Starnina's "Thebaid" in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
I am not a reincarnationist, nor a
subscriber to Nietzsche’s theory of the “eternal return”, but I have not failed
to note a certain circularity in my life, as I had reason to ponder last week,
when I spent three days at Notre Dame University at the meeting of the Medieval
Academy of America. It was the
ninetieth annual meeting of this venerable institution, and while I have not
been to all ninety, I must say that I do not recall another at which I found
the intellectual fare more to my liking.
I
used to be quite active in academy events and governance, and a regular
participant in the annual meetings, which have no fixed venue but move around
among many centers of medieval studies in this country and Canada. In retirement, however, my attendance
has been intermittent. Paris has a
certain pull, and of course life does move on. The early years of the Soviet regime saw the emergence of
the sociological category known as “former people”. These were the aristocrats, ecclesiastics, and bourgeois
professionals of the ancien régime
who, lacking the will, means, or opportunity to flee and dispossessed of
material possession and social station, now just sort of hung about like some
collective ghost of Banquo. I
wasn’t exactly spectral, but I did feel more than a little “former” as I bobbed
about on the surface of a sea of youthful energy and ambition.
My
first significant publication, in 1966, was a long essay on the Old English
poem usually called the “Dream of the Rood”. The poet's stunning conceit is that the personified Cross appears
to the dreamer and relates to him, from the perspective of the Cross, the story
of the Crucifixion. The poet
claims to relate a vision hwæt mē gemætte to midre
nihte, syðþan reordberend reste wunedon--“that
I encountered in the middle of the night, after folks [literally, voice-bearers] had gone to their beds.” The poem is a product of the rich
monastic culture of Anglo-Saxon England and—if I am right—is actually an
exposition of a specifically monastic theology. One of the papers I heard at Notre Dame cited this essay
with the archaeological respect one might muster in invoking Gibbon or, maybe,
Herodotus. It would have startled
the young scholar to learn I was extant, let alone sitting before her very
podium.
Opening Lines of the "Dream of the Rood" in the Vercelli Book
I
had the very satisfying experience of being able to listen to talks by several
of my own former students, and it was one them that took me unexpectedly in the
direction of sleepless monks again.
Scott Bruce, a historian at the University of Colorado, whom I had first
met long years past when he was a student in a graduate seminar on asceticism, read
an interesting paper entitled “Nocte
surgamus: Sleep, Stars, and the Navigation of the Night Office in Medieval
Monasticism.” The Latin phrase
means “Let us rise in the night”.
Sleeper cell: stone mattresses for a hard night's night
The
monastic names for the “night office” of prayers and praises, which was
performed around midnight, varied somewhat, often being called the vigil or vigils. How did
monks manage to get up in the middle of the night, night after night, to
perform this duty so vigilantly?
There were several strands to Professor Bruce’s paper, but one of the
most interesting had to do with the history of human sleep generally. For there assuredly is such a history,
and it has recently found its historian.*
The monks probably had less difficulty than we might imagine, because
like most other people they “naturally” awoke in the middle of the night.
Much
of the extraordinarily rapid change that separates us from the world of our
ancestors is of course technological, and of recent advent. One of the most revolutionary
novelties—electric lighting—is not yet a century and a half old. It is so new, in fact, that was
lacking in my earliest years in rural Arkansas. When it got dark, you went to bed—just like the chickens.
To
“go to bed with the chickens”—meaning with the arrival of dark—was to habituate
oneself to patterns of night sleep that shifted somewhat with the seasons, even
with geographical latitude, but that on the whole were markedly longer than
ours. We know from many written
records throughout Europe and early America that people generally experienced a
night’s sleep in two installments.
A “first sleep” (this was their name for it) was heavy
and dream-filled. It lasted from
three to five hours. It was a balm
for the physical exhaustion of heavy labor that most people in the Old World
experienced.
The
sleeper then awoke for a period of an hour or two. He or she might visit the latrine or use the chamber
pot. It was the common hour for
married couples to make love. Many
people seem simply to have lain quietly in idle reverie, wool-gathering, prayer,
or contemplation in a kind of hypnagogic suspension quite different from
anxious insomnia. Members of
religious communities rose to perform the liturgical office. After an indeterminate period, they drifted
into sleep again. The hard edge of
exhaustion having been blunted, the “second sleep” was less deep than the
first, perhaps a kind of intermittent drowse such as I myself know very
well. It ended when the night
ended with the light of dawn. Then
it was that “voice-bearers” arose from their beds. The monk moved on to the morning office, and the peasant to
the field.
*A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We
Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” American Historical Review, 106 (2001): 343-386.
