence the fruit comes too: “so that this matter is very well ordained thus.”
In matters of utility or of ceremony medieval authority creates a special organ for every function, because it regards the function as an idea and considers it as an actual thing. The “grand sergeanty” of the king of England comprised a dignitary whose office it was to hold the king’s head when he crossed the Channel and was suffering with sea-sickness. A certain John Baker held this office in 1442, and after his death it passed to his two daughters.
Of the same nature is the custom, very ancient and very primitive, of giving a proper name to inanimate objects. We witnessed a revival of this usage when the big guns during the late war got names. During the Middle Ages it was much more frequent. Like the swords of the heroes in the chansons de geste, the stone mortars in the wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had names of their own: “Le Chien d’Orléans, la Gringade, la Bourgeoise, Dulle Griete.” A few very celebrated diamonds are still known by proper names: this, too, is a survival of a widely spread custom. Several jewels of Charles the Bold had their names : “le sancy, les trois frères, la hôte, la balle de Flandres.” If, at the present time, ships still have names, but bells and most houses have not, the reason lies in the fact that the ship preserves a sort of personality, also expressed in the English usage of making ships feminine. In the Middle Ages this tendency to personify things was much stronger; every house and every bell had its name.
In the minds of the Middle Ages every event, every case, fictitious or historic, tends to crystallize, to become a parable, an example, a proof, in order to be applied as a standing instance of a general moral truth. In the same way every utterance becomes a dictum, a maxim, a text. For every question of conduct Scripture, legends, history, literature, furnish a crowd of examples or of types, together making up a sort of moral clan, to which the matter in question belongs. If it is desired to make someone to pardon an offence, all the Biblical cases of pardon are enumerated to him; if to dissuade him from marrying, all the unhappy marriages of antiquity are cited. In order to free himself from blame for the murder of the duke of Orleans, Jean sans Peur compares himself to Joab and his victim to Absalom, rating himself as less guilty than Joab, because he had not acted in open defiance of a royal warning. “Ainsy avoit le bon duc Jehan attrait ce fait à moralité.”[1]
In the Middle Ages everyone liked to base a serious argument on a text, so as to give it a foundation. In 1406, at the national council of Paris, where the question of the schism was debated, the twelve propositions for and against renouncing obedience to the pope of Avignon, all started from a Biblical quotation. Profane orators, too, no less than preachers, choose their text.
All the traits indicated are found united in striking fashion in the famous plea delivered on the 8th of March, 1408, at the hôtel de Saint Pol before a princely audience, by Master Jean Petit, divine, preacher and poet, in order to clear the duke of Burgundy of the charge of the murder which the latter repented of having confessed. It is a real masterpiece of political wickedness, built up with perfect art and in a severe style on the text: Radix omnium malorum cupiditas (the root of all evil is covetousness). The whole is cunningly arranged in a scheme of scholastic distinctions and complementary Biblical texts, illustrated by Scriptural and historical examples and animated by a fiendish verve. After having enumerated twelve reasons obliging the duke of Burgundy to honour, love and avenge the king of France, Maître Petit draws two applications from his text: covetousness makes apostates and it makes traitors. Apostasy and treason are divided and subdivided, and then illustrated by three examples. Lucifer, Absalom and Athalia rise up before the imagination of the hearers as the archetypes of a traitor. Eight truths are brought forward to justify tyrannicide. Referring to one of the eight, he says: “I shall prove this truth by twelve reasons in honour of the twelve apostles.” And he cites three sentences of the doctors, three of the philosophers, three of the jurists and three from Scripture. From the eight truths eight corollaries are derived, completed by a ninth. By the aid of allusions or insinuations he revives all the old suspicions which hung over the memory of the ambitious and debauched prince: his responsibility for the disaster of the “bal des ardents,” where the young king’s company, disguised as wild men, miserably perished by fire, while the king himself narrowly escaped; his plans of murder and poisoning, hatched in the Celestine monastery, in the course of his conversations with “the sorcerer,” Philippe de Mézières. The notorious leaning of the duke towards necromancy furnished an opportunity for describing very picturesque scenes of horror. Maître Petit is even familiar with the demons whom Orleans consulted; he knows their names and the way in which they were dressed. He goes so far as to ascribe a sinister meaning to the delirious utterances of the mad king.
All this makes up the major term of the syllogism. The minor follows it, point by point. Grounding themselves on the general propositions which had raised the case to the plane of fundamental ethics and had artfully roused a sentiment of shuddering horror, the direct accusations burst out in a flood of passionate hatred and defamation. The pleading lasted for four hours, and at the end Jean sans Peur pronounced the words: “I avouch you” (Je vous avoue). The justification was written out in four costly copies for the duke and his nearest relations, ornamented with gilding and miniatures, and bound in pressed leather. It was also for sale.
The tendency to give each particular case the character of a moral sentence or of an example, so that it becomes something substantial and unchallengeable, the crystallization of thought, in short, finds its most general and natural expression in the proverb. In the thought of the Middle Ages proverbs have performed a very living function. There were hundreds in current use in every nation. The greater number are striking and concise. Their tone is often ironical, their accent always that of bonhomie and resignation. The wisdom we glean from them is sometimes profound and beneficent. They never preach resistance. “Les grans poissons mangent les plus petis.” “Les mal vestus assiet ondos ou vent.” “Nul n’est chaste si ne besongne.” “Au besoing on s’aide du diable.” “Il n’est si ferré qui ne glice.” [2] To the laments of moralists about the depravation of man the proverbs oppose a smiling detachment. The proverb always glozes over iniquity. Now it is naïvely pagan and now almost evangelical. A people which has many proverbs in current use will be less given to talking nonsense, and so will avoid many confused arguments and empty phrases. Leaving arguments to cultured people, it is content with judging each case by referring to the authority of some.proverb. The crystallization of thought in proverbs is therefore not without advantage to society.
Proverbs in their crude simplicity were thoroughly in accordance with the general spirit of the literature of the epoch. The level reached by authors was but little higher than that of the proverbs. The dicta of Froissart often read like proverbs gone wrong. “It is thus with feats of arms: sometimes one loses, another time one wins.” “There is nothing of which one does not tire.” It is therefore safer, instead of hazarding moral sentences of one’s own, to use well-established proverbs like Geffroi de Paris, who lards his rhyming chronicle with them. The literature of the time is full of ballads of which each stanza ends with a proverb, as, for instance, the Ballade de Fougères of Alain Chartier, the Complaincte de Eco of Coquillart, and several poems by Jean Molinet, not to mention Villon’s well-known ballad which was entirely composed of them. The 171 stanzas of the Passe Temps d’Oysiveté, by Robert Gaguin, nearly all end in some phrase looking like a proverb, although the greater number are not found in the best-known collections. Did Gaguin invent them, then? In that case we should have a still more curious indication of the vital function of the proverb at this epoch, if we see them here arising in an individual mind, in statu nascendi, as it were.
In political speeches and in sermons, proverbs are in frequent use. Gerson, Jean de Varennes, Jean Petit, Guillaume Fillastre, Olivier Maillard, take pains to strengthen their arguments by the most common ones. “Qui de tout se tait, de tout a paix.—Chef bien peigné porte mal bacinet.—Qui commun sert, nul ne l’en paye.”[3]
Related to the proverb, in so far as it is a crystallized form of thought, is the motto, which the declining Middle Ages cultivated with marked predilection. It differs from it in that it is not, like the proverb, a wise adage of general application, but a personal maxim or exhortation. To adopt a motto is, so to say, to choose a text for the sermon of one’s life. The motto is a symbol and a token. Marked in golden letters on every article of the wardrobe and of the equipment, it must have exercised a suggestive influence of no mean importance. The moral tone of these mottoes is mostly that of resignation, like that of the proverbs, or that of hope. The motto should be mysterious. “Quand sera ce?—Tost ou tard vienne.—Va oultre.—Autre fois mieulx.—Plus deuil que joye.”[4] The greater number refer to love. “Aultre naray.—Vostre plaisir.—Souvienne vous.—Plus que toutes.”[5] When of such a nature they were worn on armour and caparisons. Those engraved in rings have a more intimate note: “Mon cuer avez.—Je le desire.—Pour toujours.—Tout pour vous.”[6]
A complement to mottoes is found in the emblem, like the knotty stick of Louis of Orleans with the motto “Je l’envie,” a gambling term meaning “I challenge,” to which Jean sans Peur replied with a plane and the words “Ic houd,” that is to say, “accepted.” Another instance is the flint-and-steel of Philip the Good. With the emblem and the motto we enter the sphere of heraldic thought, of which the psychology is yet to be written. To the men of the Middle Ages the coat of arms was undoubtedly more than a matter of vanity or of genealogical interest. Heraldic figures in their minds acquired a value almost like that of a totem. Whole complexes of pride and ambition, of loyalty and devotion, were condensed in the symbols of lions, lilies or crosses, which thus marked and expressed intricate mental contexts by means of an image.
The spirit of casuistry, which was greatly developed in the Middle Ages, is another expression of the same tendency to isolate each thing as a special entity. It is another effect of the dominant idealism. Every question which presents itself must have its ideal solution, which will become apparent as soon as we have ascertained, by the aid of formal rules, the relation of the case in question to the eternal verities. Casuistry reigns in all the departments of the mind: alike in morals and in law, and in matters of ceremony, of etiquette, of tournaments and the chase, and, above all, of love. We have already spoken of the influence which chivalrous casuistry exercised on the origins of the laws of war. Let us quote some more examples from the Arbre des Batailles of Honoré Bonet. Should a member of the clergy aid his father or his bishop? Is one bound to make good borrowed armour which one has lost during a battle? May one fight a battle on festal days? Is it better to fight fasting or after a meal?
No subject lent itself better to the distinction of casuistry than that of prisoners of war. To take noble and rich prisoners was, at that time, the main point of the military profession. In what circumstances may one escape from captivity? What is a safe conduct worth? To whom does an escaped and recaptured prisoner belong? May a prisoner on parole fly, if his victor puts him in chains? Or may he do go, if his captor forgot to ask his parole? In Le Jouvencel two captains dispute for a prisoner before the commander-in-chief. “I seized him first,” says one, “by the arm and by the right hand, and tore his glove from him.” “But to me,” says the other, “he gave that same hand with his parole.”
Besides idealism, a strong formalism is at the bottom of all the traits enumerated. “The innate belief in the transcendental reality of things brings about as a result that every notion is strictly defined and limited, isolated, as it were, in a plastic form, and it is this form which is all-important. Mortal sins are distinguished from venial sins according to fixed rules. In law, culpability is established in the first place by the formal nature of the deed. The ancient judicial adage, “The deed judges the man,” had lost nothing of its force. Although jurisprudence had been long ago freed from the extreme formalism of primitive law, which knew no difference between the intentional and the involuntary deed and did not punish an attempt that had miscarried, yet traces of a severe formalism existed in great number at the close of the Middle Ages. Thus, there was a rule of long standing that a slip of the tongue in the formula of an oath rendered it null and void, the oath being a sacred thing. In the thirteenth century an exception was made in favour of foreign merchants who only knew the language of the country imperfectly, and it was conceded that their incorrect language in taking the oath should not lose them their rights.
The extreme sensibility to everything touching honour is an effect of the general formalism. A nobleman is blamed for having the caparison of his horse ornamented with his armorial bearings, because, if the horse, “a brute beast,” should stumble at the joust, the coat of arms would be dragged through the sand and the whole family dishonoured.
The formal element occupied a large place in everything connected with vengeance, expiations, reparations for wounded honour. The right of vengeance, a very vital element in the “ customs of France and the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, was exercised more or less according to fixed rules. It is not always furious anger which urges people to acts of violence in pursuit of vengeance; amends for offended honour are sought according to a well-regulated plan. It is, above all, a question of shedding blood, not of killing; sometimes care is taken to wound the victim only in the face, the arms, or the thighs.
The satisfaction sought for, being formal, is symbolic. In political reconciliations in the fifteenth century, symbolic actions have a very large share: demolition of houses which recall the crime, erection of commemorative crosses or chapels, injunctions to block up a doorway, etc., not to mention expiatory processions and masses for the dead. After his reconciliation with his brother at Rouen in 1469, Louis XI’s first care is to have the ring which the bishop of Lisieux gave to Charles in marrying him to Normandy as its duke, broken on an anvil in the presence of the notables.
The chronicle of Jean de Roye records a striking instance of this craving for symbols and forms. One Laurent Guernier had been hanged by mistake at Paris in 1478; he had obtained a reprieve, but his pardon arrived too late. A year later his brother obtained permission to have the body honourably buried. “And before this bier went four town criers of the aforesaid town sounding their rattles, and on their breasts were the arms of the aforesaid Guernier, and around that bier were four tapers and eight torches, carried by men dressed in mourning and bearing the aforesaid crest. And in this way it was carried, passing through the aforesaid city of Paris ... as far as the gate of Saint Anthony, where the aforesaid corpse was placed on a cart draped in black to take it to Provins to be buried. And one of the aforesaid criers who walked before the aforesaid corpse, cried: “Good people, say your pater nosters for the soul of the late Laurent Guernier, in his life an inhabitant of Provins, who was lately found dead under an oak-tree!”
The mentality of the declining Middle Ages often seems to us to display an incredible superficiality and feebleness. The complexity of things is ignored by it in a truly astounding manner. It proceeds to generalizations unhesitatingly on the strength of a single instance. Its liability to wrong judgment is extreme. Inexactitude, credulity, levity, inconsistency, are common features of medieval reasoning. All these defects are rooted in its fundamental formalism. To explain a situation or an event, a single motive suffices, and, for choice, the most general motive, the most direct or the grossest. To Burgundian party-feeling, for example, there could be but a single ground which could have urged the duke of Burgundy to compass the murder of the duke of Orleans: he wished to avenge the (assumed) adultery of the queen with Orleans. In every controversy people would disregard all the features of the case save a few, whose significance they exaggerated at pleasure. Thus the presentment of a fact, in the minds of the epoch, is always like a primitive woodcut, with strong and simple lines and very clearly marked contours.
So much for “simplistic” habits of mind. As to ill-considered generalization, it manifests itself on every page of the literature of that time. From a single case of impartiality reported of the English of olden time, Olivier de la Marche concludes that at that period the English were virtuous, and because of that had been able to conquer France. The importance of a particular case is exaggerated, because it is seen in an ideal light. Moreover, every case can be paralleled in sacred history, and so be exalted to higher significance. In 1404 a procession of students at Paris was assaulted: two were wounded, the clothes of a third were torn. This was enough for the chancellor of the University, carried away by the heat of his indignation, and by a simple consonance, “Les enfants, les jolis escoliers comme agneaux innocens,”[7] to launch into comparison of the incident to the massacre of Bethlehem.
If for every particular case an explanation is so easily admitted, and, once admitted, takes root in the mind without meeting with resistance, then the danger of wrong judgments is extremely great. Nietzsche said that abstaining from, wrong judgments would make life impossible, and it is probable that the intense life which we sometimes envy past centuries, was partly due to the facility of false judgments. In our own day too, in times which require the utmost exertion of national force, the nerves need the help of false judgment. The men: of the Middle Ages lived in a continual mental crisis. They could not for a moment dispense with false judgments of the grossest kind. If, in the fifteenth century, the cause of the dukes of Burgundy could persuade so many Frenchmen first to breach of fealty and next to hostility to their country, this political sentiment can only be explained by a whole tissue of emotional conceptions and confused ideas.
It is in this light that the general and constant habit of ridiculously exaggerating the number of enemies killed in battle should be considered. Chastellain gives a loss of five nobles on the side of the duke at the battle of Gavre, as against twenty or thirty thousand of the Ghent rebels.
What are we to say, lastly, of the curious levity of the authors of the close of the Middle Ages, which often impresses us as an absolute lack of mental power? It sometimes seems as if they were content to present to their readers a series of vague pictures, and felt no need whatever of really hard thinking. Superficial description of outward circumstances—this is all we get from writers like Froissart and Monstrelet. Compared with Herodotus, to say nothing of Thucydides, their narrative is disjointed, empty, without pith or meaning. They do not distinguish the essential from the accidental. Their lack of precision is deplorable. Monstrelet was present at the interview of the duke of Burgundy with Joan of Arc, when a prisoner: he does not remember what was said. Thomas Basin himself, who conducted the process of rehabilitation, says in his chronicle that Joan was born at Vaucouleurs instead of Domremy, and that she was conducted to Tours by Baudricourt himself, whom he calls lord of the town instead of captain, while he is mistaken by three months as to the date of her first interview with the dauphin. Olivier de la Marche, master of the ceremonies and an impeccable courtier, constantly muddles the genealogy of the ducal family and goes so far as to make the marriage of Charles with Margaret of York take place after the siege of Neuss in 1475, though he was present at the wedding festivities in 1468. Even Commines is not exempt from surprising inexactitudes.
The credulity and the lack of critical spirit are too general and too well known to make it necessary to cite examples. It goes without saying that here the degree of erudition makes ὃ great difference. Basin and Molinet treated the popular belief that Charles the Bold would come back as a fable. Ten years after the battle of Nancy, people were still lending money which was to be reimbursed on his return.
“J’ay veu chose incongneue:
Ung mort ressusciter,
Et sur sa revenue
Par milliers achapter.
L’un dit: il est en vie,
L’autre: ce n’est que vent.
Tous bons cueurs sans envie
Le regrettent souvent.”[8]
On the one hand, their clear outlines and frequently anthropomorphic character give ideas a marked degree of fixity and immobility; on the other hand, the meaning of a conception runs a constant risk of being lost in the too vivid form. The principal person of the long allegorical and satirical poem of Eustache Deschamps, Le Miroir de Mariage, is called Franc Vouloir. Folly and Desire advise him to marry, Repertory of Science dissuades him. Now, if we ask ourselves what Deschamps wanted to express by the abstraction Franc Vouloir, it appears that the idea oscillates between the careless liberty of the bachelor and free will in a philosophic sense. The personification has more or less absorbed the idea which gave it birth. As undecided as the character of the central figure is the moral tone of the poem. The pious praise of the spiritual marriage and of the contemplative life contrasts strangely with the customary and rather vulgar mockery of women and of female virtue. The author sometimes puts exalted truths into the mouth of Folly and Desire, though their part is that of the devil’s advocate. It is very hard to decide what was the personal conviction of the poet, and to what degree he was serious.
To distinguish clearly the serious element from pose and playfulness, is a problem that crops up in connection with nearly all the manifestations of the mentality of the Middle Ages. We saw it arise in connection with chivalry, and with the forms of love and of piety. We always have to remember that in more primitive cultural phases than ours, the line of demarcation between sincere conviction and “pretending” often seems to be wanting. What would be -hypocrisy in a modern mind, is not always so in a medieval one.
The general want of balance, characterizing the soul of this epoch, in spite of the clear-cut form of its ideas, is especially felt in the domain of superstition. On the subject of sorcery, doubt and rationalistic interpretations alternate with the blindest credulity. We can never tell precisely to what degree this belief was sincere. Philippe de Mézières, in the Songe du Vieil Pelerin, tells that he himself learned the magic arts from a Spaniard. During more than ten years he did not succeed in forgetting his infamous knowledge. “As a volenté ne povoit pas bien extirper de son cuer les dessusdits signes et l’effect d’iceulx contre Dieu.”[9] At last, “through the grace of God, by dint of confessing and resisting, he was delivered from this great folly, which is an enemy to the Christian soul.”
During the horrible campaign of persecution against sorcerers in 1461, known as the “Vauderie d’Arras,” both the people and the magistrates gravely doubted the reality of the alleged crimes. Outside the town of Arras, says Jacques du Clercq, “not one person in a thousand believed that it was true that they practised the aforesaid sorcery. Such things were never before heard of happening in these countries.” Nevertheless, the town suffered severely in consequence: people would no longer shelter its merchants or give them credit, for fear that, accused of witchcraft, on the morrow, perhaps, they might lose all their possessions by confiscation. One of the inquisitors, who claimed to be able to discover the guilty at sight, and went so far as to declare that it was impossible for a man to be wrongly accused of sorcery, afterwards went mad. A poem full of hatred accused the persecutors of having got up the whole affair out of covetousness, and the bishop himself called the persecution “a thing intended by some evil persons.” Philip the Good, having asked the advice of the Faculty of Louvain, several of its members declared that the sorcery was not real. Upon which the duke, who, in spite of the archaic turn of his mind, was not superstitious, sent the king-at-arms of the Golden Fleece to Arras. Then the executions and the imprisonments ceased. Later on, all the processes were annulled, which fact the town celebrated by a joyful feast with representations of edifying “moralities.”The opinion that the rides through the air and the orgies of the witches’ sabbath were but delusions which the devil suggested to the poor foolish women, was already rather widely spread in the fifteenth century. Froissart, describing the striking case of a Gascon nobleman and his familiar demon called Horton (he surpasses himself here in exactness and vividness of narrative), treats it as an “error.” But it is an error caused by the devil, so the rationalizing interpretation, after all, goes only half-way. Gerson alone goes so far as to suggest the notion of a cerebral lesion, the others confine themselves to the hypothesis of diabolical illusions. Martin Lefranc, provost of the church of Lausanne, in the Champion des Dames, which he dedicated to Philip the Good in 1440, defended this opinion.
“Je ne croiray tant que je vive
Que femme corporellement
Voit par l’air comme merle ou grive,
—Dit le Champion prestement.—
| · | · | · | · | · | · | · |
Quant la pourelle est en sa couche,
Pour y dormir et reposer,
L’ennemi qui point ne se couche
Se vient encoste allé poser.
Lors illusions composer
Lui scet sy tres soubtillement
Qu’elle croit faire ou proposer
Ce qu’elle songe seulement.
Force la vielle songera
Que sur un chat ou sur un chien
A l’assemblée s’en ira;
Mais certes il n’en sera rien:
Et sy n’est baston ne mesrien
Qui le peut ung pas enlever.”[10]
In general the mental attitude towards supernatural facts was a vacillating one. Rational interpretation, timid credulity, or the suspicion of diabolical ruses, have the upper hand by turns. The Church did its best to combat superstitions. Friar Richard, the popular preacher at Paris, has the mandrakes brought to him to be burned, "which many foolish people kept in safe places, having such great faith in this ordure, that, indeed, they firmly believed, that so long as they had it (provided it were very neatly wrapped up in silk or linen folds) they would never be poor so long as they lived."
Dogmatic theology was always studious to inculcate the exact distinction between matters of faith and of superstition. Benedictions and conjurations, says Denis the Carthusian in his treatise Contra vitia superstitionum, have no effect in themselves. They operate only in so far as they are pronounced as humble prayers, with pious intention and placing one’s hope in God. Since popular belief, nevertheless, attributes magical virtue to them, it would be better that the clergy forbade these practices altogether."
Unhappily, the zeal of the Church for the purity of the faith did not affect demonomania. Its own doctrine prevented it from uprooting belief in it. For it kept to the norm, fixed by the authority of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas: Omnia quae visibiliter fiunt in hoc mundo, possunt fieri per daemones.[11] Conjurations, says Denis, continuing the argument we have just cited, often take effect in spite of the absence of a pious intention, because then the devil has taken a hand in it. This ambiguity left room for a good deal of uncertainty. The fear of sorcery and the blind fury of persecution continued to darken the mental atmosphere of the age. The official confirmation of both the theory and the practice of persecution was effected in the last quarter of the fifteenth century by the Malleus maleficarum, the Hammer for Witches, by two German Dominicans, which appeared in 1487, and by the bull, Summis desiderantes, of Pope Innocent VIII, of 1484.
So towards the end of the Middle Ages this dark system of delusion and cruelty grew slowly to completion. All the deficiencies of medieval thinking and its inherent tendencies to gross error had contributed to its building. The fifteenth century transmitted it to the coming age like a horrible disease, which for a long time neither classical culture nor Protestant reformation nor the Catholic revival were able or even willing to cure.
- ↑ Thus good duke John had drawn the moral inference of the case.
- ↑ The big fishes eat the smaller. The badly dressed are placed with their back to the wind. None is chaste if he has no business. At need we let the devil help us. No horse is so well shod that it never slips.
- ↑ He who is silent about all things, is troubled by nothing.—A well-groomed head wears the helmet badly.—He who serves the common weal, is paid by none for his trouble.
- ↑ When will it be?—Soon or late it may come.—Onward.—Better next time.—More sorrow than joy.
- ↑ I shall have no other.—Your pleasure.—Remember.—More than all.
- ↑ You have my heart.—I desire it.—For ever.—All for you.
- ↑ The children, the pretty scholars, like innocent lambs.
- ↑ I have seen an unknown thing: A dead man coming to life, And on his return Buy for thousands. The one says: he is alive. The other: it is but wind. All good hearts, void of envy, Regret his loss often.
- ↑ He could not voluntarily extirpate from his mind the aforesaid signs and their effect against God.
- ↑ As long as I live I shall not believe That a woman can bodily Travel through the air like blackbird or thrush, Said the Champion forthwith…. When the poor woman lies in her bed, In order to sleep and to rest there, The enemy who never lies down to sleep Comes and remains by her side. Then to call up illusions Before her he can so subtly, That she thinks she does or proposes to do What she only dreams. Perhaps the gammer will dream That on a cat or on a dog She will go to the meeting; But certainly nothing will happen; And there is neither a stick nor a beam Which could lift her a step.
- ↑ All that happens visibly in this world, can be done by demons.