Session 6: You Wouldn’t Read About It
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 19th September – Monday 21st September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Of Witches, Ghosts and Devilish Creatures. The Experience of Fear in the Early Modern Southern Netherlands
Sonja Deschrijver and Vrajabhumi Vanderheyden
Department of History, University of Antwerp, Belgium
In 1589 Truyken Oyen decided to play a practical joke on two jumpy beguines who were heading home in the dark. She covered herself with a white sheet en set out to scare them. Scared they were indeed. But instead of bringing about laughter, the joke turned out to have a bitter ending. For she also scared a firm farmer’s wife and her family, who mistook Truyken for a devilish creature and consequently beat her up. Identifying herself and explaining the joke to them didn’t set things straight: the mad farmers accused her of witchcraft, thus instigating a legal procedure of which the outcome remains unknown. No one likes to be scared, but to a modern reader, the reactions of the duped people in the light of fear is rather excessive. How can we explain their disproportionate response?
Using several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cases relating to topics as witchcraft, possession and ghostly encounters, all of them situated in the duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands, we will explore the experience of fear in relation to its specific temporal and cultural context, addressing questions as to how religion shaped the experience of fear and the reactions to it, and the ways in which fear was expressed. As an important guideline, we will refer to the early modern experience of the self and the body as porous entities, permeable by external influences experiences such as scares. The outside world was thought not to stop at the skin and in that sense fear could be directly harmful. This way, the saying “the only thing to fear is fear itself” gains a very literal implication when applied to the early modern age.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Liberating the Man from the Beast: The Werewolf in Quebecois Folklore
Cynthia Jones
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
In many Quebecois folktales, there are accounts of werewolves, which differ slightly from European folktales in that they are deeply tied to catholic symbolism. Many of these folktales express anxieties the colonial settlers had of the heathen Indian tribes that were abundant at the time and moreover, what they really express is the clash of two cultures (Indian and European) and the Quebecois settlers’ attempt to relieve the anxiety over these differences. In most of these tales, there is a mélange of Indian respect for the wolf and man’s fear of the beast that resides within man. In these stories the reader senses an evil that comes from without and an evil that comes from within. The only way to cure man of this beastly guise is to liberate him through the Lord by inflicting some sort of flesh wound.
Also, it has been argued that the conflict between linear time and cyclical time in a narrative will cause suspense and fear within the reader or listener. Using Mircea Eliade’s concept of cyclical time and historical time from his book, The Sacred and the Profane, I will explore how, when the two clashes into each other, cyclical time becomes a sort of liminal area and linear time becomes that of “civilized” society. The conflict of these two sensations of times represents the conflict between the Quebecois settlers and the Indian tribes, which is translated as the werewolf within the Quebecois folktales. The werewolf represents a liminal creature, which can only live on the outskirts of society, and will only be seen at night. He is forced to endure a constant rebirth like that of Eliade’s cyclical time, whereas good Christian citizens will remain safe in their linear time. Thus through these folktales we will see Western man’s constant desire to liberate himself from the horrible devilish beast that resides within himself and also in the outskirts of society: the liminal space. In the end the question that arises is: is it possible to separate the man from the beast?
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
And the World Became Rifty: Property and Context of Terror in Medieval Society
Rainhard Bengez
TUM – Technische Universität München (Technical University of Munich), Germany
In 14th century the Black Death, the second and deadliest known pandemic in human history, killed within five years one third of Europe’s population. The plentiful perish shocked the political and social landscape and flattened the way for the era of Renaissance and Enlightenment.
A pestilent fear and horror preceded the plague. The message of the coming Black Death was as worse as the plague. Anarchy and chaos ruled the street. The polity impended to collapse. According to the Florentine bard Giovanni Boccaccio and other contemporary witnesses, people acted differently. A first group tried to isolate oneself in order to stay alive. A second group cultivated a fatalistic splurge including inter alia diffuse and public act of sex. A third group took a middle course between isolation and participation while using aromatic oil and special tools. The people awaited the Black Death as divine penalty. As long as the plague lasted they tried to find the villain, the culprit. Elsewhere pogroms flared up. With the end of the pest the primitive trust in God faded and a new age began.
In this presentation I would like to demonstrate that terror, cruelty and fear are inseparably aligned with medieval (Christian) society. Moreover they are the movers of the social live. Not only as a pure political fact the medieval community may be considered as timeless, ontologically undivided body or being. Finally, this identification is a motion to the point of its doom. Despite society’s cruelty, fear and terror at its end the human being will become the center of interest. This structural equilibrium of terror and attitude will be contrasted with minds from Thomas Hobbes.
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