St. Christopher carrying the Christ child; book of hours, England, 1316-1331; New York, Pierpont Morgan MS G.50 f. 5v
St. Christopher is a saint with an exciting etymological pedigree. The name Christopher is actually a brief description of one of the most famous stories about him: he is the Christ-bearer, from the Greek words Χριστός (Christ) and φέρειν (to bear or carry). Christopher, the story goes, was a new convert to Christianity and, as an ascetic spiritual exercise, undertook to wait by a river ford, carrying travelers across on his back. One day, a young child came along and requested passage.
Christopher carrying the Christ child; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, in the English translation by John Trevisa, England, first quarter of the 15th century; BL, Harley MS 614, f. 5r
As he carried the child across, the boy seemed to increase in weight until it seemed to Christopher that he carried the entire weight of the world on his back. This anomaly was explained when, on being challenged, the boy revealed that he was in fact the Christ child, and the weighty importance of his burden – responsible for both the creation and redemption of indeed the whole world – meant that this physical weight was a true reflection of its spiritual and symbolic importance. Depictions of Christopher, therefore, are easily recognizable, in depicting this famous story and rendering visible the pun of his name. Christopher is almost always shown stooped over, fording a river while carrying a small child on his back.
St. Christopher carrying the Christ child; prayer roll, Yorkshire, c. 1500; New York, Pierpont Morgan MS G.39, f. 12r
While this iconography is the most frequent and prevalent representation of Christopher, it is not, however, fully consistent with how the saint is represented in some of the earliest medieval descriptions of his story. Christopher is perhaps able to bear such a weighty burden because he is no ordinary man, but a giant in strength and stature. He was a convert to Christianity, coming from a country somewhere in the mysterious east – a region that, in medieval chronicles, romances, and travel writings, was frequently asserted to be the home of wonders and so-called “monstrous races,” mysterious peoples with strange customs and bizarre bodies: cannibals, men with ears like fans or faces in the center of their chests.
The marvels of India including, in the top center, three cynocephali conversing; Livres des Merveilles du Monde, France, c. 1460; New York, Pierpont Morgan MS M.461, f. 41v
Among these strange peoples were the cynocephali, the dog-headed men, and it was to this race that Christopher was sometimes said to belong. In Mandeville’s Travels, one of the best-known of the travel narratives in the English traditions, a race of dog-headed men are described who are a fascinating combination of the fierce and the cultured: “Men and wymmen of that contre [country] hath houndes hedes [heads] and they ben resonable and they worshipeth an oxe for her [their] god and they gon [go about] alle naked save a lytel cloth byfore her [their] privyteis and they ben good men to fiȝt [fight] and they beren [carry] a great targe [shield] with wham [which] they coveryn alle her [their] body and a sper [spear] in her honde [hand].”
Armed cynocephalus and, on the left, a member of a cannibal race being mauled by a dog; John Mandeville, Travels, England, c. 1410-1420; BL, Royal MS 17 C. xxxviii, f. 43r
Despite their bestial appearance, they have “reason” and an apparently well-developed religion (although one, to Christian sensibilities, misguided). Largely naked, they are still human enough to wear loincloths and carry weapons – and when they defeat an enemy in battle, they take the prisoner to their king, “a gret lord and devout in his faith,” who wears a prayer necklace the author compares to a rosary.
Initial ‘C’ decorated with a cynocephalus; Odo of Asti, Expositio in psalmos, Northern Italy, 1100-1149; New York, Pierpont Morgan MS G.51, f. 23v
Such a religiously-minded race, indisputably and terrifyingly “other,” but strongly mirroring the familiar, seems an appropriate match for St. Christopher. Being physically strong himself, one version of Christopher’s story goes, he decided to seek out and serve the strongest king he could find. But a powerful human king still stood in fear of the name of the devil, and when Christopher then sought out Satan as clearly the more powerful lord, he was likewise disappointed to find his new master frightened by the Christian symbolism of the cross. So finally he decides to serve Christ instead, as clearly the most powerful. In this version of the story, Christopher is cast in the role of a virtuous outsider, and his bestial appearance makes him an even more powerful spiritual exemplar, while the conclusion of the tale reassures the faithful of Christianity’s superiority, obvious even to someone not quite fully human.
Pentecost including, at bottom center, a cynocephalus among those representing the far-flung nations of the world; Gospel book, Van, Turkey, 1461; New York, Pierpont Morgan MS M.749, f. 9r
Nicole Eddy
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame
The account of Abel’s slaying in Genesis represents one of those moments where the desire for more detail is frustrated utterly by Scripture’s silence. How did Cain murder his brother? Where did he learn to kill? What did he do with the body? And so on and so forth in this manner, without recourse to satisfactory answers from the primary sources.
Much like Nature, however, ancient and medieval scriptural commentators abhorred a vacuum; wherever lacunae existed in the biblical narratives, many were more than happy to fill the gaps with clever conjecture, rationalistic explanations, and apocrypha sourced from a variety of traditions. Perhaps the grandest example of this taste for a veritably encyclopedic concatenation of biblical trivia is what Bernard Bischoff economically called Das Bibelwerk (or the Reference Bible), the massive eight-century Irish biblical commentary bearing the Latin title Pauca problesmata de enigmatibus ex tomis canonicis (“Little Questions on Obscurities from Canonical Books”). Unsurprisingly, then, there arose in both the early Jewish and Christian textual communities a number of traditions dealing with the precise method of Abel’s murder.
The neck or head, for example, is identified in a number of early Jewish sources, including the Genesis Rabbah, as the anatomical locus of Abel’s murder. Similarly, the Babylonian Talmud explains how Cain, unfamiliar with the mechanics of death, effectively unleashes a flurry of wild blows until he finds the sweet spot of the neck. The neck and its vital organs are further implicated in the act of strangulation or suffocation, a method alternatively suggested both in Ambrosiaster’s Quaestiones Ueteris et Noui Testamenti CXXVII and the Reference Bible.
Cain strangling Abel. Ivory panel from Salerno Cathedral, c. 1084, now in the Louvre.
Tucked away in a quirky little sermon on tithing dating from at least the eighth century (a copy of which survives in British Library, MS Royal 5. E. XIII, ff. 9r-11r ), we also find the jarring explanation that Cain both suffocated and decapitated Abel with the jawbone of an ass, perhaps even implying that he used animal’s remaining teeth to saw off his brother’s head. Yikes! In fact the earliest literary source to specify the jawbone of an ass as Cain’s murder weapon is a comment on Genesis IV. 8 found in glosses originating from the Canterbury school of Theodore and Hadrian in the seventh century.
Cain striking Abel with a jaw-bone. The “Taymouth Hours.” British Library, MS Yates-Thompson 13, f. 28r, s. xiv (2/4).
Among others, J. E. Cross and T. D. Hill have also noted the presence of this tradition both in the later Old English prose dialogue Solomon and Saturn, as well as in the mid twelfth-century Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn, where the jawbone is said to be that of a camel.
Cain striking Abel with a jaw-bone (of a camel? ass?). The “Huth Psalter.” British Library, MS Additional 38116, f. 9r, s. xiii ex.
The extra-scriptural tradition that Cain used a jaw-bone (whether that of an ass, camel, or otherwise) to slay his brother may ultimately derive, as M. Shapiro and A. A. Barb have suggested, from his designation as a tiller of the ground. In trying to account for the murder-weapon, early literal-minded commentators may have sought an instrument germane to Cain’s agrarian occupation, such as a scythe.
Cain killing Abel with a scythe. Bible historiale. British Library, MS Harley 4381, f. 10r, 1403-1404.
Such an implement would not, of course, have been made from metal, since the forging of metal tools only began generations later with Tubal-Cain, as any early biblical scholar worth his salt would have remembered. In the absence of metallurgical science, then, a scythe or sickle would have been made of animal bone, perhaps even a jawbone (or so the argument goes). As it happens, excavations of Near Eastern palaeolithic settlements have discovered just this sort of object, animal jawbones inset with flint blades as a replacement for the original teeth.
That his agrarian occupation did encourage other creative conjectures, however, is clear enough from the statement, found in the eighth or ninth-century Vita Anstrudis, that Cain killed his brother with a hoe; or from Benzo of Alba’s Ad Heinricum ImperatoremLibri VII where, this time, Cain is said to have used a shovel.
Cain cleaving Abel’s head with a shovel. The “Psalter of St. Louis.” Bibliothèque nationale, Lat. 10525, f. 2r, 1270-1274.
Yet by far the most macabre explanation comes to us from the thirteenth-century Joca monachorum (“Monks’ Jokes”) dialogue. There, in response to the question how Cain decapitated his brother, the interrogator is told matter of factly that, since he didn’t have a sword, Cain used his teeth, and then buried Abel twelve feet deep. One of the very earliest sources to allude to this outrageously primal method of killing is the apocryphal Latin Life of Adam and Eve (or the Apocalypse of Moses in the Greek version), a collection of texts largely considered to be Jewish in origin and dating to the first century AD. Here Eve is said to have dreamt of Abel’s murder, seeing in her vision Cain mercilessly drinking up every drop of his brother’s blood and vomiting it forth upon the earth. A striking depiction of this scene can be found in the so-called “Alba Bible” from Maqueda, Spain (c. 1430).
Some such source as this must also lie behind the account given in the Zohar (a thirteenth century collection of esoteric and Kabbalistic scriptural exegesis), where Cain is said to have bit his brother like a serpent because he did not know how to separate body and soul.
It is worth pointing out as well that the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal Jewish text dating from around the third to first century BC, describes the antediluvian giants of Genesis 6 as cannibalistic monsters who drank the blood of their own race. These very giants, according to the tradition preserved in both the Irish Reference Bible and the Old English poem Beowulf, among others sources, had sprung directly from the murderous seed of Cain. The Book of Enoch, or at least a fragment of its Latin translation, was also definitely known in Anglo-Saxon England by the tenth century at the latest, and it is perhaps this very bit of apocryphal lore that the Beowulf poet had in mind when describing the monstrous kin of Cain, among whom the blood-drinking horror of the marches—Grendel—numbered.
While certainly not exhaustive, the above little discussion will have shown, if nothing else, how wonderfully (or frightfully) imaginative and diverse apocryphal tradition could be in the face of Scripture’s silence. For questions remained, and answers were demanded—and when every detail, no matter how seemingly trivial, potentially held deep symbolic significance, such silence was indeed unacceptable. Luckily, there existed a robust inheritance of extra-biblical sources and authorities to satisfy even the most inquisitive of minds.
Christopher Scheirer
PhD Candidate
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame
Further Reading:
Bischoff, Bernard and Michael Lapidge, eds., Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge, 1994), p. 499.
Barb, A. A., “Cain’s Murder-Weapon and Samson’s Jawbone of an Ass,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972), pp. 386-87.
Cross, J. E., “Cain’s Jawbone: Earlier Allusions” in KM 80: A Birthday Album for Kenneth Muir, Tuesday, 5 May, 1987, ed. A. Kettle (Liverpool, 1987), p. 33.
Cross, J. E. and T. D. Hill., The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus (Toronto, 1982).
Henderson, G., “Cain’s Jaw-Bone,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24.1/2 (1961), pp. 108-114.
Mellinkoff, Ruth, “Cain’s Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf: Part I, Noachic Tradition,” Anglo-Saxon England 8 (1979), pp. 143-162.
Orchard, Andy, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Toronto, 1995), pp. 58-85.
Shapiro, M. “‘Cain’s Jaw-bone That Did the First Murder’,” The Art Bulletin 24.3 (1942). Pp 205-212.
W. Suchier, ed. Das mittellateinsche Gespräch Adrian und Epictitus: nebst verwandten Texten (Joca Monachorum) (Tübingen, 1955), no. 23, p. 124.
Genesis Rabbah: The Judaic Commentary to the Book of Genesis. A New American Translation, trans. J. Neusner (Atlanta, 1985), p. 248.
Sanhedrin, ed. I. Epstein, trans. Jacob Shachter, 2 vols. (London, 1935), I, 37b, p. 237.
Vita Anstrudis Abbatissae Laudunensis V, 25-26, ed. W. Levison, MGH: Scriptorum Rerum Merovingicarum 6 (Hannover, 1913), p. 68: “Semper enim pars malorum infesta est parti piorum, ex quo Cain fregit sarculo guttur fraternum.”
St. Patrick, with his bishop’s cross and miter, is surrounded by demons, gleefully torturing departed sinners; Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: The Vision of William Staunton, England, 1451; British Library, Royal MS 17 B. xliii, f. 132v
St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner, and at Notre Dame, proud home of the Fighting Irish, it seems a fitting time to examine more closely this saint now synonymous with Ireland. It may come as a surprise to learn, then, that the saint is not, by birth, Irish at all. Instead, Patrick was born in Roman-occupied Britain, in the late fourth or early fifth century. His first encounter with Ireland was not a friendly one, as he was captured by Irish raiders at sixteen, and sold into slavery. Six years later, the young slave was able to escape, and made his way back to Britain. Years later, he returned to Ireland, becoming the “Apostle of the Irish” for his efforts to convert the Irish to Christianity. He was not the first missionary to come to the island – he was preceded by enigmatic figure St. Palladius, who was sent to Ireland by the pope in 431. But for whatever reason, it is Patrick’s reputation that has proven the more enduring.
St. Patrick (with halo) reclines on a hillock, while, below him, visionary beasts frolic; Wauchier de Denain, Lives of the Saints, Paris, 2nd quarter of the 13th century; British Library, Royal MS 20 D. vi, f. 213
Popular myth credits him with “driving the snakes out of Ireland,” although this is not the Herculean task it might sound, since there do not seem to ever have been snakes in Ireland to begin with! Scientists attribute this circumstance to Ireland’s lack of a landlink to mainland Europe following the last ice age. The usual explanation for the snake tale (besides a desire to credit an observed anomaly to a well-known national hero) is that the story is in its roots an allegorical one. In Genesis and elsewhere, the association between snakes and the demonic is strong.
Snakes, twined around the roots of a basil plant, which was thought to be effective as a deterrent against them; Pseudo-Apuleius Platonicus, De medicaminibus herbarum, Germany, 2nd half of the 12th century; British Library, Harley MS 4986, f. 43v
The medieval allegorical connotations of the venemous asp give a window on some of the associations that discussion of snakes might have brought up, and are not inapropos to Patrick’s story. The asp, medieval bestiaries tell us, has a defense mechanism against that natural predator of asps, the snake-charmer, who draws it from its hole in these stories not with pipe music but with mystic incantations. An unwary snake could find itself in trouble this way, bewitched from its protective home. But the clever asp does the no-hands equivalent of putting its fingers in its ears, pressing one ear to the ground and sticking its tail in the other to block out the sound of the charmer’s chanting (a particularly tricky technique to execute, given snakes’ lack of external ear structures). In this way, the asp can be read allegorically as a recalcitrant convert, with one ear to worldly pleasures, and stopping up the ear that might hear words from heaven advocating spiritual reform: an appropriate genius loci for an aspiring missionary to cast out. While you’re wearing your green this St. Patrick’s Day, then, don’t forget to watch out for snakes!
An asp, refusing to listen to the incantations of the snake charmer; Bestiary, England, 2nd quarter of the 13th century; British Library, Harley MS 4751, f. 61r
Nicole Eddy
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame
