A Shared Devotional Grammar: Prayers after Communion

The devout sister reading one of Thalbach’s fancier prayerbooks, OENB 11750, had her choice of several prayers after she received the sacrament at mass. Five options are given, each with its own take on what the sacrament actually meant. The first reflects on the act of reception itself, the second draws on nature imagery, while the remaining three turn toward Christological belief, the Trinity, and thanksgiving to the Father.

(1) O dise empfengknus dess Zartten waren Fronleichnus vnnd koſtharlichen bluotts

        O this reception of the tender, true Body and precious Blood of the Lord

(2) O Du ware speis der Engell O Du/o wares himelbrot der Ellendenn Menschenn

        O You true food of the angels, O You, O true heavenly bread of wretched mankind

(3) HErr Jesu Christe Jch glaub das Tich dich waren gott vnd menſch eim empfangen hab

        Lord Jesus Christ, I believe that I have truly received You, true God and man

(4) O Du Edle Driualtigkeit las dir wolgefallen

        O noble Trinity, be well pleased

(5) Danckh dir millter Vatter. Wurdiger herr vnd barmhertziger Gott

        I thank You, gracious Father, worthy Lord and merciful God

That second prayer is why I’m here today. How lovely that the experiential world of trees, sun, food and spiritual grace mingle together in a meditative mix of high highs and low lows.

TEXT (which starts with a 3-line drop cap initial):

O Du ware speis der Engell O Dů
wares himelbrot der Ellendenn
Menschenn in der wüste des Jamerthals
O du Liechter glantz / der ewigen Clarenn
Súnnen O du hoher Cederbaúm, wie
hastu dich genaigt zu mir armes würmlin,
Nur beger ich von allem himlischen heer,
Das si mir Gott helffenn bitten dancken,
der groſen gnad die gott mit mir armē ſinder
gewurckt hat. Amen.

O You true food of the angels,
O You, true bread of heaven for wretched
people in the wilderness of the valley of sorrow,
O You bright radiance of the eternal, clear Sun,
O You tall cedar tree, how
have You inclined Yourself to me, a poor worm?
I only desire of all the heavenly host
that they help me to pray and give thanks to God
for the great grace that God has bestowed upon me,
a poor sinner. Amen.

Having received the sacrament, the food is both tangible and spiritual; a miracle and a metaphor. Christ is the food of the angels, heavenly sustenance provided through sacramental miracle to the wretched here on earth. People, in contrast to angels, are wretched: they are in valleys, in shade or darkness, in wildernesses. The sacrament, however, reminds the devotee of the “eternal clear sun,” moving her attention from shade to the strength of the towering tree.

And, of course, that tall cedar tree of mid-prayer calls on biblical resonances. Tall, sweet-smelling, beautiful, strong: the tree is a building material, the stuff of temples and noble dwellings, an adornment along river banks, the wealth of nature that can be evoked as landscape. Here, the sacrament as cedar “inclines” toward the penitent whose salvation comes from Christ’s sacrifice on a wooden cross. The body bent, the tree “inclined”: the prayer is curiously evoking the imperviousness of cedar wood to the “worm,” poor worm, who is also the speaker herself, seeking salvation. I think there’s likely a resonance of the voluntary nature of the passion here: Christ accepted the need of sacrifice to save the very essence of the poor. He “leans in” to support and to salvage the struggling “worm” of humanity. The prayer’s opposites -- food and wilderness, shade and radiance, wood and worm – swing us back and forth from grace to undeservingness and back.

The prayer shifts at this junction, however, and the angels who have dwelt naturally with Christ’s heavenly substance are asked to support those for whom he chose the sacrificial path. The very angels of the start of the prayer who live in a higher realm are to join the devotee in giving thanks to God for the gift of grace.

This is an attractive set of nature images – a rich image-bank for the communicant as she considers the sacramental experience from multiple angles. Thus, it’s hardly a surprise that the prayer was not peculiar to Thalbach; it crops up in a variety of sources. This prayer belongs to a known complex of companion texts, an array of a dozen prayers that have interlinking concordances. What becomes interesting in comparison is not (just) that the complex exists (see HAIMERL or KORNRUMPF), but how it works. Curiously, its constituent members vary, but the internal order for the complex remains strikingly stable. Haimerl noted the presence of the complex in 1952, but his presentation – a dense listing of prayer incipits relegated to footnotes – disguises its organizational logic. To my eye, there is a marked stability-with-variability that characterizes this set of post-sacrament prayers.

The full set typically starts with prayers of preparation, the devotee readying him- or herself for communion. For instance:

“O Milter guttiger Herre Ihesu christe. Ich pin nicht wirdig das ich heiß dein kint oder creatur. Vnd das du eingeest In mein hawß” -- O gracious, kind Lord Jesus Christ, I am not worthy to be called Your child or creature, nor for You to enter my house...(quoted here from its Cgm 127 instance).

The question of spiritual need and the common trope of unworthiness that is nevertheless redeemed in the act is rehearsed and reinforced. There is then a procedural gap in prayer as the devotee becomes the communicant, and the set picks up with what we will take as our focus, they prayers designated for “after taking the sacrament,” typically highlighted through rubric.

Here is where the patterning shows the adaptability of manuscript copying. Across half-a-dozen manuscripts which share a concordance with the Thalbach prayer, we see a range of solutions for “what to include,” showing that the prayers are not actually circulating as a fixed suite. No surviving complex contains every option, and the individual collections vary in length and selection. But all of them operate under the same idea-logic, as shown in the markedly stable performative sequence that emerges.

Ordered listing of prayers after sacrament from six 15th-16th c prayerbooks; blank cells are for alignment

That is to say: these prayers may not come as a completed unit, but neither are they arranged randomly. Comparison shows that this complex works less like a fixed textual cycle than like an ordered repertoire. Across the witnesses, they appear in a remarkably stable performative order: praise and reception come first; prayers reflecting on the meaning of the Eucharist follow; belief and a specifically Trinitarian address come next; thanksgiving follows reflection and affirmation; petition comes afterward; and Marian intercession, when present, comes last. Individual books can omit stages, but they do not jumble them.

The comparison therefore suggests something more sophisticated than either a single transmitted prayer cycle or a loose anthology. These texts circulated as a repertoire of possible devotional actions, with an understood sequence even when only some of its parts were selected. A compiler could expand or contract the sequence, but its basic choreography remained recognizable. One might move directly from reception to the “true food of the angels” prayer, then to belief, Trinity, and thanksgiving, as in the Thalbach manuscript. Another might add praise before reception, or petitions and Marian prayer afterward. What remains stable is not the membership of the group but its devotional logic. The complex functions not as a fixed cycle, but as a flexible repertoire whose devotional order remains stable even as compilers shorten, extend, and reshape it.

That matters for understanding the five prayers in ÖNB 11750. They are presented as choices (“Ein anders schon gebet”: another beautiful prayer) , but they are not merely five interchangeable reflections after Communion. Together they occupy successive positions within a broader pattern of Eucharistic devotion: first the communicant receives, then interprets what has happened, articulates belief, turns toward the Trinity, and gives her thanks. The Thalbach compiler, in other words, has produced a compact version of a much larger devotional choreography.

And the “true food of the angels” prayer sits at a particularly stable point within that choreography. It appears in every complex in the comparison, always after reception or an equivalent preparatory opening and before thanksgiving or petition. Its imagery of food, sun, cedar, worm, grace, and heavenly assistance grounds the devotee in a succession of images. In so doing, it helps the communicant dwell on the disproportion at the heart of the sacrament: heavenly food given to the wretched, radiance entering a valley, lofty cedar bending toward the worm.

Perhaps that explains this prayer’s stability amidst the variability of this complex of post-communion prayers. It is retained for the job that it does, for its work of centering spiritual experience in an observable view of everyday landscape. And, if the prayer gives the communicant a landscape in which to understand the sacrament, the prayerbook gives her a path through it.

And that is today’s take-away. A prayerbook does more than preserve words. It gives shape to the communicant’s movement through the sacrament, using a widely shared devotional grammar to create a particular path through the experience.

 

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WANT TO KNOW MORE?

• On another post-communion meditation from Thalbach
• On a Segen from the same manuscript (ÖNB 11750)
• Prayer practices as repetition with a purpose

MANUSCRIPT DETAILS AND SOURCES OF INFORMATION:

• OENB Cod. 11750, fol. 28r: an ornate Thalbach prayerbook from the late 16^th century; the prayers for after the sacrament come after an array of preparation *for* the sacrament. More details available from the author as needed.
• Beinecke Ms 28 (Germany, 1513), ff. 93v-98r, a prayerbook written in 1513 at the Benedictine monastery of Tegernsee, by Melchior Wigg (alias Bruder Paulus). https://pre1600ms.beinecke.library.yale.edu/docs/pre1600.ms028.htm
• Cgm 127, dated 1476 and likely for the Nuremberg St Katharinakloster, where, as Haimerl points out, it fits in a larger cycle of communion prayers by Heinrich Seuse and the so-called “St Bernhard’s Cursus” (Franz Xavier HAIMERL, Mittelalterliche Frömmigkeit im Spiegel der Gebetbuchliteratur Süddeutschlands, Münchener Theologische Studien I, 4 (München 1952), p. 48 n247).
• Cgm 165, dated 1510,, copied by M. R. (see fol. 318r), and belonged to “Dienerin” Elisabeth Röbin (HAIMERL p. 53 n267). Here again it, as Haimerl explains, Suso’s communion prayer is included in a larger group of prayers that closely matches the corresponding group in the other manuscript and serves the same purpose.
• The German Hortulus has a section of such prayers (HAIMERL p. 143 n897 and CYRUS Seelengartlein inventory). I have written separately about the Seelengartlein as a prayer collection.
• Augsburg, Cod. III.1.8º 6, fol. 159^v–160^v , discussed in Karin SCHNEIDER, Die Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg; Reihe 2: Die deutschen Handschriften; Bd. 1: Deutsche mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg: die Siganturengruppen Cod. I. 3 und Cod. III. 1 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz 1988)
• For further concordances for this widespread prayer-group, see Gisela KORNRUMPF and Paul-Gerhard VÖLKER: Die deutschen mittelalterlichen Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek München (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968), p. 282: https://bilder.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de/bilder/hs-bilder/k/HSK0051_b282.jpg

Seven Times a Day: Prayer as Humane Practice

One of the things that shows up again and again in early devotional books is instruction that feels, at first glance, almost excessive.

“…und bett das gebet ze vii malen ain tag… also an den vii tagen…”
(“…and pray the prayer seven times in one day… and so across the seven days…”)

Say this prayer seven times.
Do this (described action) for seven days.
Add seven Ave Marias.
Repeat it again tomorrow.

And again.

If you’ve never spent time with this kind of prayerbook material, it can feel like a kind of spiritual overkill. Surely once would do? Doesn’t sincerity matter more than counting?

But the more time I spend with these books, the more I think that repetition is not the excess. It’s the point.

In one section I’ve been working through recently, the instructions are precise and insistent: the prayer is to be performed multiple times a day, across a structured sequence of days, with additional prayers layered in. It is not simply said – it is kept in mind as active practice. Maintained. Carried forward.

“wer dis nachgeschriben gebett ain gantzes iar spricht…”
(“whoever says this written prayer for a whole year…”)

What’s going on here is not just devotion. It’s a kind of sacred timekeeping. Repetition, in this context, does something very particular: it organizes the day. It creates a rhythm that the body can learn: Stand. Kneel. Speak. Repeat. Rinse and repeat tomorrow.

“…sprich vii ave maria stend und knüw…”
(“…say seven Ave Maria, standing and kneeling…”)

These actions sculpt reliability, less by adding than by uncovering. (I’m thinking here of Michelangelo, releasing the sculpture from the stone.) Coming back to the same kind of prayer hones the inner person in an act of “social becoming,” crafting a prayer-centered persona which is the reader’s presumed ideal.

This matters because late medieval devotion – especially outside strictly regulated liturgical settings – has a problem to solve. How do you ensure that prayer actually happens? Not once, not in a moment of crisis, but consistently, over time?

Repetition is one answer. It’s the medieval equivalent of habit-stacking.

Not because people are forgetful (though they are), and not because God needs reminding (He does not), but because *practice needs structure*. A prayer said once is an event. A prayer said seven times a day becomes a habit. A prayer repeated across days becomes part of the fabric of life.

There’s also a sonic dimension to this that I don’t think we pay enough attention to. A single utterance disappears almost as soon as it is spoken. But repetition accumulates. It lingers. It fills space – not just physically, but socially. If multiple people are engaged in similar cycles of prayer, the result is not isolated sound, but patterned sound.

You start to get something like a devotional soundscape.

And that soundscape? Not grand or monumental. It’s small-scale, iterative, almost backgrounded. But it is persistent. It marks time as surely as bells do – just on a different register.

Repetition also does something else: it redistributes effort. If a single, perfectly attentive prayer is hard to sustain (and it is), then repetition allows for fluctuation. Some iterations will be distracted. Some will be rushed. Some will “land.” The concern is real; the scribe-compiler repeatedly reminds the reader that attitude matters:

“…ob mit andacht…”
(“…if [it is done] with devotion…”)

Attention and devotion can wax and wane; structured prayer – cycles of repetition – absorbs that variation so the cumulative effort preserves the necessary attitude.

I find this to be a very humane system. It doesn’t require perfection. It only requires return.

And then there’s the number itself: seven. Seven days. Seven repetitions. Seven Ave Maria.

This is not arbitrary, of course. It resonates with biblical time (creation, completion), with liturgical cycles, with long-standing symbolic structures. But in practice, it also functions as a manageable unit. Neither endless nor trivial. Just enough to feel like something has been properly fulfilled.

Enough to count.

“…so wirstu erhört und erlöst uff aller dinen not…”
(“…then you will be heard and released from all your need…”)

So when we see these instructions – repeat this prayer seven times a day, for seven days – it’s tempting to read them as quantitative, even mechanical.

But I’m increasingly convinced that what’s at stake here is not quantity, but persistence.

These repeated forms take something inherently fleeting – spoken prayer – and embed it within a set of temporal and bodily structures that allow it to endure: across the day, across the week, across the community that performs it.

These forms do so not by heightening a single utterance, but by distributing it.

Repetition, in sum, is not excess. It is a technology for making prayer last.

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WORKS CITED

All prayer excerpts come from VLB Hs 17, the Thalbach Sister’s Prayerbook, fols. 142-149. This section contains a prayer for sorrow and worry; the prayer "Stand auf"; a Prayer of St Bernard; the Prayer “In gotes namen”; a wonky version of the Golden Crown Prayer; a prayer in four sections to ULF (Mary) to be said on Fridays; a morning greeting to the ULF; and a prayer to Christ, O her jesu christe des ůbersten vatters sun.

The silence of the woods is full of noise

The woods are many things: peaceful, calming, multi-hued, and (in my memory) often silent. But that mental shorthand is a mistake. That forested silence only addresses the pleasurable absence of the sound-detritus of modern life. There are no car horns, no rumble of heating or cooling systems, no yakety yakety yak yak of too many people in too close proximity, no clacking keys, inspired or otherwise. In other words, the woods create the illusion of silence by taking away irritants.

Truth to tell, the thing my brain likes to encode as “silence” is anything but. There is, in the woods, a continuous burble of a stream. The crickets offer up a track of chirping, that sawing stridulation that calls to mates and forms the backdrop of dreamland.

Other night-noises abound as well. There’s the scream and then hoot of an owl noting its territory; the rustle of a mammalian something-or-other searching for a snack amidst the leaf-litter of the forest floor; the wit wit wit of a first bird at morning light. I listen to these noises, and translate them from the unexpected “what?” into the identified “oh, that.” These sounds bring the satisfaction of discovery, and yet they are quiet, ever so quiet, and in their quiet regularity they soothe.

What we (or at least I) think of as forest silence, then, is the absence of urban noise. It is also bound up in anticipatory listening. Was that the rumbling croak of frogs? The intermittent drops of dew from the treetops? The tap tap tap of water dribbling over an end-of-season waterfall?

Silence here is a coded word, speaking to peace as measured in slowed breathing -- the rise and fall of the backpacker at ease, sleeping perhaps more deeply than home bed and familiar surroundings allow. It is a word reflective of paced regularity, of less-familiar noises often repeated, assessed, and held in the translated understanding of thing-as-sound. By grappling with what a noise represents, we become comfortable with it, often to the point that it no longer registers.

What I recall, in my fecklessness, as silence, is instead the susuration of leaves, the murmers of small animals, the steady quiet systematic vamp-til-ready steady state of forest hum. It is, in other words, a low-level background that caresses and comforts my ears, accustomed as they are to the more penetrating sounds of urban existence.

Silence as golden? Not exactly. But forest as restorative, a living quiet that listens back? Absolutely!

Listening in on the Nuns’ Rebellion at Kloster Goldenstein

Bells, chants, prayers, the scrape of chairs at table, the hum of a vacuum, the splash of a sink being plunged: the soundscape of Goldenstein Cloister is equal parts liturgy and daily life. Layer onto that the laughter of eighty-something sisters sharing coffee, the creak of a chairlift, the slap of running shoes from Sister Rita’s daily 5K after prayer, and you begin to hear what’s at stake in Austria right now.

The Augustinian choir women of Goldenstein had spent their lives in this convent—decades of vows that they believed bound the Church as much as themselves. And then, dissolution. Closure. The doors shut on their home, the place where they had lived out obedience, prayer, and community. Their leader called it a “necessary act of care.” But care for whom? Care, in this telling, seems less about human dignity and more about ease of management. (There may be a plausible “other side” to the story, but when your church leader argues that orthopedic shoes are a violation of the vow of poverty, somebody hasn’t thought about how decisions about elders read in the broader universe.)

What these sisters assert is simple and radical: their vows were two-way. The Church has responsibilities here. And the sisters and their supporters are claiming them.The three Augustinian sisters—Rita, Bernadette, and Regina—repossessed their cloister earlier this month. That sparked a cascade of attention: a podcast episode, a BBC story, Guardian coverage, and a flourishing Instagram feed that pairs black-and-white habits with splashes of bright flowers and cheerful captions in German and English.

What I hear in all this isn’t only the sound of bells or the chant of the office. It’s the sound of determination, of voices raised in defense of their rights, of a community that has chosen to rally around them. On-site helpers showed up with brooms and mops to scrub the convent back into habitability. Supporters—English and German alike—comment on their posts, write emails, show up at Mass. And even when there is no priest to say Mass, the sisters sing the rosary together, because prayer continues regardless of who is willing to stand at the altar.

Why bring this story here?

First: because it’s a rare window into monastic life today, with all its joy, grit, and creativity.

Second: because some of you may want to follow them online or even donate. They’re @nonnen_goldenstein on Instagram, and their captions read like tiny table-prayers, interspersed with photos of a community refusing to fade quietly away.

Third: because it’s a living parable of resistance. For those of us who study monastic history, it’s not every day that we get a real-life #NunsOnTheRun story unfolding in our time. These sisters have claimed their right to remain, to pray, to belong. The least we can do is listen, and perhaps add our voices in support.

Their own social media team has a bouquet of hashtags: #nunsontherun #goldenstein #augustinerchorfrauen #churchfluencer #nonnen #klosterleben #elsbethen #fyp #gästebuch #guestbook #willkommen #youarewelcome. Give them a follow. Raise up your voice for the dignity and self-determination of those who have faithfully served. Support their renewed convent soundscape. After all, the soundscape of Goldenstein is not just liturgy or rebellion—it’s the sound of life insisted upon, carried forward, and sung into being.

RESOURCES: 

Bethany Bell, “Defiant nuns flee care home for their abandoned convent in the Alps,” BBC, 12 September 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y8r2gk0vyo

Kate Connelly, “‘We were obedient our entire lives’: the nuns who broke back into their convent,” The Guardian, 26 Sept 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/26/we-were-obedient-our-entire-lives-the-nuns-who-broke-back-into-their-convent

Kloster Goldenstein: 

• Instagram Account: @nonnen_goldenstein, https://www.instagram.com/nonnen_goldenstein/
• Their gofundme is at https://gofund.me/6f2f1838c 
• A taste of their community worship: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPGUpStCADw/
• Convent website: https://goldenstein.cc/

Asian Sojourn 3: Living in Sacred Space – Kathmandu

My morning walks in Kathmandu (taken back in June 2025) had me thinking a lot about the ways in which spaces become sacred. Every fifth building seemed to be a temple or a stupa, and as I said before, my hotel window opened out onto the Atko Narayan Temple, and there was a ceremony there on Wednesday of my visit.

As a first-time visitor to Kathmandu, I would get up many a morning (yay, jetlag?) and walk around the Durbar Square complex, enjoying the sleepy pigeons and ringing of bells, or wander through the streets enjoying the mix of architecture, the bustle of cleaning and setting up for the day, and the visible and audible practice of faith. I peered through at many a Bahal courtyard, those monastic courtyards with small shrines, and went into a few if they weren’t a center of activity. I tried to remain unobtrusive, but also was drawn to the beauty and to the demonstrated care for this overlap of public space and private belief.

Offerings of flowers and food, the ringing of bells, the tidying of shrines, the singing in group or alone: all these activities seemed integrated into a day, suggesting a much more physically engaged religion than the more staid practices of my Christian Science grandparents or my Lutheran inlaws. Likewise, the intermixture of regular housing, active business, and spots inviting active devotion is compressed relative to urban landscapes I regularly inhabit. That meant that cooking and commerce rubbed elbows with sacred practices, reminding me how thin the boundary might be between ordinary routine and spiritual gesture. I wonder if medieval practices of faith, before the emergence of confessional concerns, might have been just as colorful, as sound-based, and as kinetic as what I experienced in Kathmandu. Was Bregenz like this, a mix of street cleaning, setting up stalls with vegetables from the farms uphill, bells and clatter and clamour all mixing in with the chants of the hours and the calls of hopeful merchants? It would have been lively, if so!

The infrastructure of Kathmandu also strikes a notable contrast with the more familiar streets of Nashville. Transport is, as the tourist guidebooks remind us, often done in human-powered vehicles, whether that’s of people or of packages. Overloaded bikes like the one below impressed the stuffing out of me; I’m hard put to bike myself up a hill let alone contemplate carrying a bunch of packages. Not shown is the time we saw two people on a bike, the one in front balancing what was clearly a flat screen TV in its box. Holy moly! And then there’s the wiring. Yes, we did experience power outages. With that wiring spaghetti, it’s a wonder that there was power at all! 

But one cannot subsist on the sacred alone, and I’d like to give a shout-out to Kathmandu’s food scene.

I mentioned the Ginger Cafe, but I also got my share of street food and momos. I never did find my way back to the best shop, but everywhere I stopped, I always found the food fresh and the stall-owners friendly, forgiving of my linguistic inabilities. Momos are the easiest food the first time out (not only my first meal but my most frequent!), but the fried breakfast breads – and especially the Jeri Swari – were a special treat. Jeri Swari is cool: the “Jeri” is a deep-fried, sugar-coated flour batter which is shaped into intricate loops or coils and fried until crispy, then soaked in saffron-infused syrup. The “Swari” part is a flatbread which is both a wrapper and the justification: “I’m an adult eating a real breakfast and not just chowing down on a honey-delivery system.”

Watching your food being made is a delicious way to start any day. It’s also a reminder that in Kathmandu, even everyday meals are carefully crafted. The generosity and care of the cooks are as much a part of the experience as are the flavors themselves.

Attention filtering – the voluntary earlid

An auditory distraction — a crying baby, a ringing phone — hits like a punch to the gut, instantly demanding our attention. But recent studies by Mandal and colleagues (2024) suggest that our minds may be better shielded than we think.

They introduce the idea of an “attentional earlid.” Just as eyelids can open and shut to regulate what reaches our eyes, our attention seems to have a mental earlid that blocks irrelevant sounds from interfering with other tasks.

To test this, Mandal’s team asked participants to do visual puzzles while irrelevant sounds — simple, pure sine-wave beeps — popped up in the background. These weren’t meaningful noises like a person’s name or an odd sound that stood out in context; they were deliberately boring. Surprisingly, the beeps didn’t slow people down or cause mistakes. In the face of noise, the earlid held.

But there was a catch. When the task included listening — for example, counting the number of time a particular sound occurred — the earlid opened, and the irrelevant beeps slipped in, pulling at attention. In other words, if your ears are already opened, stray noises evidently sneak through on the same pathway.

This fits with broader psychological findings: our brain has limited channels of processing, a bit like trying to carry too many grocery bags. Perceptual load theory (Lavie 1995 is the classic work) says we only have so much capacity. Mandal’s earlid idea adds another layer: when sound isn’t part of the job, our brains can shut the door on irrelevant auditory clutter altogether.

That has real consequences for musicological me. Much of my work relies on listening-as-study, but the background noise in our in-town property hovers around 70 dB. Out on the farm, on the other hand, it drops to the 30s or 40s (unless the turkeys are quarreling). Thus, in town, my earlids have to contend with a flood of competing input. At home, the quiet of the countryside acts like a protective layer, letting my attention settle on the music.

So here’s my observation: if the earlid is about shutting a door and closing off the sound entirely, then quiet spaces might work more like sound-glasses: they cut the glare of unwanted noise so my ears can adjust to what matters most. That may explain why listening at home, in relative silence, always seems to lead to better prep for the deeper analysis and meaning-making than the work I do later on campus. (Huh. I’d always just chalked it up to the distractions of a peopled landscape once I got to my office.)

I’ll have to think about this more; I’ve mentioned in other earlid posts that in my own musical-listening practice, I see a linkage of left-brain intellectual processing and right-brain beauty-finding as a strong sound filtering mechanism. The rest of the world can fall away when I’m working in my musico-analytical space, and even Mandal’s content disruption – my name – can miss my attention on-ramp. (Sorry, kids!) I’m not yet sure whether I think that’s an “attentional earlid” or a “sound-glasses” type phenomenon – or a third thing altogether.

At any rate, today’s browsing in the literature was a bit dismaying to my prejudices. Maybe, just maybe, those noise-canceling headphones y’all carry around are actually important as tools to help manage both attention earlids and sound-glasses. If so, they could be essential, if unstylish, accessories for those thinking tasks that occupy my days.

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REFERENCES:

• Cyrus, Cynthia. “I am (not) a crocodile: Earlids and the thinking person” [Blog post]. Silences and Sounds, 15 Nov 2024, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/11/i-am-not-crocodile-earlids-and-thinking.html.
• Lavie, N. 1995: Lavie, Nilli. “Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21/3 (1995): 451–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.21.3.451
• Mandal 2024a: Mandal, A., Liesefeld, A. M., & Liesefeld, H. R. “The surprising robustness of visual search against concurrent auditory distraction.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50/1 (2024): 99–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001168
• Mandal 2024b: Mandal, Ananya, Jan Philipp Röer, and Heinrich R. Liesefeld. “Auditory Distractors Are Processed but Do Not Interfere with Visual Search of Any Difficulty When Sound Is Irrelevant.” Visual Cognition 32/9–10 (2024): 1067–83. doi:10.1080/13506285.2024.2397825.

  
  

Asian Sojourn 2: Kathmandu: parade rest!

From Delhi, I traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, where we had a hotel just two blocks from Durbar Square. My host picked me up from the airport, hallelujah, and drove me across town in his very, very small car through the very crowded and monsoon-wetted streets. Once to the hotel, he gave me the standard orientation to drinkable water (and undrinkable); the various amenities, including generous outlets right by the bed and a swivel fan; and a few pointers on where I might want to go the next day.

The view from my bed was rather stunning, since our hotel faced the Atko Narayan Temple; in this rendition, you can see the edges of my window:

It was a delightful location, and one of the days of our stay, there was a festival, so I got to observe the ceremonies with burning offerings, bell ringing, chanting, and the like. No pictures, though; I didn't want to be intrusive.

After a lovely, lovely night's sleep topped off with a productive dose of jet lag (love my kindle, love that I can do highlighting on my kindle, made SO much research progress at 2a.m.!), it was time to face the city.

Being a first-time tourist in Nepal, I started with Kathmandu Durbar Square, as one does, by paying my entrance fee and getting my long-term visit card (hint: bring along your passport and a passport photo when you first show up; your fee will last until the end of your visa), and then went touring. I never did master the names of all of the square's buildings, but I was fond of the carvings and the architecture, and enjoyed spending a GREAT deal of time looking at all the intricate details.

 

But my leisurely pace was interrupted when the courtyard started filling with soldiers -- soldiers carrying drums! It seems the military band was under review. Setting up took some time, but they eventually got themselves ordered. I did notice that they formed up as much in the shade as they could (and who could blame them?). Eventually, however, their commander shifted them back to the center of the courtyard and out into that bright, warm sunlight. 

While there was some tootling around beforehand, the flag ceremony introduced the drums and winds.

 

After a good deal of speechifying (all in Nepali so I can’t report the content!), the unit marched out. 

 

There must have been some activity outside of the palace, because it was at least 10 minutes before the soldiers passed by on the outside on parade, music whirling along with them as the percussion kept steady time.

Watching the first portion of a parade, even a small one, made me think about those commonalities with my hometown experience. I too have been in groups which have crowded toward the shade while wearing an unpleasantly heavy uniform; outdoor performance environments are not always optimal. Sure, dark fabrics with heft and weight look impressive, but there’s a reason science-fiction often references temperature-regulating textiles! (And I in my short-sleeves was grateful to be recording from the shade, and I was seated on the steps, not standing or moving around!)

In all, about 45 minutes elapsed while I watched the group. I had time to think, in that idle way, about the meta-messaging of such events. The pride and perfectability of formation was a signal of the kind of discipline the group represents, and was reinforced by two different leaders, the quieter of which got quicker movements from the group. The (memorized) music spoke to a regularity of rehearsal. The timbres seemed familiar even if the instruments per se were not. The winds reminded me of fifes, though I never got a good look at the instruments since I was trying to stay out of the way and not be THAT tourist. Still, the fife and drum type combination has a lasting appeal in the military world, so the whole experience was weirdly familiar, for all that I was on the far side of the globe.

In all, my first full day was a great success. The chance encounter with the pass-in-review meant that I managed to hit the “urban soundscape” button right out of the gate with "real music," not just the sounds and noises of the city. And historically-oriented me was truly delighted in the architecture, carvings, and museum displays. 

I’m not one for crowds, but I’m genuinely glad that we chose to stay down by the “busy old center” for this part of our trip. 

Note: These events took place July 1-2, 2025.

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RESOURCES: ARRIVING IN NEPAL 

• My flights into Nepal were limited to a single carry-on (7 kg total), and a checked bag of 20 kg total (44lb). I had known to pack with those limits, but I know others had been caught out.
• When you arrive, there's a screening that includes watches and gold jewelry as well as electronics and so forth; be prepared to stand in that line a longish moment since others may have buried those items at the bottom of their bags. There are signs in English with instructions.
• I did the Nepal "visa on arrival" process, and I filled out all of the paperwork of step one right there in the arrival area, though you can do part of it online up to 15 days in advance (if you print out your results). I had brought sufficient US cash to pay for my tourist visa, but I did use the airport ATM to get my first batch of Nepali rupees (since I had to pre-pay the hotel upon arrival). It is also possible to get a taxi from the taxi desk in the airport (which is what Nissa did when she arrived), and the cost is regulated so you don't have to worry about negotiating in your travel-weary sleep-deprived state.
• We each had an e-SIM purchased from trip.com; I used the airport wifi to log in and claim it. Even sleep deprived it was an easy process: scan the QR code and click where it tells you.
• We stayed in a distinctly budget hotel, Nirvana Kuti by Durbar Square -- really just three apartments, one per floor, with a bathroom, hallway sink, and small kitchen area with a kettle and (drinkable) water dispenser as well as a wash-up sink. The rooms were basic but spotless, and cheap, cheap, cheap! The space had comfey beds; fan but not AC; robust WiFi as long as the power was on; but no on-site services. There's a little convenience store right next door for all your snacking needs. However, for all that it was a plain-jane (and budget-friendly) location, our host Bobby was one of the highlights. A Nepali native who had studied for three years in Australia, he was super friendly, interested in cross-cultural conversations at his daily check-in, and incredibly helpful with arrangements and recommendations. (For instance, he took us a couple of blocks over to buy umbrellas at local rather than tourist prices!) We liked the place and its location so much that we stayed there again upon our return. NOTE: there is a second hotel of the same name, so use your map and navigate to the one by Atko Narayan Temple...
• We ate several times over by Freak Street, where every other shop is a restaurant. My favorite was the Ginger Cafe (I got the veg khaja set, very yummy!) which is technically located on a cross-street, Phalchasa Galli. I was the only non-native in the restaurant.

Listening to the Birds

Tufted titmouse with a call-out saying tweetle tweetle tweetle

In What the Robin Knows, Jon Young suggests that we all follow the practice of sitting and actively listening to birds. He observes that the world birds share with us – that we share with the birds – can be understood through the acoustical signals they send. There’s a background level of noise that is standard, the so-called baseline, and there are the alarm calls and sudden silences that tell us about the “happenings” that the birds are experiencing – ones we can share if we’re paying full attention to their signals. Is that alarm call about us, walking obliviously through the woods, or is it about the nearby fox that we won’t see unless we pay attention?

Paying attention is a challenge, of course. He talks about beginning listeners, and the differences between their experience of soundscape (my word, not his) versus those of more experienced attendees. A bit of explanation first: he uses the term “sit spot” to characterize a place outdoors where one goes to meditate listen repeatedly over time. He recommends these be convenient to the household to encourage frequent practice. 

To get at the idea of what listening is, he first gives instructions, and then contrasts two listeners. The task is a simple one: “Listen to the silence and hear all the sounds around you. There will be many in your sit spot.” The results are quite varied:

I always find it instructive to ask new people how many airplanes they heard while sitting in their sit spots. “Three?” one might say hesitantly, after a pause. I may have asked a more experienced individual with a nearby sit spot to be sure to pick up the planes. I turn to her and say, “How many?” “Seven,” she replies. “No way! I can hear a plane. There were three,” the new student argues. “No, there were seven.” The next day, I put that same student in charge of counting planes in his sit spot, and his count goes up. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

Young’s point is that listening isn’t passive—it’s a skill developed over time. Noticing all the layers of sound, even silence, is part of the task:

I like differentiating between the sounds made by the wind as it flows through the branches, the shrubs, the grass – all of them different… Even in the bedroom in the dead of night, there’s plenty to hear. Silence itself has a sound, and listening to it is good practice for picking up the junco’s tiny tunes and alarms. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

He calls for us to adopt what he characterizes as the “Routine of Invisibility,” using an observer’s amble rather than the destination-focused stride of the hiker. This, he argues, will give us more grounding in what is happening within our sphere of observation, since we will avoid becoming that obnoxious thing, the “bird plow” that drives the birds upward toward safety as we move forward into their space. He also makes a strong case for the “interspecies alarm system,” where the listening birds will respond differently (as a group) to the tense, stressed coyote needing to feed its young than to the more relaxed coyote out on an amble – and where the signal that one group of listening birds sets off will be picked up by altogether different species in ways that tend to make all the song-bird species safer. (Unless, of course, there’s a “wake hunter,” the raptor coming along to pick off one of the disturbed birds while it’s distracted. It’s a jungle out there.)

In all, I enjoyed the book, but as my dad says, Young’s notion of the sit spot is not a practice that I’m likely to adopt. My precious outdoor minutes are probably better spent on the walking that keeps me healthy than on the listening stance, if only because it encourages an outdoor stillness that too closely reflects the indoor stillness of the writer’s daily life. But I’ll certainly use Young’s idea of the variability in bird calls – the companion check versus the song vs the adolescent “feed me” demands – as well as his idea of tending to the baseline sounds as part of my outdoor practice. 

And as a musicologist, I firmly agree with his ideas that we should all listen to ALL the sounds that we find ourselves immersed in. Awareness, self-discipline, and attentive practice shape how we hear the world. And that’s a takeaway I can get behind.

Young, Jon. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Mariner Books, 2012/r2013.

Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg) (2/23/25)

An image of Chaco Canyon ruins from 2012

Note: The current blog post is in dialog with Primeau and Witt (2018), and draws on my own wanderings through Vorarlberg during summer 2024 and on Herbert Kaufmann’s Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten to understand Vorarlberg church placement.

Primeau and Witt’s study of “Soundscapes in the Past” asks “how people heard in their wider surroundings,” and answer the question in part with GIS measures. Their insight is that landscape matters and consider significant the “location of features within the built environment and performance spaces” (875).  They use the term “soundshed” – akin to watershed – to capture the way in which sound carries or is disrupted by the topographical features of a place.

They center their study on the rich archaeological site at Chaco Canyon, proposing that the Chacoan builders utilized terrain and topography as acoustical elements in their planning. They suggest that “certain features may have been placed at their locations so individuals may have heard events occurring elsewhere” (p. 875). In other words, the Chaco Canyon residents built with an eye (an ear?) toward the soundshed that surrounded them, choosing building locations and orienting openings to best use the acoustical features of a resonant landscape.

Primeau and Witt acknowledge the embodied nature of hearing, but importantly point out that larger elements in the local environment can shape these embodied perceptions. As Tilley (2008) has shown, surfaces, inclinations, textures and other elements can reduce or amplify sound. Given the nature of a canyon environment, echoic and non-echoic surfaces abound, both as elements of the built environment and of the natural surroundings.

The stark nature of Chaco Canyon’s building ruins of mud-brick and stone (shown in Figure 1 in the left-hand column) might historically have been softened by furs and fabrics, and almost certainly had sound-absorbing storage or even people – in other words by surfaces with less resonance than the  present day. The landscape too with its swales and swells, the hills and cliffs, and even the plant life each contribute in positive and negative ways to noise propagation, particularly at distance.

  Four Views of Chaco Canyon, July 2012

Primeau and Witt  believe, with Hamilton and Whitehouse (2006) that there can be an effective and measurable distance for interactions including speaking and shouting. Their newer methodology, however, seeks to establish more objective parameters than merely personal experience. They propose SPreAD: a System for the Prediction of Acoustic Detectability.

They observe that there are various element at play, distance attenuation being only one. Sound source height plays into sound’s ability to carry, as does the atmospheric absorption loss, which varies by temperature and humidity. Nevertheless, they assert that “Like visibility, audibility can be an actively managed aspect of the built environment, and one can question the relationship between sound and site in the landscape.”

For them, the presence of ceremonial sites on higher locations had significance, for it might mean the audibility of a ceremony’s start or end by individuals elsewhere in the Canyon community. Events in one place were meant to be experienced by individuals in another, they argue, and topographical placement support that.

For a medieval monastic historian, their conch shell examples were readily translated into the positioning of churches in Austria’s Vorarlberg. Such churches had a marked preference for locations on the hills that jutted up out of the local landscape; it is the rare church indeed that lacks a view (or that can be visited without a hike or a climb!). The inventory in Kaufmann (n.d.) makes the point effective: in image after image, it is easy to get a photo of the church from down below (as it were), because they are so frequently higher than the surrounding neighborhood. This can be confirmed in person; wear good walking shoes if you want to climb to see the building in person.

The parish church of St Nikolaus in Damuls, for instance, is on a hill; if it were waterside, we’d describe its placement as on a promontory:

  Damuls -- church of St Nikolaus: image July 2024

Already more prominent than the surrounding landscape, the position of the bells for Vorarlberg churches were even further elevated through built bell towers, typically added in the 13th to the 17th centuries. Elevation proves to be even more important than central location; many of the central churches of my study are several blocks away from the heart of the medieval “downtown,” such as it was. Clearly, the acoustical benefits of being high, along with the defensible ones, made these locations prime real-estate from the perspective of church communications. Neighbors near and far could readily hear the ringing of bells for starts or ends of service – along with weather warnings or peals of other sorts (war, arrival, general announcements). This meant that the topographical benefits of height outweighed the inconveniences of a further walk or an uphill climb. Just as at Chaco Canyon, events in one place in medieval Vorarlberg were meant to be experienced by individuals somewhat distant, and, again like Chaco Canyon, the topographical placement of churches and their bells support that.

Primeau and Witt’s study reinforces the idea that sound is not just a byproduct of environment but an actively shaped and managed aspect of spatial experience. Their concept of the “soundshed” and the methodology of SPreAD provide tools for assessing how people in the past may have structured their auditory worlds with intention—whether for ceremony, communication, or social cohesion.

Applying this framework to medieval churches in the Vorarlberg highlights how different cultures have used elevation to project sound across landscapes. These parallels suggest that sound, like sight, was a crucial factor in how such historical spaces were designed and experienced. Soundshed and soundscape design mattered as much to the late medieval church-planner as to the Chacoan builder some three centuries earlier. Both actively sought to manage audibility as an element of their built environment. Building for the ear in this way reminds us that sound was never incidental—it was an integral part of how people of the past shaped and experienced their worlds.

WORKS CITED:
Hamilton, Sue, Ruth Whitehouse, Keri Brown, Pamela Combes, Edward Herring, and Mike Seager Thomas. “Phenomenology in Practice: Towards a Methodology for a ‘Subjective’ Approach.” European Journal of Archaeology 9, no. 1 (2006): 31–71.

Kaufmann, Herbert, ed. Sakrale Kunst und Kulturstätten: Landesausgabe Vorarlberg. Innsbruck: Süd-West-Presseverlag, n.d.

Primeau, Kristy, and David E. Witt.“Soundscapes in the Past: Investigating Sound at the Landscape Level.” Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 19 (2018): 875-885.

Mapping Soundscapes: Applying Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou’s Measures to Memory and Place

A 3-way Venn diagram of Individual, Sound and Environment

Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece.

Every place, argues Stratoudakis &  Papadimitriou (2007), has its own distinctive sound picture. That is, it had a unique identity, “not only in terms of geography or physical-temporal aspects, but also in its acoustic properties.”

In their map of understanding (Fig. 1), the individual intersects directly with sound through meaning-making and can also listen and/or emit, shaping sound as it exists. Sound likewise interacts with the environment through coloration and direct/reflected sound. Thus, the three worlds interact with sound as one of the mediators of the individual’s relationship to the broader environment. That is, the “inner reality – inner sounds, thoughts, feelings and memory,” as Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou put it, takes in environmental information through sound.

Figure 1: Sound as Meter, derived by Cynthia Cyrus from Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou (2007)

This is an interesting point, since the shape of experience AS memory is heavily dependent on sensory memory. I wrote recently about the memory of a 1614 snowball fight and of the 13th feet of snow of one terrible winter that Sister Anna Wittweilerin attests to in her Tagebuch (absorbed later in the Thalbach Convent Chronicle). (Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up)

As we follow her memory (Thalbach Chronicle, Gath 4 p. 86; Rapp p. 625), we actually superimpose sound details without her naming them. We can imagine the “thwuck” of a snowball thrown and successfully landed on its target; we can hear in our inner soundtrack the laughter of the sisters engaging in a bout of unusually fine fun. I can hear the clucking hens, their day disturbed by the unusual activity, and perhaps a single rooster crow to establish inner territory within the hen-house while the outer world manifests these unusual games and noises. I imagine the trees whispering off to the right of the convent yard in the hillside between them and the parish church as the inevitable winter breeze rolls down the afternoon mountainside. And we know from experience that the broader landscape would be hushed, since snow deadens sound. All of these elements were present in my inner landscape as I read Wittweilerin’s passage, though she uses no sound words at all. Her nouns – snow, snowball, hen-yard – become my soundtrack through an associative linkage of my own inner memories of these things.

My projection of this past environment, in other words, DOES appear to be mediated in part by sound-memory as well as by the convent sister’s narrative. Readers bring their own experiences to the things they are reading; that includes their own experiences of sound-as-mediator.

The second big contribution that Stratoudakis & Papdimitriou make is to model one approach to considering sound. Since “soundscape is an ever-changing version of a given environment [and thus] presents great spatio-temporal variability,” they provide a model for considering changes over time. They ask that we consider sampling positions as well as recording periods. For them, sound (and its attributes), space (geographical coordinates) and time (annual and daily cycles) are the three main elements for describing a soundscape. They suggest a day divided into three hour chunks, and consider a variety of individual parameters. 

They also caution that one should note “places of particular geo-morphological interest.” The gurgling stream, for instance, that is close to Thalbach’s back property in summertime, would shape the soundscape as a kind of acoustical dent (or would it be hill?), a natural feature that would deform the experience of other sounds as its summer-time omnipresence shades and colors the other sounds in its proximity.

Measures from their study that could be particular useful for other projects (like my own) are these:

• Source (bird, frog, car…)
• Area sampled
• Timestamp
• Origin: biological, geological, anthropological
• Meaning: background, foreground

I gave some thought to those measures as I trod through graveyards on my research trip. Birds: check. Crickets: Also check. Stream: Yep. Fountain: noted. Bell peals: Cool, I mean, yep. Cars are, of course, historical anachronisms, but they function too as a reminder that the wagons and carts of former time should be accounted for in a historical re-imagining of the past.

To be fair, Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s ultimate interest lies in the mapping and manipulations that computer modeling allows, and it is indeed fascinating stuff. But for me, at this point, the pragmatic elements of parsing the sound-world had more ready applicability, and it is that more humanistic element of their study that I have shared here.  A link to their full study is in the notes below.

TAKE-AWAY
Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou offer a handy model for thinking about sound as measurable yet deeply experiential. While their research is oriented toward computational modeling and A-V replication, its implications extend beyond technical applications. Their framework provides a useful lens for humanistic inquiries, helping us parse how environments, past and present, are aurally constructed and mediated. In particular, their model of a sound-mediated understanding of environment emphasizes the importance of spatial and temporal variability in soundscapes. It also inadvertently underscores the ways in which individual memory and perception shape our understanding of sound. My own reflections on convent narratives and historical re-imaginings highlight how memory itself can function as an imagination-informed soundscape—one in which readers contribute their own inner sonic realities to narratives that seem on the surface to be silent.

In short, whether addressed to the recorded sounds of a contemporary Grecian landscape (them) or to the imagined echoes of historical spaces (me), Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s measures offer a method for attending more carefully to the role of sound in shaping experience.

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WORKS CITED: 

Cyrus, Cynthia J. “Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up” [Blog post]. Silences and Sounds Blog, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com, 19 Feb 2025.

Rapp, Ludwig. Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, Bd. 2. Brixen 1896.

Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece. Digital copy available here.

Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.

“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 21^st 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