May 29, 2025 • 47 mins
One of the most celebrated moments in childhood is when a person utters their very first words, stepping over a brand new threshold of communication. And from that moment on, all bets are off. This week, Danièle speaks with Julie Singer about what medieval people thought about infancy in general, how literary children could be vehicles for truth and justice, and how even in the Middle Ages kids were known to say the darnedest things.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety
two of the Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sebalski, also known
as the five Minute Medievalist. One of the most celebrated
moments in childhood is when a person utters their very
first words, stepping over a brand new threshold of communication,
and anyone who spent time with kids knows that from
(00:37):
that moment on, all bets are off, innocent and unfiltered.
The speech of children can frequently cause us to think
deeply or blush deeply, just as it did in the
Middle Ages. This week, I spoke with doctor Julie Singer
about infant speech in medieval literature. Julie is professor of
French at Washington University in Saint Louis and the author
(01:00):
of Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval Friends, Machines, Madness,
Metaphor and Blindness, and Therapy in Late Medieval French and
Italian Poetry. Her new book is Out of the Mouths
of Babes Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, our conversation
on what medieval people thought about infancy in general, how
(01:21):
literary children could be vehicles for truth and justice, and
how even in the Middle Ages kids were known to
say the darnedest things is coming up right after this. Well,
welcome Julie to talk about medieval childhood and.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
All that stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
We are already laughing as we started this because we
had this freak power outage, but we're going to try
this again.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Welcome.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Okay, So what we started talking about is how medieval
people thought about childhood, because it's not quite the same
as how the nineteenth century historians told us to think
about it. So how did medieval people think about childhood?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
It's a great question, and I think a lot of
us have this perception that people in the Middle Ages
or the early Modern period thought of children as little adults.
This is a perception that's been around for quite a while,
especially since the work of a historian called Philippe Ariez,
who did really groundbreaking studies of childhood in pre modern periods.
(02:26):
But there was a lot that he might have misinterpreted
in the evidence.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
So while a.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Lot of us think that maybe people in the Middle
Ages didn't conceive of childhood as a special time in
life with different expectations than we have for people in adulthood.
That doesn't seem to have been true at all. Now,
what did make childhood quite different in medieval Europe is
the fact that infant mortality was so high. Now, this
(02:55):
doesn't mean people loved their children less or tried to
be detached from them, but it does mean that childhood
had really different symbolic resonances for medieval people than it
has today.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Absolutely, Okay, So childhood wasn't as simple as you're just
born and then you're a little grown up. There are
distinct stages that people talk about when they're conceptualizing childhood
from the ancient period that gets sort of brought into
the medieval period. So what are the phases of childhood
that children are expected.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
To go through?
Speaker 3 (03:29):
In the Middle Ages, especially academic writers were really interested
in creating categories and subcategories. So one of the topics
that gets talked about a lot is the ages of man.
That is this idea that we can divide the ordinary
life cycle or life course of a human being into steps,
(03:49):
and if people survive, they will pretty much follow those
steps in order. These models tend, of course, to start
with childhood. But depending on how many steps they divide
the human life into, there can be more than one
phase of childhood. So we might have three lives where
it's just childhood, young adulthood, and old age all the
(04:12):
way up to seven and more life stages. And in
those models with lots and lots of life stages, we
find that early childhood is treated very differently than later childhood.
And we get some echoes of this today. Right if
we think about religious rituals, for example, well, why does
confirmation happen when it happens for a child today? A
(04:35):
lot of that goes right back to these medieval ideas
about what makes a young child different from what we
might call a tween today or an adolescent. When are
they capable of reason? When are they capable of taking
on more responsibility? And for medieval writers, a lot of
this gets tied to when can they talk? Because if
(04:57):
they can't talk, we don't think they can necessarily reason.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Right, And this is where your book is focused, in
the connection between childhood and language. And for you, this
begins in utero. Tell us a little bit about why
you started in utero.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Well, you might think it would be pretty simple to
figure out when childhood starts. But it's actually a little
bit complicated in these medieval texts. Is a fetus a
child or not? I think that's a question that a
lot of people wrestle with today. When does life start?
So if childhood is a process of acquiring new competencies,
(05:35):
new responsibilities, increased ability to participate in society, well where
does that start? And we do see medieval writers I
think wrestling with that question by imagining, Okay, well what
is it like to be a fetus? What can fetuses do?
What do they perceive around them? What do they know
about the world.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Well, this is what brings me to my next question,
which is how do you figure that when you're looking
at medieval sources, Because I mean, obviously the children are
not writing books, and people who are writing books are
often not at the side of the cradle.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So where did you look for.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Resources to find out more about medieval childhood and especially infancy.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
The first thing I had to wrestle with was that,
in a way, I wasn't writing a book about children.
That is, I don't think I've necessarily learned a whole
lot about what real children's lived experience was like. But
what I have learned a lot about is how adults
used their ideas about children to explore some really big
(06:38):
questions like when does life begin? What is it to
be a human? And so while we can never know,
I don't think, not with current technologies, not even with ultrasound,
we can't really know what it's like, or can't really
remember what it's like to be a fetus in the womb,
it's fascinating to see how the writers imagine that space
(07:02):
and that time. So I began with looking at medieval encyclopedias, because, again,
while the popular perception might be that in the Middle
Ages there wasn't a whole lot of scientific writing that
was accessible to non specialists, in fact, there was a
huge boom starting especially in the thirteenth century in encyclopedias.
(07:23):
People wanted to know about these areas of knowledge that
they didn't.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Necessarily otherwise have access to.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
So I started with these encyclopedias, but I soon found
that in a lot of literature as well, we get
these spaces reimagined, but not often with completely normal human infants.
So one of the key scenes of fetal speech is
the visitation when the Virgin Mary is visiting her cousin,
(07:52):
and they're both pregnant at the time. A lot of
medieval writers start imagining, well, it's not just Mary and
Liza who are having a conversation, but John the Baptist
and Christ, who are in their wombs at the same time,
are also interacting. So while that doesn't necessarily tell us
about the experience of a normal human child, I think
(08:13):
it tells us something very interesting about what happens when
these writers try to imagine the point of view of
somebody in utero.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
It's really interesting and fascinating the way that medieval people
will work around ideas like this, because there is an
understanding that the feet is well understand you to a point,
and that people are still speaking to Bali's still rubbing
Bali's back in the day, so there is an idea
that you can still communicate, and it's interesting to see
these medieval thinkers engaging with well, what are they thinking,
(08:44):
even if we're talking about miraculous stories right now, we're
talking about biblical figures.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Absolutely, and I think it all goes back to that
question of they were doing the things that we were
doing right Like you said, they were talking to their belly,
they were noticed the movement. So you get a lot
of discussion in medieval French texts about well, could you
feel the fetus moving yet or not? And that makes
a big difference in whether it's thought to have its
(09:12):
full human faculties, right, does it have the most human.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Parts of its soul yet?
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Often popularly it's thought that when that fetus has its soul,
that's when you start to feel it move although the
scientific writers tend to say that it happens a bit
earlier in gestation than that first feeling of movement or
what's called quickening. Now, some of the embryologists in the
Middle Ages, because yes, surprisingly there is embryology in the
(09:41):
Middle Ages, some of the medieval embryologists say something that
I just love, which is that when a fetus is
endowed with its soul, it laughs, but nobody can hear it.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I love that, I mean because I love to laugh
more than maybe maybe anybody at least that's what some
listeners dolly, and so I love that with you, one
of the first communications that's happening, even if no one
can hear us laughter.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So these children are born, and in the medieval conception
of the world, they're born with sin. They're born in
ways that are kind of mucky, and their first thought
is about sinfulness.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Right, tell us how that works. That's right.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Well, the idea of original sin is that all people
since Adam and Eve are born with a shared responsibility
for humanity's downfall, which can be redeemed right. This is
a message of hope, but it means that even a
newborn baby is not fully innocent. So even a newborn
(10:43):
baby shares that responsibility. And one of the earlier things
I noticed when I was working on this book is
these wonderful interpretations of what newborns are actually saying when
they start to cry. And again, this starts off a
lot in biblical commentaries, but it soon spreads into all
kinds of texts where they basically say, well, when a
(11:07):
newborn boy is born, he cries ah, and when a
newborn girl is born, she cries a. And what they
are saying is a it's really cold out here.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Anybody here who is as old as I am might
remember a movie called Look Who's Talking that came out
I think in the late eighties, where they dubbed over
an infant character, and when this infant was born it's
put me back in Medieval writers say the same thing.
The first thing they say is I didn't like that
experience of being born. That was uncomfortable. I don't like
where I am right now. This is not a good
(11:40):
place to be. But these interpretations get increasingly elaborate, until
it is thought that boys and girls are crying out
the Ah of Adam and the a of Eve, and
they're kind of lamenting that they have been brought into
this world where they know that they're waiting for a
whole lot of suffering and trouble no matter what. This
(12:03):
is pretty incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I don't think I've come across this before, that the
boys are crying out to Adam and the girls are
crying out to Eve. But now I'm never going to
listen to Infant Christ the same way without listening which
vowel are we going? Because apparently it's very significant. And
one of the things that you remarked on that I
think is really interesting is that this idea of gendering
(12:25):
becomes sort of more entrenched in this the vowels that
these children are crying out, and that people are more
concerned with gender at birth than they are at death,
and this is something that really kind of jumped out
of me, because this seems to be something that is
true today, Like when someone dies, no one is saying
it's a girl, it's a boy. When children are born.
This is really important, and I mean it makes sense
(12:46):
when the entire world, the medieval world I'm talking about,
is gendered into what roles are going to play. But
I thought that was interesting because you're bringing together the
ways that infants like people who are dying are closer
to the afterlife than at any other point. So can
you tell us more about what you learned and what
you thought about this sort of space where you are
(13:07):
really close to the afterlife.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Both of these endpoints of the human life cycle, the
beginning and the end, are often discussed in the Middle
Ages as times when greater social equality is possible. As
you were saying, we all are basically born in the
same way. We all basically die, maybe by different methods,
and there are gruesome medieval texts about the different ways
(13:33):
that you can die, for example, But the idea still
is that these are essentially flattening experiences that it doesn't
matter if you are a prince or if you are
a very poor family childbirth is going to happen about
the same way, and the outcomes, risky as they are,
are similar no matter who you are in society. So
(13:56):
we think of medieval Europe as being a very stratified place,
and undoubtedly it is, but it's a place where there
is a lot of lip service paid to equality, and
that especially comes out around being born and dying. It's
interesting what you brought up about gender, though, because for
all of this conversation about how, oh, we are all
(14:17):
born in the same way, we're all the same at birth,
that does not cut across gender lines. You don't see
people saying, well, a boy child and a girl child
are basically the same, even from a very young age.
They're not. And even from a very young age. Gender
is hugely present in this conversation because so much of
the discourse about childbirth is also a discourse about the
(14:40):
mother's body. So we're in a highly gendered experience where
if we're being told that birth is suffering and birth
is sin, well, what you're coming out of is a
woman's body. So you do, unfortunately, tend to see a
fair amount of light to medium misogyny around these descriptions
(15:00):
of childbirth.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Yes, And even though I think this is a great
entry point into those early experiences that I'm about to
lead you into, because what happens even though these gendered
experiences are very different. You know, of this is a boy,
this is a girl, and that's very important to society.
At the same time, they're raised in the same way.
Even though these gender distinctions are very important to people's
(15:23):
conception of these children, they are raised with their mothers
and their wet nurses, and this is their first experience
of language, which is so important to your book. And
yet this is gendered again in that these first experiences
of language almost disappear from what we understand what the
texts are around this time. So can you tell us
a little bit more about what we can find out
(15:45):
about these early experiences of language and baby talk and lullabies.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
This comes back to what we were talking about earlier
with there being multiple sub phases within childhood, and there's
really a perception that something changes around the age of seven,
both in the life and in the capacities of a child. Now,
the word infant literally comes from the Latin for non speaking,
(16:11):
and there's a big idea that one stops being an infant,
when you start getting your adult teeth, your permanent teeth.
There's this idea that little children lisp. When you still
have your baby teeth. You can't enunciate, you can't talk,
and if you can't talk intelligently, then you can't really
reason either. Around age seven, children are losing those two
(16:33):
front teeth, they're getting their permanent teeth, and this is
when they're ready, if they're a boy of a certain class.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
To go to school. So this is where we.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Start seeing more of that branching off into divergent experiences.
This is where some children remain with their mother and
others don't. But prior to that age of seven, it
really is mothers and wet nurses who are responsible not
just for child rearing, but for all of the teaching
that comes into play when you're raising a child. So
(17:01):
before that age of seven, a child is supposed to
learn their native language, their mother tongue, some rudiments of
reading for the children who are going to do so,
they memorize their basic prayers, they have some ideas of
religious doctrine that are going to be built on later on.
So their mothers are not just changing their diapers, but
(17:22):
their mothers really are their first teachers. In the historical records,
children tend to.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Show up if they die. It's just a.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
Sad fact of they're not out there accomplishing things in
the world, so they don't really turn up. So there
isn't much in the way of historical records talking about say,
two year old children, three year old children. There isn't
much in the way of historical records talking about what
life is like in the nursery. What are they learning
(17:52):
from their mothers, What are their mothers and their nurses
talking about with them? And this is where literature can
bring us into some really interesting places. We do have
medical guides for women in the Middle Ages, and a
lot of this includes advice for mothers and nurses for
the care of infants. But again it kind of drops
(18:12):
off after that weaning, which would have happened between about
age two and age three, So the medical sources don't
tell us a lot about that kind of lost childhood either.
That's what the French historian Djierlette calls it. He says,
between about the age of three and the age of seven,
we just suddenly have this whole, this crater. In the
(18:33):
documentary evidence and we don't know much about children in
that window. But in literature, this is where we get
some interesting things happening. We get a lot of descriptions
of mothers caring for their children. We get advice for
mothers on how to choose a wet nurse. And we
can read between the lines of that kind of advice
literature and tell, okay, if this is what a good
(18:55):
wet nurse is, what does that tell us about what
a good wet nurse does?
Speaker 2 (19:00):
And we get a lot of literary.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Imagining of these characters. But the one thing that has
driven absolutely bonkers is that I cannot find evidence of
lalabis in medieval France. There's a strong tradition of lalabies
in medieval English literature. Mostly they are imagined to be
songs that Mary is singing to baby Jesus, especially on
(19:24):
the flight into Egypt. So we have collections there. I
think there are more than twenty lalabi texts in medieval
English that are collected together. We have lalabies in some
other languages. I've found a couple of plays from medieval
France where there are women singing and that I think
these are probably lalabis, but it is just not a
(19:46):
common literary tradition there. I haven't even found out if
there's a special name for a song that a woman
sings to a child in medieval French, such as lalabi.
I thought I had it and that I didn't have it.
They use a verb, right, so they don't say lalabies.
I found a medieval encyclopedia that's been translated into multiple
languages in the Middle Ages. Okay, let me see. We
(20:08):
have the Latin original. It says lallaby. We have the
Middle English translation. It says lollings and cradle songs. Let
me look at the French translation.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
What does it say?
Speaker 3 (20:17):
It says CHANTI to sing. But I do think it's
fascinating that lallabies aren't treated as an object. They're not
a thing that has a name. They're treated as an action.
There's something that women do with children, and that kept
coming up over and over as I was looking at
these scenes of women and children interacting in the nursery,
(20:40):
that this is not something that is labeled with names.
But it's described as a relationship.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Yes, and it's described as an essential part of mothering
that you can't not do it, and it's funny because
when you're talking about lullabies. Growing up in northern Ontario,
one of the first things I learned in French was fedorudu,
which is which is.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
A French lullaby.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
And so you know, I'm reading your book and coming
across these children that are going to see fid So
it's interesting to see that it's still coming along, and
yet we don't have these actual lullabies right now. But
I mean, again, it makes sense who's writing, who has
the pen in hand. It's not the mothers. The mothers
are busy singing the byes.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
And maybe what they're saying isn't so important as the
fact that they're saying it or singing it at all.
We see this over and over with these ideas about
child communication, that maybe what they're saying is less important
than the fact that they are vocalizing at all. But
it does raise some questions for these medieval writers. Okay,
what is language? What kinds of sounds have enough meaning
(21:46):
that they rise to the level of language versus just
being voice or just being noise. So when a woman
sings a child a lullaby, is that just a voice
or do the word matter that go along with it.
I think clearly we can see that, yes, lallabies teach things.
They're teaching language, if they are religious songs, possibly they're
(22:09):
teaching some doctrine. Incidentally, there there is some indirect evidence
that lallabies are thought of as this kind of teaching
song because among Jewish writers there's a lot of discussion
of should you hire a Christian woman to be a
wet nurse for your child? So there's an acknowledgment that
something is being conveyed in the speech, in the singing,
(22:31):
in the milk itself that has to be weighed as
a potential cultural risk.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yes, and that again it's so critical, but we don't
need to talk about it, I guess because everybody has
a you know, it's one of those holes for historians
that's just so frustrating because you really want to know
what happened, and then children begin to speak, and then
children begin to say the darnedest thing. So I do.
I do want to get into the perhaps more literary
(22:59):
and biblical exams. About one place where I think we
can definitely connect as modern people as medieval people is
these children speaking in Fablio, where it's like little pictures
have big ears. It doesn't always go well, but it's
something that I think is very common that kids are
saying the darnest things. So tell us a little bit
about these kids starting to say things that the adults
(23:20):
think are hilarious.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Well, believe it or not.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
This is where the whole thing started for me decades ago,
when I was reading a fablio. So these comic stories
from the Middle Ages, often they're a little on the
raunchy side, and I was reading this one called the
Priest in the Larder, where there is a shoemaker who's
about to go off to market, and he says, I'll
(23:44):
be gone for a long time, and his child says, oh, good, daddy,
I like it when you go away, because the priest
comes over and mommy serves better food. But what's strange
is that the fablio then the narrator specifies this child
was two or three three years old, but spoke very
well for her age, and that just stuck in my
mind throughout my career. I thought, how interesting that they
(24:08):
pointed out exactly.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
That this is the age of the child, but that
the child.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Speaks more reasonably than that age would dictate. So over time,
as I kept coming across more and more examples of
children speaking. That one always stuck with me. I thought, finally,
I get to do something here. I get to think
about how this works. Because when you break it down,
the child exists because somebody had sex, and the child
(24:37):
is here to speak about somebody having sex with somebody
else without even knowing what it is that they're actually
talking about. This child displays the perfectly stereotypical child behavior
of wanting more snacks. I think all of us who
have kids have been there. I love it, and we
(24:57):
see this frequently. In medieval text, child is drowned and
then is resuscitated through a miracle, and the first thing
she says is can I have a pair? It's like, yes,
somebody knew children. Somebody knew a three year old?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Who can I have a pair.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
So there's so much in here that really does reflect
what it was like to live with a child. There's
so much in here that shows, no, these aren't little adults.
Somebody knew about kids wanting a snack. And yet the
questions that they come around to asking, I think are
very different than the ones we might ask with a
similar situation, Say of this little girl from the fablio
(25:34):
because ultimately it serves these bigger questions about innocence. I
think it's still a commonplace today. Little children are innocent, right,
But if we're in a context where we are weighing
two things that are both true at the same time,
that yes, little children are innocent. Literally they don't know,
they can't do any harm, they don't know what's happening
(25:55):
in the world around them. And yet within this broader
Christian world worldview of shared responsibility for original sin, no
toddlers aren't any more innocent than anybody else. In fact,
it's worse because they don't even.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Know how guilty they are.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
So we see people grappling with Okay, then what does
it actually mean to be innocent? If we can see
this person who so obviously is innocent and yet they're
involved in these situations of sin, what does that actually
tell us? Does innocence exist at all in this world
and is just as possible if we don't think that
(26:31):
innocence is possible?
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Yes, Well, what I think is worth mentioning before we
got into that deeper point is that the moral of
the fablio is not to not dally with the priest
it's to not do it in front of your kids.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
To not do it in front of the kids.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Because they will definitely write you out. So this is
this is an important point about childhood and innocence because
one of the themes that you bring in as you
dive into this is there are people adults within the
medieval world who are are also thought of as innocent
and childlife and these are the adults that are disabled.
So how and why was it important for you to
(27:07):
bring disability into this narrative of childhood.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Childhood is a particular moment in life when the expectation
is that the child cannot fully participate in society, that
there is something limiting their ability to contribute in the
same way that a typical adult would be expected to contribute. However,
(27:31):
a child is expected to outgrow those limitations if the
child survives, and to be a full contributor to society,
whereas people with certain disabilities. And I wouldn't want to
say as a broad brush that people with disabilities are
considered to be innocent or to be incapable, but we
do see that there are certain categories of adults who,
(27:55):
like children, are impeded from full participation in society for
various reasons, and who are not expected to grow.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Out of that.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
So a lot of great scholars of medieval law have
looked into rules around guardianship, for example, to ask the question,
is an adult with certain disabilities that prevent them from
participating in the kinds of legal proceedings that are necessary
for property ownership? For example? Are these people kind of
permanent children in the eyes of the law in this
(28:28):
period because of the fact that they're not able to
swear an oath or not able to testify in court,
or to do the other things that are involved with
property ownership. So for me, this is a really interesting question.
I work a lot on disability in general, so to
think about how is childhood like and not like disability,
and then how do these categories completely get scrambled when
(28:51):
we talk about children with disabilities. For me, it was
really interesting to tease out. And again because I've been
thinking so much about child's speech, it was really the
question of muteness or of an inability to speak that
got my attention here, because we do have miracle stories
where children who are deaf and mute or just mute
(29:11):
are healed. And then the question becomes when they're healed miraculously,
do they know how to speak or do they still have.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
To learn like a baby wood.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Yes, And in talking about this, I used old language
accidentally and that these are people with disabilities, and really
we change the language as society to really center the
fact that these are people disabilities are just incidental to
their personhood. And you really see that in these miracle
stories that you're talking about, especially depending on who's telling them,
where if a person's ability to speak is miraculously granted
(29:45):
to them, their personhood is still there, was there beforehand,
and it's there afterwards, and then they are taught to speak.
I'm thinking about the miracle of Louis in particular, where
he's taught to speak in the same sort of compassionate
or not compassion that children were. Again we're talking about
individual parents and stuff, but medieval parenting was a bit
(30:07):
more severe, say, but Louis is taught, he's not dismissed
as a person who is not useful. He is integrated
into society depending on his needs. And I think that
this is an important part of your discussion as well.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Yes, So the story that you're referring to is one
of the best known stories of a child with a
disability in medieval France, and it gets.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Talked a lot about because we have.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
A version of the story that is based on his
own testimony about the story.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
So, a child was.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Abandoned at a castle in Burgundy at about the age
of eight. He was led there by another child and left,
and work was found for this deaf and mute child
with the smith of the castle. There's an extensive description
of the kinds of torture that he was put through,
especially by the other children who were trying to figure
(31:04):
out if he was really mute or if he was
just up to something. But when he's a young man,
the funeral procession of Louis the Ninth, the soon to
be Saint Louis, comes through town, and he follows it
because he's annoyed that he hasn't been given new shoes
at his workplace, and he thinks, I'll follow these rich
people and see where they're going and maybe they will
(31:25):
give me better stuff. Now, he has been deaf and
mute for as long as anybody at the castle has
known him, so they haven't been able to teach him
anything at all about religion or prayer. One of the
common received ideas in this period is that deaf and
mute people are not teachable. There's no consistent sign language.
(31:45):
There are no institutionalized efforts at education of the deaf
before the sixteenth century.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
So he goes off.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
He follows the coffin all the way to Sandny, the
burial place of the kings of France, and he receives
a miracle. Can he can hear again, and he doesn't
know what's going on. He wasn't actually praying, He was
just imitating the movements of the other people at the
tomb because he doesn't know what prayer even is. But
he receives the miracle. And the reason we know this
(32:14):
story is because during the canonization trial of Saint Louis,
when testimonies were gathered, this young man himself, who received
afterward the name Louis, testified as well as other people
who had known him in his youths. They had to
establish that he had been deaf and mute so that
they could establish that a miracle had taken place. He
(32:37):
gained the ability to hear, but had never been taught
to speak, so he went back to the place where
he had been raised and they taught him how to
speak in the way that you would teach a small child.
And they put him in the kitchen and they showed
him things and said the names, and he repeated the
names after them, and then they gave him more complicated
things to repeat, and he did it. And then they
taught him his prayers. So we get this really full
(32:59):
description of language learning the way a child learns it,
but as performed with an adult who had just gained
this capacity.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
It's such an important story because it tells us so
much about the way people regarded each other and the
way that they regarded children, and it is very illustrative
of that practical sense of how you acquire speech, why
it's important, why it's valued. So I think then we
do need to get to the more fanciful examples, and
(33:29):
that we have biblical examples. I'm thinking about Daniel, and
we have the example of Merlin, which is perhaps more
fantastical and interesting, and this idea of speech being a
way to advocate for oneself or one's mother, and perhaps
in the place of women or a mother in general.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Okay, so let's.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Get to these prodigies that are speaking way before they're
supposed to be speaking.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Yes, the case of Daniel is quite interesting. So in
the Book of Daniel, at the end there's the tape
of Susannah and the Elders.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Those of us raised in a.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Protestant background might not be as familiar with this story
because this is considered one of the apocryphal books in
Protestant churches, but it's very much a full part of
the Bible for our medieval Christian readers. And in this story, Daniel,
who is simply described as a child, is able to
vindicate a woman who has been wrongly accused of infidelity.
(34:28):
And he's able to do so essentially by tricking the
two witnesses into contradicting one another. The great mystery writer
Dorothy Sayers, who by the way, was a medievalist by training,
published an anthology of Detective Fiction, and she put the
Book of Daniel, chapter thirteen as the first story in
her Anthology of Detective Fiction, because, like Poirot, except a child,
(34:54):
But the Bible doesn't specify the age of Daniel when
he does this. And what I found that's really fascinating
is that in medieval French literature, he is a baby
when he does this, So the authorities of the medieval
Church generally put him around age twelve. But when we
read these texts by medieval French writers like Jum de
(35:15):
Machau or Christine de Pison, he's one two three years old.
When he's speaking, not only speaking, but proving the falsehood.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Of the speech of others.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It's pretty incredible to think about that and to think
a little bit about how it's very medieval to take
something from the Bible and make it even more Yes,
you know, like it's even more miraculous that he's defending
this woman because he's even younger. And I love how
you do mention in the book how Christine pulls back
some of the agency from Daniel gives it back to Susannah,
(35:49):
which is very Christine as well. Yes, but why was
it important do you think for medieval people to sort
of repeat this story of Daniel as being important, as
being something to talk about when we're talking about childhood
and innocence and what children know.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
My sense is that it kind of depends on what
the overall aims of the text are, and that in
the texts where the focus is really on female chastity
as the topic in and of itself, it doesn't matter
so much if Daniel is very small. So in guides
for How to be a Good Wife, written in France
(36:27):
in the exact same period, we see Daniel being five
six years old. But in books where they're really trying
to get at the problem of justice and the problem
of who has a voice in our system and who
gets believed and who doesn't get believed, Daniel gets younger
and younger in these So I think there's a clear
connection here to this question of who has a voice
(36:50):
in our system, who matters, and who is the little guy?
And how do we make sure that even the little
guy gets heard?
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Yes, And the idea that when everything else stripped away,
all of the human implements, the innocence that you get
to is very close to childhood, right mm hmmm.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Although in the case of Merlin, he's very a tricky
case because he's not quite human and he's certainly not
innocent even when he is born. The circumstances of the
conception of the future wizard Merlin are super complicated because
his mother is essentially raped by an incubus, so he
(37:28):
is not fully human, but she is not responsible for
having chosen this, and so essentially there's a push and
pull between the good and the evil within Merlin from
the beginning, and this translates into him being born.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
Harry with teeth. He's able to speak at a.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Very young age, and when his mother is being prosecuted
for having refused to divulge the identity of her baby's father,
he is able to come to her defense. But he
doesn't do it by saying, my mother is innocent. Merlin's
mother is not innocent, although she's certainly not culpable, but
she's not innocent. But Merlin does it by proving that
(38:09):
the judge's mother had also had an affair with a priest,
and therefore, if the judge wants to punish Merlin's mother,
the judge also needs to punish his own mother first,
because what she did was even worse. And so the
judge says, you know what, let's just forget that.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
This whole thing, ever happens.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
It is quite the image this tiny Harry's.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Merlin, eighteen month old Mary Merlin, Yes, keeping as good
as he gets.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
I mean, it's an interesting question about justice again, because
the idea is almost that there is no justice, or
if there is justice, then everybody is culpable. And it's
interesting that you have this child of an incubus telling
this to the judge.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yes, and Merlin's mother keeps repeating, I cannot tell you
more because I do not know what happened to me.
And I think this is a very powerful statement about
kind of the disenfranchisement of women that she's saying, I
don't know what has happened to me. I don't even
have the language to describe what happened to me. I
cannot defend myself in the kind of system that you
(39:13):
have set up, because the system you have set up
depends on people being able to explain in your language
things that you understand. And you don't understand my experience.
And there isn't language for my experience.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, And I think that's a really interesting point as well,
as there is no language for that experience, just as
there is no language for the child experience, and so
you have to create these amazing narratives to sort of
read on to them what the experience is, which can
go very badly, as we've seen with poor Merlin's mother.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yes, that's right, well.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
And I think that this is a part of another
aspect to your book where you're talking about Susanna also
in some versions of her story becoming sort of back
to the primitive language of humans, which is she's just
crying and she has to have this male child. I
don't think that's accidental coming to speak on her behalf,
because she's sort of regressed to a point where she
(40:09):
doesn't have language anymore.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
That's right, and it gets us back to, I would say,
a bare human condition. Right. When you strip away language,
when you strip away the pretense that our systems can
render justice, what are you actually left with? And I
think this is why, ultimately these small children are so powerful,
because they are what you're left with when you take
(40:35):
away the education and the good manners and the years
of home training and everything that turns us into an adult,
and you just say, okay, what is it to be
a human.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Without all of that other stuff?
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Well, babies are the ones who can give voice to that.
And so I think that there's a reason why it's.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
A baby who has to give voice.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
To someone like Susannah or Merlin's mother as well.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
It's let me rip away.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
All of the pretense, all of the claims we might
make about equality, all the claims we might make about justice,
and this is all that's left.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yes, And so when you're looking at this, you're looking
at literature and culture more broadly. Are you seeing babies
appearing not just in the form of baby Jesus, because
this is the one example that everyone looks at for,
like innocence and precociousness and all of those things. Are
you seeing it mostly being centered around this baby Jesus.
Are you seeing babies everywhere being precocious and being symbols.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
I think there are babies everywhere, And I think even
Baby Jesus can be really instructive because so often the
authors say, but he's not like any other child. For example,
we were talking earlier about that question of when does
a fetus.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Acquire a soul?
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Our writers always have to tell us this is true
of every human except for Jesus. He had a soul
from conception, because it is not possible to imagine Jesus
ever having existed in what they would call a vegetable
or an animal state. So we can also learn a
lot about what people might have thought about ordinary children
(42:11):
by what they say is exceptional about.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Either Jesus or these other very.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
Holy children like Daniel, who are serving as instruments through
which God can put something right.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Well, absolutely, he can do it however he wants. But
this is, I mean, this is the example that the
medieval world is looking to. So as we wrap up
as somebody who's been studying babies in the medieval world
and also disability in the medieval world, what do you
want to leave people with people who are maybe not
so familiar with the medieval world about how we should
(42:46):
look at these conceptions that people have of children at
the time, considering all of the myths that we've put
on it as modern people, What do you want to
leave people with when they're looking at representations of medieval children.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
I think what I would like us all to leave
with is just these ideas of what it means to
care for someone else and how much the human condition
is a dependent condition that we don't have to be
afraid of depending on others, but that we can all
flourish when we embrace that dependence and when we're not
(43:22):
trying to hide it. I think that this is something
that emerges both with literary discussions of babies and small
children and their mothers and with discussions of people with
disabilities or people we might identify as such today, that
the human condition works best when we're not trying to
pretend that we don't need each other.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Oh, I love that. I love that.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
That is a beautiful way too, and this discussion and
to think about history and about contemporary events as well.
I mean, I think we could use a lot more
compassion today. So I'm hoping people will take that wisdom
that you've just delivered to us and run with it
for the rest of the day, the rest of the week,
the rest of the year, the rest.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Of our lives.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
So thank you so much, Julie for coming on and
talking to us about medieval babies.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
It was a pleasure to find out more about Julie's work.
You can check out her faculty page at Washington University
in Saint Louis. Her new book is Out of the
Mouths of Babes Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature. Before
we go, here's Peter from medievalist dot Net to tell
us what's on the website.
Speaker 4 (44:28):
What's up, Peter, Hey, Hey, So Jacquelin Murray, who is
well known among US Canadian medievalists. She has written her
first piece for us on Medievalist dot net, and it's
about popes named Leo.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Well, there are a few popes named Leo, So I
mean there's lots of work with here.
Speaker 4 (44:45):
Indeed, indeed, so it goes from Pope Leo one, who
gets the Moniker the great mm hmm, he did some
good stuff, right, and Pope le third, who alos has
tongue cut.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Out exciting times.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
That's not good for a pope.
Speaker 4 (44:59):
No nobody. He's luckier than Publio the fifth, who was
deposed and murdered within a month of being elected.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
It's not a safe thing to be a pope.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
That's why there are a lot of Leos.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Because bad things just keep happening. You wouldn't think after
a certain point you wouldn't want to pick that name anymore.
Speaker 4 (45:15):
Indeed, indeed, But well, good luck to our new poblio, right, Yes.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
This poblio may he reign for a long time in healthily. Right.
Speaker 4 (45:24):
So we have that, plus we have this piece on
vikings having you mean sailing farther out into the open
sea than was first believed. There's a scholar named Greer Jarrett,
and he and a team sailed five thousand kilometers around
Scandinavia kind of figure this out. So's some pretty good
visuals and video on our on our site, just him
and his team sailing the ocean blue.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
That's awesome. I love it when people actually put themselves
in the shoes of people from back in the day.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Awesome.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
Yeah, indeed, so that's a pretty good thing. So we
have got that, plus much much more, including why the
Iron Maiden was not a medieval punishment.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Yes, I think there's lots of people who should.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Read that one.
Speaker 4 (46:03):
Although you're a good rock band but.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
Not a medieval rock band. I think this is the
consistent through line, right, I'm madeen, not medieval.
Speaker 4 (46:12):
That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Well, thanks Peter for stopping by and telling us what's
on the website. Thanks thank you to all of you
who tune in to hear my speech each week and
support this podcast by spreading the word, letting the ads
play through, or becoming patrons on patreon dot com. Without you,
none of this would be possible, So thank you. To
(46:34):
find out how to become a patron and to help
me keep the medieval goodness coming, please visit patreon dot
com slash Medievalists for everything from infants to imprints, follow
medievalist dot net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue
Sky at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sibalski across
social media at five n Medievalist or five minute Medievalist,
(46:57):
and you can find my books at all your favorite
books doors. Our music is Beyond the Warriors by gie Frog.
Thanks for listening, and have yourself an awesome day
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety
two of the Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sebalski, also known
as the five Minute Medievalist. One of the most celebrated
moments in childhood is when a person utters their very
first words, stepping over a brand new threshold of communication,
and anyone who spent time with kids knows that from
(00:37):
that moment on, all bets are off, innocent and unfiltered.
The speech of children can frequently cause us to think
deeply or blush deeply, just as it did in the
Middle Ages. This week, I spoke with doctor Julie Singer
about infant speech in medieval literature. Julie is professor of
French at Washington University in Saint Louis and the author
(01:00):
of Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval Friends, Machines, Madness,
Metaphor and Blindness, and Therapy in Late Medieval French and
Italian Poetry. Her new book is Out of the Mouths
of Babes Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, our conversation
on what medieval people thought about infancy in general, how
(01:21):
literary children could be vehicles for truth and justice, and
how even in the Middle Ages kids were known to
say the darnedest things is coming up right after this. Well,
welcome Julie to talk about medieval childhood and.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
All that stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
We are already laughing as we started this because we
had this freak power outage, but we're going to try
this again.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Welcome.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Okay, So what we started talking about is how medieval
people thought about childhood, because it's not quite the same
as how the nineteenth century historians told us to think
about it. So how did medieval people think about childhood?
Speaker 3 (02:04):
It's a great question, and I think a lot of
us have this perception that people in the Middle Ages
or the early Modern period thought of children as little adults.
This is a perception that's been around for quite a while,
especially since the work of a historian called Philippe Ariez,
who did really groundbreaking studies of childhood in pre modern periods.
(02:26):
But there was a lot that he might have misinterpreted
in the evidence.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
So while a.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
Lot of us think that maybe people in the Middle
Ages didn't conceive of childhood as a special time in
life with different expectations than we have for people in adulthood.
That doesn't seem to have been true at all. Now,
what did make childhood quite different in medieval Europe is
the fact that infant mortality was so high. Now, this
(02:55):
doesn't mean people loved their children less or tried to
be detached from them, but it does mean that childhood
had really different symbolic resonances for medieval people than it
has today.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Absolutely, Okay, So childhood wasn't as simple as you're just
born and then you're a little grown up. There are
distinct stages that people talk about when they're conceptualizing childhood
from the ancient period that gets sort of brought into
the medieval period. So what are the phases of childhood
that children are expected.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
To go through?
Speaker 3 (03:29):
In the Middle Ages, especially academic writers were really interested
in creating categories and subcategories. So one of the topics
that gets talked about a lot is the ages of man.
That is this idea that we can divide the ordinary
life cycle or life course of a human being into steps,
(03:49):
and if people survive, they will pretty much follow those
steps in order. These models tend, of course, to start
with childhood. But depending on how many steps they divide
the human life into, there can be more than one
phase of childhood. So we might have three lives where
it's just childhood, young adulthood, and old age all the
(04:12):
way up to seven and more life stages. And in
those models with lots and lots of life stages, we
find that early childhood is treated very differently than later childhood.
And we get some echoes of this today. Right if
we think about religious rituals, for example, well, why does
confirmation happen when it happens for a child today? A
(04:35):
lot of that goes right back to these medieval ideas
about what makes a young child different from what we
might call a tween today or an adolescent. When are
they capable of reason? When are they capable of taking
on more responsibility? And for medieval writers, a lot of
this gets tied to when can they talk? Because if
(04:57):
they can't talk, we don't think they can necessarily reason.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Right, And this is where your book is focused, in
the connection between childhood and language. And for you, this
begins in utero. Tell us a little bit about why
you started in utero.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Well, you might think it would be pretty simple to
figure out when childhood starts. But it's actually a little
bit complicated in these medieval texts. Is a fetus a
child or not? I think that's a question that a
lot of people wrestle with today. When does life start?
So if childhood is a process of acquiring new competencies,
(05:35):
new responsibilities, increased ability to participate in society, well where
does that start? And we do see medieval writers I
think wrestling with that question by imagining, Okay, well what
is it like to be a fetus? What can fetuses do?
What do they perceive around them? What do they know
about the world.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Well, this is what brings me to my next question,
which is how do you figure that when you're looking
at medieval sources, Because I mean, obviously the children are
not writing books, and people who are writing books are
often not at the side of the cradle.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So where did you look for.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Resources to find out more about medieval childhood and especially infancy.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
The first thing I had to wrestle with was that,
in a way, I wasn't writing a book about children.
That is, I don't think I've necessarily learned a whole
lot about what real children's lived experience was like. But
what I have learned a lot about is how adults
used their ideas about children to explore some really big
(06:38):
questions like when does life begin? What is it to
be a human? And so while we can never know,
I don't think, not with current technologies, not even with ultrasound,
we can't really know what it's like, or can't really
remember what it's like to be a fetus in the womb,
it's fascinating to see how the writers imagine that space
(07:02):
and that time. So I began with looking at medieval encyclopedias, because, again,
while the popular perception might be that in the Middle
Ages there wasn't a whole lot of scientific writing that
was accessible to non specialists, in fact, there was a
huge boom starting especially in the thirteenth century in encyclopedias.
(07:23):
People wanted to know about these areas of knowledge that
they didn't.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Necessarily otherwise have access to.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
So I started with these encyclopedias, but I soon found
that in a lot of literature as well, we get
these spaces reimagined, but not often with completely normal human infants.
So one of the key scenes of fetal speech is
the visitation when the Virgin Mary is visiting her cousin,
(07:52):
and they're both pregnant at the time. A lot of
medieval writers start imagining, well, it's not just Mary and
Liza who are having a conversation, but John the Baptist
and Christ, who are in their wombs at the same time,
are also interacting. So while that doesn't necessarily tell us
about the experience of a normal human child, I think
(08:13):
it tells us something very interesting about what happens when
these writers try to imagine the point of view of
somebody in utero.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
It's really interesting and fascinating the way that medieval people
will work around ideas like this, because there is an
understanding that the feet is well understand you to a point,
and that people are still speaking to Bali's still rubbing
Bali's back in the day, so there is an idea
that you can still communicate, and it's interesting to see
these medieval thinkers engaging with well, what are they thinking,
(08:44):
even if we're talking about miraculous stories right now, we're
talking about biblical figures.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Absolutely, and I think it all goes back to that
question of they were doing the things that we were
doing right Like you said, they were talking to their belly,
they were noticed the movement. So you get a lot
of discussion in medieval French texts about well, could you
feel the fetus moving yet or not? And that makes
a big difference in whether it's thought to have its
(09:12):
full human faculties, right, does it have the most human.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Parts of its soul yet?
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Often popularly it's thought that when that fetus has its soul,
that's when you start to feel it move although the
scientific writers tend to say that it happens a bit
earlier in gestation than that first feeling of movement or
what's called quickening. Now, some of the embryologists in the
Middle Ages, because yes, surprisingly there is embryology in the
(09:41):
Middle Ages, some of the medieval embryologists say something that
I just love, which is that when a fetus is
endowed with its soul, it laughs, but nobody can hear it.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I love that, I mean because I love to laugh
more than maybe maybe anybody at least that's what some
listeners dolly, and so I love that with you, one
of the first communications that's happening, even if no one
can hear us laughter.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So these children are born, and in the medieval conception
of the world, they're born with sin. They're born in
ways that are kind of mucky, and their first thought
is about sinfulness.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Right, tell us how that works. That's right.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Well, the idea of original sin is that all people
since Adam and Eve are born with a shared responsibility
for humanity's downfall, which can be redeemed right. This is
a message of hope, but it means that even a
newborn baby is not fully innocent. So even a newborn
(10:43):
baby shares that responsibility. And one of the earlier things
I noticed when I was working on this book is
these wonderful interpretations of what newborns are actually saying when
they start to cry. And again, this starts off a
lot in biblical commentaries, but it soon spreads into all
kinds of texts where they basically say, well, when a
(11:07):
newborn boy is born, he cries ah, and when a
newborn girl is born, she cries a. And what they
are saying is a it's really cold out here.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Anybody here who is as old as I am might
remember a movie called Look Who's Talking that came out
I think in the late eighties, where they dubbed over
an infant character, and when this infant was born it's
put me back in Medieval writers say the same thing.
The first thing they say is I didn't like that
experience of being born. That was uncomfortable. I don't like
where I am right now. This is not a good
(11:40):
place to be. But these interpretations get increasingly elaborate, until
it is thought that boys and girls are crying out
the Ah of Adam and the a of Eve, and
they're kind of lamenting that they have been brought into
this world where they know that they're waiting for a
whole lot of suffering and trouble no matter what. This
(12:03):
is pretty incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I don't think I've come across this before, that the
boys are crying out to Adam and the girls are
crying out to Eve. But now I'm never going to
listen to Infant Christ the same way without listening which
vowel are we going? Because apparently it's very significant. And
one of the things that you remarked on that I
think is really interesting is that this idea of gendering
(12:25):
becomes sort of more entrenched in this the vowels that
these children are crying out, and that people are more
concerned with gender at birth than they are at death,
and this is something that really kind of jumped out
of me, because this seems to be something that is
true today, Like when someone dies, no one is saying
it's a girl, it's a boy. When children are born.
This is really important, and I mean it makes sense
(12:46):
when the entire world, the medieval world I'm talking about,
is gendered into what roles are going to play. But
I thought that was interesting because you're bringing together the
ways that infants like people who are dying are closer
to the afterlife than at any other point. So can
you tell us more about what you learned and what
you thought about this sort of space where you are
(13:07):
really close to the afterlife.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Both of these endpoints of the human life cycle, the
beginning and the end, are often discussed in the Middle
Ages as times when greater social equality is possible. As
you were saying, we all are basically born in the
same way. We all basically die, maybe by different methods,
and there are gruesome medieval texts about the different ways
(13:33):
that you can die, for example, But the idea still
is that these are essentially flattening experiences that it doesn't
matter if you are a prince or if you are
a very poor family childbirth is going to happen about
the same way, and the outcomes, risky as they are,
are similar no matter who you are in society. So
(13:56):
we think of medieval Europe as being a very stratified place,
and undoubtedly it is, but it's a place where there
is a lot of lip service paid to equality, and
that especially comes out around being born and dying. It's
interesting what you brought up about gender, though, because for
all of this conversation about how, oh, we are all
(14:17):
born in the same way, we're all the same at birth,
that does not cut across gender lines. You don't see
people saying, well, a boy child and a girl child
are basically the same, even from a very young age.
They're not. And even from a very young age. Gender
is hugely present in this conversation because so much of
the discourse about childbirth is also a discourse about the
(14:40):
mother's body. So we're in a highly gendered experience where
if we're being told that birth is suffering and birth
is sin, well, what you're coming out of is a
woman's body. So you do, unfortunately, tend to see a
fair amount of light to medium misogyny around these descriptions
(15:00):
of childbirth.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Yes, And even though I think this is a great
entry point into those early experiences that I'm about to
lead you into, because what happens even though these gendered
experiences are very different. You know, of this is a boy,
this is a girl, and that's very important to society.
At the same time, they're raised in the same way.
Even though these gender distinctions are very important to people's
(15:23):
conception of these children, they are raised with their mothers
and their wet nurses, and this is their first experience
of language, which is so important to your book. And
yet this is gendered again in that these first experiences
of language almost disappear from what we understand what the
texts are around this time. So can you tell us
a little bit more about what we can find out
(15:45):
about these early experiences of language and baby talk and lullabies.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
This comes back to what we were talking about earlier
with there being multiple sub phases within childhood, and there's
really a perception that something changes around the age of seven,
both in the life and in the capacities of a child. Now,
the word infant literally comes from the Latin for non speaking,
(16:11):
and there's a big idea that one stops being an infant,
when you start getting your adult teeth, your permanent teeth.
There's this idea that little children lisp. When you still
have your baby teeth. You can't enunciate, you can't talk,
and if you can't talk intelligently, then you can't really
reason either. Around age seven, children are losing those two
(16:33):
front teeth, they're getting their permanent teeth, and this is
when they're ready, if they're a boy of a certain class.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
To go to school. So this is where we.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Start seeing more of that branching off into divergent experiences.
This is where some children remain with their mother and
others don't. But prior to that age of seven, it
really is mothers and wet nurses who are responsible not
just for child rearing, but for all of the teaching
that comes into play when you're raising a child. So
(17:01):
before that age of seven, a child is supposed to
learn their native language, their mother tongue, some rudiments of
reading for the children who are going to do so,
they memorize their basic prayers, they have some ideas of
religious doctrine that are going to be built on later on.
So their mothers are not just changing their diapers, but
(17:22):
their mothers really are their first teachers. In the historical records,
children tend to.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Show up if they die. It's just a.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
Sad fact of they're not out there accomplishing things in
the world, so they don't really turn up. So there
isn't much in the way of historical records talking about say,
two year old children, three year old children. There isn't
much in the way of historical records talking about what
life is like in the nursery. What are they learning
(17:52):
from their mothers, What are their mothers and their nurses
talking about with them? And this is where literature can
bring us into some really interesting places. We do have
medical guides for women in the Middle Ages, and a
lot of this includes advice for mothers and nurses for
the care of infants. But again it kind of drops
(18:12):
off after that weaning, which would have happened between about
age two and age three, So the medical sources don't
tell us a lot about that kind of lost childhood either.
That's what the French historian Djierlette calls it. He says,
between about the age of three and the age of seven,
we just suddenly have this whole, this crater. In the
(18:33):
documentary evidence and we don't know much about children in
that window. But in literature, this is where we get
some interesting things happening. We get a lot of descriptions
of mothers caring for their children. We get advice for
mothers on how to choose a wet nurse. And we
can read between the lines of that kind of advice
literature and tell, okay, if this is what a good
(18:55):
wet nurse is, what does that tell us about what
a good wet nurse does?
Speaker 2 (19:00):
And we get a lot of literary.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Imagining of these characters. But the one thing that has
driven absolutely bonkers is that I cannot find evidence of
lalabis in medieval France. There's a strong tradition of lalabies
in medieval English literature. Mostly they are imagined to be
songs that Mary is singing to baby Jesus, especially on
(19:24):
the flight into Egypt. So we have collections there. I
think there are more than twenty lalabi texts in medieval
English that are collected together. We have lalabies in some
other languages. I've found a couple of plays from medieval
France where there are women singing and that I think
these are probably lalabis, but it is just not a
(19:46):
common literary tradition there. I haven't even found out if
there's a special name for a song that a woman
sings to a child in medieval French, such as lalabi.
I thought I had it and that I didn't have it.
They use a verb, right, so they don't say lalabies.
I found a medieval encyclopedia that's been translated into multiple
languages in the Middle Ages. Okay, let me see. We
(20:08):
have the Latin original. It says lallaby. We have the
Middle English translation. It says lollings and cradle songs. Let
me look at the French translation.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
What does it say?
Speaker 3 (20:17):
It says CHANTI to sing. But I do think it's
fascinating that lallabies aren't treated as an object. They're not
a thing that has a name. They're treated as an action.
There's something that women do with children, and that kept
coming up over and over as I was looking at
these scenes of women and children interacting in the nursery,
(20:40):
that this is not something that is labeled with names.
But it's described as a relationship.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Yes, and it's described as an essential part of mothering
that you can't not do it, and it's funny because
when you're talking about lullabies. Growing up in northern Ontario,
one of the first things I learned in French was fedorudu,
which is which is.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
A French lullaby.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
And so you know, I'm reading your book and coming
across these children that are going to see fid So
it's interesting to see that it's still coming along, and
yet we don't have these actual lullabies right now. But
I mean, again, it makes sense who's writing, who has
the pen in hand. It's not the mothers. The mothers
are busy singing the byes.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
And maybe what they're saying isn't so important as the
fact that they're saying it or singing it at all.
We see this over and over with these ideas about
child communication, that maybe what they're saying is less important
than the fact that they are vocalizing at all. But
it does raise some questions for these medieval writers. Okay,
what is language? What kinds of sounds have enough meaning
(21:46):
that they rise to the level of language versus just
being voice or just being noise. So when a woman
sings a child a lullaby, is that just a voice
or do the word matter that go along with it.
I think clearly we can see that, yes, lallabies teach things.
They're teaching language, if they are religious songs, possibly they're
(22:09):
teaching some doctrine. Incidentally, there there is some indirect evidence
that lallabies are thought of as this kind of teaching
song because among Jewish writers there's a lot of discussion
of should you hire a Christian woman to be a
wet nurse for your child? So there's an acknowledgment that
something is being conveyed in the speech, in the singing,
(22:31):
in the milk itself that has to be weighed as
a potential cultural risk.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Yes, and that again it's so critical, but we don't
need to talk about it, I guess because everybody has
a you know, it's one of those holes for historians
that's just so frustrating because you really want to know
what happened, and then children begin to speak, and then
children begin to say the darnedest thing. So I do.
I do want to get into the perhaps more literary
(22:59):
and biblical exams. About one place where I think we
can definitely connect as modern people as medieval people is
these children speaking in Fablio, where it's like little pictures
have big ears. It doesn't always go well, but it's
something that I think is very common that kids are
saying the darnest things. So tell us a little bit
about these kids starting to say things that the adults
(23:20):
think are hilarious.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Well, believe it or not.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
This is where the whole thing started for me decades ago,
when I was reading a fablio. So these comic stories
from the Middle Ages, often they're a little on the
raunchy side, and I was reading this one called the
Priest in the Larder, where there is a shoemaker who's
about to go off to market, and he says, I'll
(23:44):
be gone for a long time, and his child says, oh, good, daddy,
I like it when you go away, because the priest
comes over and mommy serves better food. But what's strange
is that the fablio then the narrator specifies this child
was two or three three years old, but spoke very
well for her age, and that just stuck in my
mind throughout my career. I thought, how interesting that they
(24:08):
pointed out exactly.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
That this is the age of the child, but that
the child.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Speaks more reasonably than that age would dictate. So over time,
as I kept coming across more and more examples of
children speaking. That one always stuck with me. I thought, finally,
I get to do something here. I get to think
about how this works. Because when you break it down,
the child exists because somebody had sex, and the child
(24:37):
is here to speak about somebody having sex with somebody
else without even knowing what it is that they're actually
talking about. This child displays the perfectly stereotypical child behavior
of wanting more snacks. I think all of us who
have kids have been there. I love it, and we
(24:57):
see this frequently. In medieval text, child is drowned and
then is resuscitated through a miracle, and the first thing
she says is can I have a pair? It's like, yes,
somebody knew children. Somebody knew a three year old?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Who can I have a pair.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
So there's so much in here that really does reflect
what it was like to live with a child. There's
so much in here that shows, no, these aren't little adults.
Somebody knew about kids wanting a snack. And yet the
questions that they come around to asking, I think are
very different than the ones we might ask with a
similar situation, Say of this little girl from the fablio
(25:34):
because ultimately it serves these bigger questions about innocence. I
think it's still a commonplace today. Little children are innocent, right,
But if we're in a context where we are weighing
two things that are both true at the same time,
that yes, little children are innocent. Literally they don't know,
they can't do any harm, they don't know what's happening
(25:55):
in the world around them. And yet within this broader
Christian world worldview of shared responsibility for original sin, no
toddlers aren't any more innocent than anybody else. In fact,
it's worse because they don't even.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Know how guilty they are.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
So we see people grappling with Okay, then what does
it actually mean to be innocent? If we can see
this person who so obviously is innocent and yet they're
involved in these situations of sin, what does that actually
tell us? Does innocence exist at all in this world
and is just as possible if we don't think that
(26:31):
innocence is possible?
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Yes, Well, what I think is worth mentioning before we
got into that deeper point is that the moral of
the fablio is not to not dally with the priest
it's to not do it in front of your kids.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
To not do it in front of the kids.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
Because they will definitely write you out. So this is
this is an important point about childhood and innocence because
one of the themes that you bring in as you
dive into this is there are people adults within the
medieval world who are are also thought of as innocent
and childlife and these are the adults that are disabled.
So how and why was it important for you to
(27:07):
bring disability into this narrative of childhood.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Childhood is a particular moment in life when the expectation
is that the child cannot fully participate in society, that
there is something limiting their ability to contribute in the
same way that a typical adult would be expected to contribute. However,
(27:31):
a child is expected to outgrow those limitations if the
child survives, and to be a full contributor to society,
whereas people with certain disabilities. And I wouldn't want to
say as a broad brush that people with disabilities are
considered to be innocent or to be incapable, but we
do see that there are certain categories of adults who,
(27:55):
like children, are impeded from full participation in society for
various reasons, and who are not expected to grow.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Out of that.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
So a lot of great scholars of medieval law have
looked into rules around guardianship, for example, to ask the question,
is an adult with certain disabilities that prevent them from
participating in the kinds of legal proceedings that are necessary
for property ownership? For example? Are these people kind of
permanent children in the eyes of the law in this
(28:28):
period because of the fact that they're not able to
swear an oath or not able to testify in court,
or to do the other things that are involved with
property ownership. So for me, this is a really interesting question.
I work a lot on disability in general, so to
think about how is childhood like and not like disability,
and then how do these categories completely get scrambled when
(28:51):
we talk about children with disabilities. For me, it was
really interesting to tease out. And again because I've been
thinking so much about child's speech, it was really the
question of muteness or of an inability to speak that
got my attention here, because we do have miracle stories
where children who are deaf and mute or just mute
(29:11):
are healed. And then the question becomes when they're healed miraculously,
do they know how to speak or do they still have.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
To learn like a baby wood.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Yes, And in talking about this, I used old language
accidentally and that these are people with disabilities, and really
we change the language as society to really center the
fact that these are people disabilities are just incidental to
their personhood. And you really see that in these miracle
stories that you're talking about, especially depending on who's telling them,
where if a person's ability to speak is miraculously granted
(29:45):
to them, their personhood is still there, was there beforehand,
and it's there afterwards, and then they are taught to speak.
I'm thinking about the miracle of Louis in particular, where
he's taught to speak in the same sort of compassionate
or not compassion that children were. Again we're talking about
individual parents and stuff, but medieval parenting was a bit
(30:07):
more severe, say, but Louis is taught, he's not dismissed
as a person who is not useful. He is integrated
into society depending on his needs. And I think that
this is an important part of your discussion as well.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Yes, So the story that you're referring to is one
of the best known stories of a child with a
disability in medieval France, and it gets.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Talked a lot about because we have.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
A version of the story that is based on his
own testimony about the story.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
So, a child was.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Abandoned at a castle in Burgundy at about the age
of eight. He was led there by another child and left,
and work was found for this deaf and mute child
with the smith of the castle. There's an extensive description
of the kinds of torture that he was put through,
especially by the other children who were trying to figure
(31:04):
out if he was really mute or if he was
just up to something. But when he's a young man,
the funeral procession of Louis the Ninth, the soon to
be Saint Louis, comes through town, and he follows it
because he's annoyed that he hasn't been given new shoes
at his workplace, and he thinks, I'll follow these rich
people and see where they're going and maybe they will
(31:25):
give me better stuff. Now, he has been deaf and
mute for as long as anybody at the castle has
known him, so they haven't been able to teach him
anything at all about religion or prayer. One of the
common received ideas in this period is that deaf and
mute people are not teachable. There's no consistent sign language.
(31:45):
There are no institutionalized efforts at education of the deaf
before the sixteenth century.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
So he goes off.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
He follows the coffin all the way to Sandny, the
burial place of the kings of France, and he receives
a miracle. Can he can hear again, and he doesn't
know what's going on. He wasn't actually praying, He was
just imitating the movements of the other people at the
tomb because he doesn't know what prayer even is. But
he receives the miracle. And the reason we know this
(32:14):
story is because during the canonization trial of Saint Louis,
when testimonies were gathered, this young man himself, who received
afterward the name Louis, testified as well as other people
who had known him in his youths. They had to
establish that he had been deaf and mute so that
they could establish that a miracle had taken place. He
(32:37):
gained the ability to hear, but had never been taught
to speak, so he went back to the place where
he had been raised and they taught him how to
speak in the way that you would teach a small child.
And they put him in the kitchen and they showed
him things and said the names, and he repeated the
names after them, and then they gave him more complicated
things to repeat, and he did it. And then they
taught him his prayers. So we get this really full
(32:59):
description of language learning the way a child learns it,
but as performed with an adult who had just gained
this capacity.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
It's such an important story because it tells us so
much about the way people regarded each other and the
way that they regarded children, and it is very illustrative
of that practical sense of how you acquire speech, why
it's important, why it's valued. So I think then we
do need to get to the more fanciful examples, and
(33:29):
that we have biblical examples. I'm thinking about Daniel, and
we have the example of Merlin, which is perhaps more
fantastical and interesting, and this idea of speech being a
way to advocate for oneself or one's mother, and perhaps
in the place of women or a mother in general.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Okay, so let's.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Get to these prodigies that are speaking way before they're
supposed to be speaking.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Yes, the case of Daniel is quite interesting. So in
the Book of Daniel, at the end there's the tape
of Susannah and the Elders.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Those of us raised in a.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Protestant background might not be as familiar with this story
because this is considered one of the apocryphal books in
Protestant churches, but it's very much a full part of
the Bible for our medieval Christian readers. And in this story, Daniel,
who is simply described as a child, is able to
vindicate a woman who has been wrongly accused of infidelity.
(34:28):
And he's able to do so essentially by tricking the
two witnesses into contradicting one another. The great mystery writer
Dorothy Sayers, who by the way, was a medievalist by training,
published an anthology of Detective Fiction, and she put the
Book of Daniel, chapter thirteen as the first story in
her Anthology of Detective Fiction, because, like Poirot, except a child,
(34:54):
But the Bible doesn't specify the age of Daniel when
he does this. And what I found that's really fascinating
is that in medieval French literature, he is a baby
when he does this, So the authorities of the medieval
Church generally put him around age twelve. But when we
read these texts by medieval French writers like Jum de
(35:15):
Machau or Christine de Pison, he's one two three years old.
When he's speaking, not only speaking, but proving the falsehood.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Of the speech of others.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It's pretty incredible to think about that and to think
a little bit about how it's very medieval to take
something from the Bible and make it even more Yes,
you know, like it's even more miraculous that he's defending
this woman because he's even younger. And I love how
you do mention in the book how Christine pulls back
some of the agency from Daniel gives it back to Susannah,
(35:49):
which is very Christine as well. Yes, but why was
it important do you think for medieval people to sort
of repeat this story of Daniel as being important, as
being something to talk about when we're talking about childhood
and innocence and what children know.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
My sense is that it kind of depends on what
the overall aims of the text are, and that in
the texts where the focus is really on female chastity
as the topic in and of itself, it doesn't matter
so much if Daniel is very small. So in guides
for How to be a Good Wife, written in France
(36:27):
in the exact same period, we see Daniel being five
six years old. But in books where they're really trying
to get at the problem of justice and the problem
of who has a voice in our system and who
gets believed and who doesn't get believed, Daniel gets younger
and younger in these So I think there's a clear
connection here to this question of who has a voice
(36:50):
in our system, who matters, and who is the little guy?
And how do we make sure that even the little
guy gets heard?
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Yes, And the idea that when everything else stripped away,
all of the human implements, the innocence that you get
to is very close to childhood, right mm hmmm.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Although in the case of Merlin, he's very a tricky
case because he's not quite human and he's certainly not
innocent even when he is born. The circumstances of the
conception of the future wizard Merlin are super complicated because
his mother is essentially raped by an incubus, so he
(37:28):
is not fully human, but she is not responsible for
having chosen this, and so essentially there's a push and
pull between the good and the evil within Merlin from
the beginning, and this translates into him being born.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
Harry with teeth. He's able to speak at a.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Very young age, and when his mother is being prosecuted
for having refused to divulge the identity of her baby's father,
he is able to come to her defense. But he
doesn't do it by saying, my mother is innocent. Merlin's
mother is not innocent, although she's certainly not culpable, but
she's not innocent. But Merlin does it by proving that
(38:09):
the judge's mother had also had an affair with a priest,
and therefore, if the judge wants to punish Merlin's mother,
the judge also needs to punish his own mother first,
because what she did was even worse. And so the
judge says, you know what, let's just forget that.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
This whole thing, ever happens.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
It is quite the image this tiny Harry's.
Speaker 3 (38:29):
Merlin, eighteen month old Mary Merlin, Yes, keeping as good
as he gets.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
I mean, it's an interesting question about justice again, because
the idea is almost that there is no justice, or
if there is justice, then everybody is culpable. And it's
interesting that you have this child of an incubus telling
this to the judge.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yes, and Merlin's mother keeps repeating, I cannot tell you
more because I do not know what happened to me.
And I think this is a very powerful statement about
kind of the disenfranchisement of women that she's saying, I
don't know what has happened to me. I don't even
have the language to describe what happened to me. I
cannot defend myself in the kind of system that you
(39:13):
have set up, because the system you have set up
depends on people being able to explain in your language
things that you understand. And you don't understand my experience.
And there isn't language for my experience.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, And I think that's a really interesting point as well,
as there is no language for that experience, just as
there is no language for the child experience, and so
you have to create these amazing narratives to sort of
read on to them what the experience is, which can
go very badly, as we've seen with poor Merlin's mother.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yes, that's right, well.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
And I think that this is a part of another
aspect to your book where you're talking about Susanna also
in some versions of her story becoming sort of back
to the primitive language of humans, which is she's just
crying and she has to have this male child. I
don't think that's accidental coming to speak on her behalf,
because she's sort of regressed to a point where she
(40:09):
doesn't have language anymore.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
That's right, and it gets us back to, I would say,
a bare human condition. Right. When you strip away language,
when you strip away the pretense that our systems can
render justice, what are you actually left with? And I
think this is why, ultimately these small children are so powerful,
because they are what you're left with when you take
(40:35):
away the education and the good manners and the years
of home training and everything that turns us into an adult,
and you just say, okay, what is it to be
a human.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Without all of that other stuff?
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Well, babies are the ones who can give voice to that.
And so I think that there's a reason why it's.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
A baby who has to give voice.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
To someone like Susannah or Merlin's mother as well.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
It's let me rip away.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
All of the pretense, all of the claims we might
make about equality, all the claims we might make about justice,
and this is all that's left.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yes, And so when you're looking at this, you're looking
at literature and culture more broadly. Are you seeing babies
appearing not just in the form of baby Jesus, because
this is the one example that everyone looks at for,
like innocence and precociousness and all of those things. Are
you seeing it mostly being centered around this baby Jesus.
Are you seeing babies everywhere being precocious and being symbols.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
I think there are babies everywhere, And I think even
Baby Jesus can be really instructive because so often the
authors say, but he's not like any other child. For example,
we were talking earlier about that question of when does
a fetus.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Acquire a soul?
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Our writers always have to tell us this is true
of every human except for Jesus. He had a soul
from conception, because it is not possible to imagine Jesus
ever having existed in what they would call a vegetable
or an animal state. So we can also learn a
lot about what people might have thought about ordinary children
(42:11):
by what they say is exceptional about.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Either Jesus or these other very.
Speaker 3 (42:16):
Holy children like Daniel, who are serving as instruments through
which God can put something right.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Well, absolutely, he can do it however he wants. But
this is, I mean, this is the example that the
medieval world is looking to. So as we wrap up
as somebody who's been studying babies in the medieval world
and also disability in the medieval world, what do you
want to leave people with people who are maybe not
so familiar with the medieval world about how we should
(42:46):
look at these conceptions that people have of children at
the time, considering all of the myths that we've put
on it as modern people, What do you want to
leave people with when they're looking at representations of medieval children.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
I think what I would like us all to leave
with is just these ideas of what it means to
care for someone else and how much the human condition
is a dependent condition that we don't have to be
afraid of depending on others, but that we can all
flourish when we embrace that dependence and when we're not
(43:22):
trying to hide it. I think that this is something
that emerges both with literary discussions of babies and small
children and their mothers and with discussions of people with
disabilities or people we might identify as such today, that
the human condition works best when we're not trying to
pretend that we don't need each other.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Oh, I love that. I love that.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
That is a beautiful way too, and this discussion and
to think about history and about contemporary events as well.
I mean, I think we could use a lot more
compassion today. So I'm hoping people will take that wisdom
that you've just delivered to us and run with it
for the rest of the day, the rest of the week,
the rest of the year, the rest.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Of our lives.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
So thank you so much, Julie for coming on and
talking to us about medieval babies.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
It was a pleasure to find out more about Julie's work.
You can check out her faculty page at Washington University
in Saint Louis. Her new book is Out of the
Mouths of Babes Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature. Before
we go, here's Peter from medievalist dot Net to tell
us what's on the website.
Speaker 4 (44:28):
What's up, Peter, Hey, Hey, So Jacquelin Murray, who is
well known among US Canadian medievalists. She has written her
first piece for us on Medievalist dot net, and it's
about popes named Leo.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Well, there are a few popes named Leo, So I
mean there's lots of work with here.
Speaker 4 (44:45):
Indeed, indeed, so it goes from Pope Leo one, who
gets the Moniker the great mm hmm, he did some
good stuff, right, and Pope le third, who alos has
tongue cut.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Out exciting times.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
That's not good for a pope.
Speaker 4 (44:59):
No nobody. He's luckier than Publio the fifth, who was
deposed and murdered within a month of being elected.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
It's not a safe thing to be a pope.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
That's why there are a lot of Leos.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Because bad things just keep happening. You wouldn't think after
a certain point you wouldn't want to pick that name anymore.
Speaker 4 (45:15):
Indeed, indeed, But well, good luck to our new poblio, right, Yes.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
This poblio may he reign for a long time in healthily. Right.
Speaker 4 (45:24):
So we have that, plus we have this piece on
vikings having you mean sailing farther out into the open
sea than was first believed. There's a scholar named Greer Jarrett,
and he and a team sailed five thousand kilometers around
Scandinavia kind of figure this out. So's some pretty good
visuals and video on our on our site, just him
and his team sailing the ocean blue.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
That's awesome. I love it when people actually put themselves
in the shoes of people from back in the day.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Awesome.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
Yeah, indeed, so that's a pretty good thing. So we
have got that, plus much much more, including why the
Iron Maiden was not a medieval punishment.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Yes, I think there's lots of people who should.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Read that one.
Speaker 4 (46:03):
Although you're a good rock band but.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
Not a medieval rock band. I think this is the
consistent through line, right, I'm madeen, not medieval.
Speaker 4 (46:12):
That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Well, thanks Peter for stopping by and telling us what's
on the website. Thanks thank you to all of you
who tune in to hear my speech each week and
support this podcast by spreading the word, letting the ads
play through, or becoming patrons on patreon dot com. Without you,
none of this would be possible, So thank you. To
(46:34):
find out how to become a patron and to help
me keep the medieval goodness coming, please visit patreon dot
com slash Medievalists for everything from infants to imprints, follow
medievalist dot net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue
Sky at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sibalski across
social media at five n Medievalist or five minute Medievalist,
(46:57):
and you can find my books at all your favorite
books doors. Our music is Beyond the Warriors by gie Frog.
Thanks for listening, and have yourself an awesome day
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