Negative Campaigning, Medieval Style

Good natured readers have been sending me links to op-eds and letters to the editor in which someone drops the old M-bomb while referring to something McCain, Obama, Palin, or Biden said or did recently. Thus far, I have decided to distance myself from the presidential election. As a medieval blogger, I have a responsibility not to seem partisan or biased. With this blog’s vast reach, if I were to intimate that the Middle Ages somehow taught us which candidate to vote for, it would jeopardize the very fabric of our fragile democracy.

Consider this a blanket response to claims that a candidate is “getting medieval” by doing this or that.  The medievals  weren’t so big on the whole democracy thing, but if they had had presidential elections, their attack ads wouldn’t pussyfoot around the real issues that mattered to voters. They would get straight to the point:

No, this is not further evidence of my obsession with magical private parts. It is, rather, more or less what some scholars think actually happened in the medieval town of Massa Marittima in the thirteenth century.

Back in 2000, workers restoring the wall of a medieval public fountain in the town discovered a mural hidden under years of grime. At first blush, it was a pretty tame find:

Just a big tree with a group of women in medieval garb clustered beneath it, presumably the sort of women who would have frequented the fountain in its heyday, right? Oh, how wrong you are, my naive readers.  As the layers of grime came off, it became apparent that the tree’s branches were inhabited–by over two dozen detached penises:

At first, it was thought that the mural was meant as some sort of fertility display. But more recently, George Ferzoco, director of the Centre for Tuscan Studies at the University of Leicester, published a book that argues the mural was meant as political propaganda. During the time when the fresco was likely painted, Massa Marittima was controlled by the Guelphs,* who had recently expelled their rivals the Ghibellines. The black eagles flying about underneath the tree were the symbol of the ousted Ghibelline faction.  Taken together with other details in the mural, Ferzoco says that it is meant to send a clear message to the people of Massa Marittima: “if the Ghibellines are allowed power they will bring with them heresy, sexual perversion, civic strife and witchcraft.”

Let’s run down the charges:

Civic strife?

Check. The two women bent over at the foot of the tree are pulling each other’s hair and fighting over one of the tree’s inhabitants. (Hard to make out with the images I could find, but it’s there.)

Sexual perversion?

Check. The woman on the far left in the beatific pose is being sodomized by a penis. (Click the image above to zoom in; you can just make out the back end of the perpetrator.)

Heresy and witchcraft?

Well, this requires a bit more of a stretch. According to the Malleus Malificarum, AKA The Witch Hammer, a guidebook written in Germany in the fifteenth century in order to assist and instruct the pious in recognizing and responding to the threat of witchcraft, witches have the ability to remove a man’s penis and keep it alive and mobile while detached:

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?

…

For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest.

On the charge of witchcraft, I am less convinced. Beyond the problematic several centuries separating the Massa Marittima mural and the Malleus, there is little in the mural other than their proximity to the magic johnsons, that suggests that these women are witches. 

I know I’m going to take some heat from the medieval witchcraft lobby here, but not every medieval woman found taking an interest in a suddenly mobile phallus should be considered a witch. The Bibliotheque Nationale, for instance, has a manuscript of the Romance of the Rose with a marginal illustration of a woman trying to fish a penis out of a penis tree,*** much like the woman in the Massa Marittima mural, and in the Romance of the Rose it’s usually just thought to be a joke about how lascivious women are.****  Similarly, there is the German medieval story, Nonnenturnier, in which a man quarrels with his penis so much that it decides to leave him, eventually ending up at a convent where a group of nuns hold a tournament to determine who will get to have it.

So while I doubt the witchcraft allegations, I’m still sold overall on the political message of the mural.  If you let Ghibellines run your town, it’s going to be pretty much 24/7 your daughters and wives getting sodomized by flying penises.  That, my friends, is not change we can believe in.