https://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Touch-in-the-Middle-Ages-300x185.png 300w, By Ken Mondschein
One of the most-mourned casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic is human touch. Psychologists tell us that this is not merely a want, but a need: Touch stimulates the immune system and staves off depression. It builds social bonds. Children who are not touched can become antisocial, angry, and aggressive. Harry Harlow, in a now-infamous experiment, found that baby monkeys preferred a plush mother-substitute to one that was made of wire but could provide food. Even in the best of times, we are a touch-starved society: We live in alienating, physically distancing cities and suburbs; social norms and internalized homophobia in our culture keep men from embracing or holding hands; and the justified backlash against sexual harassment has taught us to keep anything that might be construed as a “bad touch” to ourselves. One of the critiques of Joe Biden is his inappropriate touching of women, but videos and photos show him continuing to put his hands on strangers—something that was taught not so long ago in “how to be charismatic” classes.
Touch, especially homosocial touch, had many important roles in the Middle Ages. One of the most interesting passages in Jean of Joinville’s Life of St. Louis is when the king and his court, after a defeat, have an angry and contentious debate over whether or not to return to France or remain in the Holy Land. Joinville argues to remain, but fearing both his fellow nobles and the king are angry with him, walks away from the company and stands with his arms thrust through a grated window:
As I was standing there, the King came and leant over my shoulder and placed both his hands upon my head. And I thought that it was Lord Philip of Annemoes, who had plagued me enough that day, because of the advice I had given the King; and I said: “Leave me in peace, Lord Philip!” By mishap, as I jerked my head, the King’s hand slipped down over my face, and I recognised the King by an emerald that he wore on his finger.
St. Louis and Joinville confer, and the king reveals that it was his intention to remain, and he was grateful to Joinville for his support. But part of this communication was by touch: Rather than being the mocking touch of an opponent, the king’s touch is comforting, reveals his confidence in Joinville, and emboldens him to continue arguing his side.
There are many, many other examples of touching in the feudal relationship. The great French historian Marc Bloch discusses in his Feudal Society (first published in French as La Société Féodale, 1939) how part of the ceremony of fealty was placing one’s hands between one’s lord’s, and how the knightly accolade could be an embrace – “welcome to the family.” Bloch’s book The Royal Touch (Rois et Thaumaturges, 1924) discusses how the touch of the kings of England and France was supposed to cure skin diseases and was seen as a sign of divine appointment. Less gently, Bloch also discusses in Feudal Society how children were slapped at memorable events to fix them in their memories.
Bloch also discusses touching in religion. Unlike modern museums, where one cannot physically interact with the objects, medieval people had an obsession with touching relics in churches. Relics were conduits to the divine; to be “real,” they couldn’t simply be something in the imagination, but something—someone—one had to sense with one’s physical body. Touch is proof.
But relics, even if they are held to be representative of personalities, are still objects. It is interpersonal touch in the Middle Ages that is so important, such as the kiss of peace. The most outrageous example of this that comes to mind—albeit one that still involves kissing the deceased—is when in 1407 the prevôt (royally-appointed mayor) of Paris was forced to make amends for hanging two students accused of murder. The University held that the students should have been tried in an ecclesiastical court and threatened to go on strike, ruining the city financially. The prevôt was forced to take the corpses off the gibbet with his own hands, give them the kiss of peace, and deliver them to the University.
Even during times of plague, medieval people could, and did, touch one another—indeed, they had to. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio points out, the reaction in Florence to the Black Death was not total social isolation, but restriction:
Some… formed small communities, living entirely separate from everybody else…. Others…. thought the sure cure for the plague was to drink and be merry, to go about singing and amusing themselves, satisfying every appetite they could.
It was only when one was visibly taken ill that touch was avoided: “To speak to or go near the sick brought infection and a common death to the living; and moreover, to touch the clothes or anything else the sick had touched or worn gave the disease to the person touching,” Boccaccio observed. “Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them.” Likewise, he saw those who abandoned the city and human society altogether to quarantine themselves in the countryside as “cruel”: Some degree of social distancing was reasonable, but the danger must be met communally.
Ken Mondschein is a history professor at UMass-Mt. Ida College, Anna Maria College, and Boston University, as well as a fencing master and jouster. Click here to visit his website.
Click here to read more from Ken
Top Image: British Library MS Royal 10 E IV f. 24r
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