Thank you.
So there's this popular poem from later medieval England called "The Three Living and the Three Dead." Artists seem to have had a fun time illustrating it, for sure. Is that zombies chasing a noblewoman? Exciting, right?
Well, in the poem, three nobles (most frequently kings) are out hunting in the woods when they stumble across three skeletons! The nobles cry out in fear. The skeletons step forward. "Beware what you see," they say. "What you are, we once were. What we are, you soon shall be."
The end.
No, really.
This idea of memento mori, remember that you will die, permeates late medieval religion. There was no shortage of graphic depictions of hell, from art in churches to popular literature; and no shortage of sins that would send you there without proper confession. Whether stressing the "never-ending terrors of hell" or the "incomparable joys of heaven," religious teaching oriented around the quest for salvation. In literature aimed at lay people, this meant a scrupulous focus on right behavior in life, and sacramental confession, penance, and absolution when one inevitably failed to live up to the standards.
Medieval moral teaching was organized primarily around the seven deadly sins: pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth (in the 15th century, sloth was meandering its way from the earlier meaning of spiritual listlessness to the more modern interpretation of browsing reddit laziness). For the most part, pastoral texts aimed at lay people (sermons, didactic literature, prayer books) took a very general and abstracted approach to these sins, as we see in the prayers that the Bolton Book of Hours urged its readers to pray:
I acknowledge also that I have sinned in anger of heart through my own presumptuousness, that is to say in rancor and hardheartedness, being contentious and striking my fellow Christians [in deed or in thought].
This was useful because, as Church statesman and theologian Jean Gerson recognized, there were many many kinds of Christians, all of whom had their own individual experiences and sins. It was much more efficient for pastors to take a more psychological approach to the root of sins rather than trying to identify laundry lists of possible behaviors, from chucking snowballs at passers-by to contemplating infanticide.
However, there is a fairly strong surviving strand inherited from the high Middle Ages of just that second kind of text. In particular, authors like Heinrich von Langenstein delved into the sin of wrath in three facets: warmongering, arson, and murder. It's not hard to see the pressing socio-political concerns of late medieval Germany in Heinrich's Erchantnuzz der Sund (Recognition of Sin). This was the bloody, tumultuous time in which the German princes worked to bring the "robber knights" of the lower landed nobility under their control.
It's important to be aware that when Heinrich and others are talking about warmongering, arson, and murder--as with all discussions of wrath in particular--they are talking about the irrational, excessive surrender to wrath. Theologians recognized that righteous anger could be a good thing so long as it remained controlled (just as eating is a good thing, until you get to the point of gluttony where you are no longer in control and "you have made your stomach your God").
Still, we can see a certain amount of attention paid in late medieval pastoral religion to the problems of knighthood. Less on the proper battlefield and more associated with the interfamilial feuds, but still the practices of knighthood.
However, there's something interesting going on here. This idea of right behavior and the need for confession, the idea of a quest for salvation, seems to imply that salvation is something that must be earned: it is not guaranteed. Indeed, late medieval theology hung in a place of Heilsungewissheit, or the unknowability of salvation. Right behavior, and confession in the face of inevitable failings, could not guarantee salvation in and of themselves.
But they could, however, bring the Christian to the point where they could hope and prepare to receive God's mercy. This is the point made, over and over, in one of the most famous genres of late medieval literature, the ars moriendi: the Art of Dying.
Death, books and sermons assured readers, was only a fearful thing if one were unprepared for it. People unprepared for death, or who see death as a bad thing, are too attached to the ephemera of this world. Instead, people need to put their hope and trust in God. It is, ultimately, God's freely given grace that works salvation. The uncertainty of salvation, the ultimate unknowability of whether you have "done enough" in terms of moral behavior and confession, is meant to bring you to a point where you fall into humble confidence in God: it's ultimately the power of God, not your own.
So if this is the teaching, and these books on dying well are incredibly popular, what evidence do we have for how this played out in practice?
Thanks to a certain pesky Augustinian friar, many people today are familiar with the late medieval iteration of the doctrine of indulgences. Although this is often understood as "buying your salvation," that's not quite true. Indulgences could be granted for any number of pious deeds, from completing pilgrimages to helping build a church; the idea was that good deeds on earth could help make up for one's purgatorial debt.
There is surprisingly little research on indulgences in the 15th century. One difficult thing to grasp is the mathematics of it all. Indulgences in inordinate amounts of years are granted, thousands of years off purgatory; indulgences are promoted by the Church to fund Church activities or they are scribbled into the margins of a prayer book by its owner. Were people really doing math? Or were indulgences simply a more concrete way to understand this idea of working your way out of purgatory?
But the thing that indulgences share with other popular practices like paying to have monks say Mass for your soul, donating candles to the parish church, or even patronizing a monastery, is this idea of release from purgatory. In other words, you assume that you are on a trajectory to heaven. Purgatory was not a second chance land. There was only one exit, and it led to heaven.
Now, this didn't necessarily make for anxiety-free death scenes. The ars moriendi chapter in Heinrich Seuse's Little Book of Wisdom, which was popular enough to circulate on its own as an independent text, contains a rich, incredibly moving depiction of a "man dying poorly" who is concerned not about hell but about the pains of purgatory he will suffer. Although the character as written is the produce of Seuse's imagination, it is not hard to see his pastoral experience poking through in the evocation of the character. (Most of the late medieval pastoral writers were just that: pastors). The ars moriendi, after all, promote an ideal. The fifteenth century has been characterized as the most pious, and the most ecclesiastically pious, period in the history of Christianity. But that doesn't mean Christians did Christianity perfectly.
Pastors folded stories into their sermons of people who saw devils coming to drag them off on their deathbeds. They preached the horrors of hellmouths with leering eyes and sharp teeth. Visionaries recounted the horrid punishments they believed they had witnessed on their mystical voyages through the underworld.
But medieval Christians donated candles for churches. They prayed for the souls of their deceased parents and children. They participated in penitential processions, went on pilgrimages near and far, and counted the days, months, and years of their time in purgatory.
You can certainly dig up stories of individual people dying "well" or "poorly" according to the standards of the ars moriendi, although there will always be some question of the recorder's bias. But as focused as medieval Christians were on the "last things" of judgment, heaven, hell and purgatory, they by and large seem to have trusted that through the grace of God, their fate pointed upwards.
In short, no. Nobles and noble families gave generous donations and land to local monasteries to "keep them in their prayers" and to help family members find their way in the afterlife. Knights, in addition to this, depending on the time period and climate of the time, went on crusade to guarantee their spot in heaven, as it was decreed condoned by God. However, there are instances of culturally perceived (and instructed by clergy) fear of demonic influence and damnation particularly in the within the peasant discourse on women, menstruation, and bestiality which I can provide sources for if desired.
In exploring the theme of religious family networks and the growth and spread of crusading communities, the most paramount study in the collection of books would be Jochen Schenk’s Templar Families: Landowning families and the Order of the Temple in France, 1120-1307. The book encapsulates the vigorously interwoven relationships between the Templars and wealthy noble families supporting the crusades and their role in creating Templar communities. He analyzes the Cistercian influence on French families to accept the new Order of the Temple.
He argued that the traditional outlook of individual piety, security, and drive for social advancement did not sufficiently explain why large family groups continued supporting the Templars and crusades over the centuries. He argues in the light of Alan Forey’s study on kinship and friendship ties; where parental and family pressures to join in support led to family traditions and the creation of a crusading family ideal. He focuses on the Burgundy, Champagne, and Languedoc regions, where large archives are still available to study. His sources used are genealogical, charters, inventories, and religious cartularies to make associations with other religious Orders.
In his study of religious families and their interaction with the Order, he draws the relationship to commitment to reform monasticism and commitment to multiple similar religious communities. He analyzes the similarities of Cistercian communities to the origin of the Templar and their interrelations. Like other authors here, Schenk cites the influence of St. Bernard’s De Laude Novae Militae as hugely influential in their influence, perception, and establishment. In which, Bernard sanctions violence as a spiritually meritorious exercise which led knightly nobles and their families to engage in spiritual salvation through supporting and crusading; and allowed laymen and women to express sympathy and find remedy for their spiritual concerns. Donating to the Order meant laymen could gain access to the Orders’ Prayers and collective memory of merit. Joining a confraternity or becoming a Donat of the Order allowed prospective pilgrims, and lay nobles alike the benefit of the Templars spiritual benefits, associated emotionally and spiritually, without fully professing to it. Through the Bull milites Templii these members were allowed a partial indulgence and burial with the Order, and Donats were considered of a higher tier. Donats professed their body and soul in order to become a full brother later in life. These members provided valuable contacts, and secular connections for their network. He goes further to comment on the abundance of Cistercian representatives at the Council of Troyes, in which the Templar Rule was standardized; and within Cistercian and Benedictine elements can be found.
Bishops with a reform minded outlook saw the Order as a tool to reform their diocese. They associated themselves, gifted lands, and privileges to the Templar to instill new religious spirit and fervor among their followers. The Orders well-being was then on associated with spiritual wellbeing of those who supported it. Families took the wellbeing of their members within the Order to heart, and gave endowments, rights and privileges, as well as methods of production such as mills, houses for commanderies, and hospitals under their income. The support of families stems from the religious induction by Bernard of Clairvaux, returning pilgrims and crusaders grateful of Templar help, and Hugh of Payns network of powerful friendships in the realm. His personal networks were a donor base at their conception. Relations with the Templar became a method of “social glue” in which men and women used their influence and relationship with the Order to encourage others to do so. Using Laudatio, donations and transactions can be confirmed and reconfirmed through multiple generations to pass on trusts and privileges to new members. Creating a legacy and tradition in families associated with the Order, further creating confrates and consorores in which even unreligious patrons- both men and women, could act in a religious framework of relatives. He further reinforces his study of devotion of Templar families to the crusading cause by analyzing religious cartularies of other religious communities and finding families donating to a variety of them, not just the Templars. Most notably they tended to also donate to Cistercian and Benedictine communities not unlike the Templars. While they worried about their spirituality, they saw the Templars as a manifestation of their support and sacrifices to the Holy Land. Following the Templars arrest, these families continued donating to other similar Orders to continue their traditional support and cause.
For more, see Schenk, Jochen. Templar Families: Landowning Families and the Order of the Temple in France, C.1120-1307. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012
