August 13, 2025 • 42 mins
The people of the Middle Ages were no strangers to Cupid’s arrows, and just like us, they loved a good love letter. But in a world where literacy rates were far below what they are today, who was writing their most heartfelt feelings down? And how do we know? This week, Danièle speaks with Myra Stokes and Ad Putter about where we find love letters, and the way people wrote and sent them, along with a couple of spicy – and hilarious – examples.
You can enrol in Danièle's online course Calamity and Change: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Century at https://medievalstudies.thinkific.com/courses/calamity-and-change
You can enrol in Danièle's online course Calamity and Change: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Century at https://medievalstudies.thinkific.com/courses/calamity-and-change
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred two of
the Medieval podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sabolski. A quick
scan of the shelves in the romance section of the
(00:22):
bookstore may lead a person to believe that the medieval
world was full of spicy romance, and that is absolutely correct.
The people of the Middle Ages were no strangers to
Cupid's arrows, and just like us, they loved a good
love letter. But in a world where literacy rates were
far below what they are today, who was writing their
(00:42):
most heartfelt feelings down? And how do we know? This
week I spoke with doctor Myra Stokes and doctor ad
Putter about medieval love letters. Myra is a former senior
lecturer in the English Department at the University of Bristol
and the author of books across a range of subjects,
including Justice and Mercy, Impierres Plowman and The Language of
(01:05):
Jane Austen Adds, Professor of English Literature and the director
of the Center for Medieval Studies, also at the University
of Bristol. He's the author of an introduction to the
Gawain poet, as well as the co author of several
other books. Together. This Dynamic Duo edited the works of
the Gawain poet, a subject close to my heart and
(01:28):
speaking of hearts, Their new collaboration is Medieval love Letters,
a critical anthology. Our conversation on where we find love
letters and the way people wrote and sent them, along
with a couple of spicy and hilarious examples, is coming
up right after this. Well, thank you to the both
(01:49):
of you for coming in and talking to us about
medieval love letters. This is so exciting because I think
this is the Jews that people really want to know about.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, well, medieval love letters. Yeah, they're a bit different
from modern love letters. And one of the things that
really interested us in doing the book is thinking about
the way these letters were written, which often involved the
use of subscribes. You know, we think of love as
a deeply personal thing. Of course it is, but in
the medieval period you may have to rely on a
(02:19):
scribe to write the letter for you. Then, of course
you need the letter delivered, and in this period you
don't put it in the post with a stamp on it,
but you have to have it delivered, and that brings
with it all kinds of risks. You know, the letter
might be intercepted. It's personal, it's secret. Can you trust
the person who delivers it? So what you see in
(02:43):
these letters is that writers take precautions of various sorts.
They may have a little what they call a token
in the letter, or a little thing that both the
sender and the addressy will know but no one else
will know, that will therefore help to authenticate the letter.
(03:03):
They may add in their own handwriting a little PostScript
so that the person receiving the letter can actually verify
that that is the person. So there all kinds of
ways in which writers negotiate the problems of writing letters
in the medieval period, which has its so in historical color.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
It's so interesting when you think about it, because in
some ways you're writing the most personal thing, like you're saying,
but it's also almost like a postcard where if you
haven't sealed it, or if you're using a scribe or
using a reader, everyone knows what your sentiments are.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, it's personal and private. But the other aspect of
the love letter that makes it rather different from writing
a personal letter now is that it's also an art form.
Amira and I teach English literature. We teach poetry in
an English Department, and most of the love letters are
in verse, and this is really something that is distinguishers
(04:01):
the medieval love letter from I suppose love letters still
get written now, but they're probably unlikely to be written
as formal poetry, so that's another thing that makes it
quite different.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Well, this was making me think a little bit as
I was looking through your book. Everyone's having a discussion
about AI right now and whether you can write a
letter and is it really you? And I was thinking
about maybe you'd hire a scribe and say that can
you make this sound better? Then I can make it
sound like do you find a scribe that that's going
to be poetic to make you sound better? Is this
something that you think people were doing.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
That could go on. Yes, especially if you were really
not literate at all, you would go to a scribe
and he would usually he would suggest ways, and they
also did use manuals model letters. These things were very popular.
They weren't simply on love. They covered all occasions you
(04:59):
might need. But there was usually a love letter there
and you might just imitate that or adapt it, or
sometimes just take it over. And the other thing you
could do was use an existing poem. You would simply
send that as a kind of Valentine really, and you
might give the messenger some personal message, and then you
(05:21):
would simply confirm that the messenger came from you, and
he might then say, oh, she's very well and she
sent you her love, that kind of thing. But you
might use existing poems, and you certainly might use existing
letters or get the scribe who probably did know model letters.
Part of his training would have been in model letter
(05:43):
collections and composition, so you could do that. That's less usual,
but you can certainly see the influence of models in
the letters.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Well, it reminds me of that moment in a Night's
Tale where they're actively writing that letter. Do you remember this?
And then even still you have the messenger who's saying,
I've also sent you a token, in which case, in
this case it's a kiss, which I absolutely love.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I love that movie.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
It seems to be a favorite of medievalist because you
have little moments like this.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
I quite like the analogy with Ai. Not that long ago.
I had to do a kind of letter of condolence,
and I got Ai to suggest me various formulas. I
didn't use any of them, but it was fascinating to
see that it could and this is really the situation
I suppose with these formula, is right, these manuals that
give you models and examples. One of my favorites Bon
(06:40):
Compagnia Descigna, an Italian writer from the thirteenth century who
writes model love letters for all occasions for men and women. Yes.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yeah, so if you want to proposition a none, you'll
tell you how, and you'll also give her options of
saying no, politely saying yes, why not? I'm miserable? Here
is he rather enjoys himself? But literally all occasions?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Yes, yes, I absolutely love this source. I think it's
called the Wheel of Venus in English, right, and I
think two of my favorite examples were how to dissuade
a woman from taking the veil?
Speaker 4 (07:19):
So this is what.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
You're getting out here, and persuading someone to marry for money?
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yes, yes, this is amazing.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Okay, so tell us a little bit about this source,
like who is this being written for. Do you have
a whole community of people that needs to persuade people
to not be nuns? What's going on here?
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
So I might say worthwhile saying something about this man
and what makes him so interesting, because you'll get a
sense of the audience from his CV as it were.
He was probably university trained in Bologna and then in Florence.
But he really may aid his fortune, I suppose popularizing
(08:04):
the art of literacy, putting it in the hands of
ordinary people. Well, ordinary is an inverted brackets. The whole
thing is of course in Latin. It's still for an elite,
but it is no longer for an academic elite, not
for scholars. It is for you and I, so it's
got a much broader appeal. And his language, which Maira savors,
(08:26):
Mamaya absolutely loves, is Latins.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Slightly Italian conversation, all that and make it up as
you go along. His audience may in fact have been
university students who had a secretarial career in mind, which
was a very popular route for young men. They would
write letters for people and do their business for them
(08:51):
as a shortcut. Really, you don't need to read Cicero
and Vergi. I can make you competent here. And of
course that goes down very well with students. So he
was popular with the students, less so with his colleagues,
who thought he was a popularizer and a crowd pleaser.
And he was who actually read these letters. I don't know.
(09:16):
It may have been partly a joke.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
They were certainly popular, though, eight manuscripts, and we edited
it from an early printed edition, so it went into
print too, So there were certainly users of the manual.
And my favorite is not actually the two U site.
It is wonderful, but my favorite is for sure the
(09:39):
letter from a woman inviting the lover to a trist. Yeah,
to come, well more than a trist to the bedroom. Yes,
And it goes something like this. You know you've had
violets from me before, I e chased kisses. But now
I will give you the whole rose bush. Let the
(10:01):
north wind is gone, that's her husband. Let the suthin
enter the bedroom and spread its fragrance.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Okay, it's not fine, it's explicit, but you can see
how it works.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
You can decode the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
That that is a little gem which works in as
many of these love letters do, some learned illusions, so
actually you can probably be understood at two levels.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Really well, I love this because we have so many
examples and things like Fablo of students right who have
enough Latin, and they're always the ones who are romancing people,
especially when husbands are a way, So it makes total
sense you would have a manual for how to do this,
because there are letters in this Wheel of Venus that say,
(10:49):
you know, here's what you do before the conquest, and
here's what you could write to her after the conquest,
like it's going to happen because these letters are so good.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
And to deal with the various awkwardnesses that arise, Like
one awkwardness is that she might now be pregnant and
you get a letter from a woman saying we have
a problem, and that the reply from the man saying,
no we haven't.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
So yes, there's the human.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Life is in there.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
And I just love the confidence with which this is
written because it just it's written in a way that
these letters cannot fail you. And I think that's something
that is so familiar to us as well, when we're
getting advice, maybe advice on dating and things like that,
they're like, this is a fail sea, It's totally going
to work for you, And it's the same thing in
this letter, this book of letters that you should be
(11:41):
writing to people. I love it.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
That's been the response of a very few people actually
to say we thought things would be very different now.
Obviously things are different in somewhere. I mean, we've discussed
already that the mechanics of writing letters might be quite different,
but of course the human heart hasn't changed very much
over the centuries. So there's so much to recognize in
(12:03):
these medieval letters about ourselves.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yes, some thing's come up, of course, which aren't common now.
You're probably not going to face a girlfriend who might
be pressured into being a nun, or that you or
even proposition anne one would hope, and also arranged marriages.
There's a rather sad little poem a girl breaking off
(12:28):
and saying We're going to have to stop because I'm
getting married and you know it can't go on, And
so there were areas, of course that don't exist now.
But otherwise, yes, it doesn't change much the actual emotion
or they need to communicate.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yes, I think you're absolutely right that a big subject
of these love letters is also a heartbreak, and it's
devastation as much as it is these hilarious things about
convincing someone not to be a nun. So you found
this one in a manuscript. It is sort of a
whole piece together, all of these things that are supposed
to be used as models for love letters. Where are
(13:07):
you finding other love letters? Considering it's such an ephemeral thing,
people are reusing parchment or maybe getting rid of them.
Where are you finding love letters that aren't exemplars like
this one?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
So some of our finds were in curious places, often
on fly leaves of manuscripts.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
And they would be drafts, not the actual letters, and
not provably of course, actual letters, but they look like it.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
The Norfolk cabot, yeah, we have this, we have this
series of letters. We're really quite remarkable from a Norfolk abbot,
or could be a Suffolk cabet too, but anyway, in
an abbot in East Anglia written to a nun called Margaret,
you can see the love.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Affair hitting hitches. She hasn't turned up for a trist
and he's rather cross and of course communications would be difficult.
He's also very anxious this should not get out for
obvious reasons. So there could be drafts, there could be
actual missives. We've got the letters themselves. That is the
(14:18):
case with a canoness from Ramiramont. Her letters were kept
by the man she was writing to, who was Pierre Hagenbacher,
who was a general in the Burgundian army, and they
were found with his letters when he died, so he'd
obviously kept them. Whether he'd just forgotten about them, one
doesn't know. But those are those are as near as
(14:41):
you can get to actual examples. We know they were sent,
we know they were kept.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, and we have a few examples of love letters also.
And what we're beginning to see in the fifteenth century
is like these gentry collections, the correspondence of gentry families.
Now you have to look quite hard, you know, that
has to be said. We have to look quite hard
to find the interesting letters because mostly these letter collections
are dull and boring unless you're interested in the state
(15:10):
management and things like that. But in those collections there's
usually one with any lap two three, maybe even in
the case of the armber letters. Love letters that you
can find in these gentry collections by that stage. These
letters are written in English, and that also needs to
be said. There's something that makes writing a letter in
(15:33):
the medieval period quite different, because even if you are
in England, and England is our main focus, you may
well be writing them in a language that isn't actually
your mother tongue. You might be writing them in French,
which was deemed to be the polite language for so
many centuries. So it we be beginning to see some
of those letters in these gentry collections in the fifteenth century,
(15:56):
and we include some of those, and we also discuss
in a very long introduction.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yes, there is a famous Valentine from Margaret Paston which
we do include, or where we don't edit it, it's
already been edited. And the Armborough collection includes some poems
which are not always thought of as the letters, but
they're in a letter collection, and they are plainly to
someone rather than just models and generic. There seems to
(16:25):
be an actual situation going on, and that's rather an
interesting one because he does actually learn poetry as he's proceeding.
Is he starts off using a model, actually an existing
poem that was quite well known, and just adds a
little PostScript, and then adapts another French one, and then
starts adapting and really refining and writing his own verse.
(16:49):
So he sort of gets the trick as he's going along.
But again there's not that many for obvious reasons that
because it was confidential of love letters that do survive,
but enough to give you some notion. The drafts are
likely more common and of course always arguable if somebody
could say, well, it's not an actual letter, it's just
(17:13):
a fiction, and you can never completely disprove that. But
there's usually telltale signs of something specific and not simply generic,
but you can never be certain.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, in the case of the letters of the Norfolk Abbott,
for instance, there is some little detail like it might say,
I'm going this is in French. Of course I'm going
to Essex, and that's been crossed out, and presumably the
reason that's crossed out is that he changed his mind.
So we are pretty confident that they are drafts of
(17:48):
real love letters, and that really got us so interested
in trying to find out, you know, who this abbot
may have been, who Margaret may have been, just giving
the options, ruling quite a few options out and ending,
I'm sorry to say, with a great deal of uncertainty. Well,
you get interested in the people.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
For sure. And this is such an interesting collection too,
because there is the added power dynamic right where you
see that the abbot's leaning on the nun sening you're
supposed to obey me in way? Is it kind of
creepy considering that this is supposed to be a love affair,
and so yeah, you get really invested in the story.
What's happening, what's going to happen next?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
You know, it's it's it really is what we would
call abusing your position, Yes, and that is very disturbing
to read. I will speak up on behalf of Margaret here,
who I think really shows We only, of course know
her replies from what the abbot writes. But we mustn't
(18:47):
underestimate women, and we don't. In this collection. We have
a lot of letters by women themselves. Any people think
that we don't have many letters from women, but it's
a good number of letters written by women. We must
to underestimate them. And when we don't want to underestimate Margaret,
who seems to have been quite capable offending this guy,
or she did not turn up at kings Lynn where
(19:10):
if she was expected kings Lynn, I clean it was
kings Lynn, Yes, somewhere and somewhere in Norfolk, that is.
And we can plot as it were, these movements on
the map. All these place names get mentioned, and that's
really something that makes the letter.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
It makes these.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Seem to us like draft letters of actual letters rather
than models. Oh indeed, you know, sure, Deesprie.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Well, it's a tricky business when you think about it.
If you're trying to set up a tryst back in
the old days there are no cell phones. People have
to show up at the right place at the right time,
and it doesn't always work out. Okay, so we're talking
about an abb and a nun here. What's your sense
of how many letters people are able to get when
they're behind the cloister walls and how much privacy they
(19:58):
can expect there, because this is an the only collection
of letters we have between people who are supposed to
be in order.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Absolutely they used inter media is a lot. This is
I think a difference in sensibility is we wouldn't want
a third around that they were used to that they
used confident The ladies used their ladies maids or a confidante.
The men often had a staff and they could send
a messenger. So the ami, in the strict sense, the
(20:30):
friend was actually a very necessary element. And he's even
in love allegories like Le Roman d' laos, which has
all sorts of abstractions that you need. Don Jair off
pretty pride that kind of thing or welcome. But there
is ami.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Ami is the go between, I mean and Troilis and Crosida.
It's panderas. And actually, when I was young, there will
also go between. You had a little bit of right
because you wouldn't dare to speak to your lady, to
your girl. It was a bit of paper that a
friend had to deliver. So I realized that this, that
(21:10):
this book was necessary when my friends said, when I
was teaching Toilers and Chrysida, and I explained, you know
why there was a need for Pandoras. And while there
was a need for approaching the lady in a letter.
First of all, when you declare your love, you're putting
a lot at risk and you need to control your emotions.
So doing it in writing makes perfect sense. But my
(21:31):
student said to me, oh, no, we just text each other.
So I thought, right, what we need. Clearly there's a
need for a book that explains this.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yes you're saying.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
And it was also a way of course of maintaining
privacy a little because it was difficult to meet in person.
Actually you had to arrange that. You were very women,
especially very rarely alone, so you used into Medjuri is
to arrange things so that it people couldn't see you
were communicating. The men, it was slightly easier for all
(22:04):
because they have messengers who could travel. The women did
use their servants, but they couldn't go very far. They
might be able to go down to the marketplace. Juliet
uses her nurse, if you remember, so somebody who's in
your confidence. So in a way they accepted that there
would always be a third or a fourth, even whereas
(22:28):
I think we would be unhappy with that, really, and
I'm afraid often children were used as messengers as well,
or as kind of token chaperones. That there will be
a little girl or a little boy around.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Now we know the name of some of them from letters,
because the letters might say, you know, make sure that
you can trust Hubert. Yes, he's a good man, you
can trust what he says. So the letters sometimes make
reference to the messenger, as in this very interesting love
letter that Claire sends to George Seely in the fifteenth century.
(23:05):
So the Seely is our family dealing in woolen textiles,
and they have a branch in Calais, and George Seely
is the man who looks after the Calais branch, and
he obviously had a mistress there. He's far away from
the eyes of the family, so it's a bit easier
to have a bit on the side. And this was Claire,
(23:25):
and Claire writes a letter to him that has been preserved,
a love letter, and Claire also names the person who
will deliver the letter, who is I think Bartholomew. And
Bartholomew is a little boy that works for George Seely.
So yeah, now, but you mentioned Danny ol the whole
(23:48):
religious situation, because this is interested readers of the book
that we have. You know, we have love letters from Abbots,
we have love letters from Canonessa's, from the canoness and Rimiremont.
But the religious life is also very diverse. So on
the one hand, you can have let's say, enclosed monks
(24:10):
right who are not supposed to stray from their monastery,
though they actually do, as we know from Chaucer. On
the other hand, there are people like the Canonessas of Remiremont,
who didn't take religious vows, who had private lodgings. I
think Mayra in your book you called it genteel accommodation.
It's very pleasant being a Canonessa Miromo. If I were
(24:33):
a woman in the fifteenth century, I would have wanted
to be a canoness. Very pleasant. They could go traveling,
they could go away for months if they wanted to,
They could take husbands. Then of course there would be
an expectation that they would give up their lodgings at
the abbey. So religious life is so very diverse, and
(24:56):
relations between religious people are very diverse to and sometimes
very ambiguous. So you might have in the Surfling and
letters that's fifteenth century German. Now the Surfling was a
Germany on the border with France and Switzerland. These nuns
(25:17):
had friars who wrote letters to them, and it's hard
to know what to make of them. They read like
love letters.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
But they had almost a formal system of gotfron shaft
is you partnered up with one of the friars who
became known. Sounds like an euphemism, but one doesn't know
how euphemistic it is. There was certainly room for more
if they wanted, but it's impossible to tell. They may
just have been friends. I mean, they needed friends and
(25:49):
in the opposite sex, and they may just have partnered
up in a fairly kind of innocent way, really, and
it would be epistolary the relationship because strictly men weren't
on the premises, but there was a little window you
could communicate with the outside world. And one really doesn't
know how far it was a game and how far
(26:12):
it was real. It's difficult. Remember also that the expectations
of people's commitments the religious life was different. Is we
would now assume that anyone who's a nun or a
monk was strictly celibate and wasn't going to partner up.
They were very used to people who were in the
(26:33):
religious life for career reasons. For women, sometimes there was
no other route for irrespectable. So they were quite used
to people whose commitment would be lukewarm, to say the least,
and they probably wouldn't find it as shocking as we
do that there were affairs going on between nuns and abbots,
(26:56):
or that it.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Shouldn't of course, yeah, I get that sense also from
also you know, you think of Don John in the
Shipment s Tale, these monks who are winking at the
women shankin. You know, there's all these characters in Chaucer,
and you don't get the sense of it being as
scandal as much as it might seem.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Now, well, it's interesting what the two of you are
bringing up in that we know that the courtly love
tradition is all about flirting, and you can flirt really,
really far and still have plausible deniability. And I think
this is such a big part of the culture that
may be different from today because today we're like, we
really want to be clear in our text. That's why
we have our emojis to make sure that we're not misunderstood.
(27:40):
But here there's so much room for it. And yes,
when you're looking at these correspondences, you're like, there's something
going on or not. And do you find this in
most letters that you're not quite sure or is this
kind of just something that you see in really formalized letters.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
I think we often see this ambiguity, and the ambiguity
is very helpful when you are declaring your feelings to someone.
This deniability is also very useful. Did you say it
or did you not say it? Did you mean anything
or did you not mean anything? So yeah, I think
(28:20):
certainly in the case of these sofling and letters that
we just mentioned, now, these letters, I find it simply
impossible to decide whether these are real love letters or
whether we're dealing with platonic love. And what makes it
even more confusing is that these letters cite real love letters,
(28:43):
although when I say real love letters, I mean letters
from a fictional source. So the Friars writing to the
nuns are sometimes using as a basis of that letters
letters from a literary text that clearly are love letters.
So this makes it even harder to know what you're
dealing with. Certainly, the Reformers, and the reason we have
(29:05):
these letters is that the Reformers got hold of them.
They were scandalized by it. So certainly the Reformers would
have taken a dim view of these letters and thought
that they certainly thought that they transgressed the boundary of
what was acceptable.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
But that they had their own agenda, of course, for
putting as bad a construction on it as they could.
But that particular instance is very hard. It's one of
the Friars using a letter from a literary text, but
it is a love letter. It's Urialis and Lucrease, which
was a very famous love story, as popular as Toilers
(29:44):
and Crusade in its day, and he's taken that and
simply transcribed it and sent it now in the original
it certainly is a love letter, but the terms love
and respect and this kind of thing are of course
open to interpretation. You could say it was simply an
expression of devotion and friendship. There was always that margin,
(30:09):
and it is sometimes difficult to tell letters of what
were called friendship. I mean, friendship was expressed in the
most flower returns between men and women, or between women
and between men, in ways that to us would sound
very suggestive. But it was simply meant to be passionate, tender,
(30:31):
you know, loving, And of course that is useful for
what you're calling deniability as well, that if the letter
was discovered you could say, well, he's simply devoted to me,
or you know, it's friendship. You can't always tell. Sometimes
you can very plainly. I mean some of the past
and letters, one of the girls was having an affair
(30:53):
with I think it was an estate somebody who worked
on the estate, and they did eventually get married. Of course,
it was not popular with her relatives, and there we
know that this is a love affair, and they run
into all sorts of difficulties. I mean, he actually says
somebody came with the letters that claimed from you but
he didn't have a token. It's very difficult for them
(31:16):
to find trustworthy messengers.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Well, you've gone in the direction I was hoping to
head in where sometimes when you're looking at these letters
and they are between men and men, women and women,
and you're like, are they just roommates? Because this is
a super important part of history, but something that is
very hard to untangle. So when you're dealing with these letters,
do you have rules that you follow personally that help
(31:39):
you decide which category we should put this in or
is it kind of just something that you decide on
a case by case basis.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
One of the things I think we think about when
we decide is this a model love letter or is
it just a poem or is this a love letter
that was a draft or actually sent? Would be circumstance,
acial detail as soon as names get mentioned, for example,
that is actually itself quite revealing. Places of course, place
(32:09):
names would be very revealing. You're clearly not dealing with
a model. If you give that the amount of detail
that would be a clue.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
The other hand, the absence of them is not because
they did avoid any identifying details deliberately. We've got a
correspondence between the poet Masho and a girlfriend called They're On.
We think the name was their on. These are real,
but they very carefully avoid any name. My brother, your sister.
(32:41):
I think one of the servants has a nickname. Who
does get mentioned, and of course well famous people Duke
John or something, but they very carefully avoid any personal
names or places. And some of the guidebooks did advise
that don't give anything that might identify you in case
(33:03):
they're intercepted.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
That could be yes, the letter could be intercepted, and
you wouldn't want the name mentioned. And the canoness of
Ramirono also doesn't name herself in it. She kind of says, so, well,
you know from who this is.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Oh, she has a nicknamed Guyrie, which some people say
maybe an abbreviation of Margaret, but I suspect is that
a kind of pet name between them or something.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
So maybe what Danielle says that actually you do you
have to do it on a case by case basis
as probably the way, and then you're dealing still with
the kind of yes, balance of probabilities. We don't always know.
We just have to accept that.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Well, this leads me to the question, because we are
getting to the end of our time. Which ones you've
done a whole collection of them? Which ones are your
favorites because you just love the story and maybe you
want the story to be something. Which ones are your
favorites in your collection?
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Eloise would always be my favorite because she writes so
well and so powerfully. The story is well known, and
by the way, there is no doubt. It's a very
clear case. I think my bon.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Well, I love Bonk Compano.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
I think his model letters are just brilliant. They're witty,
they're very accepting. I think of the kinds of situations
that people will find themselves in and that you will
find yourself in, and he has a letter for all occasions.
I was gripped by the Norfolk Abbot too. I'm sorry
I don't have favorites because also, you know, the letters
we have here are so different. We have we have
(34:37):
model letters, we have real letters or drafts of real letters.
So it's hard to name a favorite. But I got
very into the Norfolk Abbot and trying to work out
who he was. And it's a bit like a detective, really,
you know who's done it? Who is this guy abusing
(34:57):
his position of authority and if he was Abbots, I mean,
we may still be able to nail them down. I've
not given up all hope something might come to light.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
Yes, we're neither of us professional historians, so we sort
of shelved that one, but there are certainly avenues we
haven't yet explored for trying to find out who he is.
The canoness, I'm quite pleased, is probably not recoverable. All
sorts of historians have attempted to find out who she was,
(35:28):
and I'm rather pleased they have failed, and she will
retain her privacy, really, but she tells us enough about
herself and her situation so that you can imagine she
had a father, she had a sister, and so on,
and we do know who her lover was, and I'm
not particularly anxious to unearth there. I don't think who
(35:49):
she is, but the Norfolk abbtict would be interesting.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
And there's also other questions that might decide what your
favorite one is, because sometimes there's lessions of literary value.
You know, which which you like best as a poem,
and that's not always going to be the same answer.
But I like some of the ones that are really
quite bad poetry. So Humphrey Newton, who is a Cheshia
(36:15):
gentleman in the early sixteenth century, has a couple of
letters where again he provides a little circumstantial detail that
allows the address to know that he is the person
who she saw, so he might say something in this
letter like, h and I saw you with this old woman.
(36:36):
Remember you know, you were just about to go into church,
and you talk to her there and you cast your
eye on me. Then you remember. This kind of stuff
I find interesting. I don't think that is great poetry.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
It's quite witty. But by the way, that probably is
a fictional situation. I mean it may not be. And
it's an aughty per really because it's playing with confidentiality
but gives the game away completely, really, but yes, it
is a very engaging.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Piece for literary merit. It's eloise that you that Mayra
was hugely impressed with the letters of letters of Helloise
in particular, and they are really impressive. And what comes
across on these letters is just the I think it's
just the controlled emotion in them. You feel both the emotion.
(37:32):
She is still in love with Abelade. She is in
the convent not because of God. She is in the
convent because he asked her to she is not thinking
about God, she is thinking about him. This is so powerful,
but it's also written in such fine Latin. Yeah, it's
(37:54):
just hugely impressive. It's so impressive. But the way you know,
it's also an argument why we think that the letters
that are sometimes thought to be by Eloise found in
a much later collection, not we think by Eloise, who
has this impressive quality in her writing. So if you
(38:14):
want literary merit, you've got Eloise.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Well.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
I love this because it just goes to show that
your book has something for everyone, for the romantics, for
the detectives, for the people who love amazing grammar and composition.
It's got it all, which is why I enjoyed it
so much. So thank you so much for coming on
and telling us all about it. I hope people will
run out and dive into these romantic letters from the
Middle Ages. Thanks for being.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Here, thanks for having us Daniel.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
To find out more about Mara and ads work, you
can visit their faculty pages at the University of Bristol.
Their new book is Medieval Love Letters, a Critical Anthology.
Before we go, here's Peter from Medievalist next to tell
us what's on the website. What's going on?
Speaker 5 (39:00):
Hey, hey, so one of the key battles of the
Wars of the Roses may not even happened at all.
What I know, I know this is really interesting research.
Two historians, Paul Dawson and David Grummitt, and they take
a look at the Battle of Wakefield, and this is
the one that takes place on December thirtieth, fourteen sixty
(39:21):
or so, it's supposed to have happened. And the traditional
story has you know, Richard, Duke of York, leading these
forces out of Sandal Castle and they get to get
crushed by the Lancastrians. Right now, what Paul and David
are arguing is basically that story is largely made up
by two historians long after the fact.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
That's big news, indeed.
Speaker 5 (39:44):
So they look at the kind of earliest sources, like
stuff that came out like in fourteen sixty one, and
they point to a very very different story where Duke
Richard and some of his followers are like leaving Wakefield
the day before and they wind up getting ambushed and
murdered out on the street.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Oh, I mean, I'm working on the time earlier in
that century where this is happening a lot in France,
but getting ambushed and murdered is very different from losing
a battle.
Speaker 5 (40:14):
Yeah, yeah, so I think this is going to rewrite
history books.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Everyone needs to check out this article and see what
it says, because huge if true.
Speaker 5 (40:23):
Yeah indeed, indeed. So Yeah, it's a fascinating article that
articles open access. Check out our piece on that and
then check out the article for all the details. So
we have that. Plus we have a story from Finland
where they examined the remains of two people from the
twelfth century. They were buried fifty kilometers apart, yet DNA
analysis found out they were brother and sister.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Oh I wonder what happened there.
Speaker 5 (40:47):
I know, it's kind of a cute little story. So
they don't know anything about these two except that they
are brother and sister. So there's some some nice details
on that site. Plus we have Lord Chevalier on five
upcoming medieval movies that you might want to see and
Donald Ostrowski on the conversion of Voladimir the Great.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Well, this all sounds amazing, lots of new stuff coming out,
lots of new stuff to see, So thanks Peter for
coming by and telling us all about it.
Speaker 5 (41:13):
Thanks well.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
We're halfway through my miniseries for Dan Jones's This Is
History podcast, and things are getting real in the Kingdom
of France. We've already heard about King Charles's homicidal break
with reality and a little oopsie of a party thanks
to his brother Louis of Oileon this week, the wheel
of fortune is about to spin wildly again. To find
(41:37):
out what happens next, check out This Is History Presents
the Glass King for everything from love letters to Ironfettersfollowmidievalist
dot Net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue Sky
at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sebalski across social
media at fiven Medievalist or five Minute Medievalist, and you
(42:00):
can find my books at all your favorite bookstores. Our
music is by Christian Overton. Thanks for listening, and have
yourself a lovely day.
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred two of
the Medieval podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sabolski. A quick
scan of the shelves in the romance section of the
(00:22):
bookstore may lead a person to believe that the medieval
world was full of spicy romance, and that is absolutely correct.
The people of the Middle Ages were no strangers to
Cupid's arrows, and just like us, they loved a good
love letter. But in a world where literacy rates were
far below what they are today, who was writing their
(00:42):
most heartfelt feelings down? And how do we know? This
week I spoke with doctor Myra Stokes and doctor ad
Putter about medieval love letters. Myra is a former senior
lecturer in the English Department at the University of Bristol
and the author of books across a range of subjects,
including Justice and Mercy, Impierres Plowman and The Language of
(01:05):
Jane Austen Adds, Professor of English Literature and the director
of the Center for Medieval Studies, also at the University
of Bristol. He's the author of an introduction to the
Gawain poet, as well as the co author of several
other books. Together. This Dynamic Duo edited the works of
the Gawain poet, a subject close to my heart and
(01:28):
speaking of hearts, Their new collaboration is Medieval love Letters,
a critical anthology. Our conversation on where we find love
letters and the way people wrote and sent them, along
with a couple of spicy and hilarious examples, is coming
up right after this. Well, thank you to the both
(01:49):
of you for coming in and talking to us about
medieval love letters. This is so exciting because I think
this is the Jews that people really want to know about.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, well, medieval love letters. Yeah, they're a bit different
from modern love letters. And one of the things that
really interested us in doing the book is thinking about
the way these letters were written, which often involved the
use of subscribes. You know, we think of love as
a deeply personal thing. Of course it is, but in
the medieval period you may have to rely on a
(02:19):
scribe to write the letter for you. Then, of course
you need the letter delivered, and in this period you
don't put it in the post with a stamp on it,
but you have to have it delivered, and that brings
with it all kinds of risks. You know, the letter
might be intercepted. It's personal, it's secret. Can you trust
the person who delivers it? So what you see in
(02:43):
these letters is that writers take precautions of various sorts.
They may have a little what they call a token
in the letter, or a little thing that both the
sender and the addressy will know but no one else
will know, that will therefore help to authenticate the letter.
(03:03):
They may add in their own handwriting a little PostScript
so that the person receiving the letter can actually verify
that that is the person. So there all kinds of
ways in which writers negotiate the problems of writing letters
in the medieval period, which has its so in historical color.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
It's so interesting when you think about it, because in
some ways you're writing the most personal thing, like you're saying,
but it's also almost like a postcard where if you
haven't sealed it, or if you're using a scribe or
using a reader, everyone knows what your sentiments are.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, it's personal and private. But the other aspect of
the love letter that makes it rather different from writing
a personal letter now is that it's also an art form.
Amira and I teach English literature. We teach poetry in
an English Department, and most of the love letters are
in verse, and this is really something that is distinguishers
(04:01):
the medieval love letter from I suppose love letters still
get written now, but they're probably unlikely to be written
as formal poetry, so that's another thing that makes it
quite different.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Well, this was making me think a little bit as
I was looking through your book. Everyone's having a discussion
about AI right now and whether you can write a
letter and is it really you? And I was thinking
about maybe you'd hire a scribe and say that can
you make this sound better? Then I can make it
sound like do you find a scribe that that's going
to be poetic to make you sound better? Is this
something that you think people were doing.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
That could go on. Yes, especially if you were really
not literate at all, you would go to a scribe
and he would usually he would suggest ways, and they
also did use manuals model letters. These things were very popular.
They weren't simply on love. They covered all occasions you
(04:59):
might need. But there was usually a love letter there
and you might just imitate that or adapt it, or
sometimes just take it over. And the other thing you
could do was use an existing poem. You would simply
send that as a kind of Valentine really, and you
might give the messenger some personal message, and then you
(05:21):
would simply confirm that the messenger came from you, and
he might then say, oh, she's very well and she
sent you her love, that kind of thing. But you
might use existing poems, and you certainly might use existing
letters or get the scribe who probably did know model letters.
Part of his training would have been in model letter
(05:43):
collections and composition, so you could do that. That's less usual,
but you can certainly see the influence of models in
the letters.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Well, it reminds me of that moment in a Night's
Tale where they're actively writing that letter. Do you remember this?
And then even still you have the messenger who's saying,
I've also sent you a token, in which case, in
this case it's a kiss, which I absolutely love.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I love that movie.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
It seems to be a favorite of medievalist because you
have little moments like this.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
I quite like the analogy with Ai. Not that long ago.
I had to do a kind of letter of condolence,
and I got Ai to suggest me various formulas. I
didn't use any of them, but it was fascinating to
see that it could and this is really the situation
I suppose with these formula, is right, these manuals that
give you models and examples. One of my favorites Bon
(06:40):
Compagnia Descigna, an Italian writer from the thirteenth century who
writes model love letters for all occasions for men and women. Yes.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yeah, so if you want to proposition a none, you'll
tell you how, and you'll also give her options of
saying no, politely saying yes, why not? I'm miserable? Here
is he rather enjoys himself? But literally all occasions?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Yes, yes, I absolutely love this source. I think it's
called the Wheel of Venus in English, right, and I
think two of my favorite examples were how to dissuade
a woman from taking the veil?
Speaker 4 (07:19):
So this is what.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
You're getting out here, and persuading someone to marry for money?
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yes, yes, this is amazing.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Okay, so tell us a little bit about this source,
like who is this being written for. Do you have
a whole community of people that needs to persuade people
to not be nuns? What's going on here?
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
So I might say worthwhile saying something about this man
and what makes him so interesting, because you'll get a
sense of the audience from his CV as it were.
He was probably university trained in Bologna and then in Florence.
But he really may aid his fortune, I suppose popularizing
(08:04):
the art of literacy, putting it in the hands of
ordinary people. Well, ordinary is an inverted brackets. The whole
thing is of course in Latin. It's still for an elite,
but it is no longer for an academic elite, not
for scholars. It is for you and I, so it's
got a much broader appeal. And his language, which Maira savors,
(08:26):
Mamaya absolutely loves, is Latins.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Slightly Italian conversation, all that and make it up as
you go along. His audience may in fact have been
university students who had a secretarial career in mind, which
was a very popular route for young men. They would
write letters for people and do their business for them
(08:51):
as a shortcut. Really, you don't need to read Cicero
and Vergi. I can make you competent here. And of
course that goes down very well with students. So he
was popular with the students, less so with his colleagues,
who thought he was a popularizer and a crowd pleaser.
And he was who actually read these letters. I don't know.
(09:16):
It may have been partly a joke.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
They were certainly popular, though, eight manuscripts, and we edited
it from an early printed edition, so it went into
print too, So there were certainly users of the manual.
And my favorite is not actually the two U site.
It is wonderful, but my favorite is for sure the
(09:39):
letter from a woman inviting the lover to a trist. Yeah,
to come, well more than a trist to the bedroom. Yes,
And it goes something like this. You know you've had
violets from me before, I e chased kisses. But now
I will give you the whole rose bush. Let the
(10:01):
north wind is gone, that's her husband. Let the suthin
enter the bedroom and spread its fragrance.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Okay, it's not fine, it's explicit, but you can see
how it works.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
You can decode the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
That that is a little gem which works in as
many of these love letters do, some learned illusions, so
actually you can probably be understood at two levels.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Really well, I love this because we have so many
examples and things like Fablo of students right who have
enough Latin, and they're always the ones who are romancing people,
especially when husbands are a way, So it makes total
sense you would have a manual for how to do this,
because there are letters in this Wheel of Venus that say,
(10:49):
you know, here's what you do before the conquest, and
here's what you could write to her after the conquest,
like it's going to happen because these letters are so good.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
And to deal with the various awkwardnesses that arise, Like
one awkwardness is that she might now be pregnant and
you get a letter from a woman saying we have
a problem, and that the reply from the man saying,
no we haven't.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
So yes, there's the human.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Life is in there.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
And I just love the confidence with which this is
written because it just it's written in a way that
these letters cannot fail you. And I think that's something
that is so familiar to us as well, when we're
getting advice, maybe advice on dating and things like that,
they're like, this is a fail sea, It's totally going
to work for you, And it's the same thing in
this letter, this book of letters that you should be
(11:41):
writing to people. I love it.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
That's been the response of a very few people actually
to say we thought things would be very different now.
Obviously things are different in somewhere. I mean, we've discussed
already that the mechanics of writing letters might be quite different,
but of course the human heart hasn't changed very much
over the centuries. So there's so much to recognize in
(12:03):
these medieval letters about ourselves.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yes, some thing's come up, of course, which aren't common now.
You're probably not going to face a girlfriend who might
be pressured into being a nun, or that you or
even proposition anne one would hope, and also arranged marriages.
There's a rather sad little poem a girl breaking off
(12:28):
and saying We're going to have to stop because I'm
getting married and you know it can't go on, And
so there were areas, of course that don't exist now.
But otherwise, yes, it doesn't change much the actual emotion
or they need to communicate.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yes, I think you're absolutely right that a big subject
of these love letters is also a heartbreak, and it's
devastation as much as it is these hilarious things about
convincing someone not to be a nun. So you found
this one in a manuscript. It is sort of a
whole piece together, all of these things that are supposed
to be used as models for love letters. Where are
(13:07):
you finding other love letters? Considering it's such an ephemeral thing,
people are reusing parchment or maybe getting rid of them.
Where are you finding love letters that aren't exemplars like
this one?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
So some of our finds were in curious places, often
on fly leaves of manuscripts.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
And they would be drafts, not the actual letters, and
not provably of course, actual letters, but they look like it.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
The Norfolk cabot, yeah, we have this, we have this
series of letters. We're really quite remarkable from a Norfolk abbot,
or could be a Suffolk cabet too, but anyway, in
an abbot in East Anglia written to a nun called Margaret,
you can see the love.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Affair hitting hitches. She hasn't turned up for a trist
and he's rather cross and of course communications would be difficult.
He's also very anxious this should not get out for
obvious reasons. So there could be drafts, there could be
actual missives. We've got the letters themselves. That is the
(14:18):
case with a canoness from Ramiramont. Her letters were kept
by the man she was writing to, who was Pierre Hagenbacher,
who was a general in the Burgundian army, and they
were found with his letters when he died, so he'd
obviously kept them. Whether he'd just forgotten about them, one
doesn't know. But those are those are as near as
(14:41):
you can get to actual examples. We know they were sent,
we know they were kept.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, and we have a few examples of love letters also.
And what we're beginning to see in the fifteenth century
is like these gentry collections, the correspondence of gentry families.
Now you have to look quite hard, you know, that
has to be said. We have to look quite hard
to find the interesting letters because mostly these letter collections
are dull and boring unless you're interested in the state
(15:10):
management and things like that. But in those collections there's
usually one with any lap two three, maybe even in
the case of the armber letters. Love letters that you
can find in these gentry collections by that stage. These
letters are written in English, and that also needs to
be said. There's something that makes writing a letter in
(15:33):
the medieval period quite different, because even if you are
in England, and England is our main focus, you may
well be writing them in a language that isn't actually
your mother tongue. You might be writing them in French,
which was deemed to be the polite language for so
many centuries. So it we be beginning to see some
of those letters in these gentry collections in the fifteenth century,
(15:56):
and we include some of those, and we also discuss
in a very long introduction.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Yes, there is a famous Valentine from Margaret Paston which
we do include, or where we don't edit it, it's
already been edited. And the Armborough collection includes some poems
which are not always thought of as the letters, but
they're in a letter collection, and they are plainly to
someone rather than just models and generic. There seems to
(16:25):
be an actual situation going on, and that's rather an
interesting one because he does actually learn poetry as he's proceeding.
Is he starts off using a model, actually an existing
poem that was quite well known, and just adds a
little PostScript, and then adapts another French one, and then
starts adapting and really refining and writing his own verse.
(16:49):
So he sort of gets the trick as he's going along.
But again there's not that many for obvious reasons that
because it was confidential of love letters that do survive,
but enough to give you some notion. The drafts are
likely more common and of course always arguable if somebody
could say, well, it's not an actual letter, it's just
(17:13):
a fiction, and you can never completely disprove that. But
there's usually telltale signs of something specific and not simply generic,
but you can never be certain.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, in the case of the letters of the Norfolk Abbott,
for instance, there is some little detail like it might say,
I'm going this is in French. Of course I'm going
to Essex, and that's been crossed out, and presumably the
reason that's crossed out is that he changed his mind.
So we are pretty confident that they are drafts of
(17:48):
real love letters, and that really got us so interested
in trying to find out, you know, who this abbot
may have been, who Margaret may have been, just giving
the options, ruling quite a few options out and ending,
I'm sorry to say, with a great deal of uncertainty. Well,
you get interested in the people.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
For sure. And this is such an interesting collection too,
because there is the added power dynamic right where you
see that the abbot's leaning on the nun sening you're
supposed to obey me in way? Is it kind of
creepy considering that this is supposed to be a love affair,
and so yeah, you get really invested in the story.
What's happening, what's going to happen next?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
You know, it's it's it really is what we would
call abusing your position, Yes, and that is very disturbing
to read. I will speak up on behalf of Margaret here,
who I think really shows We only, of course know
her replies from what the abbot writes. But we mustn't
(18:47):
underestimate women, and we don't. In this collection. We have
a lot of letters by women themselves. Any people think
that we don't have many letters from women, but it's
a good number of letters written by women. We must
to underestimate them. And when we don't want to underestimate Margaret,
who seems to have been quite capable offending this guy,
or she did not turn up at kings Lynn where
(19:10):
if she was expected kings Lynn, I clean it was
kings Lynn, Yes, somewhere and somewhere in Norfolk, that is.
And we can plot as it were, these movements on
the map. All these place names get mentioned, and that's
really something that makes the letter.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
It makes these.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Seem to us like draft letters of actual letters rather
than models. Oh indeed, you know, sure, Deesprie.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Well, it's a tricky business when you think about it.
If you're trying to set up a tryst back in
the old days there are no cell phones. People have
to show up at the right place at the right time,
and it doesn't always work out. Okay, so we're talking
about an abb and a nun here. What's your sense
of how many letters people are able to get when
they're behind the cloister walls and how much privacy they
(19:58):
can expect there, because this is an the only collection
of letters we have between people who are supposed to
be in order.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Absolutely they used inter media is a lot. This is
I think a difference in sensibility is we wouldn't want
a third around that they were used to that they
used confident The ladies used their ladies maids or a confidante.
The men often had a staff and they could send
a messenger. So the ami, in the strict sense, the
(20:30):
friend was actually a very necessary element. And he's even
in love allegories like Le Roman d' laos, which has
all sorts of abstractions that you need. Don Jair off
pretty pride that kind of thing or welcome. But there
is ami.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Ami is the go between, I mean and Troilis and Crosida.
It's panderas. And actually, when I was young, there will
also go between. You had a little bit of right
because you wouldn't dare to speak to your lady, to
your girl. It was a bit of paper that a
friend had to deliver. So I realized that this, that
(21:10):
this book was necessary when my friends said, when I
was teaching Toilers and Chrysida, and I explained, you know
why there was a need for Pandoras. And while there
was a need for approaching the lady in a letter.
First of all, when you declare your love, you're putting
a lot at risk and you need to control your emotions.
So doing it in writing makes perfect sense. But my
(21:31):
student said to me, oh, no, we just text each other.
So I thought, right, what we need. Clearly there's a
need for a book that explains this.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yes you're saying.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
And it was also a way of course of maintaining
privacy a little because it was difficult to meet in person.
Actually you had to arrange that. You were very women,
especially very rarely alone, so you used into Medjuri is
to arrange things so that it people couldn't see you
were communicating. The men, it was slightly easier for all
(22:04):
because they have messengers who could travel. The women did
use their servants, but they couldn't go very far. They
might be able to go down to the marketplace. Juliet
uses her nurse, if you remember, so somebody who's in
your confidence. So in a way they accepted that there
would always be a third or a fourth, even whereas
(22:28):
I think we would be unhappy with that, really, and
I'm afraid often children were used as messengers as well,
or as kind of token chaperones. That there will be
a little girl or a little boy around.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Now we know the name of some of them from letters,
because the letters might say, you know, make sure that
you can trust Hubert. Yes, he's a good man, you
can trust what he says. So the letters sometimes make
reference to the messenger, as in this very interesting love
letter that Claire sends to George Seely in the fifteenth century.
(23:05):
So the Seely is our family dealing in woolen textiles,
and they have a branch in Calais, and George Seely
is the man who looks after the Calais branch, and
he obviously had a mistress there. He's far away from
the eyes of the family, so it's a bit easier
to have a bit on the side. And this was Claire,
(23:25):
and Claire writes a letter to him that has been preserved,
a love letter, and Claire also names the person who
will deliver the letter, who is I think Bartholomew. And
Bartholomew is a little boy that works for George Seely.
So yeah, now, but you mentioned Danny ol the whole
(23:48):
religious situation, because this is interested readers of the book
that we have. You know, we have love letters from Abbots,
we have love letters from Canonessa's, from the canoness and Rimiremont.
But the religious life is also very diverse. So on
the one hand, you can have let's say, enclosed monks
(24:10):
right who are not supposed to stray from their monastery,
though they actually do, as we know from Chaucer. On
the other hand, there are people like the Canonessas of Remiremont,
who didn't take religious vows, who had private lodgings. I
think Mayra in your book you called it genteel accommodation.
It's very pleasant being a Canonessa Miromo. If I were
(24:33):
a woman in the fifteenth century, I would have wanted
to be a canoness. Very pleasant. They could go traveling,
they could go away for months if they wanted to,
They could take husbands. Then of course there would be
an expectation that they would give up their lodgings at
the abbey. So religious life is so very diverse, and
(24:56):
relations between religious people are very diverse to and sometimes
very ambiguous. So you might have in the Surfling and
letters that's fifteenth century German. Now the Surfling was a
Germany on the border with France and Switzerland. These nuns
(25:17):
had friars who wrote letters to them, and it's hard
to know what to make of them. They read like
love letters.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
But they had almost a formal system of gotfron shaft
is you partnered up with one of the friars who
became known. Sounds like an euphemism, but one doesn't know
how euphemistic it is. There was certainly room for more
if they wanted, but it's impossible to tell. They may
just have been friends. I mean, they needed friends and
(25:49):
in the opposite sex, and they may just have partnered
up in a fairly kind of innocent way, really, and
it would be epistolary the relationship because strictly men weren't
on the premises, but there was a little window you
could communicate with the outside world. And one really doesn't
know how far it was a game and how far
(26:12):
it was real. It's difficult. Remember also that the expectations
of people's commitments the religious life was different. Is we
would now assume that anyone who's a nun or a
monk was strictly celibate and wasn't going to partner up.
They were very used to people who were in the
(26:33):
religious life for career reasons. For women, sometimes there was
no other route for irrespectable. So they were quite used
to people whose commitment would be lukewarm, to say the least,
and they probably wouldn't find it as shocking as we
do that there were affairs going on between nuns and abbots,
(26:56):
or that it.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Shouldn't of course, yeah, I get that sense also from
also you know, you think of Don John in the
Shipment s Tale, these monks who are winking at the
women shankin. You know, there's all these characters in Chaucer,
and you don't get the sense of it being as
scandal as much as it might seem.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Now, well, it's interesting what the two of you are
bringing up in that we know that the courtly love
tradition is all about flirting, and you can flirt really,
really far and still have plausible deniability. And I think
this is such a big part of the culture that
may be different from today because today we're like, we
really want to be clear in our text. That's why
we have our emojis to make sure that we're not misunderstood.
(27:40):
But here there's so much room for it. And yes,
when you're looking at these correspondences, you're like, there's something
going on or not. And do you find this in
most letters that you're not quite sure or is this
kind of just something that you see in really formalized letters.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
I think we often see this ambiguity, and the ambiguity
is very helpful when you are declaring your feelings to someone.
This deniability is also very useful. Did you say it
or did you not say it? Did you mean anything
or did you not mean anything? So yeah, I think
(28:20):
certainly in the case of these sofling and letters that
we just mentioned, now, these letters, I find it simply
impossible to decide whether these are real love letters or
whether we're dealing with platonic love. And what makes it
even more confusing is that these letters cite real love letters,
(28:43):
although when I say real love letters, I mean letters
from a fictional source. So the Friars writing to the
nuns are sometimes using as a basis of that letters
letters from a literary text that clearly are love letters.
So this makes it even harder to know what you're
dealing with. Certainly, the Reformers, and the reason we have
(29:05):
these letters is that the Reformers got hold of them.
They were scandalized by it. So certainly the Reformers would
have taken a dim view of these letters and thought
that they certainly thought that they transgressed the boundary of
what was acceptable.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
But that they had their own agenda, of course, for
putting as bad a construction on it as they could.
But that particular instance is very hard. It's one of
the Friars using a letter from a literary text, but
it is a love letter. It's Urialis and Lucrease, which
was a very famous love story, as popular as Toilers
(29:44):
and Crusade in its day, and he's taken that and
simply transcribed it and sent it now in the original
it certainly is a love letter, but the terms love
and respect and this kind of thing are of course
open to interpretation. You could say it was simply an
expression of devotion and friendship. There was always that margin,
(30:09):
and it is sometimes difficult to tell letters of what
were called friendship. I mean, friendship was expressed in the
most flower returns between men and women, or between women
and between men, in ways that to us would sound
very suggestive. But it was simply meant to be passionate, tender,
(30:31):
you know, loving, And of course that is useful for
what you're calling deniability as well, that if the letter
was discovered you could say, well, he's simply devoted to me,
or you know, it's friendship. You can't always tell. Sometimes
you can very plainly. I mean some of the past
and letters, one of the girls was having an affair
(30:53):
with I think it was an estate somebody who worked
on the estate, and they did eventually get married. Of course,
it was not popular with her relatives, and there we
know that this is a love affair, and they run
into all sorts of difficulties. I mean, he actually says
somebody came with the letters that claimed from you but
he didn't have a token. It's very difficult for them
(31:16):
to find trustworthy messengers.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Well, you've gone in the direction I was hoping to
head in where sometimes when you're looking at these letters
and they are between men and men, women and women,
and you're like, are they just roommates? Because this is
a super important part of history, but something that is
very hard to untangle. So when you're dealing with these letters,
do you have rules that you follow personally that help
(31:39):
you decide which category we should put this in or
is it kind of just something that you decide on
a case by case basis.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
One of the things I think we think about when
we decide is this a model love letter or is
it just a poem or is this a love letter
that was a draft or actually sent? Would be circumstance,
acial detail as soon as names get mentioned, for example,
that is actually itself quite revealing. Places of course, place
(32:09):
names would be very revealing. You're clearly not dealing with
a model. If you give that the amount of detail
that would be a clue.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
The other hand, the absence of them is not because
they did avoid any identifying details deliberately. We've got a
correspondence between the poet Masho and a girlfriend called They're On.
We think the name was their on. These are real,
but they very carefully avoid any name. My brother, your sister.
(32:41):
I think one of the servants has a nickname. Who
does get mentioned, and of course well famous people Duke
John or something, but they very carefully avoid any personal
names or places. And some of the guidebooks did advise
that don't give anything that might identify you in case
(33:03):
they're intercepted.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
That could be yes, the letter could be intercepted, and
you wouldn't want the name mentioned. And the canoness of
Ramirono also doesn't name herself in it. She kind of says, so, well,
you know from who this is.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Oh, she has a nicknamed Guyrie, which some people say
maybe an abbreviation of Margaret, but I suspect is that
a kind of pet name between them or something.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
So maybe what Danielle says that actually you do you
have to do it on a case by case basis
as probably the way, and then you're dealing still with
the kind of yes, balance of probabilities. We don't always know.
We just have to accept that.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Well, this leads me to the question, because we are
getting to the end of our time. Which ones you've
done a whole collection of them? Which ones are your
favorites because you just love the story and maybe you
want the story to be something. Which ones are your
favorites in your collection?
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Eloise would always be my favorite because she writes so
well and so powerfully. The story is well known, and
by the way, there is no doubt. It's a very
clear case. I think my bon.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Well, I love Bonk Compano.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
I think his model letters are just brilliant. They're witty,
they're very accepting. I think of the kinds of situations
that people will find themselves in and that you will
find yourself in, and he has a letter for all occasions.
I was gripped by the Norfolk Abbot too. I'm sorry
I don't have favorites because also, you know, the letters
we have here are so different. We have we have
(34:37):
model letters, we have real letters or drafts of real letters.
So it's hard to name a favorite. But I got
very into the Norfolk Abbot and trying to work out
who he was. And it's a bit like a detective, really,
you know who's done it? Who is this guy abusing
(34:57):
his position of authority and if he was Abbots, I mean,
we may still be able to nail them down. I've
not given up all hope something might come to light.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
Yes, we're neither of us professional historians, so we sort
of shelved that one, but there are certainly avenues we
haven't yet explored for trying to find out who he is.
The canoness, I'm quite pleased, is probably not recoverable. All
sorts of historians have attempted to find out who she was,
(35:28):
and I'm rather pleased they have failed, and she will
retain her privacy, really, but she tells us enough about
herself and her situation so that you can imagine she
had a father, she had a sister, and so on,
and we do know who her lover was, and I'm
not particularly anxious to unearth there. I don't think who
(35:49):
she is, but the Norfolk abbtict would be interesting.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
And there's also other questions that might decide what your
favorite one is, because sometimes there's lessions of literary value.
You know, which which you like best as a poem,
and that's not always going to be the same answer.
But I like some of the ones that are really
quite bad poetry. So Humphrey Newton, who is a Cheshia
(36:15):
gentleman in the early sixteenth century, has a couple of
letters where again he provides a little circumstantial detail that
allows the address to know that he is the person
who she saw, so he might say something in this
letter like, h and I saw you with this old woman.
(36:36):
Remember you know, you were just about to go into church,
and you talk to her there and you cast your
eye on me. Then you remember. This kind of stuff
I find interesting. I don't think that is great poetry.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
It's quite witty. But by the way, that probably is
a fictional situation. I mean it may not be. And
it's an aughty per really because it's playing with confidentiality
but gives the game away completely, really, but yes, it
is a very engaging.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Piece for literary merit. It's eloise that you that Mayra
was hugely impressed with the letters of letters of Helloise
in particular, and they are really impressive. And what comes
across on these letters is just the I think it's
just the controlled emotion in them. You feel both the emotion.
(37:32):
She is still in love with Abelade. She is in
the convent not because of God. She is in the
convent because he asked her to she is not thinking
about God, she is thinking about him. This is so powerful,
but it's also written in such fine Latin. Yeah, it's
(37:54):
just hugely impressive. It's so impressive. But the way you know,
it's also an argument why we think that the letters
that are sometimes thought to be by Eloise found in
a much later collection, not we think by Eloise, who
has this impressive quality in her writing. So if you
(38:14):
want literary merit, you've got Eloise.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Well.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
I love this because it just goes to show that
your book has something for everyone, for the romantics, for
the detectives, for the people who love amazing grammar and composition.
It's got it all, which is why I enjoyed it
so much. So thank you so much for coming on
and telling us all about it. I hope people will
run out and dive into these romantic letters from the
Middle Ages. Thanks for being.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Here, thanks for having us Daniel.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
To find out more about Mara and ads work, you
can visit their faculty pages at the University of Bristol.
Their new book is Medieval Love Letters, a Critical Anthology.
Before we go, here's Peter from Medievalist next to tell
us what's on the website. What's going on?
Speaker 5 (39:00):
Hey, hey, so one of the key battles of the
Wars of the Roses may not even happened at all.
What I know, I know this is really interesting research.
Two historians, Paul Dawson and David Grummitt, and they take
a look at the Battle of Wakefield, and this is
the one that takes place on December thirtieth, fourteen sixty
(39:21):
or so, it's supposed to have happened. And the traditional
story has you know, Richard, Duke of York, leading these
forces out of Sandal Castle and they get to get
crushed by the Lancastrians. Right now, what Paul and David
are arguing is basically that story is largely made up
by two historians long after the fact.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
That's big news, indeed.
Speaker 5 (39:44):
So they look at the kind of earliest sources, like
stuff that came out like in fourteen sixty one, and
they point to a very very different story where Duke
Richard and some of his followers are like leaving Wakefield
the day before and they wind up getting ambushed and
murdered out on the street.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Oh, I mean, I'm working on the time earlier in
that century where this is happening a lot in France,
but getting ambushed and murdered is very different from losing
a battle.
Speaker 5 (40:14):
Yeah, yeah, so I think this is going to rewrite
history books.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Everyone needs to check out this article and see what
it says, because huge if true.
Speaker 5 (40:23):
Yeah indeed, indeed. So Yeah, it's a fascinating article that
articles open access. Check out our piece on that and
then check out the article for all the details. So
we have that. Plus we have a story from Finland
where they examined the remains of two people from the
twelfth century. They were buried fifty kilometers apart, yet DNA
analysis found out they were brother and sister.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Oh I wonder what happened there.
Speaker 5 (40:47):
I know, it's kind of a cute little story. So
they don't know anything about these two except that they
are brother and sister. So there's some some nice details
on that site. Plus we have Lord Chevalier on five
upcoming medieval movies that you might want to see and
Donald Ostrowski on the conversion of Voladimir the Great.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Well, this all sounds amazing, lots of new stuff coming out,
lots of new stuff to see, So thanks Peter for
coming by and telling us all about it.
Speaker 5 (41:13):
Thanks well.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
We're halfway through my miniseries for Dan Jones's This Is
History podcast, and things are getting real in the Kingdom
of France. We've already heard about King Charles's homicidal break
with reality and a little oopsie of a party thanks
to his brother Louis of Oileon this week, the wheel
of fortune is about to spin wildly again. To find
(41:37):
out what happens next, check out This Is History Presents
the Glass King for everything from love letters to Ironfettersfollowmidievalist
dot Net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue Sky
at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sebalski across social
media at fiven Medievalist or five Minute Medievalist, and you
(42:00):
can find my books at all your favorite bookstores. Our
music is by Christian Overton. Thanks for listening, and have
yourself a lovely day.
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