Crypt
Life, death and disease in the Middle Ages and beyond
Alice Roberts
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Well written and well researched but, for me, just a bit too heavy on the techniques and skills surrounding the discoveries and insights inferred and explored in each chapter.
Still, a couple of the chapters were interesting but most, in the middle, I skimmed and skipped and, to be honest, it felt a little too much like the completion of a contractually obligated piece to complete the ABC trilogy and satisfy a publisher, an author and their motives.
However, to this reader, it just made clear that a well edited and slightly larger one book of the three titles (appreciate there are a few years between them all and hindsight is a wonderful thing!) would have been a more complete and insightful set of stories about the threads and new findings and interpretations of history and the new technology that helps that happen; the book seemed a little bit of everything and nothing in particular – despite the seven chapters of unique forms of crypt – that didn’t really seem to have or make a point. Sorry Alice.
Still, despite the author’s prologue (an osteobiography) and spirit, knowledge and passion of the subjects and skill of clearly presenting, it may be historically and archaeologically that je ne comprends pas?!
Archaeology is not ancillary to history; it is not its slightly scruffier, grubbier handmaiden. It’s unashamedly earthy, grounded and physical, but out of the dirt come gems of understanding. Bringing together these two disciplines – history and archaeology, with all these new scientific techniques – we now have an extremely powerful way of interrogating and understanding the past.
This is the third book of a series in which I have explored the stories of the past that archaeology can now reconstruct, focusing on burials and the analysis of human remains. But don’t worry if you haven’t read the other two. There’s a chronology running through them: in the first book, Ancestors, I looked at what prehistoric burials tell us about ancient lives; in the second book, Buried, I moved into the first millennium of the Common Era (Anno Domini in old money), with stories of Romans, Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. This book is located in the High and Late Middle Ages – roughly 1000 CE to 1500 CE – with a brief but useful foray into the sixteenth century.
And it’s a bit different from the others in that there’s a focus on pathology: on disease and injury; the experience of human suffering in the past; and on the evolution of the diseases themselves.
A good passage
A neatly ordered view of history lays it all out as a succession of Ages, which are first designated by technological changes – stone, bronze, iron – and then by geopolitics and royal dynasties – Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Plantagenet, Tudor. This partitioning gives us a way of talking about history, but it also emphasises the boundaries between one era and the next, as though these are fault lines that run all the way down, between kingdoms and empires to the level of farms and fami-lies, descending and hitting the ground with a huge shudder. The dust settles – and people open their eyes on a new period of history.
Parcelling up history in this way obscures the continuity that exists at so many levels. Delving just a little into the connections between European monarchs opens up a view of the past where ruling elites are busily forging alliances, arranging marriages for overtly political and diplomatic reasons (with women treated as commodities to be exchanged), squabbling with relatives over inheritance rights and trying to keep inherited assets in the family. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that incest, a universal taboo in human societies, seems to occur more often as an exception to this rule in powerful elites, going all the way back to the Neolithic: aDNA analysis of one individual buried in Newgrange in Ireland revealed that he was the son of an incestuous union.)
In school history books, 1066 marks the fault line between Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman period. But it’s really not that simple. We must dig down into the tangled relationships of the ruling classes in ninth-to-eleventh century northwest to Europe and take a wider geopolitical perspective, to understand how territories were being carved up, marked out and distributed between the ruling elites of Europe.
A second good passage
St Mary Magdalene’s name crops up again and again in association with leprosy hospitals – in fact, it’s the most popular dedication for these establishments. And it’s a mistake. Or at least, it seems to be based on mistaken identity. It all begins with the New Testament, which features two men called Lazarus. One is a character in a parable: he’s a beggar, covered in sores (suggesting a connection with leprosy), at a rich man’s gate. When this Lazarus dies, he goes to heaven, while the rich man descends into the fiery pit of hell. More famous is Lazarus of Bethany: he’s the one who famously dies and is then improbably reanimated by Jesus a whole four days later. That Lazarus had a sister called Mary (of Bethany), and in the sixth century Pope Gregory decided that she was probably the same person as the follower of Jesus described in the Gospels as Mary of Magdala. And so Mary Magdalene became, in a very convoluted way, the patron saint of people with leprosy.
A third good passage
The new synthesis of history, archaeology and genetics offers us a much more detailed picture of the past than we’ve ever been able to see before. Not just at a grand scale – though it certainly does that too – but at an individual level. Piecing together different sources of information, we can paint detailed portraits of people, some of whose names we know; many we don’t.