Hello there! I saw your reblog of a post about medieval culture. Would you mind explaining some of your references? because i am dying of curiosity. --debates about cannibal babies --twelfth century werewolf renaissance --infancy gospels
okay so like. i don’t actually remember the details about the cannibal babies. but basically i think it comes from like... some kind of theological belief that the matter which forms humans’ bodies comes from what they eat, combined with the idea that Judgment Day will involve physical resurrection of the body. cannibalism is a problem then because it would mean people’s bodies are divided up, right? so that’ll interfere with resurrection. but maybe the body parts get repatriated to the original person. but then if two cannibals have a baby, that baby’s body is only made up of other people’s bodies, because humans are made from what they eat. so like. how can both the baby and the eaten people be resurrected at the end of days?? they can’t. this is a problem!!
(this is me attempting to regurgitate a half-remembered thread that i read last year. uhhhh here’s an actual thread by someone who actually knows stuff about this.)
the werewolf renaissance i already talked about, basically it’s just that there was a big resurgence in werewolf stories and writing (they’d been around in the ancient world, then they’d died down for a while) in like the 12th century, PARTLY because everyone was obsessed with ovid, partly because everyone was obsessed with souls, partly because werewolves are just fucking rad i guess
so like on a theological level you get stories that seem to be trying to explore whether a werewolf has a human soul or an animal soul and therefore whether a werewolf can receive communion (see gerald of wales’ wolves of ossory for a very obvious example of this) but also they just like. wrote a lot of werewolf stories. as i said in the linked post, caroline walker bynum’s book metamorphosis and identity is a good source for looking at shapeshifting narratives in medieval lit!
and the infancy gospels are like. non-canonical biblical fanfic about child jesus that involve him killing a bunch of other kids. like at one point all the parents in nazareth go to joseph and they’re like “we don’t want your son to play with our kids anymore” and he’s like “why not” and they’re like “he keeps killing them”, and at another point they’re accusing jesus of killing this one kid who just kind of... died while they were playing, and jesus is like “i did not kill him, i will prove it”, so he resurrects this kid, asks him “did i kill you??” and the kid confirms that no, jesus did not kill him, he was just inconveniently nearby when he died. and jesus is like “SEE I TOLD YOU SO” and then like. kills the kid again. or un-resurrects him. same deal.
anyway when you know how much medieval irish writers liked the infancy gospels, the boyhood deeds of cú chulainn start making a lot more sense
