Bernard S. Bachrach

Visions and Psychopathology in the Middle Ages

Descriptions of visionary experiences from written medieval sources are examined from a cross-cultural perspective. The mental states of the persons having the visions range from terminal illnesses, states of starvation, stress-related syndromes, dreams and hypnagogic states, and seemingly unremarkable mental states. Although a few of the visions elicited some skepticism on the part of contemporaries, most reports of visions were accepted at face value as bona fide visions, with no discernible differentiation between starvation visions, dreams, deliria of illnesses, and possible mental illness. Only four of the visions appeared causally related, by todays standards, to mental illnesses. These persons were not recognized as mentally ill by their contemporaries. Since there was a recognition of mental illness in the Middle Ages, it would appear that such recognition was based on symptoms other than visions or hallucinations. It is also possible that hallucinations, as culturally supported phenomena, were not as available as forms of expression of psychoses in the Middle Ages as they are today. Such a possibility has interesting implications regarding the role of a culture in shaping the forms by which mental illnesses are expressed, recognized, and labeled.

Medieval Visions and Contemporary Hallucinations

The hallucinations of 23 patients with predominantly religious themes were compared with descriptions of visions from the Middle Ages. Although there were many points of similarity between the two classes of phenomena, none of the medieval visionaries was identified as mentally ill. The role of cultural norms in determining the attribution of mental illness, and the limitations of Euro-American criteria of psychoses, are discussed in the light of these findings.

Medieval Siege Warfare: A Reconnaisance

Historians writing during the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries unambiguously recognized the importance, indeed the central role, played by siege warfare in European military history during the Middle Ages, i.e., from the dissolution of the Roman empire in the West at least until the emergence of high quality gunpowder weapons. Thus, for example, Hans Delbruck observed: “Throughout the entire Middle Ages we find...the exploitation of the defensive in fortified places.”(1) Charles Oman, Delbruck’s contemporary, took much the same position. (2) Recognition of the importance of siege warfare, however, did not lead historians to the obvious conclusion that the subject merited intensive study as an essential aspect, if not the essential aspect, of medieval military history, and as a key to our understanding of the Middle Ages. Indeed, Henry Guerlac observed in 1943: “nothing is more conspicuously lacking in the field of military studies than a well-illustrated history of the arts of fortification and siegecraft.”(3) Yet, only two years later Ferdinand Lot wrote in the introduction to his classic study, L’Art militaire et les armees au moyen age et dans le proche orient: “il laisse de cote une parti essentielle du sujet, la Guerre de sieges, qui a joue un si grand role dans les siecles qu’on a passes en revue.”(4) In 1980, Philippe Contamine noted: “In its most usual form medieval warfare was made up of a succession of sieges accompanied by skirmishes and devastation.” Indeed, Contamine goes so far as to suggest that medieval warfare was dominated by “fear of the pitched battle” and a “siege mentality.” Like Lot, Contamine did not provide a major change of focus.(5) The failure of military historians to pursue the study of medieval siege warfare can be rather simply, if not simplistically, explained as a result of “presentism.” During the later nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth, military planners cleaved to the doctrine which is often styled “the strategy of overthrow.” This emphasized “the importance of battle to such a degree that they regarded it as the only important act in war.”(6) Indeed, those historians who wrote medieval military history, whether professional scholars or amateurs, not only would appear to have adhered to this doctrine but regarded any other way of conducting warfare as ostensibly unworthy of study.(7) Thus, when scholars such as Delbruck, Oman, and Lot wrote medieval military history they looked for battles to study. Even more importantly, they focused attention upon the so-called “knights” or “heavily armed cavalry.” This element in society putatively dominated the battlefield, and thus they are also thought to have dominated medieval warfare with the shock of their mounted charge. This model is still regarded as the “key” to understanding the military history of the Middle Ages.(8)

Child Care and Child Abuse in Early Medieval Europe

The concern about widespread abuse of children in modern Western society has led historians and health care professionals to examine the past for evidence of similar abusive practices. The expectation has been that the past, especially the Middle Ages, will reveal even worse attitudes and practices toward children. Our research, based upon an analysis of care given to sick children in early medieval Europe, suggests that considerable attention, effort, and expense were devoted to seeking help for sick and crippled children. At the same time, there is no body of evidence to sustain the notion of widespread child abuse during these Dark Ages of Western civilization.

A reappraisal of medieval mysticism & hysteria

This paper examines the historical association between medieval mysticism and asceticism and the psychopathological condition of hysteria. We first review the particular forms of medieval mysticism and asceticism that seem to have inspired modern psychiatrists and reductive historians to dismiss these phenomena as indubitably neurotic behaviours. Then we review the concept of hysteria as it evolved during the last two centuries for points of convergence with mysticism. Finally, we question the validity of value-laden diagnostic formulations in the domain of personality assessment. A few highly dramatic but culturally endorsed religious behaviours occuring in an otherwise well functioning individual does not constitute a basis for any psychiatric diagnosis, let alone a condemnatory characterological one such as hysteria. We propose a perspective for looking at medieval mystical states of mind and behaviours in context that moves beyond ahistoric assumptions that employ modern Western standards as the yardstick for medieval health and illness.

Toward a reappraisal of William the Great, duke of Aquitaine (995–1030)

William, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou, has won a glowing reputation from historians for his personal piety and his active support of religious reform. Scholars have given him the sobriquet ‘the Great’, and he is traditionally regarded as one of those overmighty subjects whose fame and power eclipsed their less accomplished Capetian contemporaries. As count and duke, however, William clearly had responsibilities that went beyond support of the Church. In the present study an effort has been made to examine the more secular aspects of Williams career to see if, in fact, he justly deserves to be considered one of the outstanding figures of the early eleventh century.

Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium

This text makes important inroads into the widely discussed topic of historical memory, evoking the everyday lives of 11th-century people and both their written and nonwritten ways of preserving the past. Women praying for their dead, monks creating and recreating their archives, scribes choosing which royal families of the past to applaud and which to forget - it is from such sources that most of our knowledge of the medieval period comes. Through descriptions of various acts of remembrance, including the naming of children and the recording of visions, the author unearths a wide range of approaches to preserving the past as it was or formulating the past that an individual or group prefers to imagine. By focusing on a turning point in medieval history, one in which an effort was made to make a cultural break with the previous centuries, Geary offers an example of specific mental and social structures that filtered the memories communicated by social elites and ordinary individuals alike. The author focuses on the former Carolingian empire to compare how people from Provence to Bavaria recalled their familial, institutional, and regional pasts. In examining written accounts and documents, he considers attitudes toward a wide range of topics - from gender and fashion to politics and religious practices - and shows how these attitudes reveal the social transformations taking place in the 11th century as well as the ways in which people had already begun to think about the past. Throughout his investigation, the author maintains that what matters is not so much the content of what is remembered but rather the ways in which memories are structured and represented, and ultimately what is forgotten along the way.

The Costs of Fortress Construction in Tenth-Century Germany: The Case of Hildagsburg

It is generally recognized that the Ottonian kings of Germany (919-1024) were powerful. However, there is a great deal of controversy among specialists in the history of the early medieval German kingdom regarding the basis of this power. One school of thought holds that rulers such as Otto I (936-973) ruled rather than governed, and were able to use their sacral authority to mobilize the secular and particularly ecclesiastical magnates of the German kingdom to do their bidding. Another school of thought raises the possibility that the Ottonian kings utilized the administrative inheritance from their Carolingian predecessors to govern Germany in manner consistent with earlier states, which made extensive use of the written word among other administrative technologies. This study is intended to demonstrate the enormous resources that were deployed by the Ottonian kings to construct hundreds of fortifications, principally along the eastern frontiers of the German kingdom. The concomitant necessity of mobili...

The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian (review)

The problems are the publisher’s: the book is overpriced, the font tiny, the illustrations excellent but sparse, and the proofreading minimal. As to turf and ethnicity, the book is less about territory in itself than about control, which may be attached to territory but is also about people, whose identities are complex and shifting. Despite the odd lingering assumption that China was always the defender in reality as well as in Song minds, what I get from the book is that trying to impose rigid schema or plans on the frontier will bring failure, whereas working with it is more likely to achieve results that can count as success even if they were not the original intention. Nobody interested in war or borders should be without this book.

Continuity of written administration in the Late Carolingian East c. 887–911 The Royal Fisc

Introduction, p. 109. – Written Administration in Francia occidentalis and Francia media, p. 109. – Written Administration in the Late Carolingian East, p. 112. – The Fisc in the German Historiographical Tradition, p. 113. – Capitulary de villis and the Scale of Written Administration, p. 117. – Royal Beneficia, p. 124. – Arnulf, Zwentibold, and Louis the Child. Sources of Information, p. 130. – Records of the Royal Fisc, p. 133. – Archiving Fiscal Records, p. 138. – The Confiscation of Beneficia, p. 141. – Regranting Beneficia, p. 143. – Maintaining Government Records, p. 144. – Conclusion, p. 145.