Mind, Body and Soul: The Self in Medieval Christian and Medical Thought

The materialism of medieval eschatology, as Walker Bynum finds, emphasises personhood as a ‘psychosomatic unity’, moving away from Platonic body-soul dualism.1 C. Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995), p. 135. By the mid-twelfth century, theologians increasingly viewed personhood as composite, a perspective deepened with the development of the doctrine of purgatory in the thirteenth century.2 The concept of a purgatorial state was officially recognised at the council of Lyon in 1274. In Western Scandinavia, the significance of purgatory increases in the thirteenth century, and the fourteenth century sees the first occurrence of a Norse term for purgatorium: hreinsanarstaðr (place of purification). C. Carlsen, Old Norse Visions of the Afterlife (Oxford, 2013), p. 19. A rhetoric of wholeness emerges, with the soul yearning for the body:3 The yearning of soul for body is seen in several Old Norse works: in Duggals leizla, ed. P. Cahill (Reykjavík, 1983), p. 25, the soul attempts (to no avail) to re-enter the dying body. In Morkinskinna, a fish swims out of King Magnús’ mouth as he sleeps, and tries but cannot re-enter the body; Magnús interprets this spectral fish as a symbol that he will die soon (see Haki Antonsson, Damnation and Salvation in Old Norse Literature (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 183–9)). as Thomas Aquinas writes: the soul, ‘when separated from the body, is, in a way, imperfect, even as any part is when severed from its whole’.4 Quoted in Walker Bynum, Resurrection, p. 269.

Turning to Christian skaldic verse, we find expressions of this unified view of body and mind: here, cognitive and emotional faculties are framed in terms of physical location,5 That cognition was viewed as the province of the soul is evident in the Old Norse translations of two body-soul dialogues. See S. G. Eriksen, ‘Body and Soul in Old Norse Culture’, in Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350, ed. S. G. Eriksen (Turnhout, 2016), pp. 393–428 (pp. 402, 416). with kennings for ‘breast/chest’ adhering to a cardiocentric or pectoral model of cognition and emotion.6 For scholarship on the cardiocentric/pectoral model of emotion and cognition in skaldic poetry, see Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir (‘The Head, the Heart, and the Breast: Bodily Conceptions of Emotion and Cognition in Old Norse Skaldic Poetry’, VMS 15 (2019), 29–64), who notes the model’s stability within kenning-patterns across roughly five centuries of both pre-Christian and Christian verse, and Mackenzie (‘Vernacular Psychologies’, pp. 165–70), who observes a fourteenth-century shift where the chest retains its physiological role in the experience of emotion, while new elements like cardiocentric heat and hot tears are introduced. In the late thirteenth-century devotional drápa Líknarbraut (The Way of Grace), the breast/chest is denoted as the ‘land of the mind’ (‘lyndis láð’),7 Líknarbraut 5 (SkP VII, pp. 234–5): ‘land of the mind’. ‘house of thought’ (‘rann hugar’)8 Líknarbraut 7 (SkP VII, p. 237): ‘house of thought’. and ‘field of eloquence’ (‘mælsku tún’).9 Líknarbraut 4 (SkP VII, pp. 233–4): ‘field of eloquence’. The base-words are topographic and architectural features, while the determinants refer to mental abilities.10 In skaldic verse from the pre-Christian period, kennings for breast follow similar patterns, though with some variation: as Marold notes (‘Mythical and Metaphorical Landscapes’, p. 223) early tenth-century kennings for breast used in a poetological context employ marine (rather than terrestrial) base-words, alluding to the myth of the origin of the mead of poetry. In our post-Cartesian ontology, there is a temptation to interpret these kennings locating cognition in the breast as somehow metaphorical – to separate out psychological inwardness and physiological materialism. However, a comparison of these breast-kennings with other body-part kennings gives us pause. Compare the kenning ‘ground of the ears [HEAD]’ (discussed in Chapter 1), which uses a topographic feature (‘ground’) as the base-word and a physical body-part (‘ears’) as its determinant, with the kenning ‘land of thought [BREAST]’. The kennings share a parallel structure, suggesting that just as the ears (a material attribute of the human) are found on the head, so too is thought (a material attribute of the human) located in the breast.11 Other narrative contexts provide further evidence for the association of the physical organ of the heart with cognitive traits and aspects of personality; see Akv. 21–5, Am. 58–64, Vǫls., ch. 37; Fbr. (Hauksbók-version), ch. 17; Skm., ch. 17.

In turn, these kennings for breast share the same patterns as kennings for the (Christian) soul, suggesting the inseparability of the soul’s cognitive and emotional aspects from bodily materiality. The Skaldic Project identifies just two kennings for the soul in the whole corpus, both of which appear in the same, anonymous late thirteenth-century poem, Heilags anda drápa (Drápa about the Holy Spirit). The editor identifies the referent as soul on the basis of the kennings’ wider context: stanza 3 conjures an image of the soul receiving god’s mercy (‘sú hefr einkagjöf grænkat/ geðfjöll […] siðferðar blómi’ – ‘that true, singular gift has made green the mind-mountains [SOULS] with the bloom of moral conduct’).12 SkP VII, pp. 453–4. The extended visual metaphor of the soul in bloom, as Katrina Attwood notes, reminds us of the description of morally upright behaviour as the ‘fruit’ of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament.13 SkP VII, pp. 453–4. Stanza 4 returns to the same visual metaphor, this time framing the soul as ‘skóg h*ugar’ (‘forest of the mind’), decked with abundant fruit (‘aldini’) by God.14 SkP VII, pp. 455–6. While the semantic congruity between these kennings and their wider visual contexts allows for the referents to be identified as ‘soul’, these kennings nonetheless adhere to the same patterns as those referring to the physiological breast/heart (compare, for example, Guðbrandr í Svǫlum’s ‘móðfjall’ – ‘mood-mountain [HEART]’).15 Fragment 2 (SkP III, p. 198). Indeed, some scholars have simply treated the Heilags anda drápa soul-kennings as breast-kennings.16 E.g., Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘Bodily Conceptions’, pp. 44–5.

This body-soul entanglement is evident in prose as well. The Old Norse Elucidarius describes the body and soul as ‘samtengð’ (‘united’),17 Nordal, Tools, pp. 257–8. since the body does what the soul does,18 Quoted in ibid.: ‘at líkamr synisk allt gera þat er ǫnd gerir’. a point fervently discussed in the soul-body dialogue of the Old Norse Homily Book.19 See Eriksen, ‘Body and Soul’. And it is not just in life that the soul maintains a complex and integral relationship with the body, but in the afterlife too: Norse visionary literature, such as Leizla Rannveigar (an original Norse vision account that appears in Guðmundar saga biskups) and Duggals leizla (a Norse translation of the popular Visio Tnugdali),20 Guðmundar saga biskups, a bishop’s saga likely composed before 1249, survives in four versions (A–D) dating to the fourteenth century. Duggals leizla was translated c. 1300, and survives in Icelandic manuscripts from the fourteenth century onwards. present the soul as ‘somatomorphic’.21 I.e., while the soul departs from the earthly body, it nonetheless experiences the vision of the afterlife corporeally. Somatomorphic is Carol Zaleski’s term (Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford, 1988), p. 51).

Set in eastern Iceland in 1198, Leizla Rannveigar recounts a vision experienced by Rannveig, a pious woman with a chequered past. After losing consciousness, she awakes and reports her vision: she had been seized by demons, who burn her legs, hands and back, and who inform her that she is experiencing this torture on account of her affairs with priests, vanity and greed. A trio of Scandinavian saints eventually intervene and rescue her, but not before commenting on the wounds Rannveig has received from the demons, which map onto her sins committed in life:

Not only are Rannveig’s transgressions made legible on her body in the vision, but they are translated out of the world of the vision and onto Rannveig’s earthly form when she wakes up: ‘allt þar er hon var ber. þa var hon brunniN er hon racnaðe uið’ (‘every part of her body that was bare was burnt when she regained consciousness’).23 Ibid., p. 94. While the wounds attest to the veracity of Rannveig’s account, they nonetheless pose a curious phenomenological question: if the vision is experienced by the soul, how do its torments manifest later on the body? The description of Rannveig while unconscious suggests that she experiences the vision holistically since ‘hon kiptiz við hart. stundum. sem henne yrðe mioc sart’ (‘she would writhe about violently from time to time, as if she were in great pain’).24 Guðmundur sögur biskups, p. 93. This presentation of the body during the vision is different from other visions, such as Duggals leizla (p. 11), in which the body appears to be dead. This accords with the phrasing used in the early versions of the vision, in which there is no mention of the vision being experienced specifically by the sál/ǫnd (soul): instead, Rannveig is consistently referred to simply as ‘hón’ (‘she’).25 Note that since sál and ǫnd are feminine nouns, hón could feasibly also refer to the soul (though the text does not make this explicit). This changes in the later, D-version of the saga, which does refer to Rannveig’s sál. Judging from the earlier tradition of the vision, it was not (initially) important to specify a separation of the soul from the body, especially given that the marks on Rannveig’s body act as proof of the vision’s authenticity.

Duggals leizla recounts the story of a proud Irish nobleman who lies as if dead for three days, during which time he has an elaborate vision of the afterlife. Upon awakening, he is a reformed man. Although Duggal’s soul departs from his body to witness the treatment of souls in the afterlife (‘sem ỏnd min skildizt uit likam minn’ – ‘when my soul left my body’),26 Duggals, p. 15. all post-mortem souls are depicted somatically in the afterlife, possessing skin, sinews and bones,27 Ibid., p. 68: ‘hud og [ho]lld og sinar og bein’. limbs,28 Ibid., p. 76: ‘limi’. heads29 Ibid.: ‘hofutid’. and entrails.30 Ibid., p. 59: ‘innyflum’. The tortures they endure are excessively bodily, such as the explosive pregnancy inflicted on both men and women, who give birth to serpents throughout their body, ‘sua at eingi uar sa stadur likamsins at ei ut sprungu þau eiturlig kuikendi’ (‘so that there was no place on the body where those poisonous creatures did not spring out’).31 Ibid., pp. 59–60. While this somatomorphic depiction of the soul in purgatorial spaces may seem paradoxical, it aligns with thirteenth-century thought, which increasingly used the notion of the soul’s body (‘líkamr sálar’)32 Ibid., p. 61. to convey individuality, moral state and social status.33 Walker Bynum, Resurrection, p. 296. The soul’s body, in part, serves a practical function: Caesarius of Heisterbach, for example, suggests that souls must be experienced as bodies when we ourselves are embodied,34 Ibid., p. 295. a perspective stretching back to Gregory the Great.35 Gregory the Great, Dialogues (book 4, ch. 35).

The ‘soul’s body’ of visionary literature is indicative of the ways in which embodiment is essential to medieval Christian conceptions and experiences of the self. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century skaldic verse and visionary prose reflect this articulation of the self as psychosomatic unity: in the former, cognitive and emotive faculties associated with the soul are located in and expressed through the physical breast/chest; and in the latter, moral sins condemning the soul to eternal punishment map onto the body, both the earthly body in Leizla Rannveigar, and the ‘soul’s body’ of the afterlife in Duggals leizla. This somaticisation of the soul is not merely a narrative device but reflects an eschatological principle: the body manifests the soul’s sins and virtues in purgatorial space, making visible the psychosomatic unity theologians increasingly articulated. Christian conceptions of the body-soul nexus thus frame embodiment as an integral aspect of personhood, obfuscating distinctions between a ‘physical/external self’ and a ‘cognitive/internal self’.

Medical frameworks likewise approached cognition and emotion in relation to (rather than as separate from) the body. Medicine in the medieval world encompassed diverse discourses and practices, from empirical and ‘folk’ medicine, to theoretical systems influenced by Classical and Arabic traditions.36 T. Vaughan, ‘Theoretical Medicine vs. Practical Medicine’, in Vaughan, Women, Food and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours (Amsterdam, 2020), pp. 91–110. While not all medical practices and knowledge were transmitted by textual means, extant medical texts – treatises, lapidaries, antidotariums, cookbooks, herbals and charms – illustrate the broad scope of medical knowledge, synthesising what we might today consider distinct categories (philosophical, pharmaceutical, magical and religious).37 Similarly, medicine was conducted by a wide range of practitioners, with the secular professionalisation of medicine only beginning on the continent in the thirteenth century (Kanerva, ‘Porous Bodies’, pp. 108–10). Learned medieval medicine, like other branches of natural philosophy, sought not only to treat ailments but uncover nature’s secrets,38 C. Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge, UK, 2010), p. 101. with medical conceptions of the body underpinned by Neoplatonic ideas of cosmology, where man is a microcosm of the macrocosmic world.39 For the penetration of these ideas in medieval Iceland, see, e.g., the Old Norse Elucidarius, in which man is called inn minni heimr, ‘the smaller world’, i.e. microcosm (Nordal, Tools, p. 291).

Humoral theory, originating with Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE) and Galen (129–c. 200 CE), was the dominant physiological model in medieval thought. It proposed a continuum between mind and body, where health and temperament depended on balancing the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile),40 C. Saunders, ‘Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing’, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. A. Whitehead et al. (Edinburgh, 2016), n.p. each linked to the four elements,41 M. Anderson, ‘Distribution Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Studies’, in Distributed Cognition, ed. Anderson and Wheeler, pp. 18–42 (p. 24). as outlined in the Icelandic humoral treatise in Hauksbók (Af natturu mannzi bloði): ‘maðrinn hefír i ser likinði. iiijra hofuðskepna. ok má þat marka a æða bloði mannz ef…’. (‘Man has in himself the likeness of the four elements, and this can be observed in the blood from a man’s veins…’.).42 Hauksbók, p. 181. The treatise is found on ff. 16r–17r in AM 544 4to (c. 1305–15). On the contents and source of this treatise, see Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘Humoral Theory in the Medieval North: An Old Norse Translation of Epistula Vindiciani in Hauksbók’, Grípla 29 (2018), 35–66. Environmental factors, such as seasonal cycles, were further thought to influence the humours: ‘Bloð vex ok mest með mann vm uárið rauða bloð vm sumar suarta bloð vm haust enn vari vm vetur’ (‘blood increases in man in the spring, red blood [yellow bile] in summer, black blood [black bile] in autumn, but phlegm in winter’).43 Ibid., p. 182. On the interpretation of ‘red blood’ as yellow bile, see Kanerva, ‘Disturbances of the Mind and Body’, p. 239. Remedies for humoral imbalance included dietary adjustments and purging methods, like bloodletting, cauterisation, vomiting, sweating, sexual intercourse and so on.44 Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘Emotions in Njáls saga and Egils saga: Approaches and Literary Analysis’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2020), p. 63.

In this way, humoral theory materially linked mind, body and environment, and offered a system for theorising (and a set of techniques for managing) this entanglement. In Iceland, direct evidence of familiarity with humoral theory appears in medical treatises,45 E.g., in the thirteenth-century AM 655 XXX 4to and fourteenth-century Hauksbók. with much of Scandinavian medical theory traceable to the Salerno school of medicine.46 Mackenzie, ‘Vernacular Psychologies’, p. 139. As Kanerva and Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir note, humoral concepts were compatible with some native Icelandic approaches, allowing for an intersection rather than opposition between imported and native ideas (Kanerva, ‘Porous Bodies’, p. 107; Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘Emotions’, p. 66). Indirect evidence for knowledge of humoral theory appears in Icelandic law codes and in saga literature.47 Bloodletting and cauterisation appear in Grágás in the contemporary saga Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar (Brynja, ‘Emotions’, pp. 70–2), indicating the influence of Salernitan medical knowledge in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Iceland. Scholars have explored how various bodily behaviours in Íslendingasögur can be interpreted in terms of humoral theory (see Y. Tirosh, ‘Milk, Masculinity and Humor-Less Vikings: Gender in the Old Norse Polysystem’, Limes 13 (2020), 136–50; Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘Emotions’; Mackenzie, ‘Vernacular Psychologies’, pp. 128–43; Kanerva, ‘Porous Bodies’, pp. 111–13). For example, in the thirteenth-century Bandamanna saga, Óspakr is found dead next to a basin of tar-black blood, prompting speculation that this detail reflects Óspákr’s melancholic state at the time of his death (Kanerva, ‘Porous Bodies’, p. 112; Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘Humoral Theory’, p. 49). Similarly. In Njáls saga, Þórhallr’s bodily reactions (such as swelling, spurting blood and fainting) upon hearing of Njáll’s death may be shaped by contemporary humoral theory (Kanerva, ‘Porous Bodies’, pp. 101–4; Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘Emotions’, pp. 124–31; Mackenzie, ‘Vernacular Psychologies’, p. 108).

Let us focus briefly on Fóstbrœðra saga as a case study.48 The saga was likely composed in the thirteenth century, represented principally by three fourteenth-century manuscripts: Flateyjarbók, Möðruvallabók and Hauksbók. The saga includes numerous examples of anatomised or embodied emotions, reminiscent of learned medical theories. The multiple versions of the saga all feature a striking scene in which the body of Þorgeirr, known for his fearlessness, is dissected upon death, in order to find a somatic indicator of his courage. His dissectors cut open his chest to inspect the heart, because ‘vildu sjá, hvílíkt væri, svá hugprúðr sem hann var’ (‘they wanted to see what it [the heart] was like, given how courageous he was’). They find that the heart is ‘harla lítit’ (‘quite small’), and the narrator explains, ‘höfðu sumir menn þat fyrir satt, at minni sé hugprúðra manna hjörtu en huglaussa, því at menn kalla minna blóð í litlu hjarta en miklu, en kalla hjartablóði hræzlu fylgja’ (‘some men say that the heart of a courageous man is smaller than a coward’s, because men say that there is less blood in a small heart than a big one, and they say that [the amount of] heart-blood corresponds with fear’).

The Hauksbók-version of the text further emphasises the heart’s small size, adding that it contained no blood at all: ‘var þat eigi meira en valhnot ok hart sem sigg ok ekki blóð í’ (‘it was no bigger than a walnut and hard as a callous and there was no blood in it’).49 Fbr., ch. 17, p. 125. The comparison of the heart with a nut echoes stanza 51 of Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, in which Helgi is described as having a hard acorn of a heart. Nuts are also used as base-words in heart-kennings (e.g., ‘akarn aldrklifs’ (Rǫgnvaldr jarl and Hallr Þórarinsson, Háttalykill 30, SkP III, p. 1039: ‘acorn of the life-cliff [BREAST > HEART]’)). This reference follows humoral logic, since an excess or deficiency of blood was thought to affect one’s disposition.50 M. Males, ‘Fóstbrœðra saga: A Missing Link?’, Gripla 31 (2020), 71–102 (p. 90). Other anatomical digressions in the longer version of the saga similarly link bodily organs to cognitive and emotional faculties. In the Flateyjarbók redaction, for instance, a character’s jealousy is contextualised by a physiological aside: ‘reiði hvers manns er í galli, en líf í hjarta, minni í heila, metnaðr í lungum, hlátr í milti, lystisemi í lifr’ (‘anger is in the gall of each man, life-blood in the heart, memory in the brain, ambition in the lungs, laughter in the spleen, desire in the liver’).51 Fbr., ch. 21 (p. 149). The origin of this digression is unclear, though similar material appears in Pliny and Isidore,52 Males, ‘Fóstbrœðra saga’, p. 91. and comparable descriptions of the bodily location of different faculties also feature in other fourteenth-century Icelandic learned manuscripts, both in Old Norse (AM 764 4to, 2r) and in Latin (AM 194 8vo, 35r). These episodes illustrate a cultural readiness to construe character in somatic terms, and highlight how medical theories could permeate broader literary reflections on identity and emotion.53 Another passage integrates erudite anatomical detail into a context that to modern sensibilities appears incongruously or even comically learned: ‘ǫll bein hans skulfu, þau sem í váru hans líkama, en þat váru tvau hundruð beina ok fjórtán bein; tennr hans nǫtruðu, þær váru þrír tigir; allar æðar í hans hǫrundi pipruðu fyrir hræzlu sakar, þær váru fjǫgur hundruð ok fimmtán’ (Fbr., ch. 23 (p. 162): ‘All of the bones in his body shook, and that is two hundred and fourteen bones in total; his teeth rattled, and there were thirty of them; all his veins in his flesh quivered on account of fear, and there were four hundred and fifteen of them’). This description bears resemblance to the Regimen sanitatis, a Latin medical poem from the thirteenth-century Salerno school.

Placed against these theological and medical frameworks, the transformation-episodes discussed earlier take on a distinctive cast. In Christian discourse and medical theory, embodiment is regarded as an integral part of personhood, intricately linked with cognition, emotion and character. If these frameworks had influenced or informed the conception of transformation in some of these narratives, we might expect a material shift into another person or animal to alter the subject’s identity at its core, given the interdependence of bodily substance and self. Yet, episodes of transformation which involve motifs of recognition depict transformation as an outward alteration that leaves the inner self intact.

How, then, should we interpret the divergence in treatment of the body-self nexus between these intellectual models and literary depictions of transformation? One possibility is that medical and theological ideas had little impact on literary treatments of shapeshifting, either because they were unfamiliar to narrators and poets, or because they were not useful (thematically) to narrators or resonant (culturally) for audiences. Alternatively, these episodes may not envisage a change to the person’s body in the fullest sense, but rather to their outward bearing or appearance: in such a reading, body and self remain connected, with transformation touching only the external layer of a person (and not their ‘essence’). It’s likely that practical narrative considerations also played a role: a bodily transformation in which the protagonist entirely loses their identity results in the de facto death of that protagonist, posing a challenge to character-driven story arcs.

It is also worth asking whether these portrayals of transformation respond to broader cultural anxieties around the stability of the self. Medieval discourses in this period, both literary and learned, show an increasing scrutiny of the body as the seat of identity. Transformation stories may have offered audiences a means of testing this problem imaginatively: they exhibit a fascination with bodily change (and the rules governing it), accepting the proposition that the body or appearance could fluctuate; yet, this interest is coupled with a resistance to the notion of a mutable self. The motif of a person’s identity persisting despite outward transformation reassures audiences that their own ‘inner essence’ is secure, even when change occurs. Likewise, the motif of a person’s identity ‘breaking through’ a transformation enables audiences to ‘read’ and interpret transformed bodies correctly, preserving intelligibility in an otherwise ambiguous or shifting world. By affirming the coherence of identity and the limits of change, these narrative motifs could therefore allow audiences to negotiate dual concerns: the potential dissolution of self, and the risk of failing to accurately categorise and interpret the surrounding world.