by Melissa Mohr
Sometimes, inscrutably, God doesn’t punish such swearers. False swearing then damages God’s honor and reputation, denigrating the Holy Name that language should instead praise and glorify. Or, as Steven Pinker writes, “every time someone reneges on an oath and is not punished by the big guy upstairs, it casts doubt on his existence, his potency, or at the very least how carefully he’s paying attention.” We saw in the previous chapter how Yahweh’s rise to the top of the celestial hierarchy was linked inextricably to his reputation vis-à-vis the other gods. Swearing by Yahweh confessed him to be omniscient and omnipotent—the only God you need. False swearing dares him to prove this, again and again. The more people swear falsely and escape punishment, the less reliable God’s power comes to seem.
Vain swearing—swearing habitually and/or for trifles—was seen to be another problem in medieval England, for similar reasons. God had to fulfill his side of the bargain and judge the righteousness of an oath anytime someone mouthed the proper formula, whether in a matter of life or death or to express annoyance while playing cards. Reading Chaucer, or indeed almost any piece of medieval literature, it is obvious that vain swearing was widely practiced. Chaucer’s characters can barely start a sentence without prefacing it with “By God’s soul,” “For Christ’s passion,” or “By God’s precious heart.” The Pardoner addresses this kind of language before he starts his tale, warning that God will take vengeance on these swearers: “Frequent swearing is an abominable thing.” He notes that vain swearing is so important to God that he forbids it in the second commandment, before he outlaws “homicide, or many other cursed things” in later commandments.
One kind of vain swearing worried medieval commentators more than all the rest—swearing by the parts of God’s body. Chaucer’s Pardoner gives examples of these oaths as he rails against improper swearing: “by the blood of Christ,” “by God’s arms,” “by God’s nails,” and similar phrases. In tract after tract, writers single out these oaths for prohibition, repeating with the anonymous author of “On the Twenty-Five Articles” (c. 1388) that “it is not lawful to swear by creatures, nor by God’s bones, sides, nails, nor arms, or by any member of Christ’s body, as most men do, for this is against holy writ, holy doctors, and common law, and great punishment is set on it.” Jacob’s Well discusses these oaths as the fifth leaf on the branch of forswearing (which is the sixth branch on the tree of evil tongue, which grows somewhere in the ooze of gluttony), and explains why they are so very dangerous. People who use such oaths “rend God limb from limb, and are worse than Jews, for they rent him only once, and such swearers rend him every day anew. And the Jews didn’t break his bones, but they break his bones, and each limb from the other, and leave none whole.” The problem with the body-part oaths is that they “rend” God—they tear his body apart. In Catholic doctrine, Christ ascended to heaven in his physical, human body and now sits at the right hand of God, waiting to come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead. (One Lollard has somehow acquired the information that Christ’s body “in heaven … is seven foot in form and figure of flesh and blood”—Christ is seven feet tall.) This is the divine body that is under threat from oaths. When you swear “by God’s nails,” you tear the nails out of Christ’s hand as he sits in heaven. The first pattern poem written in English depicts the result of such swearing. Pattern poems, in which the lines are laid out on the page to form a specific shape, were more usually made to look like eggs, wings, altars, or crosses. In Stephen Hawes’s 1509 The Conversion of Swearers, though, the lines scattered across the page suggest Christ’s bones, and printer’s ornaments resemble flowers strewn over a corpse. “See me / Be kind,” Christ pleads. “Tear me no more / My wounds are sore / Leave swearing therefore.” (See next page.)
How could God’s creatures wield such power over their Creator? Yet it is the same power that people exercise in the ceremony of the Eucharist. Swearing by God’s body parts is in fact a perverse version of this sacrament. In the Eucharist, a priest speaks a “working word” to create God’s body, then breaks it with his hands; in swearing, all who utter the requisite formulae can break God’s body with their words alone.
The first page of the pattern poem from The Conversion of Swearers, 1509.
To Catholics, the Eucharist is the sacrament in which God’s physical body is shown to or eaten by his people, effecting and signaling their salvation. Though worshippers appear to consume bread, they are actually eating God’s physical body—the same body born of Mary, crucified on the cross, and now sitting in heaven—transubstantiated into a wafer. An Easter Sunday sermon from the late fourteenth century explains what the Host consists of and how it is the sole instrument of salvific grace: “And the same body that died on the Cross and this day rose truly God and man, the same body is on the Sacrament on the altar in form of bread … And whosoever eats it, he shall live forever.” The mechanism of this miracle is based on Aristotelian theories of matter, as we saw with the Lollards. The wafer can look like bread but be Christ’s body because after consecration the “accidents” of bread, its whiteness and roundness, remain, but its “substance” or “subject” has been changed or annihilated and replaced with the body of Christ. The priest performs this miracle by pronouncing the words of the sacring during Mass: “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” “This is my body.” These words literally transform the bread on the altar into Christ’s body, the Real Presence.
There are many exempla from the medieval period that explain in bloody detail exactly what is going on during the Eucharist. Handlyng Synne tells the tale of a monk who doubts the real, physical presence of Christ in the Host since he cannot see it with his bodily eyes. It looks like bread—how could it be God’s body? He and two abbots pray to God to “to show the truth / that you are the sacrament of the Mass” and are “rewarded” with a behind-the-scenes look at what really goes on when the priest speaks the magic words. After the words of consecration, a living child appears on the altar. The priest kills the child and divides him up, offering the monk a piece of bleeding human flesh instead of the wafer. The monk “thought that the priest brought on the paten / Morsels of the child newly slain, / And offered him a morsel of the flesh, / With all the blood on it, still fresh.” The sacrifice of the Mass is quite literally a sacrifice. This exemplum also makes clear why Christ’s body must be concealed in the “accidents” of bread, “for if we took it as flesh, we would be sick and disgusted and forsake it.”
These miracle-of-the-Host stories resemble the complaints against swearers that also abound in the pastoral literature. These complaints demonstrate in equally graphic terms what swearing does to the body of God. The Gesta Romanorum, an early fourteenth-century monastic collection of moral fables, contains a representative tale about the consequences of vain swearing. There was once a man who swore constantly, the tale goes, his whole life long. He left no part of Christ’s body untouched with his terrible oaths. His friends warned him that he should stop, but he would not, no matter what anyone said to him. One day, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen visited him. She was Mary, Christ’s mother, and she came to show the man her son. “Here is my son,” she told him, “lying in my lap, with his head all broken, and his eyes drawn out of his body and laid on his breast, his arms broken in two, his legs and feet also. With your great oaths you have torn him thus.” Just this scene is depicted in a circa 1400 wall painting from St. Lawrence’s Church, Broughton. Here, fashionable gentlemen hold parts of Christ’s body, which they have ripped from him with their oaths. Christ himself lies partially dismembered in his mother’s lap—note his right arm and leg, with the bones sticking out. Just as miracle-of-the-Host stories are supposed to show what really happens when the priest pronounces his “working word,” these complaints against swearers show what really happens when people swear.
In these two kinds of exempla, God reveals to our physical senses truths that we must ordinarily apprehend through faith. They echo the story of Doubting Thomas, who “will not b
elieve” Christ’s resurrection until he “shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side” (John 20:25). Jesus makes allowances for Thomas’s human frailty and exposes his body to the disciple’s touch, his body proving his resurrection. Thomas deems this physical sight and touch to be satisfactory evidence, and he finally believes his God is risen.
The “Warning to Swearers” in St. Lawrence’s Church, Broughton.
With their promotion of the physical senses as the most reliable means of verifying truth (for us fallen humans), these complaints also suggest why medieval swearing is portrayed as having the power to touch God’s physical body. Since oaths guarantee the truth of our statements by securing God as witness, and since we prefer physical proof that things are true, oaths work best by anchoring themselves in God’s body. Every oath in effect re-creates the Doubting Thomas scenario—our voice goes out from our bodies to touch God’s body and the truth is secured. What better way to understand and to shore up swearing’s power to make God act as witness to our words than by depicting those words as basing themselves in his body—almost as if, when we swear, we tap him on the shoulder and say, “Hey, look!”
The Eucharist was the center of complex spiritual and worldly hierarchies, constructed around God’s body as present in the Host and through people’s various relations to it—who got to make it, who could partake of it, and who had to admire it from afar. Historian Eamon Duffy succinctly lays out these connections between sacrament and medieval society: “The body of Christ … was the focus of all the hopes and aspirations of late medieval religion.” As Duffy points out, it was also the means by which those in power stayed in power, “a device in the process of the establishment of community [and] the validation of power structures.”
In this society, priests occupied the top of the hierarchy, they alone having the power to transform bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood. Lay men and women had no part in and were not supposed to understand these mysteries to the same degree as could priests—they were forbidden “even [to] touch the sacred vessels with their bare hands.” Members of the aristocracy and gentry had quite ready access to the Host, since they were able to hear Mass several times a day and to take Communion every month or more. Most of the population, however, took Communion only at Easter, and for the rest of the year were reduced to worshipping the Host at a distance during the Elevation. Even this long-distance admiration was carefully scripted, the congregation’s smallest movements dictated. Before the consecration of the Host, for example, “a bell was rung to warn worshippers absorbed in their own prayers to look up.” Next, “holding up of the hands and the more or less audible recitation of elevation prayers at the sacring was a gesture expected of everyone: refusal or omission was a frequent cause of the detection of Lollards.” The ceremony was so tightly regulated that the smallest deviation could bring accusations of heresy—Christ’s body was thought to be powerful, and it had to be handled with extreme care.
Like the Eucharist, lawful swearing was a pillar of medieval English society. It secured people’s honesty by making God a witness to people’s promises, without which allegiances would waver, criminal and Church trials would grind to a halt, marriages would remain unsolemnized, and baptism would be impossible—and without which, as one clergyman put it, “no state can stand.” Vain swearing, however, carried with it a terrifying potential for chaos. Unlike administering or receiving Communion, swearing was not a class prerogative. It threatened to disrupt the carefully maintained Eucharistic hierarchy of power by allowing anyone and everyone access to God’s body—anyone, that is, who could put together the talismanic words. Catholic pastoral literature expresses great anxiety about this democratizing potential, typically echoing the sentiments of this fifteenth-century sermon, which worries how the second commandment “is broken entirely among learned and uneducated, among young and old, among rich and poor, from a little child who can barely speak, to an old bearded man from whom age has almost taken his proper speech.” Pastoral tracts such as Jacob’s Well and Handlyng Synne react to swearing’s disruptive potential, as we have seen, with a slew of rules to regulate proper and improper use of oaths, rules as complex and rigid as those that govern the ceremony of the Eucharist. These restrictive regulations demonstrate a strong desire for control over the language, but also a fear that control is ultimately impossible. Given this ever-present suspicion that precepts, however iron-clad, might not be able to stem the flood of oaths, complaints against swearers and some pastoral texts rely on another means of protecting God, and the society organized around his body, from damage: pity. As we saw in the Gesta Romanorum, these tales depict not a wrathful God, angry that people are trying to pull off his feet, but Christ as a child, bloody and helpless. His mother often begs swearers to stop, and sometimes Christ himself asks them to have mercy. These depictions stress what pastoral literature’s strict prohibitions are intended to limit and tend to disguise—the extent to which swearing places God in our care, to be cherished or torn apart.
In the Middle Ages, swearing followed the biblical model, concerned with the Holy and not with the Shit. Many of the obscene words we use today were already in use by the medieval period, but they did not have the same offensive and emotive power. The period was not without Roman influences—we saw the religious sense of obscenity make an appearance in the apotropaic vulvas and penises of medieval Catholicism. But for the most part, obscenity as we understand it was in abeyance. It was in the Renaissance that the Shit started to make a comeback.
Chapter 4
The Rise of Obscenity
The Renaissance
Robert Southwell knew that he was sailing to his death when he left Calais for England on the morning of July 17. He landed on the southeast coast between Folkestone and Dover, dressed soberly but richly, like the gentleman he once had been. The secret service was informed of his impending arrival and hoped to eliminate what it saw as a dangerous threat as soon as he touched English soil. But here Southwell had a bit of luck. In England, it was still July 7—the English continued to refuse to adopt the “Popish” Gregorian calendar—and one of the feast days of St. Thomas Becket. Despite the Protestant government’s abolition of the holiday, hundreds of people were on the roads, traveling to and from local fairs. Southwell was able to disappear into the crowds of revelers and elude the government informers who watched the coastline.
Southwell was not a spy, not an assassin. He came to England to say Mass, to administer the sacraments, and to offer spiritual comfort to Catholics. He was, in other words, a Catholic priest, and in 1586 this was illegal.
Though he escaped capture that morning, and indeed for six more years, Southwell was eventually arrested and executed. The 1585 Act Against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, and Other Such-Like Disobedient Persons had made it high treason for priests to enter or to stay in England. Southwell, a Jesuit, was clearly in violation of the statute. When he was put on trial, however, the primary charge against him was not that he remained in England illegally but that he taught Catholics a certain kind of swearing—equivocation. Equivocation is a way to deceive your listener without lying, through the use of double meanings or mental reservation (words thought but not spoken). If you say out loud “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” but add in your mind “So that it’s any of your business,” you are equivocating through mental reservation.* It’s equivocation too when you say “Thank you for the book. I will waste no time reading it.” The person who has given you the six-hundred-page doorstop thinks that you will dive into it right away; you mean that you will never crack it open. This kind, relying on double meanings, was called amphibology (from the Greek for “both,” as in amphibian) during the Renaissance.
It might seem like mere wordplay to us today, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries equivocation was a deadly serious matter. It allowed Catholics to escape unjust persecution without committing the terrible
sins of lying or perjury. When questioned by the government, Catholics could save their souls and their bodies—they could deny that they heard Mass, that they harbored a priest, that they carried a rosary, without lying to God and so damning themselves. To the Protestant government, equivocation was a violation of law, a flouting of its just authority. It is ironic, perhaps, that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Catholics had persecuted proto-Protestants for their views on swearing, but by the sixteenth century, it was Protestants persecuting Catholics over what they thought about oaths.
The trial of Robert Southwell was one of the last appearances of the medieval model of swearing, since at its crux was the idea that oaths are so sacred, so powerful, that circuitous techniques such as equivocation are needed to avoid perjury. His trial also marked the beginning of the end for this model of swearing, however. Later in the Renaissance (usually dated 1500–1660), the strength of oaths began to decline because of the development of Protestantism and its changing definition of man’s relationship with God, and because of the growth of capitalism, with its emphasis on contracts and on man’s word as his bond. At the same time, there was an increase in “civility,” as characterized in the previous chapter—an advancing of the threshold of shame and repugnance. Body parts and actions that in the Middle Ages had been shown in public and not considered particular loci of concern became “private” and invested with the great significance of taboo. Words for these things became taboo as well. This “rise of civility” began in the later Middle Ages and was completed by the end of the seventeenth century, but it happened gradually, with stops and starts, advances and retreats, and at different stages in different geographical areas, social classes, and genres of texts. As a result, obscenities slowly gained the power lost by oaths, and the greatest linguistic taboo became not words that could rip apart God’s body but words that could reveal the human one. The balance began to swing away from the Holy and back to the Shit.