The Return of Martin Guerre - Assignment Example

? Religion and Theology John Jones June 6, The Return of Martin Guerre After the French film The Return of Martin Guerre in 1982, Natalie Zemon Davis wrote a novel to accompany it in 1983. An early French historian, who helped with the screenplay, Ms. Davis was a professor at Princeton University at the time (currently teaching in Toronto). A mostly true story, Martin Guerre is a man who lived in sixteenth century France. Plagued by boredom, and a hatred for his life, as well as early onset impotency, Guerre fled his hometown of Artigat in 1548 and disappeared for eight years, leaving behind a wife and son. His wife then became a non-entity for that time, for an abandoned woman had no rights whatsoever. Finally Martin Guerre reappears in 1556 and the happy family once again picked up where they left off. Or did they? The new Martin Guerre was in fact Arnaud du Tilh from another village. The real Guerre had fled to Spain and fought in their war against his home country, where he lost one leg in battle. du Tilh, nicknamed “Pansette” (the belly) for his voracious appetite for life’s finer things (including women) was also something of a con man and spent years perfecting the Guerre persona, for Pansette also looked remarkably like Guerre. He fooled all the villagers, including Guerre’s sisters but the one person he didn’t hoodwink was Bertrande, Martin’s wife. However, Pansette was all of what Martin never had been, perhaps more of a man, and Bertrande helped the man perfect his lie, living with him as his wife. The one downfall for Pansette was when he sold some of the family holdings and demanded an accounting of his “father’s” estate from Uncle Pierre, the executor in Martin’s absence. Enraged, Pierre managed to gather enough doubt that Pansette was the real Martin and brought him to trial. With supporters on both sides, the judge craftily turned the case over to Parliament, whose agent decided Pansette was in fact probably Martin. In the midst of that confusion, the real Martin Guerre showed back up on his crutch and proved his identity to be true. Therefore Pansette was executed by hanging. Bertrande, because of her adultery, was sentenced to the same fate but only spared due to her being female. Instead she was forced to watch probably the only man she loved die and had to live with the man who deserted her. So what was life like for the peasant class of sixteenth century Europe, France in particular? For one thing the health conditions were horrendous. The infant mortality rate was so high that thirty-three per cent of babies born failed to survive past their first birthday. That was little wonder, for such diseases as typhus, measles, malaria, smallpox, and scarlet fever were rampant. Add to that the most famous disease of the time, the Bubonic Plague, or Black Death, which killed without mercy from the lowest peasant to the Royal Families themselves. It wiped out huge percentages of the populations within days during its sporadic outbreaks, one of which occurred during Guerre’s time. However, even if one managed to avoid all of this, the average life expectancy was around forty years old. Essential services were nonexistent. There was very little fresh drinking water and raw sewage ran in the fields and streets. Hygiene was very seldom practiced and people went weeks or months without bathing. Without refrigeration, meats and dairy products spoiled very quickly. Fresh fruits and vegetables were also scarce so scurvy and rickets were commonplace. All of this contributed to an abundance of vermin such as rats and their fleas, which in turn were directly responsible for the Plague. Clothing was simple and mostly handmade for the peasant class, for fabric was expensive and rare. The French peasants, like their counterparts throughout Europe, toiled with the same primitive tools their ancestors had used for centuries. Draft animals such as horses were scant so most of the work was done by hand. The money-based economies were growing for the middle and upper classes and as such their demand for food was growing. As is often the case, unfortunately, those growing economies were made on the back of the peasantry, whose fortunes remained roughly the same on through the French Revolution, two centuries later. In the midst of all that rose one of that century’s most famous citizens, Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus), a contemporary of Guerre’s. A medical doctor, Nostradamus is credited by many for almost singlehandedly stopping the Plague in France by introducing methods of hygiene and clean water. But Nostradamus is best known for his alchemy. His predictions foretold the death of the king and most of his children. Indeed, his predictions are so uncannily accurate that almost five hundred years later; people are still quoting his forecasts. However famous as he was, Nostradamus as well as Guerre and all the other French citizens, had to be ever vigilant, for the Catholic Church had a firm grip on the country. This was at the height of the Inquisition and one could stand accused of heresy and witchcraft at a moment’s notice. Torture devices were employed by the inquisitors to extract a “confession” from the accused. There were other crimes besides heresy, which included sodomy and blasphemy. That would have been the crime Bertrande Guerre was accused of, for blasphemy included sexual morality offenses. It made little difference if one did confess, for the lack of confession was also considered an admission of guilt. Such was the fear of persecution that the citizens lived with constantly. Considering The Return of Martin Guerre there are very slight differences between the book and the movie, especially since they were essentially written by the same person. Of course the film does not offer much explanation as to why Martin disappeared, while the literary license of a novel shows that he was unhappy with his marriage and maybe wanted some excitement in his life, the classic “seven year itch”. However, the film does offer a gritty portrayal of the horrific living conditions of the peasantry and their lack of education. All things considered, Ms. Davis has researched her genre quite well and gives a fairly accurate description of a time few of us could ever begin to imagine. European Witch Craze (Part II, # 3) There is no question that the European witch craze that lasted over three centuries resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people, male and female. Literary figures, political greats (including kings), and of course religious figures up to and including the Pope himself weighed in on the subject of witchcraft and most usually used the famous quote from the Holy Bible as their justification, Exodus 22 Verse 18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. Yet at the very same time alchemists such as Nostradamus were allowed to prosper and the royalty demanded their readings. So why were they popular while countless others suffered unthinkable torture and death? We of the modern world think of Adolph Hitler and his cohorts when extreme torture and cruelty to humanity come to mind. Yet such things as flailing with spiked whips, the Iron Maiden, near drownings, brandings, and pulling out one’s finger/toenails were utilized to extract confessions from the accused. Once the confession was obtained (or even not) the most popular execution method was burning at the stake. Yet other equally hideous methods were also employed. One was drowning, in the belief a witch floated because she had denounced baptism, while still other “humane” methods included boiling, being buried alive, impalement, beheading, and hanging. In the class readings two women from fourteenth century Toulouse in France were accused of witchcraft although “advanced in years”. To the mentality of the 1300’s, such things as the one having sex with a goat and giving herself to the devil were most believable, as they believed the most famous wizard of all time, Merlin, was the product of copulation between a demon and a mortal woman. The other woman, Catherine, admitted to the Inquisition that she had a relationship with a shepherd that was “contrary to the law”. From there that developed into eating human baby carcasses and likewise having sex with a goat in various countries. Because the women confessed they were given absolution but still were required to pay the secular price. That was not specified but one of the women’s crimes was burning her aunts in effigy so that “their unfortunate lives wasted away as the waxen figures melted”. One can only speculate the same fate awaited those two women! Many writings were developed during the three centuries but the word Inquisitor was first used in 1256 by a man named Anselm in his “Treatise on Heretics”. However the true origins of heresy and the ensuing witch hysteria probably involved a man named Waldes from Lyons in 1173. Wealthy, he proclaimed to have a religious conversion and proceeded to give his money away, preaching in the streets. That in of itself was heresy in that laymen could preach, not anointed by the Church. Besides, after all, somebody’s jealousy over someone else’s money was the root cause of most of the accusations of witchcraft throughout the era. Another crime that was easiest to blame on witchcraft and the work of the devil is sex, especially outside of marriage. The unfortunate Catherine from above started out with an affair with a human. With a few notable exceptions this was only applied to females, because if a man was found out as an adulterer it was still the woman’s fault! If he was impotent, it was the work of the Devil. Quoting St. Thomas Aquinas, “the catholic faith, on the other hand, insists that demons do indeed exist and they may impede sexual intercourse by their works”. Never was there any literature stating the man may be at fault and perhaps he should look at himself. This sort of “witch hunt” outlasted the Inquisitors and in some ways is still ongoing. The writings of the supreme rulers of the time, the Popes, sealed the fate of the thousands of people. For example in 1326 Pope John XXII issued an edict which he admitted certain people “bind themselves to demons….to fulfill their most depraved lusts (lusts again!) they ask them for aid. Binding themselves to the most shameful slavery”. For this he promised excommunication, which sent fear and trembling throughout most of the populace. Also, his edict threatened an anathema of the accused, which basically gave the Inquisitors a sort of legal precedent. So it was that a century and a half later Pope Innocent VIII issued the “Witch Bull” in 1484. Basically two Inquisitors had complained that their work had been hindered by local authorities in Germany and appealed to the Pope for assistance. Innocent cemented the position of the church by stating emphatically that “it shall be permitted to the Inquisitors in these regions to exercise their office of inquisition and to proceed to the correction, imprisonment, and punishment of the aforesaid persons for their said offenses and crimes”. Thus Innocent legalized the witch hunt craze and further expounded by saying that any man who dared to infringe the edict “let him know that he incurs the wrath of almighty God”. It was a scant two years later that the Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for Hammer of the Witches) was published by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, two Inquisitors, who were the cause of the Papal Bull above. In the work they laid out the reasons that those who denied the existence of witches were in fact witches themselves. The authors also pointed out that that women were more susceptible to the temptations of the Devil and therefore the belief was ludicrous that male witches were in equal numbers as women. Indeed a good part of the work calls women “silver tongued”, “more carnal than a man”, and is a “liar by nature”. To prove their point, the authors even quoted the Roman Cicero, which is a paradox, in that the Church considered Ancient Rome to be a godless and heathen society. Due mainly to Gutenberg’s printing press the Malleus Maleficarum was singlehandedly credited with spreading the flames of the witch hunts made so famous in the seventeenth century, including Salem. It is interesting to note that being possessed by the devil was in fact set aside from the practice of witchcraft. It is recognized by most mental health experts today that what was once referred to as satanic possession was a form of mental illness, possibly paranoia or schizophrenia. So even then the Church recognized possession as an item that could be cured whereas Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Commentary on the Four Books of Sentences stated emphatically that “Witchcraft is permanent”. On the same token, the Church developed its Manual of Exorcism which is still in effect today, supposedly to cure the affected individual. In conclusion, it should be noted that no factor resulted in a three hundred year genocide started by a few men hungry to hold onto the political powers they possessed and further fueled by local superstitions and inaccurate beliefs. Rather, the old true evils of money and sex contributed to paranoia that is still talked about and written about over three centuries after it mostly ended. Read More