Hello. In the Crown of Aragon 639 years ago,
it was February 5th, 1387. My name is Jonathan
Seyfried. I'm a PhD candidate in history at the
University of New Mexico. And this is The Historian's
Notebook, a podcast about how history gets made.
Season one is titled Molt Cara Companyona. We're
looking at a document from each day of the first
year of the reign of King Joan I of Aragon and
Queen Violant de Bar. Let's begin today's
document. Today's document is one that I think
is a special leveling up of the discourse around
Joan's illness. The sender is Violant. Violant
is writing to a bunch of monasteries. And from
what I can tell, the selection of monasteries
here is pretty important. There's at least a
few of them in the list that are Carthusian monasteries,
which are known for being more like hermit -style
monasteries, I think. And so we have this letter
going out from the Queen on February 5th, so
it's a month since Pere the Ceremonious died
and Joan and Violant became King and Queen.
Violant is thanking the monasteries for their
prayers and She's noting that those prayers probably
had a beneficial effect on Joan because he is
now in better health after, and we have the word,
malalties, sickness. I think that Joan's illness
in All the other documents we've looked at so
far has been referred to obliquely, not using
the word sickness, malalties, but using the word
misfortune, accident, which does appear in this
letter too. Or difficulties, the arduies, the
difficulties encountered. And so for the first
time I think on the podcast we are encountering
the word for sickness in medieval Catalan, malalties.
I was talking to somebody who has been listening
to the podcast quite a bit and this particular
listener wanted to have me read out one of the
letters to kind of get a sense of the rhythm
of it, the voice of it. And I do realize that
not everybody has enough time to go to the web
page for each and every document each and every
day. And so I did want to grant that request.
I feel like... I feel like Joan and Violant
granting requests in these documents, but I'm...
definitely have a different status level than
the two of them. So yeah, I wanted to go ahead
and read out one of the letters, and I think
this is a really good one, and you'll notice
what's good about it is that there's a lot of
cognates to English, and you'll be able to hear
that, and then you'll be able to hear just a
little bit of the... official chancery style
that a lot of the letters conform to. So when
you listen to this one, you're getting a good
sample of the kind of official correspondence
tone that also involves a bit of a personal touch,
because Violant is talking about her husband's
weakened body. So you can't exactly keep it all
business -like when that's the topic. All right.
I'm going to begin the reading. It's going to
go for a couple minutes here. And if you're kind
of just wanting to hear me discuss the document
and not listen to it, then you can just do a
little fast forward. And I'll pick up after...
medieval Catalan reading here and discuss a little
bit more about what is in today's document. Benet
ne sia Deiu, chi permet che tanta via durat.
E com enles adversitats sia tengut tot Christia,
Recorer a nostra signor Deiu. Lo qual es donador
de tots bens, Sanador de totes malalties, E reparador
de tots mals. Pregam vos tan affectuosamon. Como
podemos que todos los días, en mises y otros
honros canónicos, queráis hacer oraciones en
la iglesia de vuestro monestad, como mi devout
amigo percibirá. praying and supplicating to
our Lord God and His Blessed Mother who wishes
to restore health to the Lord. And since you
have been praying for the Lord, just as for your
natural Lord, we... Per les dittes, pregaries,
e intercessions, nos tendrem per obligats a procurar
vos gracies e favors. No en paga de les oraciones,
Deiure fer ordinarets, en universal e en particular,
per tots los frares del dit monaster, clerques,
e leix. And then there's the Roman numerals for
the year 1387. And then the probata at the end.
So hopefully that gives you a little bit of a
sense of... what it sounds like in Catalan, and
I'm sure there's all kinds of pronunciation errors
that I made, because I'm not a native Catalan
speaker, and then in addition, Medieval Catalan
would have been pronounced with some differences.
So I apologize to anyone who knows a lot about
how to pronounce Catalan and Medieval Catalan,
because I probably did a pretty terrible job
in comparison to someone who's done this for
a while, but that was my best shot. And we're
all about just giving it your best here on the
Historian's Notebook, where we're just focusing
on that beginner's mind and trying to just kind
of give it our best go. And all in the interests
of learning and all in very, very deep respect
for those who have been working on these materials
for years and years and sometimes multiple decades
and all of the knowledge that they have built
up and that I draw on in order to make some guesses
and inferences about the meaning of what I'm
looking at here. Okay, let's talk about some
more of the content of this letter. And there's
the word accident in the first line, which is
misfortune. And then there's the word intercessions,
intercessions. And these two words, they signal
something in the context that is super important
for understanding what's happening when Violent
is thanking these monks for their prayers and
also saying, hey, keep it up, please. What's
going on is that there's a very deep belief in
the interconnectedness between the divine and
what happens to people in their daily lives.
Joan's illness is not interpreted according
to the way that we would normally in our time
think about sickness. In our time, we still have
a pretty common practice of trying to invoke
higher powers beyond the scientific in order
to give a little boost toward the recovery from
some kind of illness. People will pray for their
loved ones to get better. If you yourself are
feeling ill, you're gonna take medicine probably,
but you're also going to just have a little bit
of a hope that, and you might not necessarily
invoke some kind of deity, but you'll have some
kind of supernatural level of hope. Maybe you'll
call it luck. Maybe you'll say, oh, I just kind
of had a willpower element here that pushed me
through that illness. It's pretty common for
people when they're sick, even in our society,
to not be purely scientific in the way that they
interact with the experience. of illness. So
you can definitely understand a little bit about
what I'm going to say here, and I myself am limited
in my understanding of what I'm about to try
to characterize. Imagine a society where it's
not just like this added bonus to have prayers.
when someone is sick, but it's actually channeling
into something that's very real. Here's an interesting
fun fact about medical education in the Middle
Ages. If you were training to be a physician,
someone who would do surgeries, say, in order
to repair an injury on a body, You were actually
given more hours of training in astrology than
you were in anatomy. This is because there was
a very deep -seated belief that the position
of the stars had an actual physical effect on
the goings -on on Earth. So you wouldn't want
to do a surgery on a day that the stars were
not aligned toward the maximum benefit of the
movement of all of the physical material of a
body on the earth and the I guess you could say
spiritual waves that would connect between the
everyday physical world and the divine. So when
we're looking at what Violant is saying to these
monks in relation to Joan's illness, we're encountering
people who saw a much more direct connection
between the divine and bodily conditions. And
it's not to say that it was a regular occurrence
for them to cure something by prayer. It's not
like every single day they witnessed in a kind
of cause -effect fashion the connection between
the divine and the bodily conditions of someone
improving or not, but they did not have any doubt
that there was a role for the divine to play,
and that the more influence you would try to
build up in the divine, there would be a real
effect, and What would block it is the question
that would come up in their minds. Not whether
it was efficacious or not. It would obviously
have an effect. All these prayers would work
to make Joan healthy. But the question is, is
there something else that is at work in the opposite
direction? Is there a curse? And this is something
that is very real for Violant, for Joan, for
everyday people. This, I think, is an instance
where by looking at what the elite are writing
about, because we have way more records surviving
from the elite, we can actually extrapolate out
and make some reasonable inferences about everyday
people. And I think it's very legitimate here
and is justified by a lot of the evidence, not
just in these documents, but evidence that's
been collected widely about life in the Middle
Ages, to say that this is a window into how pretty
much everybody. And I would say that in Christian
communities and amongst Christians, this was
a very real thing, maybe even more so than in
the Jewish and Muslim communities. But even in
the Jewish and Muslim communities, there was
still a belief in the connection between the
divine and the everyday occurrences. With Christian
communities, though, there's this added bonus.
And that's where the word intercession comes
in. The intercession that Violent mentions here,
it's not just saying, oh, you helped, you interceded
in this. It's actually referring to a very large
practice of connecting to the divine in all sorts
of methods. And one method that was extremely
popular in the Middle Ages, and actually continues
to be very popular even to this day, is relics.
So if you have a piece of a saint's body, then
you can have a channel of intercession where
you can connect spiritually with that physical
remnant, and it will then be a kind of added
channel to get you access to the divine. So people,
especially Christians of the Middle Ages, were
looking for these intercession avenues and the
prayers of the monks are another such intercessionary
action. So I've kind of thrown out a lot at you
in this with a lot of context about the way that
medieval people interacted with the divine and
blended it in to the everyday. There's a more
practical question that I just want to touch
on before the end of today's episode, which is
about Joan's health and trying to track what
was going on. This letter makes it seem like
Joan has mostly recovered. There's another letter
to a lot of these monasteries. I'm not sure if
the list is actually the same list or if there's
a little bit of a difference, but Dawn Bratsch
Prince, in an article from 1994, found an article
and transcribed it not an article, a letter,
and transcribed it in which Violant is writing
to monasteries again, a lot of the same monasteries
as the ones in today's letter, and saying, thanks
for keeping up the prayers. Joan has been ill
for a long time. And that's on April 29th. So
is there one long continuous illness here? That's
a possibility. And we're going to try to keep
tracking this because, remember, it's around
the end of April that Violant reveals even more
information about the extent of Joan's illness.
And it's also in April that Violant reveals
that she has sought out a book of curses. not
to place a curse on anybody, but to try to find
out if there is a counter spell in order to negate
the effects of the curse that she believes Joan
has been subjected to by some evildoer, some
adversary. So that's what's coming up in April,
and maybe we'll see hints of it beforehand. But,
I think we've gotten to the end of today's episode.
There's, I know, a whole lot more that we could
talk about. We could talk about some of these
monasteries. I'll put some links to information
about them in the webpage for today's episode.
Thanks for listening to this installment of the
Historian's Notebook, Season 1, Molt Cara Companyona.
And if you are leaving with more questions than
you arrived with, I've done my job, because our
motto here at the Historian's Notebook is, dissatisfaction
guaranteed. Visit the website jonathanseyfried.net
to see an image of today's document and
additional show notes. and listen again tomorrow
to hear about the next day in the first year
of the reign of King Joan I of Aragon and Queen
Violant de Bar. In the meantime, take care.