THE MIDDLE AGES

Author’s Note

Throughout the Alphabeticon series, the emphasis is on the life and work of men and women, past and present, who have affected the world, for better or worse, in some significant way; or on some aspect of world history, in a given period, that has had a significant influence on the culture we inherit. In addressing such subjects, I have tried to be objective, and have left myself out of the picture: my own life and work, like my own tastes and beliefs, have always seemed irrelevant to the task at hand. However, in addressing the Middle Ages, I found myself drawn into the subject in a more personal way. This was virtually unavoidable, for medi­aeval architecture, literature, music, and religion had been formative influences on my boyhood and adolescence; and in my adult years, they had played a major role in my career as a public broadcaster. The result is a piece of writing that makes no claim to be a comprehensive overview of what is, anyway, an enormous field of study. Rather, it is just one man’s tribute to a portion of our past which, even if somewhat arbitrarily and selectively treated, has a real bearing on our present. It is as much a part of our heritage as Antiquity or the Renaissance: not so immediately pertinent as Yesterday’s News; but in the long run, profoundly nutritive.

In recent years and in certain quarters, there has been a marked tendency, on the part of some Canadians, to decry the customary expressions of our cultural heritage as unfairly and disproportionately favouring the work of “white European males”. This criticism is often voiced both snidely and stridently, without a proper regard for facts. It does contain an element of truth, in that the history of western civilization is, to some extent, a history of the patriarchal demeaning of women; and it is also true that Canada, historically, has paid too little respect to aboriginal cultures and, today, gives insufficient heed to the cultures of its growing communities of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

These flaws admitted, however, it is none the less beyond question that important work has not been exclusively achieved by men alone, in the arts and sciences, in religion and politics. This has been the case in all periods of our era. A very short list, from mediaeval times and modern, bears that out.

Dame Julian and Virginia Woolf in literature; Hildegarde of Bingen and Marie Curie in the natural sciences; St Teresa and Simone Weill in religion; Eleanor of Aquitaine and Milada Horáková in politics. These few names could be added to greatly; and although most of such accomplished women, sadly, have had to struggle to make their mark in what, too often and too much, has been a man’s world, European men have never enjoyed the kind of cultural monopoly ascribed to them by the more militant feminists. Indeed, any open-minded historian of gender politics knows that feminist triumphs go back much further than many modern pamphleteers would suspect — notably to the Middle Ages.

That phenomenon has had its fair share of air-time on CBC radio.

An obvious example is in the field of music. Not only has modern Canada been rich in women composers like Violet Archer and Alexina Louie and Barbara Pentland, and rich in great women teachers like Greta Krauss and Mary Morrison, but also it has given the world strong leadership in the performance of early music, with women like Alison Melville and Peggy Sampson.

Equally, in literature, Canada’s shining modern stars of fiction, like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro and Jane Urquhart, have mediaeval forerunners in Marjorie Kemp as travel writer, and Marguerite of Navarre as poetess and writer of short stories.

Similarly, in the world of modern faith, Mother Teresa has been universally admired, and she had eminent predecessors, long ago, in Abbess Hilda of Whitby and St Clare of Assisi.

That correspondence of then and now, that bridging of cultural time, is a fact of life too often disregarded by broadcasters, and others, who concentrate on the present without taking into account the formative effect on it of the recent or distant past. This is especially so where journalists are concerned, whether on the air or in print, whose task it is to report on and interpret immediate events. Discharging that duty is a very proper concern of the public broadcaster, but CBC radio has the further duty of reflecting the cultures of the world we live in, and of the world as it once was: the two are inextricably connected. Many people there, myself included, have produced documentaries and features and dramas that explore the Canadian past, from pioneer days to the day before yesterday. That past, in turn, was the product of an earlier time in Europe, where the first foreign settlers came from. That period, before the sixteenth century, was a consuming interest of mine (one among many) from an early age. And over the years, at CBC, I produced more than two dozen programs that explored the Middle Ages. All of them, by implication, had a bearing on the life we now live: they portrayed our heritage and, beyond that, they enshrined values we can all afford to learn from.

A short account of some of them will give some idea of their scope.

The great mediaeval literature makes wonderful radio fare. First there are the epics: I produced “Beowulf”, in the modern translation by Edwin Morgan, “The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman”, by William Langland, and the central portion of Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte Darthur”; all of which are glorious in their language. Then, in humbler patterns of speech, there were the mystery plays: I presented the horrific “Crucifixion” from the York cycle, in modern pronunciation, and “The Play of Noah” from the Chester cycle, in fifteenth-century pronunciation; and piecing together passages from all the cycles, I scripted “A Mediaeval Life of Christ”.

The history, as in any period, has its dark side as well as its light. I documented the savage record of Anti-Semitism in those centuries. I reconstructed the martyrdom of Jan Hus, Father of the Reformation, murdered by a corrupt papal court; then I went on, in another feature, to honour the ideals of the subsequent Hussite movement. Researches by Régine Pernoud prompted a feature about Joan of Arc, which tackled the ambiguities of her story without falling into the trap of hagiography or indulging in retrospective indignation.

The story of Joan, of course, has given rise to many modern treatments: notably Shaw’s play, “St Joan”; Dreyer’s film, “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” and Honegger’s oratorio, “Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher”. This last I produced on radio, in a wonderful performance by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Mendelssohn Choir, with excellent soloists. On a more modest scale, I commissioned, from Violet Archer, a setting of fifteenth-century religious lyrics. And from the fourteenth century, I set some of Richard Rolle’s religious lyrics, for soprano and two harps, for use in a feature devoted to his life and work.

It is impossible to depict late-mediaeval England without giving a place of honour to Richard Rolle de Hampole, the Yorkshire hermit, mystic, counsellor of fellow-religious, author of Latin treatises, superb vernacular poet, and the Father of English Prose. At the core of his devout life was a dedication to the sorrows of the Passion: he wrote much poetry on the subject, and his acknowledged masterpiece is “A Meditation on the Passion” in prose. I combined both, the poems and the prose, in alternation, for a program I recorded, with two Yorkshire readers, on the site of his hermitage in Hampole, late at night after the nearby pub had closed; and we felt a vivid sense, there, of distant time and contemporary time converging in that one place. Next to his hermitage had been a community of nuns, who kept his legacy alive by revering him as a saint, writing his biography, and incorporating it into an annual liturgy they composed in his honour. I reconstructed that liturgy, back in Toronto, and broadcast it with a cast of women readers and a women’s choir singing the Gregorian chants, conducted by Giles Bryant.

Just as it is impossible to ignore Rolle when dealing with late-mediaeval England, it is impossible to deal with the whole mediaeval period in Europe without recognizing that the entire culture of that time and place was steeped in Christianity — to begin with in its Roman guise, later also in its Greek Orthodox guise, and eventually in the Reformist guise, too, that helped to usher in the Renaissance. Dominant in the West, for many centuries, was the Papal Church. Within that Church, a strong bastion of cultural values was the monastic Orders. And of those Orders, the pre-eminent one was the Benedictine Order. Its abbeys and priories, whether for men or for women, were a stronghold of faith, of scholarship, of farming technique, and of the liturgical, musical, scribal, and architectural arts. Modest radio documentaries on Cluny and Clairvaux attested to that. But a major feature on Benedictine history, entitled “The Holy Rule”, traced the legacy of the Order, from its origin with St Benedict up to its flourishing state in our own time. Most of the program was recorded in Westminster Abbey, in B.C., by the monks themselves, but components were added from other communities in Saskatchewan and Québec. Interspersed through the program were short interviews with community leaders, but the bulk of it was scripted, being drawn from liturgical and other sources, ancient and modern. Recurring throughout was the chanted music of the Offices and the Mass: some of it was ornate and in Latin, sung by the Schola Cantorun in Westminster; the rest of it, in a simpler style, was sung in English by the Westminster community as a whole. This latter vernacular chant stands as a bridge between the past and the present, preserving an ancient tradition but making it accessible to future gener­ations. The adaptive Englishing of Gregorian chant has often been attempted elsewhere, but never so successfully as at Westminster, nor with such sensitive regard for the subtleties of the words and the notes, such adroit solving of the problems of combining them in a new linguistic framework. The labour involved is vast, for all the Offices and all the Masses in the whole liturgical year have to be provided for, but the new chant songs are now virtually complete.

Radio programs like “The Holy Rule” nourish a sense of who we were before we became who we are. Much has been done over the years, and is still being done, to bring alive the foundations of our world, not only on radio, but also on stage and screen, in books, and through the schoolroom. But while great attention has been paid to Classical Antiquity, to the Renaissance, to the Age of Reason, to the Industrial Revolution, and to Modernism in all its forms, not so much attention has been paid to the Middle Ages, sometimes referred to as the Ages of Faith. That is not surprising in a society become so markedly secular. But it does constitute a gap in our awareness of our own history. A few mediaeval programs on radio can help in a small way to fill that gap.

The connection between the secular and the sacred is not always apparent, and sometimes is not even there. In politics, either in Canada or elsewhere, secular concerns have usually predominated (except in fundamentalist settings, Christian or Muslim), and certainly Pierre Trudeau had a masterly grasp of worldly needs; but it is interesting to note that in his final and very private years, his true spiritual home was not in the House of Mammon but in the sanctuary of the Benedictine tradition. The boys in the political back rooms may have thought he was one of them. In fact, he had a much deeper kinship with those who have vowed themselves to the cloister.

FOOTNOTE

Westminster Abbey, in B.C., is not the only place in North America where the officiant’s official English versions of the liturgy have caused dissatisfaction, or even consternation. Several Roman Catholic communities have substituted versions of their own which aspire to a decent quality of text. Among them is a group of parishes in the south-west, particularly in Texas, which conduct the rites of worship in the unsurpassable language of Cranmer’s “Book of Common Prayer”. They call themselves Roman Catholics of Anglican Use. Doctrinally they are completely orthodox. But musically and verbally they insist on a higher standard than is aimed at by their supposed superiors. The following poem is dedicated to like-thinking monks in the Benedictine Order.