medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> The Ember Days were four groups of three days, namely the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday
> after St Lucy (13th Dec), Ash Wednesday (variable), Pentecost (fifty days after Easter) and Holy
> Cross Day (14th Sept). They were observed as days of fasting and abstinence in the western
> Church. Their early history and original purpose are obscure - unless you know better.
Dear Oriens,
Sorry for the late reply but I've been away; I hope this response is not too late to be
of use. Although I can't claim to "know better", by one of those curious synchronic
coincidences, on the airplane yesterday I began to read The Night Battles by Carlo
Ginzburg, who with scrupulous scholarly rigor has much to say about the Ember
Days. It would appear that, as with the Rogations processions, these had their
origins in the festivals of ancient vegetation and fertility cults which the Church
"Christianized", probably because they had no effective alternative for assuring
bountiful harvests and plentiful livestock and were suspicious (at the very least) of
the practices by which their rural, agricultural flocks attempted to assure such
means of livelihood. In the case of the Ember Days, however, it would appear that
remnants of these ancient beliefs also survived outside of the safely "liturgized"
forms of the Church. Based on inquisition records from the Friuli region of northern
Italy, Ginzburg traces the beliefs in and "activities" of the Benandanti, who were
men, and apparently women, born with a caul, which, it was believed, gave them
special supernatural abilities, both to see the dead and to participate in curious
festivities and battles during the Ember days. According to their own testimonies, at
these times of the year, their spirit left their bodies at night and journeyed to
nighttime revels and feasting, at which times they did battle with witches and
warlocks. The witches were armed with stalks of sorghum and the Benendanti with
fennel. The outcome of these battles influenced the harvests for that year: if the
witches won, there would be poor harvests, but if the Benandanti won, there would
be good harvests. The Benendanti themselves apparently believed that they fought
on the side of God, while the witches fought on the side of the Devil. That is, they
did not see any antipathy between their activities as Benendanti and their status as
Christians. The late 16th and early 17th-century inquisitors who interrogated them,
of course, took this sort of thing quite differently, and through a combination of
leading questioning and judicial torture managed to transmogrify such beliefs into a
rather more "canonical" picture of witchcraft. Elsewhere in Europe, other beliefs
were attached to the Ember Days: in the Tyrol, for example, people left food
offerings at these times for the dead, in return for the prospect of prosperity and
supernatural gifts. The Dominican J. Nider (1380-1438) recorded in his
Praeceptorium divinae legis the beliefs of women that during the Ember days, their
spirits visited the souls in purgatory, of whom they brought back news, as well as
information about lost or stolen objects, etc. Although solid historical evidence for
them is slight and only emerges at widely diverse times and in widely diverse
places, it would appear that such beliefs were tied to ancient fertility practices and
cults that thrived in the countryside throughout the Middle Ages. I, too, am keen to
hear from those who "know better" about this fascinating phenomenon.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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