Originally haíresis simply meant something like ‘choice’, from αἱρέω hairéō ‘to select, prefer or choose’. The Ancient Greek word didn’t have any particularly negative connotations, and you’d have heard it in the marketplace, at an election, or used to describe a school of thought or belief. It was only with the rapid spread of Christian literature that ‘heretic’ began to take on its polemical meaning: ‘people who have made a bad choice’. It was used by those Christians who considered themselves orthodox (‘right-thinking’) to attack others who had chosen a different path. This shift in meaning hardened, and exercising ‘choice’ in faith or lifestyle became an increasingly perilous move. That’s also what makes early heretics so culturally intriguing.
Two of the Twelve Apostles at
'The Washing of the Feet' (John 13; Matthew 26)
Hardham Church: chancel, south wall (c. 1100)
Heresy was only in the mind of the persecutor. In 'The Violence of Orthodoxy' (2008) Averil Cameron writes: 'to describe oneself as a heretic is in essence a logical contradiction'. Although the caricature of the malign, lurking heretic may have been largely a nightmare in orthodoxy's imagination, nonetheless the people demonised for practicing their right to 'choose' were very real. These same descriptions of 'heresy' can help fill in the void left by 'choicey' minority social groups and persecuted people whose authentic voice is often scraped and scoured from the written record, not only historically but also in much modern scholarship.
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What has 'heresy' got to do with art?
Itinerant performance artists in the middle ages were treated as tolerated aliens, subject to the most severe social stigma and suspicion. As late as the sixteenth century it was still said the Spielleut (‘entertainer’) was ‘more like the dead than the living’ and had the ‘mere semblance of humanity’ (Sächsische Weichbildrecht, 1537). Although you couldn’t kill a musician in medieval Amsterdam with impunity, nonetheless pipers, fiddlers and lute players were deprived of all legal rights and honour (Pieter van Schouwen: Sachsenspiegel, 1451).
In the face of such vilification, performers were typically drawn from the same outgroups who faced persecution for their ‘choicey’ otherness, a position not unlike that of the highly-skilled black musicians and dancers of The Cotton Club who made ‘jungle music’ for New Yorkers in the 1920’s and ’30’s. Like early Ellingtons, some later medieval musicians found that by satisfying the European love of authors, composers, conductor-led performance and the commercial value of publishable text and music notation, artists could smooth the rough passage through waves of prejudice directed at unruly extemporising ‘heretics’. Early music celebrates the tip of the iceberg which represents music surviving in notation, but we should bear in mind the unwritten music of the seven-eighths below the surface: made of the same stuff as the gleaming, visible apex, and just as fascinating.
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Art and Heresy blog posts divide mostly into two groups, based on my two main research projects:
The Picture Tellers
The Emperor drew back the curtain...
Coombes Church, near Lancing College (West Sussex, c. 1120)
Since 2018 I’ve been looking at the twelfth-century paintings in three West Sussex churches, revealed after over eight hundred years lying dormant beneath layers of disapproving whitewash. These are some of the oldest surviving wall paintings in Britain. The frescos were probably all created by one remarkable refugee artist, spokesperson for a community fleeing persecution to pursue religious tolerance, gender equality, a diet without animal products, and perhaps of greatest interest to us, freedom of artistic expression in the isolation of the South Downs. The paintings are damaged, and have a reputation for being strange, difficult and enigmatic, but seeing these collections for the first time is like making a tour of a site-specific art installation from the middle ages *spine tingle*. You can visit all three painted churches in one day by bike on a twenty-five-mile route across the Pulborough Brooks nature reserve, through medieval Steyning, over the salt marsh of the Adur river before passing below the spectacular Devil’s Dyke escarpment, essentially travelling the same Roman track across the South Downs which the artist knew. Or you can drive.
Watchers on the Wall
Design for a tower clock with musical automata
(Northern Syria, 1206)
Ismail al-Jazari: The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices
My other project looks at the ancient tradition of musical watchmen who played a horn from a tower at sunrise and sunset, protecting city walls right across Eurasia. George R. R. Martin’s Night’s Watch swears this oath: ‘I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men’ (A Game of Thrones, 1996, Chapter 48). Actual medieval horn blowers may sound a bit niche, but if I tell you that Johann Ambrosius could trace his ancestors in the church records among generations of Bachs whose shoes had worn down the stairs of various towers in Eastern Germany in order to sound the curfew and reassure the townsfolk, might you be more interested? Ambrosius’s son Johann Sebastian Bach was extraordinarily proud of this long lineage, although he didn’t join the family business of ‘blowing a horn to wake the sleepers’ because… well, like Jon Snow, his destiny lay elsewhere.
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Tolerance and compassion
‘Art & Heresy’ might sound like a really weird pairing. Search the web for ‘medieval heresy’ and you’ll find lots of eye-catching manuscript illustrations of judicial prohibition and destruction: heretics being arrested; heretical books being thrown on the pyre; heretics burned en masse at the stake, all accompanied by the odd black cat or horned devil for verisimilitude. Beautifully rendered as illuminations in prestigious volumes, these sumptuous images endorse the reader’s ethical superiority over godless ‘heretics’, whose cultural contribution was thought to extend only to an iconoclastic urge to disrespect and trash the cultural artefacts and values of orthodoxy. Contrary to appearances, ‘heretics’ were highly creative. They just did it in their own way.
let a cross be fixed. Go now and
St John the Baptist Church, Clayton, south wall (c. 1120)
The blog isn’t going to get drawn into the polemical representation of the crazed, dissembling, icon-stabbing, heretical sociopath and their struggle against the fanatical, strait-laced, art-loving, orthodox killjoy. When we talk about the stark choice between the flames of heresy and the Cross of right-thinking belief, we only revive the reductive perspective of a persecuting historical orthodoxy (R. I Moore: The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 1987). These incendiary illustrations of the ‘triumph over heresy’ hide a more nuanced and enduring relationship in which ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’ were intimately entwined: hate terms only distort what was often a spectrum of attitudes in which there was no good and evil art, and where there were no heretical and righteous people.
Instead of renewing the hunt for orthodoxy’s malevolent tormentors, the modern study of ‘heresy’ could (indeed, should) have been an opportunity to understand the long history of social and cultural diversity in Europe. A more balanced study of heresy might focus instead on tolerance and compassion, so we can understand what happens when mutual respect and toleration break down and begin to fail.
Too often our modern engagement with historical music, drama and the visual arts has served to breathe fresh life into old enmities, finding justification for modern orthodoxies of belief, class, race and gender in our apex view of the iceberg of creativity which neglects, even denies the presence of the submerged seven-eighths. The historical arts should have been the place to view this presence, a chance to observe the cultural activity and social integration of marginal communities at work.
