I was delighted to be asked to present the lecture in Medieval Studies for this year, and to be able to use it as an opportunity to present new work on the earliest Latin Maimonides. Many thanks to Henrike Lähnemann, Mark Williams, and Oxford Medieval Studies for inviting me. Although the internet failed us at the time, I was able to have a version of the lecture recorded to share here.
And don’t miss the trumpet fanfare and lovely introduction by Henrike that we caught before the wireless failed:
We visited Gloria in late September 2019 in her apartment in a senior living complex in Pittsburgh with a view of the Allegheny River. At the time, I had a strong sense that I was seeing her for the very last time. Without Covid, that probably wouldn’t have been true, but as it happened, I was right, and I think maybe she knew it too. We talked about the Democratic primary and how she liked Pete Buttigieg, we ordered Chinese food, which took a long time to arrive, and mostly we listened to an old recording made at her parents’ sixtieth anniversary that reunited her with her siblings, singing and playing all the old standards from the 30s and 40s. Beautiful music.
Before she was eleven years old, Gloria started singing with her sisters, Tess and Mary, six and eight years older than she. Gloria sang the lead, rewriting the music so it suited her alto voice, while her sisters sang harmony above and below her, their voices melting together in a way you only hear when families sing together. You can see Gloria in front here with her two sisters behind, Tess then Mary. It wasn’t long before they won the $200 first prize in Wilkins’ Amateur Hour on Pittsburgh’s WJAS radio station, under the name “The Dattilo Sisters Harmony Trio”.
But not long after that, the group broke up for a time, when Mary ran away with a man, “much older” than her — a “criminal.” Two years later she was back, with a small son, and the music continued.
It was not an easy life. Gloria’s parents emigrated from Calabria, her father Vincenzo first, rechristened James at Ellis Island, and then her mother, Carolina, the only woman in steerage with two small children. She refused to ever cross that ocean again. Carolina gave birth to ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Gloria was the last, the baby, and in many ways, it seems she got the best of her mother, as last children in large families sometimes do. They lived in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, not far from where August Wilson was growing up at the same time. They owned a little shop, and Gloria would take the incline down the hill with her mother to the Strip District to buy live chickens and vegetables to sell. Carolina crocheted an afghan from yarn found floating down the river during the Pittsburgh Flood of 1936, that still lies on a bed upstairs at our house. Carolina had little use for the Church.
It’s a life I find hard to imagine, but it was one whose contours were shared by millions of immigrants across the United States. One thing that lasts from that life is the food. My husband, who was married before her death to Angela, Gloria’s beloved only child, describes the meal they ate at Thanksgiving the first time he went down to be with her family. It began with antipasti of every kind on a kind of etagere, then progressed through Italian wedding soup before he was served ravioli so wonderful he had to have a second helping. And then. And then. They brought out a full American thanksgiving: turkey, mashed potatoes, vegetables, gravy, pies…
The girls, now renamed The Three Ds, did sing again, on “Buddy Murphy’s Guest Book,” on radio station KQV, and rebroadcast up and down the eastern seaboard. There was talk of more, of trying to make it in New York City after the war, but Carolina put her foot down. Tess got married, and that was the end.
Carolina was not allowed to get an education, but she made sure Gloria graduated high school at age fifteen, and then from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in Psychology and Sociology. Later, Gloria added an MA in Social Work. For twenty-five years, she directed a residential centre for troubled youths in Waynesburg PA. The first time I met her, at a party, she spoke of how experience with those children shaped her generous views of those who fall through the cracks and need compassion and support. Gloria was an Italian-American, a Catholic, a liberal, and a Democrat.
As we sat and talked with her that last afternoon, listening to her sing in the recording of her family, my eye was drawn to the legend written on a plaque on the wall. It was a quotation from Erma Bombeck and it read, “When I stand before God at the end of my life I would hope that I would have not a single bit of talent left and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.'” In wonderment I realized that yes, yes she had. She offered up everything of herself she had ever been given. She gave all of herself. And I have no doubt that what she gave will be received.
So now sit back, relax, shut your eyes and please listen once more to the harmony of The Three Ds, led by Gloria Gugliotta:
Jessica Knauss’s novel, Seven Noble Knights, brings to life a story from an epic poem that doesn’t exist. The tale of the seven sons of the noble Lara family, killed in vengeance during the tumultuous tenth century, is known to us today first from Alfonso X’s thirteenth-century Estoria_de_España and the Chronicle of 1344. Scholars infer from these two late sources, an original epic poem, whether an indigenous creation or one inspired by the epic poetry of the French, and they debate whether it and other early stories that found their way into the chronicle tradition are wholly imagined or have a basis in historical fact. I have myself written about a different tale from that period found only in later histories, that of Bernardo del Carpio, and I argued that story did have a basis in history, so I was eager to read Knauss’s version of this powerful story.
At first I was thrown off, because I was expecting a historicized version that takes the tale out of its later written form and situates it into the grim tenth century. What Knauss has done instead is to write the lost epic poem into the visual and material world of the thirteenth/fourteenth-century of its sources for it, much like, for instance, T.H. White did with the Arthurian tales in The Once and Future King, which placed later stories about a maybe-fifth-century king in a sort-of late medieval England of the imagination, a kind of no-time no-place. Once I realized what she was doing (and truly, only the five or six of us in the world who have spent too much time thinking about tenth-century Spain would be thrown off in this way), I settled down to enjoy the wild ride Knauss takes us on.
What I liked most about this book, is how true Knauss is to the spirit of her materials, and how uncompromising she is to the values of their time. Seven Noble Knights has the feeling of the epic poem it imagines. This is a world of blood and sex, of vengeance carried out personally by hand. These people are alien to us, what they care about, what makes them angry and how they deal with it, and Knauss allows them to retain this strangeness. Her use of language and her imagery emphasizes this sense of distance. These are not the characters of usual twenty-first century historical fiction, whom we imagine as “three-dimensional” because of their fictive interiority. Knauss’s characters are figures in the way that the characters of medieval literature are figures. We often call (or dismiss) them as stereotypes but I think Knauss’s book shows how powerful this kind of writing can be.
I felt this especially vividly with the character of Doña Lambra, who is the pivot point around whom so much of the action turns. While the centrality of the women to this story might surprise modern readers, it shouldn’t. Mercedes Vaquero, who has written brilliantly about this story and others like it, has argued that one of their roles was to create a space to discuss the fraught question of noble lineage, and women’s roles in creating and perpetuating it, and that women themselves may have been the patrons for these stories. I kept thinking of Vaquero as I was reading, and when I got to the end, lo, I discovered that Knauss had been her PhD student.
I think this novel will appeal to readers searching out a different kind of historical novel than most of what is published right now, a novel that doesn’t “bring you back in time,” but rather immerses you in a strange world and an unusual-to-us kind of story-telling.
I’m delighted to post an interview with Tinney Heath about her most recent novel, Lady of the Seven Suns, about the Roman laywoman Giacoma di Settesoli and her relationship with Saint Francis of Assisi. Tinney has a background in journalism and a passion for medieval Italy. She is the author of several previous novels, including the recently re-released A Thing Done. You can learn more about her books, and join her newsletter at her webpage: https://tinneyheath.com
You set most of your writing in Italy. How did you come to write about Italy, and how did you come to be interested in the period before the plague when so many Italophiles focus on the 15th and 16th centuries?
It probably started when I was a teenager obsessed with Italian opera. I learned to speak operatic Italian, but I quickly realized it wasn’t going to do me much good, either for research or for travel. So in time I picked up some more practical Italian and finally made my way across the pond to Florence, and then I was hooked.
To my surprise, it wasn’t the High Renaissance of Michelangelo and the Medici that most fascinated me, but an earlier Italy, that of Dante and before. There was something alarmingly familiar in those constantly squabbling Guelfs and Ghibellines, battling each other in the streets of cities whose skylines bristled with forbidding stone towers.
Dante’s contemporaries and immediate forebears occupied a world unlike ours in many ways, and yet ours seems to be witnessing an upsurge in many of the same challenges they faced: drought, flood, famine, fire, epidemics, extremes of heat and cold, scarcity and want. And conflict. Always, conflict. Strife and contention, opposing factions jockeying for power. Fear and hatred, resentment and misunderstanding, xenophobia. Vilifying one’s opponents. Polarization. There is a certain immediacy in watching a long-ago society try to deal with these challenges, because we have only to look around us to see that despite our technology and our supposed advancement, it is all still happening. Perhaps there’s some hope in the fact they must have gotten through it somehow, or we wouldn’t be here.
You chose to show us Francis and Clare through the eyes of a third person, Giacoma di Settesoli. What drew you to her as a character, what do you think her perspective offers readers, and why have so few people ever heard of her?
I learned of Giacoma’s existence by chance, shortly before a planned vacation trip to Assisi. I was intrigued by the idea that a powerful, wealthy widow with strong political connections and control over a great deal of property could somehow become fast friends with the barefoot holy man who was devoted to Holy Poverty.
Giacoma remained a laywoman, uncloistered, able (thanks to her wealth, family status, and widowhood) to move freely around Rome and Assisi, largely unhampered by societal restraints that would have restricted her point of view. More than one contemporary account says that Francesco called her “Brother” and alludes to her close friendship with Francesco and with his other early followers.
Giacoma at Francesco’s deathbed by Chilean artist Pedro Subercaseaux Errázuris, OSB (1911-1920s)
Francesco’s friendship with Giacoma is all the more surprising because he was so cautious about dealings with women. He wrote, “Let all brothers avoid evil glances and association with women. No one may counsel them, travel alone with them or eat of the same dish with them.” And yet this is the man who, on his deathbed, instructed his brothers that the prohibition on women entering the brothers’ compound need not be observed for her.
Why have so few people heard of Giacoma? Some scholars say that her obscurity comes from the 13th century Church’s reluctance to allow Francesco’s friendship with a woman to become part of the official record. Not wanting to sanction holy men fraternizing with women, the ecclesiastical authorities chose instead to ignore Giacoma as much as possible.
In the first two Church-mandated biographies of Francesco, written by Francesco’s contemporary Thomas of Celano, Giacoma is not mentioned at all. In Saint Bonaventure’s biography, written a few years later, her role is downgraded and the story of her presence at Francesco’s death is omitted. Historian Jacques Dalarun suggests that Bonaventure “exalted Clare, the cloistered nun, over Giacoma, the lay aristocrat, in having a special spiritual rapport with Francis.”
It wasn’t possible to expunge Giacoma from the record completely. We have writings from Brother Leo and others of Francesco’s earliest followers, and they talk freely about Giacoma, just as they talk about all the others who were part of Francesco’s life and brotherhood. The best the Church could do was to de-emphasize her, and that it did.
When officialdom couldn’t omit Giacoma entirely, it tried instead to emphasize the miraculous aspects of her story, thus leaving Francesco free of any suspicion. Her presence at his deathbed is a miracle because it was God who told her to go to Assisi; she was like the Magi because she brought gifts; and she was another Mary Magdalene because she mourned over Francesco’s body.
Francis and Clare are saints in the Catholic Church, and Giacoma herself is a “Blessed” — in fact (as I learned from you) her feast day is tomorrow. What were the challenges of writing a novel with broad appeal about important figures in a specific religious tradition?
Everyone has an idea of who Francesco was. To some he’s the gentle, loving patron of animals; to others, a simple man who wanted to follow in Christ’s footsteps and who was blessed with the stigmata. Many people, when asked, will start quoting from the so-called Prayer of Saint Francis (“Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace…”), not realizing that this anonymous prayer appeared for the first time in the early 20th century in a French magazine. People of all faiths and of none revere Francesco, but most of them know very little about the times in which he lived or even about his personal history, which is more complex than all the sweetly-smiling statues suggest.
Francis Wedding Lady Poverty, by Giotto
That does make it a challenge to try to depict him in fiction without offending, so I simply wrote him the way I saw him – an extraordinary man, utterly original, midwifing (sometimes reluctantly) a religious movement that had to be constantly safeguarded from any hint of heresy. I am not Catholic myself, which probably made for a steeper learning curve when writing about 13th century religion. On the other hand, it prevented me from assuming that aspects of modern Catholicism applied to the church of Francesco’s time, which was not necessarily the case.
Are there any favorite stories about your characters that you weren’t able to work into the novel?
Yes, many. For instance, there’s the story about Francesco and the wolf, in which he charms, tames, subdues, converts, befriends, and negotiates with the ravening wolf that had been terrorizing the citizens of Gubbio. He does everything but enroll it in a twelve-step program, and by the time he’s done, the townspeople have agreed to feed it and let it live in Gubbio, and the wolf, by placing its paw in Francesco’s hand, has agreed to stop killing people and their animals. (Some say the “wolf” was actually a human outlaw harrying the city.)
Francis and the Wolf, by Sassetta
There’s a delightful painting by Sassetta in London’s National Gallery showing Francesco, the wolf, the people of Gubbio, and a seated notary scribbling away at their contract. Nothing could be more quintessentially Italian and medieval than that notary, who is no doubt trying to figure out how he’s going to obtain the wolf’s signature.
The other story I would love to have included was the rather bizarre turn Brother Elias’s life took after Francesco’s death, but my timeframe wouldn’t permit it. He somehow managed to go from being Francesco’s trusted Vicar General to the person entrusted with building the lavish Basilica to house Francesco’s relics (against the wishes of some of the earliest brothers), and from there to polarizing the order, serving as papal ambassador to Emperor Frederick II, getting excommunicated and thrown out of the order, and just to cap it off, riding into battle at the side of Frederick II. It’s said that children playing in the streets used to chant, “Frate Elia has gone astray, he has chosen the evil way.” (At least, that’s what they would have chanted in Guelf territory.)
Elias’s whole unlikely trajectory is fascinating and would make a wonderful novel. I’m not going to write it, but if somebody else does, I’ll definitely read it.
Thank you, Tinney! So would I!And I am looking forward to more books from you.
I was delighted to be interviewed by Kristen Geaman about my book recently for the Royal Studies Journal blog. You can read the interview and a review of my book here.
I am thrilled by the interest the Royal Studes Journal has shown in Her Father’s Daughter. My argument in the book is that the female royal power I was seeing was not a consequence of personality or chance historical circumstances, but was rather part of the structure of how power was organized. When I was working on the book, I wanted to write it in such a way that it would be useful as a possible model for people thinking about gender and power in places and periods very different from medieval Spain. The Royal Studies Journal has helped me greatly to reach some of that audience.
Medieval historians need to do a better job of talking about race.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, at least since last January when I attended a panel on race in medieval European history at the AHA and was part of another panel on “relevance” in the study of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe down the street at the MLA. I’ve been thinking about it in a more systematic fashion over the last few months as the Lexicon Project — a group of faculty and students at the University of Chicago who gathered initially to talk about the lexicography of sexuality and gender — has expanded its focus and its community this quarter to discuss race, and as a goad to our discussion, we’ve been reading a range of scholarship in the area.
I have also been thinking about it because instead of working on hagiography and dialogue and nuns, as I thought I’d been doing now, my attention has been called back to the project I began my career as a medievalist with, back to the thirteenth-century archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. I’m working on two things at the moment — an article on Jiménez de Rada’s globalism, and a longer piece on Jewish and Christian intellectual exchange and competition.
Working on the article has made me realize what an awful lot of evidence historians of medieval Spain have left on the ground, evidence that could be used for a rich and fruitful discussion of race in the Middle Ages. Working on the other project has returned me to something I observed in my first book, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain, about the difference between the contemporary historiography of medieval Christian-Jewish relations and the historiography of medieval Christian-Muslim relations. As I wrote in 2004:
“The perceived breakdown in harmony between Jews and Christians is perceived as a puzzle, as a problem, and different factors are adduced by scholars to explain this perplexing state of affairs. By contrast, conflict in relations between Christians and Muslims is taken for granted and seems to need no explanation.”
At the time, the model of difference I was using was that of alterity, inspired somewhat by David Tracy’s Dialogue with the Other and Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. I think now that race might have been a more effective and sharper tool for understanding the difference between those two historiographies. Put simply, most of us who study Christian-Jewish relations in medieval Iberia are Jews of one kind or another. We’re of an age that we grew up, one way or another, in the long shadow of the Nazi racialist project. The one thing, perhaps, that unites us is that we know we do not want to be a race. We know what happens when Jews become a race. We’re just like you! we say. We’re white! We’re European/American/Canadian! It’s weird that you guys did all those awful things to us but we’re willing to let bygones be bygones if you let us into your universities! And we’ve been very leery of allowing race to be one of our categories of analysis for interpreting the Middle Ages, and we pretzel ourselves into knots trying to avoid it, as the news mounts up from the Tree of Life, from desecrated cemeteries, from Twitter and 8chan, that a race is not something you choose for yourself; it is something others ascribe to you.
And into this historical moment comes Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. I remember the man who became my doctoral advisor, Jocelyn Hillgarth, lamenting in the very first session of the very first class I took with him that no one wrote big books any more, no one took risks or made big arguments. This is a big book. And what it offers us is a way to cut through the anxiety medieval historians have felt about speaking of race in the Middle Ages — fears of anachronism, fears of a teleology that begins with us, obsession with biology, with vocabulary, with colour, with DNA, all these things that have made us wishy-washy and hesitant.
Race has no substantive content, Heng says. Race has no substantive content. Rather, it is “one of the primary names we have — a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes –that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the greatest import to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.”(p. 3, 27) I’ll emphasize some of words I think are key in this formulation: Race is a name. The phenomena it describes are repeating and grave. It demarcates differences that are essentialized as foundational. These differences are used as the basis for differential distributions of power.
Race is not a single “thing.” It is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences.” (p.3, 27) And it is one of the factors that creates the European subject.
This is not a review of Heng’s book. For one thing, I haven’t finished reading it. I’m sure there are places where I will disagree with this interpretation or that — I can already see a few spots where my own argument would be different. That’s not the point. I don’t take this as the last word. I take it rather as an invitation do further work, and as a gift of a powerful tool that we can use for understanding when differences that are religious or ethnic or physical or gendered become racialized (and when they don’t or haven’t and how this changes or doesn’t over time). Talking about race in the Middle Ages is not going to be about finding a particular word used, or a physiognomy described, though those may be the clues we use as evidence. Each case has to be argued on its own merits. We will disagree.
I just want my old stuff, please. I’ve become one of those people who has her favourite thises and thats. When things run out or wear out, I want more of the same. It’s especially difficult with clothing. I have an old Armani long sleeved black blouse with buttons that I bought used. It has started to *ahem* spontaneously unbutton itself, so tonight I was trying to find a replacement. The great thing about it is that it isn’t woven, it’s knit jersey, so it’s soft and not tight and uncomfortable. Could I find such a thing anywhere? No. Is it too much to ask for? Evidently yes.
I pretty much only buy one brand of shoes now, apart from things like runners — Think! shoes, made somewhere in central Europe. I have, um, nine pairs at last count — pumps, clogs, boots, sandals. I searched off and on for months just to replace one pair of brown shoes I loved with an almost identical pair. My favourite styles are not available in the States so I get them in Europe or buy them on eBay.
I got my kettle in college and my Cuisinart was a graduation present from my grandmother. When the lid broke, I got a new one from a slightly shady place in Florida rather than buy a new machine. I’ve got a Swedish Assistent mixer, just like my other grandmother’s, which was a present 25 or so years ago. I’ve replaced bits of parts for it a couple of times too.
Speaking of first grandmother, I still have quite a bit of her old clothing, though not much of it is in regular rotation any more. Off the top of my head, there’s a mohair cape from Scotland, a black on white hand embroidered silk shirt from Hong Kong, and *her* mother’s genuine alligator purse. The only thing I wear often though is a pink cashmere undershirt.
I am very loyal to the people who cut my hair. There have basically been three of them my entire life. Gaston on Laurier and then at Eclectic in Montreal from High School through graduate school. He’s retired but if you think I’m loyal, my mother went to him for about thirty years. Then I saw Geanine in Chicago for about seventeen years. Now Harumi cuts my hair and she COMES TO MY HOUSE! I began going to her at a salon and when she left I begged her to tell me if she even went to anther salon and that’s when she said she would come to me. She was born in Japan and she gets her scissors sharpened there when she goes home to visit her parents (come to think of it, I suspect she would understand this post). When she was at the salon, she got me onto a particular Japanese shampoo and conditioner that you can’t really buy here. I just found some online, but it wasn’t there a few weeks ago and I only half believe they’ll send it to me. If we ever move from Chicago, I seriously ponder coming back to get my hair cut.
The only soap I have used for years is Nablus soap. I still buy my underwear from Marks and Spencer when I am in the UK. I’m down to one lipstick, MAC’s Creme in Your Coffee, even though I kind of hate people who spell cream as creme. Urban Decay’s glide-on eye liner is a standby, even though they keep discontinuing the purples on me. Viper looks like it has possibilities. Also: Glossier Boy Brow, Bobby Brown BB Cream in Light, and OMG I see they have discontinued my undereye concealer, whatever will I do, where will I go?
I’ll do what I always do when I need advice. I’ll ask my sister.
It was lucky and maybe surprising that I liked Estella so much, given that this was my view of it for most of the time I was there:
But Estella is lovely. Imagine the shell of a soft boiled egg once you’ve knocked the top off, leaving the sides jagged and craggy, and after you’ve eaten the egg out of it. Now imagine a town nestled in the bottom of the shell, with a river twisting through it.
In the Middle Ages, there were castles on many of these hills, protecting the town, which was founded in 1090 by King Sancho Ram irez of Navarre by annexing the fortified Basque settlement of Lizarra. The king’s plan was to move the main road, which is also the pilgrimage road to Compostela, out of the difficult hills above, so it could run more easily down through the flat. He encouraged settlers from France and also Jews to come live there, and they did, settling in what became three adjacent walled communities, and creating an important trading hub.
I got a strong sense of that medieval city, especially on the side of the river where my albergue was, right on the pilgrimage road, underneath the old Jewish quarter, pressed up against the hill. In the photo above, the Camino is the street that runs behind those two cars. The ground floors of many of the buildings that run along it are very old, even medieval, as you can see from the two behind those cars. To the right is the palace of the Navarrese kings, whose first floor dates to the late twelfth century, a rare example of civic Romanesque architecture. More on that soon. In the background to the right, the tall tower you can see belongs to the church of San Pedro de la Rua. Above it, on the hill, was one of the castles I mentioned, and when it was destroyed by the Castilians in 1572 in their war against Navarre, it fell on the twelfth-century cloister of the church, destroying half of it. I wasn’t able to get into the church or cloister (hello, Spain, and churches that are not open when they say they will be) but I did use some of my strength to climb the many steps up to the facade. It was worth it.
You can see it is as much fortress as church. Estella has been on one frontier or another during most of its existence, most recently in the nineteenth century, during the Carlist Wars.
I think when most of us look at a building like this, we think things like “Gothic” “French” “European”. Maybe that polylobed arch gives some of us pause. Pilgrims will have seen one very like it walking through Cirauqui earlier that day, but others might think more of buildings that look like this:
This is the Tin Mal mosque, in Morocco, built to commemorate the Almohad leader Ibn Tumart in 1156, four years before Notre Dame was started in Paris and a few decades before San Pedro de la Rua was constructed. The Almohad Empire extended from Africa through the southern half of Spain at this time.
Look closer at some of the figures on the portal, like these two facing griffins. See the detail still preserved on their wings, and what looks like maybe traces of paint.
Compare it to this silk roundel originally wrapped around the relics of Saint Siviard and now in the treasury of Sens.
Imagine what it would have looked like if the portal had all been painted. Not the somewhat austere, stern, pure stone we see today but a riot of colour, more like a series of silk textile borders. I also like the little stone guys on thrones. I’ve never seen that before.
It’s not a church, but the Romanesque palace has some interesting sculpture too.
This capital shows Roland fighting against the giant Ferragut, part of the tale of Charlemagne in Spain found in the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle. Their battle supposedly took place outside Nájera, a few days further on the pilgrimage road.
I love the detail you can see here on their shields and their chainmail.
Here is Ferragut himself. Evidently he and Roland paused their fight many times, to discuss the finer points of their theological differences.
But I had other reasons to be interested in Estella. This town, like many others on the pilgrimage road to Compostela, had an important Jewish community throughout the Middle Ages, and when I wrote Pilgrimage, my historical novel about the twelfth-century Camino, I set an important scene among the Jews of Estella. If you have read the novel, it is the moment when Gebirga is travelling with Yusuf, a Mozarabic Christian, and two Jewish traders. They stay with a Jewish family in Estella over Shabbat, much to Gebirga’s discomfort. That evening, their prayers are interrupted by news that their slaughterhouse, down by the river, was on fire. They confront a Christian mob, whose leader tells them a story of seeing a Jew throw a crucifix into the river. At that very moment, he says, the Jewish slaughterhouse caught on fire. When asked who it was he saw, the ringleader points to Yusuf who takes to his heels. Half the mob follows him, and a brawl erupts between the other half and the Jews. It ends in a draw, but Yusuf remains missing.
When I came to Estella, I wanted to see how well what I had invented matched what was there. I based many features of this episode on stories about the Jews of Estella, including a story that the Jewish women of Estella had their own synagogue, and the anti-Semitic legend of the Jew throwing a crucifix in the river. My source for a lot of my knowledge about Jewish communities along the Camino is David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson’s wonderful The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook
The Jews of Estella were moved around during the four hundred years they lived in Estella, but when Gebirga would have stayed with them, around 1120, their community was on the hillside above the pilgrimage road and the river, up behind the albergue where I was staying. You can see a few house here in the photo, but much of the area is open, and occupied by a bypass highway, just out of sight beyond these houses. Its emptiness makes it easier to remember and imagine the lost community, easier for me than in Toledo or Barcelona.
The church of Santa Maria, here, was built on the site of the synagogue where the men would have prayed in Gebirga’s day. It was taken from by the king and given to the bishop of Pamplona to build this church in 1144.
To the left, and facing where the Jewish community would have been, was this big pile, now an old folks home, but originally a Dominican monastery, built in 1258. Those who study relations between Christians and Jews in Spain know that in the thirteenth century, Dominicans, the “Order of Preachers,” gained the right to be able to force Jews to listen to them preach. In this community, evidently they also taught Arabic. I have read about this and known about it for years; in Estella for the first time I could feel what it would have been like to have this Dominican presence imposed on your community.
This church has been locked since the late nineteenth century so all you can see is its facade. It sits right on the pilgrimage road into town, opposite the river. It is the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and it was originally built on the site where the Jew was supposed to have thrown the crucifix into the river. This facade dates from the fourteenth century, but as you’ll be able to see, its creators had their minds very firmly on the Jewish community that surrounded it even then.
The tympanum at the centre shows scenes from Holy Week — the Last Supper on the bottom; the Crucifixion at the top, the cross flanked by Mary and John; and in the middle, the harrowing of Hell, the women at the tomb, and Christ appearing before Mary Magdalene. But look at the figures holding up the tympanum.
They’re Jews. It’s a disquieting image and there are many ways to interpret the two figures. They hold up the Crucifixion and Resurrection the way what Christians call the Old Testament holds up the New. Perhaps Jewish taxes paid for the church — given the location of the church this would not be surprising. It may not even be an entirely negative depiction. At a time when Jews were increasingly being marginalized in Spain, their physical presence here makes a case for them to have a place, however fraught and marginalized, in Christendom.
Estella has had a troubling and difficult history, only a small part of which I have talked about here. It is also beautiful, only a small part of which I have shown you here.
I’ll begin at the end. I’m not in Spain any more. I’m in Chicago. This post explains why.
When I wrote my last post, sitting on a bunkbed in an albergue in Puente la Reina, I was already sick, though I didn’t know it. In fact, I’d been sick for a while. While walking up the Alto de Perdon the previous day, all of a sudden I felt a massive pain in my gut, just under my ribcage, so bad I had to sit down. I thought it was reflux, maybe from too large a coffee at breakfast. I was able to continue eventually, but the pain never went away. I stopped a lot and people started to ask me if I was okay. I’m fine, I said. I just need to rest. I figured it was my first day, the hill was high, of course I was struggling a bit. One guy was worried enough to offer me chocolate or a power bar, and I think what made me reach the summit after turning him down, was the hope he’d still be there at the top when I got there so I could take him up on the offer. He was (thanks, Victor from Singapore, wherever you are now!).
But the rest of the walk went okay, even though I couldn’t eat my lunch after I ordered it, and I couldn’t choke down more than half the power bar. I had two Fanta limon (why can’t we get that here?) and a Magnum. When I got to the albergue, the guy took one look at me and put me in a semi-private room instead of the dorm (thanks, Albergue Jakue!). I had dinner with the very nice Italian race walker who ended up in my room, by which I mean I forced myself to choke down something. By then I had decided my problem was dehydration, and that had caused the reflux, so I drank masses of water and ate a banana. I was in a lot of pain that night, not from my feet or legs or hips or shoulders but from my gut and I was beginning to experience other, um, biological manifestations. But I was good to go the next morning.
The reason the photo above shows a view of the lovely eponymous moon bridge of Puente la Reina rather than a view from it is that instead of crossing it with the rest of the pilgrims, I took a detour to a pharmacy to get something for the “reflux.” I struggled up the first hill that morning in a way disproportionate to its difficulty, but apart from that, most of that day was a magical walk, as if the Camino knew I was only going to have that one more day and wanted to give me its best. Here’s the only photo of me I have:
I walked on a Roman road:
I talked to a man my age from Poland whose father under Communism used to go often to serve as a doctor in a sanatorium in Nachod, the town in Czechia near where my grandfather’s factory was. I sat under a stone portico at the top of the medieval village of Cirauqui and rested my feet. I walked through landscapes like this:
And I rested at places like this, where I saw again a nice young woman from Belgium who had been one of those the previous day to kindly ask me if I was doing okay. (She didn’t have a white dog though, only a tall boyfriend(?). It wasn’t until Estella that I saw the blind pilgrim):
I stopped for lunch in Lorca, where King Garcia Ramirez, the grandson of the Cid, died (no, I didn’t know that before either). I forced myself to choke down a tortilla and I had another Fanta limon and I sat in the sun with a nice woman from Hungary who I had also seen the previous day in Uterga. She had stopped there for the night and had shipped her pack ahead. We both wanted to make it to Estella:
I only had about 8km of easy walking left to do. It should have been fine. But it wasn’t. The abdominal pain I had been experiencing since I started got worse and worse. As the kilometres pounded on, I started to feel dizzy and light headed, By the time I got to Villatuerta, I knew I was not going to make it. The albergue was closed but the guy there directed me to a bar across the street. I asked for a mineral water and for them to call a taxi. It was going to take an hour. It didn’t matter. It could have taken six hours There was no way I could leave that bar under my own locomotion. And then I was violently, violently ill all over the nice bartender’s bathroom.
I am going to draw a bit of a veil over the next bit. The taxi came, I went to the albergue, they put me in an empty dorm so I could have a bottom bunk (thank, Albergue Municipal de Estella!), another taxi to the Centro de Salud (which deserves a whole post on its own about different medical systems) where I got a diagnosis of gastroenteritis and a sheet of instructions, another taxi to a shop where I could get some bottles of water for the rehydration solution the doctor gave me when it became clear to him I was not going to be able to squeeze lemons and mix them with soda and salt etc. (thanks, doctor, and thanks especially to taxi driver #3 who *saw* me vomiting in the gutter outside the Centro and still picked me up *and* gave me his card in case I needed more taxis). I walked over the bridge back to the albergue, did the best I could do to wash some clothing, and collapsed in bed.
The next morning, I realized that this was not going to be a 24 or 48 hour and done thing. Recovery was going to be slow. I was not going to be sending my bag ahead, I was not going to be walking half or quarter stages. I was going home. I changed my flight. I spent two more nights in Estella, three nights in Madrid, and now I am back in Chicago. If you ask me how I’m doing, the answer is better each day but not okay, not yet. I listened to my body. It was the right decision. For that reason, it was not difficult to make.
I am going to do one more post, about Estella, probably tomorrow.
No, really, it’s true. In the Middle Ages, a pilgrim who climbed to the Alta de Perdon and who was ill could quit there and walk home and get all the available indulgences. And they did not even have to walk down the other side of the hill MOUNTAIN, which I did.
I’m not going to post a photo because a) I’m not sure it’s working (can one of you tell me from the Pamplona post?) and b) because my photo does not do justice to the grandeur on the hill. MOUNTAIN.
Now I’m in Puente la Reina collapsed on my bunk, too tired to walk to the puente and even too tired to go see Calle Rodrigo Ximenez de Rada street. I’ll see them tomorrow. Photos on Instagram.
