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A Dangerous Idea

In 1645, a young Jew who had been captured in Portuguese Brazil was brought to Lisbon and tried by the Inquisition for heresy. He had been reluctantly baptized by his parents in France, where the practice of Judaism was forbidden. His trial, in many ways so much like other inquisitorial trials, is different from any other trial I know of in one respect: The “heretic,” Isaac de Castro Tartas, defended his right to practice Judaism on the basis of a universal natural right to freedom of conscience. This was a bold defense but it ultimately failed; he was burned at the stake in 1647, at the age of nineteen. But his long exchanges with his inquisitors on religious authority and individual conscience are preserved in a lengthy dossier housed today in the Portuguese National Archives, and tell us much about the hopes and fears around this issue.

Anonymous engraver, 17th century. The text reads “Method for burning those condemned by the Inquisition” and depicts the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon, Portugal.

Today, people who live in democratic societies take religious freedom for granted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most Europeans found the idea of “freedom of conscience” deeply threatening. How could the fabric of society withstand competing religious ideas? What would convince people to live moral lives in the absence of a single, state-supported church? The anxiety Europeans felt about religious freedom impeded the struggle to achieve that freedom. Isaac de Castro’s trial vividly reflects the great divide between the few who supported this idea and the powerful authorities who rejected it. The inquisitors’ views about religious authority is often disparaged; but even in 2011 it is just as important to understand the mentality of the inquisitors as it is to understand the arguments of Isaac de Castro.

Castro defended himself by arguing that even if the inquisitors chose to regard him as a baptized heretic, he was not guilty of heresy, “because an act that is done in accordance with one’s conscience cannot be judged culpable, and the act I have and will continue to do – the act of professing Judaism – is done according to the dictates of my conscience.” Castro supported his argument by describing his experience as a practicing Jew in Amsterdam and Dutch Brazil. These were exceptional environments in which freedom of conscience had been written into law. The inquisitors would have been well aware that Dutch society was thriving and had not been torn apart by the religious diversity of its inhabitants.

The Kahal Zur Israel synagogue in Recife, Brazil was the first Jewish congregation in the New World. It was founded in 1636 during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco.

But the inquisitors were imbued with a medieval perspective on conscience, according to which individual conscience was “in error” if it differed from the teachings of the Catholic Church. Castro was accused of ignoring the Church’s authority and presumptuously adhering to his own personal beliefs. Confronted with this accusation, he strategically abandoned his argument as an individual and adopted an authoritarian counter-view. He argued that as a Jew by ancestry, and having been circumcised, he was bound to observe the Law of Moses – an argument invoking (Jewish) religious authority that met the inquisitors on their own ground. This concession by Castro,however, proved fatal. The inquisitors argued that baptism, regardless of ancestry, obligated Castro to observe the teachings of the Catholic Church. Having invoked religious authority, Castro had opened himself to attack. If “conscience” meant obedience to doctrines that did not come from within, as he had been pressured to admit, was he not bound to the first obligation he had incurred in his life, that is, baptism?

A great deal of pain, suffering, and experimentation have accompanied the process by which we have come to regard religious beliefs as a matter of individual conscience. But to understand events in our own time, it is important to understand that such an idea is not at all obvious – that for many centuries this was an idea that few could even imagine. An examination of the intense struggle in early modern Europe between those who defended religious authority and those who resisted it brings into focus the great difficulty involved in establishing a principle of religious freedom. It may help us to understand the frequent failure of well-intentioned efforts to impose an idea cherished in the western world, but alien to people conditioned to accept religious authority and to condone the persecution of religious nonconformists.

You may also like:

Historian Richard Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition: an Historical Revision (1999) offers a nuanced reassessment of the Spanish Inquisition’s role in history.

Yale Professor of Brazilian history Stuart Schwartz examines religious toleration in All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2009).

Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (1999).

Images via Wikimedia Commons

Family Outing in Austin, Texas

By Madeline Hsu

This photograph captures a 1943 family outing to The University of Texas, in Austin.

Image of an Asian family from July 19, 1943 sitting on the edge of a fountain on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin

The young father, Fred Wong, was a grandson of one of “Pershing’s Chinese“–a group of 527 Chinese who accompanied General John J. Pershing into the United States after the failure of his campaigns against General Francisco “Pancho” Villa in 1917. Villa threatened retaliation against the Chinese for aiding Pershing, who determined to bring them back with him to the United States even though he had to lobby for special federal permission to do so in violation of immigration laws that banned the admission of all Chinese laborers. Many of these refugees settled in San Antonio where they established grocery stores, laundries, and restaurants.

Fred Wong grew up in San Antonio and in 1936 married Rose Chin from Chelsea, Massachusetts. They moved to Austin in 1938 and opened New China Food Market at 714 Red River. Fred served as a Rollingwood Councilman and R.C. became a well-known artist. The couple had three children, Mitchel–reportedly the first Chinese baby born in Austin–and Linda, and Kay. Mitchel went on to attend UT and became a leading ophthalmologist in central Texas, credited with introducing Lasik surgery to the region.

On May 11, 2011, Mitchel Wong was honored with a Legacy Award at the Asian American Community Leadership Awards jointly organized by UT’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, the Center for Asian American Studies, and the Texas Exes Asian Alumni Network.

For more information about Chinese in Texas, please visit:
The Institute of Texan Cultures
The University of Texas at Austin’s Asian American Studies website
The Texas State Historical Association online

You can look up materials available at the Austin History Center, here in its finding guide.

More about Asian Americans, in Texas and beyond:
Edward J. M. Rhoads, “The Chinese in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81 (July 1977).
Irwin Tang, ed., Asian Texans: Our histories and Our Lives (2008).
Pawan Dhingra, Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (2007).

The photograph of the Wong family is posted here with the kind permission of the Austin History Center; AR.2008.005(027), Wong Family Papers, Austin History Center.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Naming and Picturing New World Nature

by Maria Jose Afanador

When Cassiano dal Pozzo, the Pope’s personal assistant, returned to the Vatican from Spain in 1626, he brought with him a Mexican manuscript on natural history, the Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis. The “herbal” was a marvelous Mexican manuscript containing illustrations of more than 180 plants. Commonly known as Codice de la Cruz-Badiano, it is considered the first illustrated survey of Mexican nature produced in the New World.

In 1552, the son of the Viceroy, Francisco de Mendoza, sent the Latin manuscript to Spain, where it probably remained until the early seventeeth century, when it came into the possession of Diego de Cortavila y Sanabria. It next appeared in the library of the Italian Cardinal Francesco Barberini, where it remained until 1902, when the Barberini library became part of the Vatican Library. The manuscript was rediscovered in 1929 by Charles Upson Clark and finally, in 1991, Pope John Paul II returned the Libellus to Mexico, where it is now in the library of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.

The herbal is organized in chapters associated with parts of the body, starting with afflictions of the head, eyes, ears, nose, teeth, and cheeks; it then goes to the chest and stomach, and continues with the knees and feet; it ends with “falling sickness or comitial sickness” and remedies for “fear or faint-heartedness, mental stupor, for one afflicted by a whirlwind or a bad wind, … and for a traveler crossing a river or lake.” The diseases treated in the herbals are named in Latin in accordance with the tradition of medieval and early modern European herbals. However, the names of the plants are all written in Náhuatl, the indigenous Aztec language.

The manuscript, produced by a Nahua physician, Martín de la Cruz, and translated into Latin by Juan Badiano, was a gift for the king that sought to demonstrate the worthiness of educating the Nahua nobility in the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. At first glance, this marvelous codex resembles a typical medieval herbal. A closer look, however, reveals a fascinating blend of European and Aztec cultures. The codice can be viewed as a form of expression of the Nahua in a context of increased European influence and as a manner of dealing with a changing reality.

Visual culture is a powerful means by which different societies depict reality and convey meanings. The images contained in this sixteenth-century manuscript pose great challenges to scholars willing to consider visual evidence as core material of historical analysis. What was the purpose of the pictographic material as utilized by the authors of the codice? Can we determine which patterns and conventions are purely Aztec or European? Is there such thing as a pure visual tradition? Does it make sense to study colonial sources under the assumption of cultural contamination? Aside from questions of cultural purity or contamination, perhaps a more interesting question to be asked is whether the purpose of these illustrations is primarily informational or aesthetic.

As a gift to the king, aesthetics certainly played an important role in the purpose of the illustrations. The beauty of the pictures is undeniable, and the extensive use of colors to depict nature surpasses other depictions of nature of the time. Although scholars have regarded the manuscript as a European source due to its resemblance to late medieval and early modern herbals, the codice contains pictographic elements of the Nahua tradition such as the glyphs, which convey both descriptive elements and the ecology of the plants. Take for example the Nahua glyph for stone –tetl– which works as a ideogram to point to the rocky soil in which the plant grows in the illustration above. The ants visible among the roots in the illustration below also indicate the environment in which this plant grows. The ants, however, are not associated with any Náhuatl glyph but it was common in European herbals to include associated parasites in such illustrations.

The Codice de la Cruz-Badiano is an example of the encounter of between writing systems, and thus of systems of knowledge, with multiple swings from the pictographic-glyphic tradition to the alphabetical. The illustrations are by no means subordinated to the writing. Visual evidence and linguistic analysis of Náhuatl offer ways of approaching the complexities of cultural forms and to provide information about natural history that was not present in the Latin texts.

This article is excerpted from the forthcoming publication:

Maria José Afanador Llach. “Nombrar y representar. Escritura y naturaleza en el Códice De la Cruz-Badiano, 1552.” In Fronteras de la Historia, vol. 16-1, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, June 2011.

The codice is available in facsimile: De la Cruz, Martín, The Badianus manuscript (Codex Barberini, Latin 241) Vatican Library; an Aztec herbal of 1552. Ed. Emily Walcott Emmart. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940.

For more on the codice see:

Debra Hassig, “Transplanted Medicine: Colonial Mexican Herbals of the Sixteenth Century.” Anthropology and Aesthetics 17-18, Spring/‌Autumn (1989).

History Underfoot

by Erika M. Bsumek

History can sometimes surround us – sometimes it’s even underfoot. This rug, from the Art and Art History Library Collection at the University of Texas, represents the kind of textiles that were made by skilled Navajo weavers and sold on the Navajo reservation from the late 19th into the early 20th century.

The attractive geometric designs of such creations corresponded with other fashion forward styles of the era and they became popular additions to dens and “Indian corners” across the U.S. Navajo rugs have had a lasting influence on interior design ever since. Consumers currently spend millions of dollars every year for antique rugs and blankets, newer rugs still being created by Navajo weavers, or even the less expensive “American Indian style” rugs made in Mexico or India.

So, what’s the history of a rug like this one and why should we care about it? One view is that after the arrival of the Spanish and the introduction of sheep in North America, weaving became central to the development of trade goods throughout the Southwest. Thus, Navajo textiles reflect Spanish influence and cultural exchange. When Anglos began settling in the region, they developed a taste for woven goods and further altered the trade. Traders encouraged weavers to include borders, like the Greek key style design found in this rug, similar to those found on Persian rugs.

In the 1880s, the white traders who encouraged these changes knew that the beautiful Navajo textiles could be sold to white consumers – if marketed correctly. Another view, the Navajo view, is that Spiderwoman (a key spiritual figure in Navajo cosmology) gave Navajo women the skill they needed to fashion cotton and wool into beautiful creations to trade and feed their families.

Traders like Lorenzo Hubbell, who ran the Ganado Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona, turned their attention to selling Navajo rugs as a way to generate income for the post. Hubbell’s first step was to convince famed hotelier Fred Harvey to stock his hotel gift shops with Navajo blankets and rugs. Harvey also used Navajo rugs as decorative accessories throughout his hotel. This meant that railway tourists to the Southwest could simply stroll into the hotel’s lobby, see the beautiful the rugs used throughout the hotel, enter the store, and purchase a rug to take home. Beyond Harvey’s gift shop sales, traders like Hubbell also published catalogues that they shipped to potential customers or curio stores throughout the United States. The text and advertisements that appeared in trader catalogues promoted the traders as much as, if not more so, than the weavers.

This kind of marketing made Navajo textiles part of an emerging fascination with “primitive’ peoples. By the early 1900s, Americans across the United States were collecting goods from Africa, Asia, and the American Southwest. Just as painters like Picasso began to include elements of indigenous art in modernist art forms, consumers could buy goods that reflected similar design elements: geometrical, bold, abstract.

As consumer fascination with Navajo rugs took hold in the marketplace, rugs grew in value. But, where were the weavers who made the products? How were they treated? Ironically, although Navajo textiles took on social value, Indians were being de-valued in society. Government efforts to assimilate Indians remained strong well into the twentieth century. In response, Navajo weavers, in particular, have worked to preserve their culture through their weavings. So, the next time you see a Navajo rug, you might want to consider its history – and more importantly, the history of the people who made it.

Read more about the marketing of Navajo crafts:

Erika Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Mrs. Zahra Haider

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

Lahore, Pakistan (June 28, 2005)

Transcript:

Zahra Haider: Actually, I was born in Dehra Dun, the year was 1928. And Dehra Dun is in India. And I was born there. We came back to Lahore and I lived with my grandparents! My own mother got very ill, she had some problem with her legs, she couldn’t walk. She recovered from that, but at that time she was like that. So my Aunt, my father’s sister, she took me over and then I lived with her all my life and she became my adopted mother.

AA: You have lived most of your life in Lahore?

ZH: Most of my life. I remember when we were in our old house, it was a big house, which is a big house with a big courtyard inside and a big garden outside. It was a big area. And we used to all sleep inside in the courtyard with all the beds laid out and mosquito nets and everything and one table fan for all of us because we used to be in a row, all the beds laid out. Then, you know the first sound one woke up to in the morning, was we could hear the noise of the lion roaring in the zoo! Really! That! And then we could hear the cocks, our own cocks and things crow and everything. And then there used to be the Salvation Army band which used to march around outside on the road of our house. These are the few things. There was a beggar woman who used to come early in the morning and she used to sing for her pennies. Those are the few noises I remember very clearly… We can’t hear any lion any more.

[Audio and Transcript Edited from Original]

AA: What happened in Lahore in your memory during the partition days?

ZH: See, we had gone up to Murree. It happened the summer. First, it started with this that we used to sleep upstairs in our house. On the roof! And we used to see—our neighbors were Hindus—surrounded. We had a lot of neighbors who were Hindus and we were quite friendly with them! But we saw them bringing up guns and things. Then we also got our guns. Inside the city, arson started, in the summer. And people were burning—inside the city, there were houses being burned—Hindus would burn Muslims, Muslims would burn Hindus. I don’t say that it was only “the bad Hindus” who were doing it. Muslims did in retaliation also! I don’t know if they started it but that’s how it [indistinguishable]. And it was such a hot summer, you can’t imagine!

We had to have our exams and all. We used to sit inside there, in the rooms—there were no air conditioners then—with the fans going. We had given our exams and all, then after that the real trouble started. Then, of course, our Hindu friends—we had friends, we used to go to the same college and everything—they took all their things away. We said, “Why are you taking them? You’ll come back when the holidays are over!” They said, “No, we are not going to come back if this is Pakistan.” And they took everything they could, you know, and moved.

AA: From the hostel?

ZH: From the hostel, and even from their homes. This is the sad thing, when one people get uprooted from their homes.

[Audio and Text Edited from Original]

When we came back from the hills, we had to go to college for our studies. And when we went to the college, it was closed. The only thing that was up were the bills, on the boards. And then, of course, we paid our bills! And then when our teachers came in they said that there aren’t enough people here, because most of the students were Hindus and Sikhs. Now we were few Muslim girls left. So they said, “No, we will now start.” Because there were a lot of refugees coming into the hostel. Because ours was Kinnaid College and the brother college was FC [Forman Christian] College. And they made FC College into a hospital. We all went. All the wounded people were taken there, the refugees. We went to work over there. They said they’ll give us marks for that. We went there and you can’t imagine what we saw!

[Audio and Transcript Edited from Original]

There were a whole group of us who had to go to work there. We used to be there form the morning to the evening. Then one afternoon we just said, “Let’s take some cold coffee and have sandwiches and have something to drink.” So we were standing upstairs on the roof and having this when the doctor with whom we were working went past and said “Here you are having so much fun and go and see what’s happening downstairs! We went down and a new lot of refugees had come in. Uff! They were in all those wounded states and everything. Then we started off by cleaning their wounds, giving them bath. We needed clothes for them. Half of them were naked. We came home whichever way we could and took out our mother’s old clothes lying to be washed and took them there and gave it to those people. We washed them, scrubbed them. We couldn’t wash them properly. Their hair was absolutely matted and full of lice! We had to cut it open and it was worn down over here, lice coming down that—they were even going all over our hands. But we had to do that! And we gave them baths and bandaged them then brought food for them, and fed them.

Little children without arms, with their hands cut off, they were just saying, “I have no mother, give me something! Give me something!” So one would give them food and things, and feed them. Then there was one occasion, there was this lady who had maggots in her wounds. And she was a beautiful red-headed girl and she had a little baby with her. The doctor spent the whole morning getting out the—first they said, “She’s about to die, we won’t do anything.” There are so many others who we can help. Then they came around the next morning and she was still living. So he picked out all the maggots. And when he had picked them all out, she died. That was so sad.

Review of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia (2000) by Urvashi Butalia

Urvashi Butalia’s remarkable book on India’s partition emerged out of the terrible violence that gripped Delhi, not in 1947, when the partition took place, but in 1984. In the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguard, the citizens of Delhi unleashed a murderous campaign of violence on the Sikh community as a whole. Delhi-ites were horrified to discover both the inaction of the local authorities to provide safety and security for citizens, and the failure of the media to report the atrocities taking place.

In response, South Asian scholars began to see for the first time, the holes in the official narratives of India’s 1947 partition into independent Pakistan and India. In this book, Urvashi Butalia turns to oral histories to tell the real story of the violence in Delhi and across North India in 1947. In Butalia’s oral histories both perpetrators and victims of the violence in Punjab reveal amazing stories of complicity and action. She contextualizes the stories by also narrating an official history of partition that covers the major events, including the story of her own divided family. Linking varied narratives illuminates facets of the partition story that are often obscured by concentration on political histories.

Butalia’s revelation that violence against women during the partition was not always connected to the narrative of religious identity gone awry is an important step in creating a gendered history of partition that shows how women became pawns in a national game about honor and community. The bodies of women came to represent the strength of different communities and their vulnerability exposed the weakness of male protectors.

Throughout these explorations, Butalia’s own concerns about the relationship between nation-building and violence come to the fore. Her oral histories consistently point to violence as an “outsider” act, perpetrated on communities by people from outside those communities. Butalia explains, “as long as violence can be located somewhere outside, a distance away from the boundaries of family and the community, it can be contained. It is for this reason, I feel, that during Partition, and in so much of the recall of Partition, violence is seen as relating only to the ‘other.’”

Many of Butalia’s partition narratives are surprising and touching. They reveal the difficulties of remembering violence and speaking about it aloud. Some of Butalia’s brave narrators remember their own complicity in actions that sharply defined religious difference and marginalized religious minorities, which became one of many reasons the subcontinent was divided.

A Medieval Vision

by Martha G. Newman

In the last years of the twelfth-century, a monk named Engelhard, from the German monastery of Langheim, composed stories about miraculous events and visions he believed his fellow monks had experienced. This was not a decision made lightly: parchment was expensive, the process of writing laborious, and monastic authors needed permission from their superiors to write at all. But Engelhard (and his abbot) considered this project worthwhile. His stories preserved memories of holy monks, celebrated the special sanctity of his monastic order, and encouraged proper behavior. Other monks must have found this collection of stories worthwhile. Over the next century, it was copied – still by hand, still on parchment – at least four times.

A Cistercian manuscript of Gregory the Great's Moral Commentary on Job, created around 1111. A monk is seen wielding an ax, and the tree has some marks near the base. The monks and the tree form the letter "I." — A Cistercian manuscript of Gregory the Great’s *Moral Commentary on Job*, created around 1111. Today it is in the municipal library in Dijon, France (ms 173). The monks and the tree form the letter “I.”

The historical text I present here is one of Engelhard’s monastic stories. I have transcribed it from an early thirteenth-century manuscript and translated it from Latin into English. It contains a striking and unusual image: an apparition of the Virgin holding a vase filled with the sweat she had collected from monks laboring in fields. The image reinforces the purpose of Engelhard’s collection, for Mary praised the monks’ work and the holiness of their monastery; after hearing the story of the vision, Engelhard claimed that the monks worked still harder. However, this story does more than exhort and praise these Cistercian monks. It also illustrates changing attitudes toward labor as Europe moved from a subsistence to a commercial economy.

Engelhard was a monk in the Cistercian order. The first Cistercian monastery was founded in 1098, the same year that the crusaders conquered the city of Jerusalem. Just as the First Crusade demonstrated the combination of technological and economic advances and new religious impulses that allowed Europe to go on the offensive, so the growth of the Cistercian order in the twelfth century also combined a new understanding of religious ideas with technological and economic innovations. These monks sought to follow, as closely as possible, the strictures of the monastic rule written by St. Benedict 600 years earlier. One result of their adherence to the Benedictine Rule was that they rejected the economic practices of their monastic contemporaries, most of whom lived off the labor of a subject peasantry. The Cistercians instead wanted to live off their own labor; they refused gifts of manors and peasant revenues and, as a result, accumulated pasture, waste, and other territory not already settled by peasants. As the monks cleared these lands, raised sheep and pigs, and created workshops for metallurgy and other crafts, they quickly became participants in a new commercial and money-based economy.

The Cistercians’ attitudes toward work did not change as quickly as their economic practices. Medieval society inherited two sets of ideas about work, both of which held work in low esteem. The classical tradition of ancient Greek and Rome valued a cultured leisure and disdained the labor of those who made this cultured leisure possible. The early Christian interpretation of Genesis emphasized that God condemned Adam and Eve to toil and pain and presented labor as a result of human sinfulness. Throughout much of the middle ages, peasants were often seen as cursed by God because they had to labor in order to survive. When the Cistercians monks included agricultural work in their monastic customs, many of their contemporaries were puzzled to see aristocratic men working as peasants: “How, truly, is it religion to dig the ground, to cut down trees, to haul manure?” critics asked.

Even the early Cistercians still viewed labor as a penance for sin. They saw their willingness to take on the work of peasants as teaching them humility and control over their bodies: work was a means of imitating the humility and suffering of Christ, not a way to produce goods for consumption and sale. Soon after the foundation of their order, the Cistercians recognized that it was difficult to combine their prescribed hours of prayer with the demands of an agricultural economy; they may also have realized that aristocratic monks were not skilled at tending sheep and harvesting grain. As a result, they formed a second group of monks within their communities. These “laybrothers” spent less time at prayer and more at work, and they were probably responsible for the economic success of many Cistercian communities.

Engelhard was not the only Cistercian to tell a story about an apparition of the Virgin Mary who encouraged Cistercian labor. There are versions in other Cistercian story collections, but these depict Mary visiting the monks while they are at work, and they emphasize the wonder of seeing such noble men toiling as peasants in the fields. They emphasize labor as a form of penance which has a spiritual value only if it has been chosen voluntarily. Engelhard’s story is different, and suggests a changing attitude toward work. The monk in his story was the cellerar – the official in charge of the laybrothers, of paying hired workers, and generally maintaining the economic well-being of the monastery. And, in Engelhard’s version, this cellerar asks the apparition whether work done out of necessity has the same spiritual value as that done voluntarily. Mary’s response is remarkable: she says that she values both forms of labor and both will receive a reward.

Engelhard’s story suggests a growing recognition of the economic value of work. His ideas are akin to those of other late twelfth-century authors who rejected the idea that those who toiled out of economic necessity were cursed by God, who began to value the involuntary labor of peasants, and who started to quantify both time and production. We are not yet observing a society in which goods are valued primarily by their market worth: Engelhard’s story depicts monks producing sweat for Mary to collect rather than commodities to sell. But Engelard’s story of a monastic vision demonstrates that European attitudes toward work had started to change in tandem with the rise of a new commercial economy in the high middle ages.

The grange of the monastery of Langheim. Plants at the forefront of the image are decorated with gold and purple ribbons. — The grange (barn and workshops) of the monastery of Langheim. Today, the remaining buildings from Langheim are part of the town of Lichtenfels, in Upper Franconia, Germany.

A Monk’s Vision of the Virgin Mary (translated by Martha G. Newman)

This event happened in a monastery of our order, in a monastery that is renowned throughout France. Everyone believes it, because the man who saw it has many witnesses to his testimony.

It was harvest time, and as the monks worked in the fields, they sweat heavily with the hard work and under the heat of the day. When evening came, they went to bed and closed the door to their dormitory. The cellarer was a holy man, wise and mature, and of such good character that he alone was allowed to remain outside to take care of the hired workers. When he was finished, he went in to go to sleep, but the door to the dormitory was closed. What should he do? Beat on the door? He was not willing to knock, because the monks were resting. Should he then leave? But then he himself would have no rest. Preferring to inconvenience himself rather than his brothers, he entered the chapter room and sat on the steps.

But he did not sleep, and behold! the young woman entered, her light preceding two other women, and she approached the monk and asked if he slept.

He responded that he was awake, but asked why, against all monastic custom and in the middle of the night, the women entered the monastery without a care.

The woman said, “I am Mary, who cares for all who are in this abbey and in this order.” She carried a glass vase, which she held to her nose as if capturing the smell from it. And she said, “ I have visited today my monks in the field, and I collected their sweat for myself in this vase. For me it is the most pleasant smell, and it is certainly worthy for my Son, and it will return the highest reward.

The monk then asked, “O holy Lady, how important is our labor for you which is not so much done from voluntary devotion as from the necessity of our poverty?”

And she answered, “What do you say? Have you not heard that what is voluntary receives a penalty and duty earns the reward? If duty receives the reward, what is voluntary now receives a part. But whether out of necessity or voluntary, what you do is mine. I claim all of your work for myself, and what I receive, I remunerate.”

Having said this, she disappeared, and the monk slept sweetly, thus refreshed in hope, comforted in faith, and willing to work.

When morning came, he joyfully and devotedly reported what he had seen to the abbot at the chapter meeting. All were joyful, all believed him, and no one doubted it because of the seriousness of his character. All were stirred up, each was aroused to work. They labored and they sweated in such a manner that Mary, as she came near, could fill up her vase.

And thus Mary was accustomed to sport sweetly with her sons; thus she showed herself in a vision to them, offering them the gift of peace and grace. Those who were meek heard and rejoiced, those who were discouraged heard and were comforted; the lazy were inspired; all ran easily and without exhaustion to give glory to Christ and Mary, and from them receiving grace.

From Engelhard of Langheim’s Miracle Book. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 13097, ff. 145v-146r.

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