All posts tagged seven deadly sins

Medieval Women: In Their Own Words @ the British Library

‘What I’m going to tell you now,’ he said, ‘may sound incredible. But then, when you’re not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.’
(The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in ‘Brave New World’, chapter 3)

In the memory of women alive today, ‘history’ was defined as the deeds of men, recorded by men, described in histories written by men, and taught by men. My mother remembers sitting through history lessons about the Crusades and the Second World War, both of which passed without mention of a single woman taking part.

When it comes to the Middle Ages, a handful of queens (Matilda and Eleanor), the egregious Joan of Arc, a handful of authors (Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan) and the composer Hildegaard of Bingen, have been known about, written about and studied for centuries, but that has tended to be your lot. The role of women in the broader life of medieval society – as not only rulers but aristocratic wives, as authors and intellectuals, as saints and visionaries, abbesses and anchorites, as merchants in towns and peasants in the fields – has been much less described and explored.

‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ is a big, informative and artfully designed exhibition, full of priceless treasures, which is firmly rooted in the modern movement of women speaking up, speaking out, and reclaiming the stories of their past.

The Book of the City of Ladies in a manuscript made under the personal supervision of Christine de Pizan, the first professional women author in Europe. This illustration unexpectedly shows elegant ladies bricklaying © British Library

This is a very polemically feminist exhibition. The aim of reclaiming women’s stories and voices is front and centre of the curators’ stated aims, of the press promotion of the show, of all the wall labels and object captions. Here’s the opening of the British Library web page about it.

Narratives about the Middle Ages are dominated by men. Male authors recorded history and wrote great works of literature, male rulers commanded kingdoms and fought wars, male authorities controlled religion. In traditional histories, medieval women’s roles have often been side-lined and limited to a few stereotypes and generalisations.

This exhibition counters this narrative by revealing women’s contributions right across medieval society, in public, private and spiritual life, taking visitors on a journey through women’s healthcare, households, work, creativity and political and religious involvement.

It’s in this spirit that ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ brings together 140 or so objects in order, as far as possible, to quote women’s own words about themselves and their lives and experiences, sourced from authentic medieval letters, books, histories, works of devotion, poems, prayers and edicts written by women.

Signed letter from Joan of Arc to the citizens of Riom, requesting gunpowder and military equipment for a coming siege, 9 November 1429, from the Municipal Archives in Riom © Town of Riom, Municipal Archives

So all the manuscripts, books and other objects on display here have been chosen to give – wherever possible – first-hand testimony of medieval women authors and their range of writings, to shed light on women’s contributions to medieval social and economic life, culture and politics, their political, dynastic and diplomatic achievements as queens and empresses, their management of sometimes very large households and religious institutions, their work as doctors and midwives, and their roles as saints and visionaries, revered in the Catholic tradition.

It certainly achieves its aims, opening doors and shedding light on all aspects of women’s experiences, right across western Europe spanning a very large time period – roughly 1100 to 1500. The exhibition is divided into three main zones. These are:

1. Private Lives

This opening section tries to give a range of insights into the everyday lives and personal worlds of medieval women, covering subjects like family and domestic life, friendship and motherhood, love and sex. There are sections about medicine and herbal remedies, good luck charms to wear during childbirth – notably a birthing girdle from the early 15th century, inscribed with prayers and charms that promised a quick and painless delivery.

Birthing girdle, England, early 15th century, an amulet for protection during childbirth © British Library

There’s an edition of the letters between the ill-fated lovers of Heloïse and Abelard, and a copy of ‘the Passion of St Margaret’, the patron saint of childbirth, which has been smudged by devotional kissing. There are love letters written by women, including – as the curators repeatedly point out – the oldest surviving Valentine’s Day letter in the English language, written by Margery Brews to her fiancé John Paston in February 1477.

Actually there’s quite a lot from the Paston letters, at least 7 letters and a will. This makes sense to anyone familiar with Middle Ages as the Paston Letters are well known and have been available in a numerous printed editions for ages. To quote the curators:

The Pastons were a Norfolk family who climbed the social ladder from peasantry to landed gentry during the 15th century. The extraordinary survival of a cache of around a thousand personal letters sent to and from the family gives unparalleled insight into their everyday lives. Some of the most prolific correspondents were the women of the family, recording joys, sorrows, loves, rivalries, friendships and arguments that span several generations. Yet most of the Paston women could not write, and relied on scribes to write down their messages for them.

This section also includes the first known book in Europe printed by a woman under her own name. This was Jedaiah ben Abraham Bedersi author of ‘Behinat ha-‘Olam’ (The Contemplation of the World) printed in Mantua (Italy), around 1476. Its printer, Estellina Conat, is also the first known female printer of Hebrew texts. She worked in a family workshop in Mantua (northern Italy). The book contains a philosophical poem written after the expulsion of Jews from France in 1306.

It’s worth pointing out that the exhibition includes half a dozen objects relating to Jewish women, and overview panels explaining the role and significance and distinctive culture of Jews in medieval Europe.

An illustration of Margaret of York kneeling before the Resurrected Christ in the Dialogue de la duchesse de Bourgogne à Jésus Christ © British Library Board

There’s a copy of a unique treatise on women’s medicine actually written by a woman. Trota of Salerno was a physician who practised at the medical school of Salerno, southern Italy, in the 12th century. She gave her name to a widely consulted collection of texts on women’s health, the Trotula. Her medical works are notable for being less theoretical and more practical than those of her male contemporaries. Since male practitioners were not permitted to conduct intimate examinations, she was able to practise women’s medicine in a more hands-on way than they could.

Toxic men and the Patriarchy are represented by John Mirfield’s ‘Breviarium Bartholomei’, a medical compendium which includes procedures for testing virginity, making a woman appear to be a virgin, and even a section on contraception, partly written in ciphers to limit access.

2. Public Lives

The second section, ‘Public Lives’, tells the stories of a host of women who shaped medieval society through their work in areas as varied as agriculture, textiles, sex work, finance, writing and printing, politics and warfare. It’s subdivided into two specific areas: ‘Work and creativity’ and ‘Power and politics’.

The seal of Empress Matilda (Add Ch 75724) Foundation charter of Bordesley Abbey by Empress Matilda © British Library Board

Specific named women of power include:

Shajar al-Durr (d. 1257) a female ruler of Egypt who defeated Louis IX of France in the Seventh Crusade
Isabella of France (1295 to 1358) who, together with her lover, Roger Mortimer, led a successful rebellion against her husband, King Edward II of England
Margaret of Anjou (1430 to 1482) who is represented by the largest hoard of gold coins ever discovered in Britain, believed to have been part of her fundraising efforts on behalf of her husband, King Henry VI of England
Anne of France (1461 to 1522) Duchess of Bourbon, known to her contemporaries as Madame la Grande (‘the Great Lady’) one of the most powerful women in late 15th-century Europe as well as the author of ‘Lessons For My Daughter’) France
a tough-minded letter from Margaret Paston to her husband John, away on business in London, requesting a detailed list of military supplies to defend their manor which was under siege from jealous local magnates (!)

Women used letters not just for personal family correspondence but for more official purposes. This section includes letters and petitions to advocate for freedoms and equality. You can see a petition written by Maria Moriana to the Mayor of London, when her master, Philip Syne, tried to sell her as a slave and then imprisoned her when she refused.

There is a copy of what is thought to be the first public defence of women in Italy, written by Nicolosa Sanuti in 1453. When the Church in Bologna imposed laws restricting what women (but not men) could wear, noblewoman Sanuti wrote this treatise in protest. She argues that through their many contributions to society, women have earned the right to wear what they want. Although unsuccessful at getting the law repealed, Nicolosa’s book won respect in intellectual circles.

A page from the Luttrell Psalter with an illustration of three women bringing in the harvest © British Library Board

3. Spiritual Lives

Religion was an integral part of medieval life and this third and final section gives you a feeling for the many roles played by women in medieval Christianity, from managers and administrators of large religious houses, to visionary writers and poets, to revered saints.

Surviving accounts show that religion could be a significant source of power for medieval women. Some women dedicated their lives to God by joining a convent and becoming nuns, while others led a religious life within society. The show includes works by the notable English women visionaries:

Julian of Norwich (around 1343 to after 1416) represented by the only complete surviving copy of her masterwork ‘The Revelations of Divine Love’ (mid-15th century) – the first work in English known to be authored by a woman
The Book of Margery Kempe, written around 1438, the earliest known autobiography in English which chronicles her life as a female mystic, in the only surviving manuscript copy from 1445 to 1450

For women who felt a religious calling, nunneries provided them with opportunities for education, creativity and community. Some of the many works produced by these communities include:

works by Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) a Benedictine abbess in the 12th century, who is famous as being the first woman composer in the western tradition – including a copy of the proto-opera, Ordo virtutum (Play of the Virtues), which she composed around 1150 to be sung at her convent
a copy of The Rule of St Clare, the first set of monastic guidelines known to have been authored by a woman
an exquisite series of painted scenes from the life of St John the Baptist created between 1175 and 1200, thought to be the only surviving creation from the renowned workshop of Herrad of Landsberg (1130 to 1195) at Hohenburg Abbey in Alsace

Miniature showing nuns processing to mass, from La sainte abbaye (The Holy Abbey), France (1290s) © British Library Board

Medieval stats

I was intrigued by the way the exhibition curators have created special panels, separate from the object labels, devoted solely to statistics. Some of these are feminist in intention but others were just stats for the joy of stats – odd, thought-provoking numbers, which are enjoyable in the way that random stats often are. Here’s a selection:

In medieval France, roughly 1.5% of medical practitioners whose names survive were women.
Of these, around 36% were midwives, the rest included barbers, surgeons, trained physicians and untrained healers.
48% of aristocratic women from England between 1350 and 1500 made bequests of books in their wills, compared with 18% of noblemen.
44% of daughters mentioned in male Londoners’ wills from 1309 to 1468 received some form of real estate, compared with 60% of sons
18% of legal cases in 14th-century York dealt with the dissolution of marriages.
26% of women employees in Paris around 1300 worked in the production of silk.
82% of slave contracts drawn up in Venice between 1360 and 1499 were for women, whose average age was 22.5.
About 10% of apprentices in medieval London were girls.

You get the picture. However, as with all blizzards of statistics they start out being fascinating, then become a bit of a chore, and at some point stop registering altogether.

Marriage chest or cassoni belonging to Elizabetta Gonzaga Mantua of Urbino, Italy (around 1488) Victoria and Albert Museum (photo by the author)

Medieval smells

And there are medieval smells! The Library has commissioned scent designer Tasha Marks to develop four ‘immersive fragrance installations’ (basically boxes or pots) – lift the lids and get a whiff of scents used (in probably wealthy) medieval households. The smells come in two of the zones: in the ‘Private Lives’ section there are two fragrances based on recipes from the 13th century text ‘De Ornatu Mulierum’ (On Women’s Cosmetics) for a hair perfume and a breath freshener.

The opening page of ‘De Ornatu Mulierum’ (On Women’s Cosmetics) © British Library Board

While in the ‘Spiritual Lives’ section there are two more scents, chosen for their associations with medieval understandings of the heavenly and demonic.

Are you a witch?

There are a couple of interactive screens scattered about the show and one of them is a brilliant interactive tool where you can find out whether you’re a witch! I immediately thought this should be a game show along the lines of Love Island or I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. The show would start with half a dozen women in a mocked-up medieval village (the kind used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) who have to undergo a series of tests and trials to establish whether they’re a witch or not (seeing if they have a third nipple or whether they float in the village pond or have a black cat).

Obviously I took the quiz – I needed to know. The first question was ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ I clicked ‘Man’ and burst out laughing when the next screen told me I was off to ‘a promising start’. I know what they mean, the obvious intent – as is the intent of most of the show – is to ram home the point that men generally had a better time of it in the Middle Ages than women.

The interactive ‘Are you a witch tool’ in ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ at the British Library (photo by the author)

A few caveats

This is an excellent exhibition. All the exhibits are fascinating, well chosen, carefully explained, and there is lots of information and context. There are some unexpected and even bizarre objects, plus the funky elements I’ve just described, the scents and the interactive screens. But I have a few caveats. More accurately, maybe, trains of thought triggered by the exhibition.

Getting inside medieval Christianity

The most obvious challenger to our modern secular values is religion. In this exhibition religion is treated from a mostly secular perspective, as an area where women were allowed to exercise a surprising amount of agency and freedom. The decision to become a nun was respected, and Christianity allowed women to become visionaries and saints, to be venerated and worshipped. This was more than was available to medieval Islam, India or China.

But my issue is that the curators – obviously modern secular feminists – treat medieval Christianity as if it was a job opportunity scheme for women seeking to escape patriarchal medieval society rather than the worldview which dominated every aspect of medieval life.

What the exhibition can’t really take on board is the big question: What if Christianity is right? What if being a woman isn’t entirely about being a strong independent woman flexing her agency and kicking sand in the face of the Patriarchy? What if the world was made by God, and Jesus was the Son He sent to redeem humanity from the Fall, and those who believe in Jesus’s resurrection and atonement will go to heaven and everyone who doesn’t believe, and wilfully sins against the laws of God, will go to hell?

What if that is the only important question in any human’s life, because it affects the fate of their immortal soul? In which case the medieval pay gap and the injustice of making women stay at home to raise children and be deprived of education or access to any profession – all issues which the exhibition raises and illustrates – become secondary, modern and secular concerns; in fact compared to the life of the spirit, barely issues at all.

I’m not saying Christianity with its patriarchal ideology is ‘true’. I’m a fairly militant atheist and a strong believer in Darwinian materialism. I’m just pointing out that a sympathetic reading of medieval history is an opportunity to enter into a world of values completely unlike ours – and explore what it would be like to believe medieval Christianity with all your heart and soul.

How would the world look then – if you knew your place in society, knew your role in life, and your main concern (apart from the basics of food and health) was being pious, attending church and avoiding temptations, physical or spiritual? If you knew that God was your Creator, that Jesus died to save you from sin, that we live in a terrible world exposed to all kinds of fragility, plague, war, early death, that only our faith can make sense of anything in life, and only faith can help us endure the terrible, arbitrary contingencies of life?

Just for an hour imagine being alive in those terrible times, without any of the conveniences of modern life, with no modern medicines or understanding of how the body works, with a life expectancy of 30, at the mercy of any number of random disasters. Wouldn’t you throw yourself on the mercy of an all-powerful God?

An illustration of St Francis and St Clare in The Rule of the Minorite Order of Sisters of St Clare, painted by the German artist Sibylla von Bondorff © British Library Board

Also, stripped of it supernatural trappings, Christianity contains many moral or ethical truths: for example, it’s not all about you. That happiness and fulfilment might not come from focusing just on your needs and problems, but by helping others. Focusing inwards, in the self, concentrates our unhappiness. Focusing outwards, on others, makes us forget ourselves in helping others. It is better to give than to receive. Charity is defined by the Etymological Dictionary as ‘Christian love in its highest manifestation.’

The beauty of the medieval worldview

I studied medieval history and literature at university. What is vital to medieval studies – and not so obvious in this exhibition – is the absolute centrality of hierarchy, pattern and order.

In the medieval worldview God was in his heaven and a complicated hierarchy of archangels and angels cascaded down from him. He controlled the universe at the centre of which was the solar system, at the centre of which was the world around which the moon, the sun and the five plants orbited, each embedded in an invisible crystal sphere, hence the music of the spheres.

The world was governed by the passage of the seasons created by the changing angle of the sun moving across a sky which, at night, was filled with the signs of the Zodiac, which had a strong influence on the world and its inhabitants, for good or evil. These complex movements and their influence on human life could be studied through the science of astrology.

Within the world of living beings there was a strong hierarchy, with man at the top and then hierarchies of animals in each of the kingdoms of the air and earth and sea. Everyone could see how larger animals preyed on smaller ones according to the hierarchies created by God.

Within human society there were distinct and fixed hierarchies, the sacred and the secular. The key institution was the Church, with the Pope as God’s representative on earth and the Church hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and so on spreading its tentacles down to every parish in Christendom. Holiness entailed following all the edicts of the Church, attending Mass, keeping the fasts and feasts and countless saints’ days, worshipping and praying in the correct manner, and avoiding all temptations to sin, either physical or spiritual.

Paralleling this was the secular hierarchy which began with the king or emperor at the top of each realm, then his assembly of nobles, barons and so on, extending down through a complex hierarchy of social ranks and functions, eventually ending with the serfs or peasants in the field.

More germane to this exhibition, there were very fixed views about the hierarchy of the family, with the father as the head of the household exercising complete control over his wife, who had her role to play in controlling their children and the sometimes numerous servants. People talk about the patriarchy nowadays, but this really was a patriarchal society.

It followed from the obsession with hierarchy that the good society was one in which everyone knew their place in society, accepted this place and contributed to their community according to their place and role, respecting their superiors, acting appropriately to their inferiors, ensuring stability and prosperity.

Down below the human level, at a basic physical level, everything in the world was made up of a mix of the four elements: fire, air, earth and water. These corresponded to the four life-giving fluids in the human body, namely:

• Blood: associated with air
• Yellow bile: associated with fire
• Phlegm: associated with water
• Black bile: associated with earth

In the medieval worldview everything was linked by connections between all these hierarchies and many more I haven’t mentioned (for example, the vast world of medieval theology with its seven sacraments, seven deadly sins, seven cardinal virtues and so on and so on).

The world was thus a vastly complicated place made up of overlapping matrices of hierarchies, structures and values, traditions, beliefs and practices. It was the complex correspondences between all these sets of values that enabled the characteristic medieval literary form of allegory where animated figures – humans or animals – stand for the abstract values within the complex value system, allowing for the creation of complex and sophisticated works of literature and visual art (such as Hildegard of Bingen’s work, Play of the Virtues, mentioned above, where a female voice plays the role of the human soul and meets 17 virtues).

These complex correspondences also, of course, allow for magic, where objects – such as someone’s hair or clothes – stand in for people themselves or their qualities or powers. Magic is just a way of tapping into the immense system of correspondences between all aspects of the material world and the spiritual world which everyone knew lay all around them, a way of deploying occult forces to influence the visible world.

Put simply, my suggestion is that, in order to really understand and enjoy all this, you have to submit to it, swim in it, forget our modern world of subatomic particles and antibiotics, technology and individualism, modern secular liberal values, and imagine a world made up of four elements where the only medicine comes from plants with magical properties which must be taken at a full moon along with the right prayers or spells. Where the only thing which can save you from life’s endless tribulations is deep faith, faith in God, His Son and the Holy Blessed Virgin Mary. Where the way to be happy was to know your place in the world and behave accordingly.

To enter this world is, I suggest, fascinating and imagination-expanding. If you really go for it, immersing yourself in Chaucer or Langland, medieval saints’ legends or the Arthurian romances, you can recapture a real sense of magic and marvels, and what it could mean to be human in a larger, stranger, more mystical sense than the modern world of TikTok and Instagram allows, entering a world of hidden powers and spirits.

My reservation about this exhibition is that it sometimes felt as if the Middle Ages were being named and shamed for not being a woke 21st century university campus; that medieval people were being ticked off for allowing a medieval gender pay gap (as one of the exhibits is titled), for forcing women to be homemakers or be married off at 13; for the failure of people living in 1200 to understand the workings of the human body as we do in 2024; for a litany of our contemporary concerns which the curators use to judge and find wanting people who lived 800 years ago.

Maybe that’s the root of my objection. What medieval people believed was strange and wonderful and inspiring, and horrible and violent and terrifying, but seeking to explore and understand such a different worldview can be immensely liberating. All of it may have been, in a scientifically literal sense wrong, and wildly contrary to our modern sense of liberal freedoms, but that is like saying ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is ‘wrong’.

History is an imaginative artefact and can, on a personal level, be made to mean whatever we want it to. Sure, public historians have a duty to research and report the facts accurately, but most of us ordinary citizens have favourite periods or characters from history and enjoy fantasising and romanticising about them. Look at the evergreen popularity of historical novels and TV series. Every year there’s another series about the bloody Tudors which usually bears only the flimsiest relation to academic history. Or consider the way hordes of medieval trappings are imported into popular culture, in a twee way in Harry Potter, in a grim way in Game of Thrones.

I love lots of medieval art and literature, sculpture, tapestries and music, for its magic, its lightness, its symbolic way of thinking, its vision of the deep interpenetration of the natural and supernatural worlds; above all for the beauty and sweetness of its literature, from the full-bodied roistering of Geoffrey Chaucer to the sweet poignancy of medieval poetry. I don’t ‘believe’ any of the ideology underpinning it, but that doesn’t stop me immersing myself in it whole-heartedly for the duration of the reading.

Sorry to be so long-winded but I’m trying to identify why I reacted a little negatively to some aspects of this exhibition, admirable though it is in intent and execution. I recoiled a bit from the way the vast 400-year period it covers – of events, people, culture and meanings, hundreds of millions of human lives and stories and works and days, festivals, celebrations, communities, wars, pogroms, atrocities and carnivals – sometimes felt like it was being reduced to an all-too-familiar and modern shopping list of injustices and grievances, in which the weirdness, wonderfulness and otherness of medieval culture which I love so much sometimes felt like it had been lost.

Installation view of ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ @ the British Library

Explicitus est liber

Maybe you’ll have a completely different take on it. It really is a lovely exhibition and it really does open your eyes to the whole world of medieval women which has been so neglected for so long. Go and make your own mind up. And, of course, to find out whether you’re a witch. You never know…

Related reviews

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (1592)

JOHN FAUSTUS: All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyèd in their several provinces;
But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;

Title and provenance

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

Date Written: c. 1589 to 1592.

Source: In 1587 a version of the story of Doctor John Faustus was published in Frankfurt-on-Main, in German. Soon after – a 1592 edition is the earliest one extant – an anonymous English translation, containing modifications and additions, was published in England, under the title The Historie of the damnable life of Doctor John Faustus. It is clear from the numerous similarities in plot, episodes and even language that the History was Marlowe’s primary source for his play.

Doctor Faustus exists in two versions: the 1604 (‘A’ text) quarto is shorter; a second, longer version was published in 1616 (the ‘B’ text). Which one is more ‘authentic’ has been exercising Marlowe scholars for four hundred years. The editor of the New Mermaid edition – Roma Gill – thinks the shorter A version likely to be purer Marlowe, and the later B version includes additions by other writers. This is a review of the 1616 ‘B’, long version, as found on the ElizabethanDrama.org website.

Executive summary

The famous theologian Doctor John Faustus is spiritually unfulfilled with his chosen vocation, teaching and debating at the university in Wittenberg. He reviews all existing forms of human learning, dismissing them one by one as trash, fit only for small minds. He decides occult knowledge and magic is the only thing for him and the climax of part one is when he conjures a devil, an agent of Satan, Mephistopheles, and signs a contract with him, which gives Faustus the gift of sorcery and the secrets of the universe for 24 years, in exchange for his eternal soul.

Then there’s the middle bit where Faustus takes advantage of his magical powers, flying into space in a chariot drawn by dragons, an extended farce scene poking fun at the pope, before the most famous scene where he conjures up the most beautiful woman in all human history, Helen of Troy, with the words: ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships…’ Different printed editions of the play give different scenes demonstrating how Faustus uses his powers.

In the final part of this moralising fairy tale Mephistopheles returns and demands Faustus’s soul and, after a lot of pleading, Faustus is dragged down to hell. So let that be a lesson to you, children: Do NOT sign away your soul to the devil, no matter how tempting the short-term offer. ‘What must you not do, Johnny?’ ‘I must no sign my soul away to the devil, miss.’ ‘Good boy, Johnny.’

The play

Prologue

Consciously rejects the grand locations and warlike deeds of his earlier plays (Dido, Tamburlaine and the Jew of Malta) for something more intimate. The prologue introduces Dr John Faustus with a potted biography of his birth, upbringing and education at Wittenberg, where he soon excels in theology.

Till swoln with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspired his overthrow;
For, falling to a devilish exercise
And glutted now with learning’s golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursèd necromancy;
Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,
Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss:
And this the man that in his study sits.

This is very slick and professional, to take us from nothing to having a good grasp of Faustus’s character and biography in just 27 lines before the prologue indicates the scene with his hand, and the play opens. Very impressive.

Act 1

Dr Johann Faustus is sitting in his study reviewing books of learning, the law, medicine, politics, and dismisses them all as superficial trash:

Philosophy is odious and obscure;
Both law and physic are for petty wits;
‘Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me

Here, right at the start of the play a Good Angel and a Bad Angel appear to Faustus, respectively encouraging him, and telling him not to, study magic. Faustus summons two fellow students of the dark arts who have, apparently, helped him, Valdes and Cornelius. To all these characters, Marlowe allots his trademark booming verse, packed with soaring ambition, studded with stunning images of luxury and power, imagining what it will be like when they have total magical control:

VALDES: As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords,
So shall the spirits of every element
Be always serviceable to us three;
Like lions shall they guard us when we please;
Like Almain rutters with their horsemen’s staves,
Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides;
Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than has the white breasts of the queen of love:
From Venice shall they drag huge argosies,
And from America the golden fleece
That yearly stuffs old Philip’s treasury;

Faustus gets excited at the images of power and luxury his friends conjure up, and he invites them for dinner and to plan how to practice magic.

Scene 2. Street outside Faustus’s house

Two scholars enter and ask Faustus’s servant, Wagner, where his master is. The scene is padded out with comic material, namely that Wagner has picked up scraps of rhetoric and logic and so teases the two scholars by proving their arguments illogical or wrongly formed etc. Eventually he spits out that his master is at dinner with Valdes and Cornelius and the two scholars go away, sad, and tutting and shaking their heads, because that pair have a bad reputation for the dark arts.

Scene 3. A grove

This is the scene where Faustus, alone in a grove in the countryside, has drawn a circle and written into it various magical symbols and now recites a Latin spell, there is a crack of thunder, and a devil appears, Mephistopheles. Although he should be terrifying, he proceeds to explain the processes and procedures of devils in relatively bureaucratic terms: when they hear anyone abjure Christ, God and the Scriptures a devil will come speeding, hoping to win a soul.

Faustus’s superficiality, the lack of understanding behind all his fine reading, is amply demonstrated. He says he agrees with the ancient philosophers in thinking hell a children’s fable, of confounding heaven and hell. When Mephistopheles tries to explain that hell isn’t a world of punishments, it is deprivation of the boundless soul-filling job of being in heaven, Faustus mocks him and tells him to ‘learn of Faustus manly fortitude’. In other words, it is plain for everyone in the audience to see that Faustus is not only a blasphemer and infidel, he us stupid when it comes to the only thing in life which matters.

It is Faustus who boastfully makes the offer, telling Mephistopheles to go and tell his master, mighty Lucifer:

FAUSTUS: Say he surrenders up to him his soul,
So he will spare him four and twenty years,
Letting him live in all voluptuousness,
Having thee ever to attend on me,
To give me whatsoever I shall ask,
To tell me whatsoever I demand,
To slay mine enemies, and to aid my friends,
And always be obedient to my will.

You can see how this kind of megalomaniac over-reaching is first cousin to Tamburlaine’s heaven-vaulting ambition, and Faustus’s ambitions are cast in very similar terms:

By him I’ll be great emperor of the world,
And make a bridge thorough the moving air,
To pass the ocean with a band of men;
I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore,
And make that country continent to Spain,
And both contributary to my crown.
The Emperor shall not live but by my leave,
Nor any potentate of Germany.
Now that I have obtained what I desired.

Scene 4

A comic scene with Wagner the servant (who speaks in servant prose) who encounter a ‘clown’ or beggar in the street and raises two devils to terrify the clown into serving him (Wagner).

Wagner can raise devils? This scene, in fact all the scenes with Wagner and some of the banter between Faustus and Mephistopheles has a raggedy comedy about it. T.S. Eliot described The Jew of Malta as ‘a savage farce’ and Faustus also has farcical elements, as if Marlowe can’t take his own story seriously.

Scene 5. Faustus’s study

He listens to the arguments of the good and bad angel, but is resolved for bad, He realises:

The god thou serv’st is thine own appetite,

And yet he is determined to do it. He argues back against the good angel, and then – it being midnight – conjures Mephistopheles. The devil tells him to stab his arm to draw the blood to sign his pact with great Lucifer.

But something genuinely spooky happens. As Faustus tries to write, his blood keeps congealing, preventing him from continuing to sign away his soul. Mephistopheles hurries offstage and returns with a chafer of flame which they use to prevent Faustus’s blood congealing, and he finishes writing out the contract. But then appears on his arm the words Homo fuge, Latin for ‘man, flee!’ Faustus is momentarily panic-stricken, but Mephistopheles magics up a dancing troupe of devils to distract him. Thus reassured (or dazzled) Faustus reads out the contract he has drawn up: Mephistopheles will be his to command for 24 years to carry out his every wish, and then:

I, John Faustus of Wittenberg, Doctor, by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer, Prince of the East, and his minister Mephistophilis; and furthermore grant unto them, that, four-and-twenty years being expired, and these articles above written being inviolate, full power to fetch or carry the said John Faustus, body and soul, flesh and blood, into their habitation wheresoever.

Mephistopheles again double checks that Faustus is entering into the contract of his own free will. This is important for the very legal pernicketiness which characterises Christian theology. Faustus affirms it. Now commences his 24 years of fun.

Faustus asks Mephisopheles about hell and the latter gives a famous and profound description:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be.

Hell is the absence of God and of God’s grace which is what saves and redeems humans. It is not so much a place, as a condition we carry round with us. Hence Mephistopheles’ earlier declaration:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think’st thou that I, that saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

Once again Faustus shows his idiocy by saying he doesn’t believe hell exists, it’s an old wives’ tale. Nonetheless, Mephistopheles says he’ll bring him the most beautiful women in the world, each morning, fresh to his bed. And Mephistopheles gives him a book full of magic spells.

Scene 6

Some time later, in Faustus’s house, he accuses Mephistopheles of misleading him, of looking up at the stars and the beautiful heaven he will never see. Mephistopheles tries to talk him round, the two angels appear and the bad won triumphs, hardening Faustus’s heart. Incidentally, there’s an indication of what the pair have been up to:

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander’s love and Oenon’s death?
And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
Made music with my Mephistophilis?

He quizzes him about the nature of the solar system, the planets and the stars, which knowledge Mephistopheles rattles off but when Faustus asks him who made it all the devil literally cannot bring himself to utter the word God.

When the good angel prompts Faustus to try to repent he is visited by Lucifer and Beelzebub. They tell him not to think on heaven or call on God. To distract him they summon up an allegorical masque of the seven deadly sins. Faustus loves the show and Lucifer gives him a parting gift of a book of magic before exiting.

Scene 7

A comic scene between Robin and Dick, two ostlers or staff at an inn who have got their hands on one of Faustus’s books and appear to be thinking of using it to gain magical powers.

Chorus 1

The chorus describes how Faustus rode a chariot pulled by dragons out into the solar system to behold the planets in their motion. Returned to earth after 8 days, he is now riding a dragon across its surface and will soon arrive at Rome.

Scene 8

Faustus and Mephistopheles review the tour they’ve made through France, Germany and down into Italy. Faustus is loving it:

Whilst I am here on earth, let me be cloyed
With all things that delight the heart of man:
My four-and-twenty years of liberty
I’ll spend in pleasure and in dalliance…

Now they hide in order to watch the annual Festival of St Peter inside the palace of the Pope. A procession enters, the striking part of which is that a ruler named Bruno is in chains, and the Pope orders him to go on all fours so as to act as a footstool for him (the Pope) to ascend his throne.

This Bruno is a fictitious ‘anti-pope’, a role which arose in the 14th century when two different popes were elected for a period of fifty years, who opposed and anathematised each other. But there was never an anti-pope named Bruno, just as the pope in these scenes is referred to as Adrian and depicted as an enemy of the Holy Roman Emperor, whereas the one and only pope named Adrian (the only Englishman to have been pope) ruled from 1154 to 1159 and was an ally of the Holy Roman Emperor. Similarly, the scene features a King Sigismund of Hungary and there has never been a King Sigismund of Hungary. In other words, these names are just handy labels for a scene of broad farce. Similarly, the scene

Faustus and Mephistopheles watch all this then disguise themselves as cardinals of France and Padua in order to give the pope their theological opinion that the antipope Bruno should immediately be burned at the stake and the Emperor excommunicated. The pope hands Bruno over to our disguised pair to carry out the sentence.

Scene 9. The pope’s privy chamber

The pope is holding a feast for king Sigismund and his cardinals. Faustus reveals that he and Mephistopheles have magically transported Bruno safely back to Germany. The two real cardinals of France and Padua enter and are perplexed when the pope asks how their imprisoning and punishment of Bruno is going; both deny any knowledge although, of course, the pope’s entire court swears they saw it happen. So the cardinals are dragged off to prison and punishment.

Faustus gets Mephistopheles to say a spell (interesting to compare these spells with the same sort of thing Shakespeare used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to make him invisible and proceeds to wreak havoc, whispering insults in the pope’s ear, as if from his neighbour, whisking away the pope’s plates and goblet of wine, etc, eventually slapping the pope. Concluding some evil spirit is loose among them, the pope calls in some friars who solemnly chant magic spells, er, prayers, until Faustus and Mephistopheles set about them, too, beating them and throwing fireworks at them as they run away. Pantomime.

Scene 10. Street near an inn

Back to the serving men Robin and Dick. The vintner accuses them of stealing a cup from the inn. Rather over-reacting, Robin uses Faustus’s book to read and spell and conjure up Mephistopheles. As punishment for dragging him away from more important work, Mephistopheles transforms them into a dog and an ape, who promptly bark and bounce around the stage. Panto.

Scene 11. Court of the Holy Roman Emperor at Innsbruck

Two servants, Frederick and Martino, explain that Faustus has arrived at the Emperor’s court, having magically transported Bruno to Germany, and has promised to show the emperor all his historical antecedents.

Scene 12. The emperors ‘presence chamber’

The emperor formally greets Faustus and thanks him for rescuing Bruno, the German anti-pope. Faustus then presents a dumb show in which we all see the figure of Alexander the Great confront and defeat the Persian emperor Darius before setting the latter’s crown on the head of his paramour. The emperor is mightily impressed, though he has to be restrained by Faustus from embracing the dumbshow Alexander.

One of the emperor’s courtiers is a drunken nitwit named Benvolio, and as a result of saying he doesn’t believe in Faustus’s powers, the latter gives him the horns of a stag. Everyone laughs then Faustus menaces him with setting a pack of devils to tear him to pieces as Diana’s hounds tore Actaeon to pieces. The emperor intercedes and so Faustus relents and removes Benvolio’s horns. This is comedy, farce – but what strikes me is the use of classical myth to articulate it. The Greek myths and legends dominate Marlowe’s imagination from start to finish.

Scene 13. A grove near Innsbruck

In revenge for his humiliation, Benvolio organises an ambush with Frederick and Martino and, when Faustus comes along, they stab him, knock him to the ground and then chop off his head! They exult over his corpse but are terrified when the headless body gets to its feet. He cannot be killed. Now he conjures up Mephistopheles and two other devils to drag the three conspirators off to dump them in mud and drag them through thornbushes and throw them off steep rocks to break their bones, and they all exit, screaming.

That’s not all. Some soldiers had been included in the assassination attempt and when they now come forward to attack Faustus, the latter conjures up Mephistopheles and other devils in the guise of an army with drums and fife who march against the soldiers and chase them offstage with fireworks.

Scene 14

Show what became of the three conspirators Benvolio, Frederick and Marino, now covered in mud, scratched and bruised and,.. with stags horns on their heads! They conclude there is nothing they can do against such magic and will retreat to Benvolio’s castle, there to live in retirement till their shame has passed.

Scene 15

A convoluted comic scene in which a horse-courser or dealer begs Faustus to sell him his magic horse, which he finally does for 40 dollars but tells the man not to ride it into water. Barely 30 seconds have passed and Faustus has just gone to bed, before the dealer returns to say he did ride the horse into water and it disappeared leaving just a straw behind. Now the dealer goes to pull Faustus out of bed but his leg comes off in his hand, Faustus wakes up shouting Murder, murder’, and the dealer runs off. Faustus’s leg is magically restored (just as his head was in scene 13) and his servant tells him the Duke of Vanholt wishes to see him.

Scene 16

Robin, Dick, the horse-courser, and a carter are down the pub sharing their reasons for hating Faustus.

Scene 17. The Court of the Duke of Vanholt

The Duke thanks Faustus for building him a castle in the air. His wife, the duchess, is pregnant and expresses a fancy for grapes. Although it is midwinter, Faustus dispatches Mephistopheles who returns a few seconds later with a spray of wonderful fresh grapes.

The Duke and Duchess are still marvelling at this when there is a load of rowdy banging at the gate. It is Robin, Dick, the carter, and the horse-courser. They’re drunk, insult Faustus and demand more beer! Faustus asks the duke to indulge him and calls for more beer. This scene takes up an inordinate space, in which the horse dealer drunkenly asks whether Faustus can remember having his leg pulled off, Faustus says yes, the dealer asks where it is, Faustus replies, back here with me, and so on. Presumably the Elizabethan audience found all this very funny.

All four begin to accuse Faustus with their grievances but one by one he strikes them dumb, last of all the hostess who’s come to ask for her bill to be paid, and they exit like zombies. The duke and duchess are very amused.

Scene 18

Back at Faustus’s, Wagner enters to tell us his master is preparing to die, has given Wagner:

his wealth,
His house, his goods, and store of golden plate,
Besides two thousand ducats ready-coined.

Then we see Faustus at dinner with two scholars. They have been discussing who was the most beautiful woman in the world (as wise and learned scholars will, after a few beers) and decided it must be Helen of Troy. Faustus promptly gets Mephistopheles to lead her in, in a dumbshow of the same style as the one where Faustus conjured up Alexander the Great. They are immensely impressed and gratified, thank Faustus and leave.

The tone completely changes as an old man enters and warns Faustus, at length, to save his soul. Faustus is stricken with remorse and tries to repent but Mephistopheles turns savage, accuses him of breaking the bargain, and warns him he will tear his flesh in piecemeal.

Faustus is so terrified he instantly promises to renew his vow, and Mephistopheles hands him a dagger so he can cut his arm and renew the contract in his own blood and then, vengefully, orders Mephistopheles to torment the good old man who just visited him. Faustus asks for just one thing – that he may possess Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world they saw a few minutes ago, to distract him from his vow.

Re-enter Helen, passing over the stage between two Cupids which prompts the famous lines:

FAUSTUS: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? −
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
[He kisses her]
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies! −
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

What strikes me now about this speech is, again, the way it is drenched in references to Greek myth, and references Troy, Paris, Achilles, Jupiter, Semele and Arethusa.

Scene 19: in which Faustus pays his debt and is dragged down to hell

With a crack of thunder Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistophilis enter Faustus’s study. Separately, Faustus finalises his will with Wagner, gifting him all his belongings. Then the scholars visit and Faustus laments and regrets his life of sin, his promise and the threat of eternal damnation.

A scholar tells him to turn to God but the devils hold his tongue, dry his tears, pull down his hands so he cannot pray. Then he for the first time tells them the full story, of how he sold his soul to the devil for 24 years of partying, Horrified, the three scholars retire into the next room.

Now Mephistopheles closes in on him, admitting it was he who drew his taste to books of magic, closed up the books of divinity and steered Faustus’s soul to damnation. The good angel and bad angel appear, the good one showing him the throne in heaven Faustus would have been awarded, the bad one explaining now he will be dragged down to hell and hell appears to be a pretty bad place. Mephistopheles shows it to him:

EVIL ANGEL: Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror stare
Into that vast perpetual torture-house.
There are the furies tossing damnèd souls
On burning forks; their bodies boil in lead;
There are live quarters broiling on the coals,
That ne’er can die; this ever-burning chair
Is for o’er-tortured souls to rest them in;
These that are fed with sops of flaming fire,
Were gluttons, and loved only delicates,
And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates:
But yet all these are nothing; thou shalt see
Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be.

It is noticeable how traditional this image is, and how different from the much more subtle, psychological definition of hell (as the absence of God which all damned people carry around within themselves wherever they go) which Mephistopheles expressed at the start of the play. Too subtle for the climax of a tragedy, which requires blood and guts and screaming, or as much garish suffering as possible. And hence the reversion to a traditional fire and pitchforks interpretation here at the play’s climax.

The clock chimes eleven. He has an hour left and delivers a blisteringly intense speech of terrified desperation:

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
O, I’ll leap up to my God! − Who pulls me down? −
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ! −

The clock ticks relentlessly forward and then strikes midnight. There isn’t, as you might have expected, a big set-piece scene featuring Lucifer, Beelzebub et all gloatingly seizing him. Instead Faustus’s final moments are brief and brutal as a pack of devils enter and drag Faustus offstage as he screams his final lines:

O mercy, Heaven! look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books! − O Mephistophilis!

Even reading this I found genuinely harrowing. Well acted onstage it can be terrifying.

Scene 20

There is a short, half-page-long scene as the three scholars cowering next door, go into Faustus’s study and discover his body all torn to pieces, and recount the terrible screams they heard. Well, they’ll gather up his body and give him a fine funeral at which all the students of the university will wear black.

Chorus 2

Brief and to the point:

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learnèd man.
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practise more than heavenly power permits.

Thoughts

A divided text

Clearly there are two completely different types or tones of content sitting cheek-by-jowl in this strange uneven text: the genuinely tragical and sometimes very moving, and the farcical, panto content. Most scholars and indeed readers and audiences can easily see that the comic scenes were almost certainly not written by Marlowe. Marlowe’s humour, as demonstrated in The Jew of Malta, is stylish, cynical and savage. Much of the humour in Faustus’s comic scenes (pulling Faustus’s leg off, cutting his head off, four churls getting drunk down the pub) is just stupid.

Endless theology

There’s enough theological issues or problems in the play – the precise status of the good and bad angel, the extent of Faustus’s free will, whether God’s grace could save him up to the last minute – to keep serious-minded scholars in academic papers for the rest of time. After all, Marlowe was himself a scholarship-winning student of divinity at Cambridge and Roma Gill’s introduction informs us that Mephistopheles’ subtle vision of hell as exclusion from the bliss of salvation is in fact closely translated from a text by the 4th century Church Father, Saint John Chrysostom.

Dazzling escapades

For us non-theologians, though, it’s useful to make a list of Faustus’s various escapades: that he rides through the solar system in a chariot pulled by dragons (!), rides across Europe on the back of a dragon, gets to slap the pope and chase friars with fireworks, and that Mephistopheles changes two servants into an ape and a dog. He creates a masque featuring Alexander the Great and builds a castle in the air and, by implication, has Homer sing to him, and has sex with Helen of Troy. On the farcical end of the scale, he sells a horse dealer a horse which is in fact a straw, gives a drunken knight real stags’ horns, survives having his head cut off and his leg pulled off, and strikes four noisy chavs dumb.

Clever critics have pointed out that Faustus’s escapades mark stages on his degeneration: he starts out hymning the infinite power of the mind, associating with Homer and travelling the solar system, before degenerating into a court entertainer for the Duke of Vanholt, calling up historical masques and magicking up fresh grapes, before he becomes involved in the downright stupid escapades involving lost heads and legs and, in the final scenes, wishes to cease having a body altogether, to be buried in the earth or to become as incorporeal as the dew, so as to escape the torments of hell.

It’s a neat idea, but ignores the actual order of some of the adventures, not least that the best one – kissing Helen of Troy – happens at the end. But it does tie together all the adventures and bring out the often tawdry and banal nature of what people actually get when their dreams are fulfilled.

Marlowe’s Greek imagination

Shakespeare litters his plays with references to English folklore, dialect words and imagery (the names and symbolism of English flowers, for example). There’s nothing like that in Marlowe. In Marlowe almost every analogy or metaphor references Greek myths or legends. From the masque of Alexander the Great early on through the apparition of Helen of Troy at its climax, through to the best line in the short epilogue mentioning Apollo, and via hundreds of other references, the Greek myths and legends dominate Marlowe’s imagination from start to finish.

Campus tragedy

Dr Faustus is a tragedy about an academic. It is a tragedy about the overweening pride which comes from being very learnèd and superior, ‘glutted with learning’s golden gifts… swollen with cunning of a self-conceit’, as the prologue puts it – but lacking wisdom or morality.

In a way, it is a tragedy about the perils of over-education. There’s a modern genre called the campus novel or campus comedy, dating from Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim and characterising many of David Lodge’s novels. The presence of the three scholars right at the climax of the play highlights the fact that, all the way through, Dr Faustus is a campus tragedy.

Dr Faustus as Marlowe’s psychodrama

Marlowe studied Divinity at university, but also read widely in Latin classical literature. The quote from St John Chrysostom indicates how deeply he knew his theology, and a glance at any of the poems or plays shows how drenched his imagination was in the Greek myths and legends.

It isn’t the most obvious thing about the play, but Dr Faustus can be read as a dramatised debate between these two halves of Marlowe’s education, between the two major cultural traditions of Europe, Christian belief and the enormous cultural heritage of the classical world.

On the whole Faustus’s vision of power and the infinite reach of the human imagination are expressed through metaphors and references to Greek myth – the downsides, the price to pay for overweening ambition, the limits of the purely human, are expressed in theological terms. Man can aspire to the marvellous – but at the end of the day, he is a creature, created by a Creator, to whom he owes an infinite debt.

Obviously this tension is openly expressed throughout the play, most narrowly in the debates between the good and evil angel, or in the warnings of the old man, who wanders in off the street to tell Faustus to repent. It is encoded in the imagery of the play, in the two contrasting sets of symbols and images, one pagan, one Christian.

But you can argue that the debate, the conflict of value systems, comes to a symbolic climax in the figure of Helen of Troy, and her appearance just before Faustus is dragged offstage by the devils.

Helen is maybe the most famous figure from all Greek myth, an image of worldly beauty, of sensual bliss who also epitomises the appeal and attraction of classical culture, and by extension, the world of the Imagination, with its promise of intellectual reward, emotional comfort and psychological reassurance. How many thousands of artists and millions of art-lovers find consolation in turning from the banal, dirty, frail and disappointing realities of the world, to open a book and enter a wonderful world of imaginative consolation.

And yet… Helen has been conjured by a devil. The entire thing is a deception. She is not real, the pleasure she brings is not real. When Faustus says:

Her lips sucks forth my soul: see, where it flies! −

There is a clear and very obvious ambiguity in the line. It is simultaneously a lover’s expression of sensual bliss, the kind of erotic hyperbole common to Renaissance poets and their heirs – but at the same time has a diabolical and theological meaning. The devil who made or is impersonating Helen really is sucking out his soul. The Helen Faustus and the audience sees is a gorgeous mask over a death’s-head skull.

And so, along with being a storming theatrical entertainment, and a satire on the entire notion of the over-ambitious Renaissance Man – Dr Faustus can also be read as dramatising the tensions in Marlowe’s divided mind between the two central traditions of European thought, which he was expert in, which saturated his thinking, and which he never managed to reconcile in his short life.

Marlowe’s works

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews