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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,' S. Baring-Gould presents an engaging exploration of medieval folklore and superstition, skillfully weaving together historical narratives, legend, and myth. His literary style is characterized by a blend of rigorous scholarship and vivid storytelling, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the peculiar beliefs that shaped the medieval worldview. Baring-Gould meticulously dissects various tales, from the familiar to the obscure, exposing the cultural and theological contexts that gave rise to such myths while deftly employing a tone that is both accessible and academic, making the text a rich resource for both casual readers and scholars alike. S. Baring-Gould was a prolific author, clergyman, and folklorist, whose deep interest in the intersection of religion and culture informed much of his work. His fascination with the narratives that have shaped human experience, particularly those rooted in the medieval era, is evident in this book. Baring-Gould's extensive travels across Europe and his scholarly pursuits offered him an invaluable perspective on the oral traditions and historical contexts that influenced these intriguing myths. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the folklore of the Middle Ages, as well as those seeking to understand how these narratives echo in contemporary culture. Baring-Gould's insightful analysis invites readers to reconsider the boundaries of myth and history, ultimately challenging the perception of medieval thought as mere superstition. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Curious Myths of the Middle Ages
Table of Contents
Introduction
At once an inquiry and an invitation, this book traces how medieval tales were born, embroidered, and believed, revealing not merely curious stories but the enduring human need to shape uncertainty into meaning, to clothe fear, hope, and moral instruction in narratives that travel across borders and centuries, adapting to each new teller while preserving the recognizable contours that link a marketplace anecdote to a monk’s chronicle, and a fireside tale to a learned compilation, demonstrating how myth functions as a shared language through which communities explain the inexplicable, negotiate authority, and remember themselves in times of faith, doubt, and change.
Curious Myths of the Middle Ages is a nonfiction compendium by S. Baring-Gould, an English cleric and scholar active in the nineteenth century. First issued in the mid-1860s, it belongs to the Victorian era’s flourishing interest in folklore, medievalism, and historical criticism. The book surveys the imaginative world of medieval Europe, yet it is framed by the methodologies and sensibilities of its own time. Readers encounter not a modern textbook but a period study that seeks to understand how celebrated legends took shape. Its setting is intellectual rather than geographical: libraries, scriptoria, pulpits, and marketplaces where stories circulated and matured.
At its core, the volume assembles essays that each consider a single legend or cluster of related tales, asking where it came from, how it traveled, and why it persisted. The author tracks narrative threads through manuscripts and printed sources, weighing testimony and comparing versions without surrendering to credulity. The voice is learned and conversational, moving from citation to reflection with a steady, explanatory rhythm. The mood favors inquiry over spectacle; wonder is acknowledged, but the emphasis is on context. The result is a guided tour of myth-making that offers discovery without demanding prior expertise from the reader.
The method privileges patient accumulation of evidence. Baring-Gould juxtaposes chronicles with popular lore, notices echoes across languages, and points to earlier motifs that reappear in new guises. He examines how devotion, polemic, entertainment, and commerce helped stories spread, and how authority—religious, political, or scholarly—could endorse or restrain belief. Rather than isolating the Middle Ages, he situates medieval narratives within longer currents that reach backward to classical and biblical materials and outward to neighboring cultures. This comparative approach invites readers to attend to transmission, transformation, and the subtle work of adaptation that keeps a legend recognizably itself.
Several themes recur throughout the collection. The book explores the line between pious example and popular fantasy, the appeal of marvels in communities confronting uncertainty, and the uses of narrative in teaching, warning, or consoling. It considers the prestige of texts and the power of repetition to lend plausibility, as well as the creativity of local tradition in reshaping borrowed material. It also probes how memory and identity can crystallize around a striking story. In emphasizing process rather than verdict, the essays suggest that myths endure less because they are believed literally than because they remain meaningful.
For contemporary readers, the study resonates beyond its historical subjects. In an age of rapid communication, the book’s attention to how stories travel, mutate, and gain authority offers a framework for thinking about rumor, misinformation, and cultural exchange. Its case studies model habits of careful reading, source evaluation, and comparative analysis that remain useful today. The work also raises questions about the ethics of interpretation: how to balance sympathy for past belief with critical scrutiny, and how to recognize one’s own era’s assumptions. Engaging with it can sharpen historical imagination while encouraging intellectual humility.
Approached on those terms, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages promises a reflective and rewarding experience. Readers will find prose shaped by Victorian scholarship, yet energized by curiosity and a desire to make connections across time. The essays can be read singly or as a sequence that accumulates insight into how legends function. Throughout, Baring-Gould aims to illuminate sources and patterns rather than to revel in mystery or to dismiss it. The result is a study that invites participation: to follow references, to compare versions, and to consider what our own cherished stories may reveal about us.
Synopsis (Selection)
Curious Myths of the Middle Ages is a compendium of essays in which S. Baring-Gould collects, compares, and contextualizes a range of medieval legends. Proceeding case by case, he traces each myth’s earliest attestations, follows its variants across languages and regions, and examines how sermons, chronicles, ballads, travel narratives, and printed pamphlets shaped its spread. His method is descriptive and documentary: he assembles sources, notes recurring motifs, and points out points of contact with classical traditions and later folklore. The result is a sequential tour through emblematic stories, showing how religious expectation, political circumstance, and imaginative literature together generate durable narratives.
The book opens with the legend of the Wandering Jew, charting the figure’s emergence from late medieval preaching and popular print to a pan-European folklore presence. Baring-Gould documents names, itineraries, and purported encounters, weighing their sources and noting the tale’s eschatological undertones. He observes how the story’s features—perpetual motion, long life, periodic reappearances—allow it to absorb local color while retaining a recognizable core. By assembling testimonies, broadsides, and literary treatments, he models his approach: track a myth’s documentary footprint, record its variations, and situate its persistence within ongoing religious curiosity and fascination with living witnesses to sacred history.
He then turns to Prester John, the imagined Christian sovereign of the East. Beginning with the famous twelfth-century letter and its diffusion, Baring-Gould follows the legend as it relocates from India to Ethiopia under the pressure of crusading hopes and shifting geography. He correlates ambassadorial reports, travelers’ tales, and cartography to show how changing knowledge of Asia and Africa reframed expectations. The narrative highlights intersections with Mongol diplomacy, missionary ventures, and the search for allies, concluding that Prester John’s kingdom was a composite of wishful inference, textual authority, and misunderstandings that nevertheless influenced European policy and sustained a durable exploration myth.
The Divining Rod provides a case study in practical superstition. Baring-Gould assembles accounts of rhabdomancy employed to find water, metals, and even criminals, referencing legal proceedings and medical experiments. He compares medieval and early modern testimonies, classical antecedents, and ecclesiastical reactions, noting cycles of credulity and skepticism. Through anecdotes and documented trials, he emphasizes how procedure, reputation, and ambiguous outcomes perpetuate the practice. Without polemic, he catalogues explanatory theories—natural causes, suggestion, fraud—showing how the rod’s appeal persists across social ranks. The chapter illustrates his broader interest in how repeated narrative patterns and selective memory sustain belief despite intermittent disconfirmation.
In the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Baring-Gould traces a late antique Christian story through medieval Europe and its adoption into Islamic tradition. He documents textual roots in Greek and Syriac sources, subsequent Latin transmissions, and devotional uses as calendrical marvel and emblem of resurrection. The survey compares localized versions, reported discoveries of the cave, and liturgical echoes. By collating linguistic and narrative changes, he demonstrates how theological themes—divine protection, suspended time—acquire new settings while preserving core structures. The chapter exemplifies cross-cultural circulation: a shared miracle narrative reinterpreted in different confessional contexts yet consistently serving didactic and consolatory purposes.
Turning to heroic and domestic legends, he examines William Tell and the Dog Gellert. For Tell, Baring-Gould juxtaposes Swiss accounts with earlier Scandinavian and German parallels to the apple-shot motif, arguing for motif migration rather than purely local origin. With Gellert, the faithful hound wrongly slain, he compiles cognate stories from Europe and beyond, pointing to a widespread tale-type about hasty judgment. In both cases, he emphasizes national appropriation and moral framing over documented event, showing how communities anchor floating narratives to named places and persons. These examples underline his method: identify archetypes, then map their historical localization.
The survey expands to marvels and moral allegories. In Tailed Men, Baring-Gould reviews reports of monstrous races and polemical accusations, tracing a lineage from classical ethnography to medieval mappae mundi and local satire. The Man in the Moon collects lunar folklore—figures seen in the disk, banishment motifs, and attributions of criminal punishment—across vernacular traditions. The Mountain of Venus (the Venusberg) explores penitential returns from enchantment, linking courtly narrative, lingering pagan elements, and Christian moralizing. Across these chapters, he highlights how wonder, geography, and morality intertwine, with travelers’ hearsay, literary fashion, and sermon exempla combining to sustain memorable, adaptable images.
Chapters on Pope Joan, Antichrist, and the Fatality of Numbers address polemical and apocalyptic narratives. Baring-Gould assembles the female pontiff’s story from chronicles and later retellings, noting its emergence, elaboration, and use in confessional controversy. On Antichrist, he catalogs prophetic schemes, signs, and timetables, surveying homiletic and scholastic sources. The numerology chapter examines the symbolic weight of numbers—three, seven, twelve, forty, 666—showing how arithmetic patterns buttressed prophecy and structured expectations. Throughout, he documents how calculation, satire, and anxiety produced resilient traditions that guided behavior, informed polemic, and periodically resurfaced in new historical circumstances.
By progressing from wandering figures and distant kingdoms through practical marvels, heroic legends, monstrous races, and apocalyptic expectations, Baring-Gould demonstrates how medieval myths originate, travel, adapt, and endure. His cumulative conclusion is procedural rather than philosophical: careful collation of sources, attention to recurring motifs, and sensitivity to social function can disentangle history from legend without dismissing the latter’s cultural value. The book’s overarching message is that myths act as repositories of hope, fear, and moral instruction, shaped by transmission and context. Presented in sequence, the essays model a historical folklore method and provide a reference map of enduring European narrative patterns.
Historical Context
S. Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (first series, 1866) surveys legends that circulated across Latin Christendom from roughly the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. The book is not set in a single locale; rather, it follows stories embedded in the Holy Roman Empire’s cities, the Rhineland and Alpine valleys, the papal and imperial courts of Rome and Cologne, the pilgrimage islands of Ireland, the German forests, and the trade routes stretching to Byzantium, the Levant, and Ethiopia. Its temporal focus spans the Crusading era, the rise of European universities, the Black Death, and the early Reformation—periods when travel, preaching, relic cults, and print reshaped collective belief.
Crusading, pilgrimage, and the search for Christian allies shaped many of the myths Baring-Gould dissects. The First Crusade (1096–1099) culminated in the capture of Jerusalem, and crusading wars continued until the fall of Acre in 1291. This movement fostered relic veneration and long-distance travel, producing legends such as the Three Kings: their relics were translated from Milan to Cologne in 1164 by Archbishop Rainald of Dassel with Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa’s sanction, prompting vast pilgrimages and the construction of Cologne Cathedral (begun 1248). The same appetite for distant marvels nourished the Letter of Prester John (circulating in Latin by 1165), which promised a powerful Christian monarch in India or the East who might aid the Holy Land. Thirteenth-century reports folded the Mongol world into this hope, with Europeans later identifying the Kerait ruler Toghrul (Wang Khan, d. 1203) as a prototype of Prester John. After Portuguese oceanic exploration, Pêro da Covilhã reached the Ethiopian highlands in the 1490s, and the embassy of Rodrigo de Lima (1520–1526) finally tied the legend to the Solomonic emperors, relocating Prester John to Africa. Pilgrimage sites like St. Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg in Ireland, recorded in the twelfth-century Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii and temporarily suppressed by papal authority in 1497, reveal how ecclesiastical power regulated visionary geographies. Baring-Gould links each myth to this historical matrix: he reconstructs the political uses of relic translations in Cologne, traces the textual diffusion of the Prester John letter through chancelleries and scriptoria, and compares pilgrim narratives with decrees that closed and reopened Lough Derg. By situating wonder-tales within crusading logistics, trade corridors, and diplomacy between Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic world, and Christian Ethiopia, he shows how geopolitical desire and sacred travel generated, moved, and authenticated medieval marvels.
Confessional conflict from the sixteenth century reshaped earlier legends into polemical weapons. The story of Pope Joan, first recorded by Jean de Mailly and Martin of Opava in the thirteenth century, became a flashpoint between Catholics and Protestants after 1517. Humanist and Reformed scholars, culminating in David Blondel’s critical demonstration (1647), attacked its plausibility using chronology and papal lists, while Catholic controversialists defended or reinterpreted the tradition. Baring-Gould reviews these citations and verdicts to show how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation transformed a medieval anecdote into a test case for ecclesiastical credibility, the control of historical memory, and the authority of Rome’s rituals and processions.
The formation of Swiss independence and late medieval civic identity frames Baring-Gould’s treatment of William Tell. The Swiss Confederation emerged from pacts of 1291 among Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, resisting Habsburg oversight. The apple-shot tale appears in the White Book of Sarnen (c. 1470) and was elaborated by Aegidius Tschudi in the sixteenth century. Its episode of compelled marksmanship under the bailiff Gessler parallels earlier Scandinavian motifs (Saxo Grammaticus’s Palnatoki). Baring-Gould uses archival dates, cantonal chronicles, and motif comparison to argue that political needs of late medieval and early modern Switzerland shaped a founding legend retrojected onto the fourteenth-century struggle.
Medieval and early modern natural history informed beliefs about the unicorn and the basilisk. European bestiaries (12th–13th centuries) moralized the unicorn, while trade brought narwhal tusks to courts and apothecaries: Elizabeth I owned a tusk valued in the 1570s at £10,000, and Christian V of Denmark’s throne (1660s–1670s) was fashioned from such ivory. The basilisk, amplified by Pliny’s legacy and Renaissance collectors, was feared as a vector of lethal contagion. Baring-Gould collates pharmacological recipes, merchant inventories, and civic anecdotes to show how medical markets, royal display, and plague anxieties converted exotic commodities and textual lore into tangible proofs of bestiary creatures.
Apocalyptic anxiety and social tension animate the Wandering Jew tradition. A thirteenth-century report by Matthew Paris (1228) mentions Cartaphilus, a figure cursed to live until the Second Coming, while a widely circulated German pamphlet in 1602 revived the tale as moral warning. The Black Death (1347–1351) and subsequent pogroms—including the mass burning of Jews in Strasbourg in 1349—deepened Europe’s obsession with divine judgment and itinerant witnesses of wrath. Baring-Gould links chronicle entries, sermons, and broadsheets to show how eschatological fear, urban rumor networks, and persecution coalesced into a durable legend that explained catastrophe and legitimated exclusion.
Germanic and central European folklore intersects with social regulation in Baring-Gould’s analyses of the Wild Hunt, Tannhäuser, and the divining rod. Orderic Vitalis (writing c. 1091) described a ghostly army, while later German reports cast the Wild Hunt as a winter omen of disorder. The Tannhäuser legend—set against thirteenth-century minnesinger culture and a Pope Urban IV who refuses absolution—circulated in early modern ballads as a caution about penitence and authority. In mining regions of Saxony and the Harz, sixteenth-century technicians debated the dowsing rod; Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (1556) criticized it, yet cases like Jacques Aymar’s 1692 Lyon investigation show its judicial afterlife. Baring-Gould exposes these practices as negotiations between custom and nascent empiricism.
Baring-Gould’s book functions as a social and political critique by tracing how institutions exploited credulity to mobilize violence, revenue, and obedience. He shows relic translations and pilgrimages underwriting civic prestige and ecclesiastical finance; crusading propaganda and the Prester John hope justifying expansion; and apocalyptic legends rationalizing antisemitic persecution. By juxtaposing chronicles with travel reports and administrative acts, he questions clerical gatekeeping of marvels, the use of myth in nation-building, and the persistence of untested procedures in law and medicine. In presenting comparative evidence and dates, he models a historically grounded skepticism that challenges the era’s injustices, information control, and the politicization of wonder.
