Showing posts with label medieval. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medieval. Show all posts

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Dominican Prayer Gestures (3/29/25)

Medieval prayer was not just a matter of words – it was a full-bodied practice, shaped by movement, posture, and gesture. As Jean-Claude Schmitt observes, such “[g]estures do not derive their meaning from their form but from their social use, from the context in which they were carried out” (p. 133). That is, we understand the significance of certain ways of holding the body and arms from the space in which they occur, the person or persons carrying them out, and the framing activities in which they are embedded.

This post briefly explores three twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources that illuminate the role of gesture in Dominican prayer: Peter the Chanter’s reflections on movement in devotion, Humbert of Romans’ structured taxonomy of bows and prostrations, and the treatises on Saint Dominic’s own prayer postures.

Together, these perspectives reveal how physical expression was not only an outward sign of inner devotion but also a communicative act, shaping and reinforcing the experience of prayer for both the individual and the community.

Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) tells us that prayer is a continuous movement. Take, for instance, his praise of the French at the moment of transubstantiation in the mass: 

these god-fearing men, I say, not only bend their head and kidneys but also remove all their hoods and caps from their heads, [and] prostrate themselves and fall on their face during the making and taking of the flesh and blood of Christ.

Four verbs in one short description: prayer for Peter is both active and sequential. Because of this, he considers gesture to be foundational for the act of praying. The positionality of the body matters in appropriately signaling the state of mind and spirit with which the petitioner approaches prayer. Here, Richard Trexler reminds us, we have submission postures. But to gesture, Peter reminds us, is an action, not an attitude. From a modern perspective, it’s a revelation of energy expended as well as engagement with the moment. Even when held in stasis – as with extended kneeling – the petitioner is putting physical energy into the act of prayer to supplement the verbal energy of the spoken prayer itself. Movement matters.

Trexler rightly points to the inconsistencies among the depictions as well as inconsistencies in Peter’s construction of the biblical authenticity for the seven gestures he articulates. Nevertheless, these “devote postures” are crafted to provide models of action in prayer. As Trexler summarizes, 

Peter the Chanter knew that the most sophisticated reader would learn body motions more quickly through pictures, and he wanted clerks to then act out his seven modes of prayer in a fashion which would edify spectators. Depersonalized figures would teach clerks, whose ritual life would then be the "book of the simple" (Trexler, p. 110).

Humbert of Romans (1200-1277) agrees with Peter the Chanter, at least in part: gesture matters, and it is imitable. Humbert, however, is less taken with ideas of movement and more with its visual endpoints. He offers a gestural grammar that explore the patterns of bending bodies in the context of the liturgy. Humbert provides a six-fold matrix of bows (inclinationes), genuflections (genuflexiones), and prostrations (prostrationes):

In his assessment of Humbert’s discussion, scholar Dmitri Zakharine points out that prostrations were an extended form of genuflection – “an amplification of the genuflection in liturgical ceremony.” (Zakharine, p. 349). He notes, however, that all these gestures had communicative power: they meant something to the petitioner, and, equally, they meant something to those who viewed these gestures.

It’s not unlike the teenager, arms akimbo. There is an authority of attitude inherent in these gestures if we see them in their proper context. For that teen with attitude, we’re mere steps away from the eye roll and the snarky comment. For the prayer-giver, we are in an opposite space, one in which the attitude reinforces a petitioning stance in the adoratio of the liturgy.

And Saint Dominic (1170-1221) himself explored a variety of stances in his prayer, at least as recorded in the multiple copies of The Nine [Alt: Fourteen] Ways of Praying of St Dominic. As Schmitt explores in detail, the illustrations to the Dominican treatise give us a wide range of gestures that Dominic was thought to have modeled.

That passive voice is doing some important work, because while the treatises agree in their hagiographical intent, they disagree, at least in part, about which prayer gestures were important enough to include. As Schmitt puts it, “the saint’s gestures quickly escaped pre-established codification of the inclinations” (Schmitt, p. 133).

The discussions of Dominic’s prayer in the treatise make clear that the captured gestures illustrated in the treatise iconography are part of a broader gestural complex. Take Dominic’s act of reading “some book opened before him.” Schmitt quotes the treatise: “He venerated his book, inclined himself toward it, kissed it with love.” In other words, the saint responded emotively and acted out his impulses in a set of actions – kissing the book, but also covering his head with his hood, or turning away from the book as if overwhelmed by its content. (Schmitt, p. 133)

This is important, because, pace Schmitt, the images and texts “offered a type of practical manual, a guide where the images presented more accurately the description of the gestures and moreover, the movement to imitate” (Schmitt, p. 140). In other words, the wise viewer might use the image as a model, for there is an “imitability” between friar and saint, reinforced by the choice of the vernacular. 

CONCLUSION

Given the differences in what they have to say, Peter, Humbert, and Dominic give us a rich view of medieval prayer gesture. For Peter the Chanter, the action is at the center of the gesture. These gestures reinforce the embodied nature of the petitioner, the life behind the words on the page or spoken into the air. For Humbert, the grammar of gesture is a central concern. He’s trying to think through the categories of meaningful acts, to give us the geometry of suitable self-abnegation, as the petitioner humbles him or herself before god. For Dominic, gesture is part of an almost theatrical construct, a staging in which bodily responses reinforce and make manifest the affective power of prayer.

Much like the implicit codes of modern body language, medieval prayer gestures carried with it meaningful information, shaping and being shaped by those who performed and witnessed them. Schmitt makes the point that prayer gestures were open to scrutiny by all – that one could see the forms of the prayer even if the words were only sub-vocal. Even in silence, the body spoke, making devotion visible to all who had eyes to see.


RESOURCES

Humbert of Romans. “Expositio super constitutiones fratrum praedicatorum.” In Opera Omnia, edited by Joachim Joseph Berthier, vol. 2: 160-167. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1888-1889.

Schmitt, Jean-Claude. “Between Text and Image: the Prayer Gestures of Saint Dominic.” History and Anthropology 1 (1984): 127-162.

Trexler, Richard C. “Legitimating Prayer Gestures in the Twelfth Century. The De Penitentia of Peter the Chanter.” History and Anthropology, 1 (1984): 97-126.

Zakharine, Dmitri. “Medieval Perspectives in Europe: Oral Culture and Bodily Practices.” In Body - Language - Communication, Volume 1, edited by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, Sedinha Tessendorf, pp. 343-364. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 38,1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.

Friday, December 6, 2024

“Bulgy enlargement” and medieval hearing loss: Insights from Flohr and Kierdorf (2022)

 

Bulgy enlargement of ear canal signaled by black arrows (from Flohr and Kierdorf 2022)

This post is a response to (and a brief meditation on) the recent work of Flohr and Kierdorf on two medieval skeletons showing signs of hearing loss:

Flohr, Stefan, & Kierdorf, Uwe. (2022). Abnormal bone loss in the external auditory canal of two adult humans from the medieval period of Germany—An attempt at differential diagnosis. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 32(4), 938–943. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3108

Since I’ve just spent a lively month developing a music and madness unit within our music history course for majors, I’ve already been reading and thinking a lot about paleopathology and diagnosis of illnesses of the past and their implications for human experience.

So, when I tripped across the Flohr and Kierdorf article on bone loss in the ear from the middle ages, it was sitting smack dab in the middle of some weird Venn diagram of transient interests.

  • Ears and hearing, check.
  • Past illnesses, check.
  • Medieval, check.
  • Soundscapes (and their absence), check.

TBH, I’m in it for the weird facts. I am not a medical person, nor do I play one on TV; I come at this as a humanist, and as someone still –STILL – bothered by ear issues of my own (Today makes it four months of otitis media and associated tinnitus, egad).

TWO DISEASES, TWO DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES

So, in the “learn something new every day” category, there are two separate diseases that can cause external auditory canal problems. External ear canal cholesteatoma (EACC) is the one most commonly diagnosed out of the past, whereas their finding of keratosis obturans in one of the skeletons is new.

Keratosis obturans, I learned from Piepergerdes et al. (1980), is a disease in which keratin (that stuff from hair and nails) accumulates in the ear, causing acute biting pain and hearing loss. It gradually forces the external auditory canal to widen, but doesn’t actually damage bone.

EACC, on the other hand, is (layman translating): skin overgrowth that inflames the area wrapping around the ear bones – periosteitis, in other words. It’s sort of like having shin splints, but in your ear. Symptoms are more an ache than an ow, plus hearing loss. This is the one that causes osteonecrosis – the bone can be damaged and deteriorate if it’s left untreated.

Of the two diseases, Keratosis obturans is more common than EACC, at least in the 21st century. However, it has been missing in the paleopathology record until now.

WHAT THEY FOUND

Flohr and Kierdorf point out that both Keratosis obturans and EACC lead to enlargement and perforation of the external auditory canal wall. They call that expansion “bulgy enlargement,” and call it out in their images (as shown in the title card for today's blog post, above).

The “why” of that skeletal deformation seems obvious to a layman (me) when you look at the way that “stuff” fills up the ear canal in Keratosis obturans. Chartrand’s Figures 5 and 6 give you an idea of how that works – the left image is several months in, the right hand one is at 5 years. Can you even imagine? Oy! Modern images from Chartrand 2013

Chartrand's images of Keratosis obturans at 4 mo. and 5 yrs

For this study, Flohr and Kierdorf examined two medieval skeletons:

  • The first skeleton was of a 6th-8th c woman age >50. Her skeleton comes from a well-studied town graveyard.
  • The second was a man age >50 from the monastery of St. Lorenz at Schöningen.We don't know if he was a monk or a lay brother; we just know that he was buried in the monastery graveyard some time (unspecified) in the late Middle Ages.

While both had “bulgy enlargement” of the ear canal, the second skeleton also had involvement of the mastoid, but the first didn’t. In other words, the woman had Keratosis obturans, and the man had EACC.

WHY IT MATTERS

The “why” provided by Flohr and Kierdorf is all about the ability to distinguish one disease from another, and that’s remarkably cool. Distinguishing between these diseases enriches our understanding of health conditions in the past, and theirs was the first to find Keratosis obturans in the archaeological record. Nifty stuff!

My own “why” is a little bit different, though. I’m thinking about the ways in which these two medieval individuals experienced the world around them.

The woman with Keratosis Obturans would have been hard of hearing, that bugaboo of the aging process. But she’d also likely have had moments of “the twitch,” that head jerking response to stabbing pain in the ear. Such pain may not have intruded very often, but she was living with pain as a regular occurrence. The world around her might still have been beautiful, but she would surely have had moments of wishing she could hear the bird singing, or follow the conversation more closely, and other moments of just wishing it would all stop. Ear pain can be the worst. Keratosis obturans was for her likely a loss, and one that plagued her on a regular basis. On the other hand, as they say, each day above the ground is a day for celebration.

The monastic man with EACC (who had also had several broken ribs, a broken arm, and other signs of hard living) was similarly hard of hearing, but his ear only ached. He too would have missed the birds, and frustrated his companions in his inattention and jumbled responses to conversational gambits. But for him, the ache of old bones and the ache of the ear might have been apiece, similar in their experiential implications. Getting old is not for the faint of heart.

A WORLD MADE MUFFLED

What’s amazing is to think about the fact that we have these clues into the sound-world of these older medieval individuals just by the signs and signals of the bones they left behind.

For both individuals, we can tell that the vibrant soundscapes of youth were now behind them; they lived in a muted world.

  • Given its more muffled nature, the world would have had mysterious almost-sounds that they’d be trying to decipher.

  • They’d mix up conversational answers because they were only guessing at what the person speaking to them had said. That can be embarrassing and can also strain relationships.

  • They might have developed some skill with lipreading (it’s a godsend, truly), but it doesn’t fully make up for what one hears through the ears, and the world goes silent when you turn around to write on the board – oh wait, that’s me. Try, … and the room went silent when when they turned to pick up the water pitcher.

  • Knock-to-enter might not have worked as a signal any more; overall acoustical signals would have become increasingly unreliable as time went by.

  • In particular, their use of the natural world and its auditory signals was no longer reliable. The sudden hush of the adjacent forest as a predator (or really any big bulky critter) comes through might not have grabbed their attention as it would have in their youth; they might have been unaware of the bleating lamb needing attention; the call of the rooster in the morning might not have served as wake up call now that the sound didn’t penetrate through as once it had.

SKELETON STORIES

In short, these skeletal clues offer something remarkable: a glimpse into the lived realities of medieval individuals as shaped by their embodied experience and its relationship to the world around them. The stories etched (or pressed) into bone invite us to imagine what it meant to listen, to strain to hear, to ache and hurt, and yet to adapt in a time not so very different from our own.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chartrand, Max Stanley. “Beware the Septic Keratosis Obturans: Stealth Public Health Threat” (March 2013): DOI: 10.4172/2161-119X.1000283

Flohr, Stefan, & Kierdorf, Uwe. Abnormal bone loss in the external auditory canal of two adult humans from the medieval period of Germany—An attempt at differential diagnosis. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 32(4) (2022): 938–943. https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3108

Piepergerdes, M C et al. “Keratosis obturans and external auditory canal cholesteatoma.” The Laryngoscope vol. 90,3 (1980): 383-91. doi:10.1002/lary.5540900303

Postulant, Novice, Professed: Initiation into Monastic Life (4/2/25)

Last night I used movie clips to help my students understand a bit more about monastic life. I did, in fact, use a clip from Sister Act (...