This episode we conclude the story of the peasant lad who spurned a humble farming life to go off live the high life with a robber knight and, as we shall see, did not ultimately get the life he expected. Here is the final part of Meier Helmbrecht.
You can get a sense of the landscape surrounding the location identified (by some scholars) as the site of the Helmbrecht Farm through this Google Street View link: https://goo.gl/maps/XrweFAqfGQEAMxxdA
Today’s Text
Wernher der Gartenaere. Meier Helmbrecht. In Peasant Life in Old German Epics, translated by Clair Hayden Bell, Columbia UP, 1931.
References
Bastow, A. “Peasant Customs and Superstitions in Thirteenth Century Germany.” Folklore, vol. 47, no. 3, Sept. 1936, pp. 313-328. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1256867.
Dobozy, Maria. The Saxon Mirror: A Sachsenspiegel of the Fourteenth Century. U of Pennsylvania P, 1999. Archive.org.
Lewis, Charlton T. A History of Germany from the Earliest Times. Harper & Brothers, 1874. Google Books.
Nordmeyer, George. “The Judge in the Meier Helmbrecht.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 63, no. 2, Feb. 1948, pp. 95-104. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/2909515.
Price, Arnold H. “Early Places Ending in -heim as Warrior Club Settlements and the Role of Soc in the Germanic Administration of Justice.” Central European History, vol. 14, no. 3, Sept. 1981, pp. 187-199. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4545929.
Audio Credit:A Clockwork Orange. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros., 1972.
Image Credit: Manuscript illustration detail of crows eating the eyes of a corpse (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 1951). From The Medieval Bestiary: https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastgallery252.htm.
We continue with Part 2 (of 3) of the 13th-century peasant epic Meier Helmbrecht, in which Helmbrecht returns to his family after a year as squire to a robber knight, and cultures clash accordingly.
Today’s Text
Wernher der Gartenaere. Meier Helmbrecht. In Peasant Life in Old German Epics, translated by Clair Hayden Bell, Columbia UP, 1931. Archive.org.
References
Bastow, A. “Peasant Customs and Superstitions in Thirteenth Century Germany.”Folklore, vol. 47, no. 3, Sept. 1936, pp. 313-328.JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1256867.
Jacobson, Evelyn M. “The Reader in ‘Helmbrecht.'” Colloquia Germanica, vol. 26, no. 3, 1993, pp. 201-210. JSTOR, hwww.jstor.org/stable/23982533.
Lewis, Charlton T. A History of Germany from the Earliest Times. Harper & Brothers, 1874. Google Books.
Nordmeyer, George. “The Judge in the Meier Helmbrecht.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 63, no. 2, Feb. 1948, pp. 95-104. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/2909515.
Nordmeyer, George. “Structure and Design in Wernher’s Meier Helbrecht.” PMLA, vol. 67, no. 2, Mar. 1952, pp. 259-287. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/460099.
Image credit: detail of cabbage harvesting from a 15th-century manuscript of Ibn Butlan’s Tacuinum sanitatis, Paris, BnF, Département des manuscrits, Latin 9333 fol. 20.
In this episode we learn how important good hair is to becoming a medieval cattle rustler with part one of the 13th-century poem Meier Helmbrecht.
Today’s Text
Wernher der Gartenaere. Meier Helmbrecht. In Peasant Life in Old German Epics, translated by Clair Hayden Bell, Columbia UP, 1931. Archive.org.
References
Bartlett, Robert. “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 4, 1994, pp. 43-60. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/3679214.
This episode, we follow up on a question from Ep. 90 about why the wandering worker Thomas Fuller might have fallen in with a criminal shepherd by looking at a pair of vagrancy and labor laws from the economically disrupted decades following the Black Death: the Statute of Laborers of 1351 and the Commons’ Petition against Vagrants of 1376. We also learn a bit about late medieval prisons.
Today’s Texts:
Henderson, Ernest F., editor and translator. Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages. George Bell and Sons, 1892, pp. 165-168. Google Books.
“Commons’ Petition Against Vagrants” of 1376,” reprinted in R.B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. MacMillan, 1970, pp. 72-74. Google Books.
References:
Clark, Elaine. “Institutional and Legal Responses to Begging in Medieval England.” Social Science History, vol. 26, no. 3, Fall 2002, pp. 447-473. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40267786.
Geltner, Guy. “Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory.” History Compass, vol. 4, 2006, pp. 1-14, doi: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00319.x. Available at guygeltner.net.
We finish off our Medieval True Crime miniseries with a look at two hangings from the year 1484 and explore some of the practices surrounding and meanings of hanging as a mode of execution in medieval Europe.
Today’s Text
Knox, Ronald, and Shane Leslie, editors and translators. The Miracles of King Henry VI. Cambridge UP, 1923.
References
Merback, Mitchell B. The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. U of Chicago P, 1999.
In this (belated) episode marking our seventh anniversary, we learn about the infernal realms, straight from the devil’s mouth, going from a 11th-century Old English text to the 16th-century stage. We also learn why you shouldn’t attack your father with an ax and what demonic possession has in common with e. Coli.
Today’s Texts
Kemble, John M., editor and translator. The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus, with an Historical Introduction. The Ælfric Society, 1848, pp. 86-88. Google Books.
Faust Book. In Early English Prose Romances, edited by William John Thoms. Nattali and Bond, 1858. Digital text available at the Perseus Project.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus from the Quarto of 1604. Edited by Alexander Dyce. Project Gutenberg, 2009.
de Vitry, Jacques. Exempla of Jacques de Vitry. Edited by Thomas Frederick Crane, David Nutt, 1890. Google Books.
Gregory the Great. The Dialogues of Saint Gregory, Surnamed the Great: Pope of Rome & the First of That Name. Translated by P.W., edited by Edmund G. Gardner, Philip Lee Warner, 1911. Digital text edited by Roger Pearce, 2004, https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/gregory_00_dialogues_intro.htm.
References
Andrew, Malcom. “Grendel in Hell.” English Studies, vol. 62, no. 5, 1981, pp. 401–410.
Robinson, Fred C. “The Devil’s Account of the Next World: An Anecdote from Old English Homiletic Literature.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 73, no., 1/3, 1972, pp. 363-371. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43345366.
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