Medieval Spirituality and Materiality in Ms. Fr. 640

Avery Lambert
Spring 2023
HIST GU4962: Making and Knowing in Early Modern Europe: Hands-On History

The author-practitioner of Ms. Fr. 640 compiled his recipe-book in a period of great religious, political, and social turmoil. Southern France in the late sixteenth-century was a hotbed of conflict amidst the Wars of Religion, during which competing religious ideas challenged older beliefs and traditions. But where in this early modern world, and in Ms. Fr. 640, can we find traces of earlier religious ritual practices? An exploration of medieval spirituality and materiality offers a framework by which to understand the manuscript’s distinctive recipe for a burn salve and provides a glimpse of the medieval past in the early modern workshop.

Ms. Fr. 640, folio 103r

On fol. 103r is a recipe titled “Against burns, excellent” which calls for a melted and curdled mixture of linseed oil and wax to be washed and stirred to create a salve. Notably, it instructs the reader to recite paternosters as they wash the wax, and, moreover, to do so with holy water: first, the practitioner washes the wax for a set of nine paternosters, then replaces the water and stirs for a set of eight paternosters, and so on, until just a single paternoster is recited. The recipe is unlike any others in Ms. Fr. 640 in that it brings religious practice into the workshop in an explicit manner, and it has received much attention for this fact.

Xiaomeng Liu’s essay on this manuscript entry and his own reconstruction process of the entry begins to explore these spiritual elements. The mixture of oil and wax became lighter and fluffier as he continued mixing and washing it, in a process that demonstrated a “materialization of spiritual devotion.”¹ The process of making the salve would lead the maker to further contemplation of spiritual ideas, and the finished salve acted as a visual reminder of salvation and grace.

I made the choice to reconstruct the recipe for a burn salve for several reasons. First, Liu’s reconstruction did not use holy water because, he writes, “‘holiness’ comes from the blessing of a priest, with no additional components.”² While the chemical composition of holy and unholy water remains the same after the blessing, the new spiritual significance of holy water would likely change the way in which a practitioner perceived the water and how he interacted with it. Disregarding the spiritual significance of the holy water minimizes the importance of the manuscript’s religious and political context, which will be discussed further below, and dismisses the religious beliefs and practices of this recipe’s author. Furthermore, the process of obtaining holy water adds to the overall procedure of salve-making and should be considered part of the recipe.

In addition, the recipe’s instructions to recite the paternoster a total of 45 times while washing and stirring the salve make it a fairly long, repetitive process. This repetition could become somewhat meditative, and I wanted to explore for myself the experience of all this prayer and washing. With this idea in mind, I believed it would be necessary to attempt a reconstruction myself to better understand the potential mindset of a practitioner through the making of this salve.

Reconstructing a Salve for Burns

I based my reconstruction protocol on that prepared by the Making and Knowing Project and used in Liu’s reconstruction.³ I made two changes to this protocol. First, as explained above, I chose to use holy water, rather than distilled water. Second, I chose to use a 1:4 ratio of unmelted wax to linseed oil, rather than a 1:4 ratio of melted wax to linseed oil, as the author-practitioner specifies the 1:4 ratio before the wax has been heated.

The first step in my reconstruction process was to get holy water. To do this, I reached out to Fr. Ryan Kuratko, a Religious Life Advisor at Columbia University and Episcopal Campus Chaplain for Harlem, Uptown, and the Bronx. Fr. Kuratko was happy to oblige and advised me on best practices with the holy water, including proper disposal, which will be discussed below. The blessing in the Episcopal liturgy reads as such:

We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water. Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage

in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death

and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life. We thank you, Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit. Therefore in joyful obedience to your Son, we bring into his fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. [Here the celebrant touches the water.] Now sanctify this water, we pray you, by the power of your Holy Spirit, that those who here are cleansed from sin and born again may continue for ever in the risen life of Jesus Christ our Savior. To him, to you, and to the Holy Spirit, be all honor and glory, now and for ever.⁴

The Episcopalian rite differs slightly from the Catholic, but both blessings follow the same structure, recalling water’s baptismal association with rebirth and salvation.

Fig. 1. The holy water, which I stored at my desk before use, brought a spiritual presence to my dorm room.

As a practicing Christian, I felt observing the blessing of the water to be a personal spiritual experience. The language of the prayer emphasizes the water’s ability to bring “us” to divine grace and makes the listeners fellow-travelers with Christ “from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.” Indeed, the blessing identifies the priest and congregants with one another and with Christ in the constant use of “we” and “us.” Fr. Kuratko sanctified the water during a weekly lunch for Episcopalian students on campus, and other students remarked to me afterwards that they found the experience edifying and enjoyable. Holding onto my gallon of holy water in the week between its blessing and my reconstruction served as a very physically present reminder of both the spiritual process of its blessing and of my own baptism and religious identification. My reconstruction process was in many ways very similar to Liu’s. Working alongside fellow student Sophie Gorup, I began by heating the linseed oil to a hot, but not-yet simmering, temperature (approximately 85ºC, by Sophie’s measurements). I then added my 25 ml of beeswax.⁵ Once my mixture began to congeal, I added holy water and began my first “washing” of 9 paternosters. After this, I drained the excess water, added fresh holy water, and “washed” the mixture for 8 paternosters, then 7, and so on.⁶ Like Liu noted, my mixture began very quickly to expand and become whiter as I washed it. I ended with a near-white, fluffy salve much like the final product Liu described. Below are two images comparing my congealing wax-oil mixture and my final salve.

Fig. 2 and 3. The wax and oil transformed as I washed and mixed them, from a semi-solid, deep orange mixture to a voluminous, near-white salve.

Reciting the paternosters was, for me, a deeply meditative experience, as I predicted. I can read and translate Latin, but not incredibly well, so while I understood the text of the paternoster, I was not focusing on the meaning of the words as I was saying them. Instead, the words of the paternoster became a tool through which I invoked a sacred power on my task and concentrated my attention on the transformation before me. I was fortunate to be in the lab when several other students were working, making it a loud and busy space, likely similar to the author-practitioner’s workshop, in which this concentration via recitation was useful. My spoken process did interact with other processes in the lab, too, in surprising and useful ways: other students used my paternosters to roughly time their work.

My own religious identity undoubtedly shaped my reconstruction experience. The process of making the salve felt to me, actively believing in the special blessing power of holy water, like a sacramental rite. Handling the material was akin to receiving communion; I interacted physically with some sort of divine presence and became some sort of vessel for it. Whether or not the author-practitioner would have had the same religious experience making this recipe is impossible to determine with any certainty, but my reconstruction offers a glimpse into what a sixteenth-century Catholic may have experienced while producing this salve.

Medieval Craft and Spirituality

Before exploring the sixteenth-century context of Fr. 640, I begin with a look at the medieval relationship between craft and spirituality. For medieval people, spoken words held the power to transform material. Keith Thomas attributes this power to the rituals of Catholic Mass. As he writes, during the Middle Ages, the general theological interpretation of the eucharistic ceremony had shifted away from the transformative effects of the “communion of the faithful” and towards the “formal consecration of the elements by the priest.”⁷ In other words, the transubstantiation of the bread and wine occurred through the formulaic prayers of consecration: it was the recited words of the specially-ordained priest which brought about the material transformation. Certainly medieval theologians articulated more nuanced doctrines of transubstantiation than this, but that level of theological discourse rarely was felt in the day-to-day practice of religious ritual.⁸ Hence, for the ordinary medieval person, attributing powers of material transformation to special words and phrases was a familiar practice.

While performance of the Mass was reserved to priests, lay people, too, adopted oral invocations into their daily rituals. Reciting prayers while gathering herbs, for example, was encouraged by medieval theologians, and it soon came to be believed that these plants were only useful if gathered in this ritual manner.⁹ Similarly, medieval healers encouraged the recitation of Ave Marias and paternosters as part of a patient’s recovery process. These beliefs were not always canonical–the Church taught that prayers, unlike spells, were not guaranteed to work and required divine concession.¹⁰ But still, the distinction between spells and prayers was generally ambiguous and uncertain, and prayers continued to hold a special intrinsic power in their mere recitation.¹¹ These conjurations were means by which to invoke the sacred within the profane world, creating order within daily life.¹²

The transformative power of formulaic prayers fits well into a framework of medieval spirituality. In a period where few people were literate, short sayings that were known by heart made up a collective cultural vocabulary. They took on a song-like quality in the rhythm of their repetition, and, conveniently, could be sung in the familiar melodies of chants. Even in a foreign Latin tongue, prayers like the paternoster or the Ave Maria were still known to be invocations to the divine higher power. The belief that these prayers could affect transformation in material objects was an acknowledgement of the spiritual presence in the everyday world.

Indeed, materiality itself was integral to objects’ sacred status in the Middle Ages. The Eucharist is emblematic of this relationship between materiality and spirituality. The Host’s status as literal bread was neither irrelevant nor oppositional to the consecrated host’s status as the corpus Christi.¹³ Rather, engagement with the literal bread and with the process of creating that bread lent itself to deep attention to and contemplation of the paradox of the Mass—the seeming persistence of the wine and bread amidst the real presence of Christ—and it was this precise paradox that people “flocked to see.”¹⁴

Host production was a highly ritualized process imbued with spiritual significance. Much concern was given to the proper grain for the Eucharist and the propriety of using white wine or vinegar rather than red wine.¹⁵ The wheat was to be chosen grain by grain, the millstones purged of all impurities, the brethren dressed in albs and directed to keep silent.¹⁶ The wafer would often then be imprinted with a figure of Christ, Christ’s name, a sacred monogram, or some other liturgical phrase.¹⁷ Even the shape of the host held spiritual import. Thirteenth-century exegesis linked the roundness of the wafer to the lack of beginning and end of he who is the alpha and the omega (Revelations 1:8, 21:6, and 22:13); to the fullness of the Earth which is the Lord’s (Psalm 23:1); and to the truth which was “round about” Christ (Psalm 88:9).¹⁸ Before a priest ever spoke Eucharistic prayers over the bread, it was already sacred, from its sacred materials, production, and appearance.

Medieval religion was often characterized by “salvific displays” of this kind: “mysteries of religion made visible, presented to the bodily eye, rather than just apprehended through an inner vision.”¹⁹ This desire for visible sacredness is particularly manifest in the devotion to relics in the period. While not necessarily participatory, as the Eucharist is, these objects nevertheless offered an emotional link between object and viewer, and a chance for reverent viewing in physical proximity to provide both physical healing and spiritual graces.²⁰ The object of the relic becomes a vessel by which the sacred power of a saint transfers to the person of the faithful. Pre-Reformation art demonstrates this effect, too: the “very materiality of the image” permits the viewer to observe the object as material, both a guiding tool to devotion and “a locus of divine agency.”²¹ Art and images could be vessels of the sacred in a belief system where the sacred and profane were able to interact with one another. Because the sacred and the profane existed on the same level and in the same space, the spiritual significance of material objects was recognized and could become a part of devotional practice. In other words, materiality was not in opposition to spirituality.²²

On a similar note, the body and bodily actions could also be sacred. Along with the spoken words of the Mass, the priest performed a sacred action as he raised, blessed, and broke the sacramental Host during its process of transformation—but before even this, the Host was produced in a highly ritualistic, codified manner, by monks following special regulations.²³ The holy objects of relics were often experienced through some sort of physical action on the part of the pilgrim: kneeling, prostration, circumambulation, and, of course, the act of pilgrimage itself. Physical action could be performed in a way that was sacred and that brought some sort of sacredness to the performer; alternatively, “strange movements” could be signs of a “diseased” soul.²⁴ The actions of the body reflected a spiritual state of being. And, critically, images, relics, and sacraments were able to demand these multivalent responses from their viewers-cum-participants.²⁵

The twelfth-century De diversibus artibus, compiled by an anonymous author under the pseudonym Theophilus, offers insight into this philosophy of physical labor. In his preface, the author describes how the “seven-fold Spirit” bestows its graces upon the craftsman; the first, the “spirit of wisdom,” teaches that “created things proceed from God and that without Him nothing is.”²⁶ To produce these “created things,” then, makes the craftsman a vessel through which God’s creative powers can be channeled, and makes the processes of craft intrinsically sacred as replications of God’s creative acts. Similarly, the craftsman has the power to share the holy processes with other men: he does “not hide away the talent given [him] by God, but, working and teaching openly and with humility, . . . faithfully reveal[s] it to those who desire to learn.”²⁷ His craft knowledge derives from the sacred source, and his sharing that knowledge is an act of divine revelation and indeed a divine imperative. The craftsman, like a prophet, reveals the secrets of God to other men. Like the prophet, all the craftsman’s knowledge derives from a higher source of inspiration, not from himself.²⁸ Theophilus urges his reader to remember that of himself he is “nothing able” and that he “possess[es] and desire[s] nothing that is not given to [him] by God,” through the “spirit of the fear of the Lord.”²⁹ The workshop is thus a space in which the divine gifts are made manifest through the action of the craftsman.

In the medieval world, then, spoken words, physical objects, and physical processes and knowledge could all be manifestations of the sacred in the physical world. But perhaps what this shows instead is that, in the medieval world, distinctions between spiritual and physical were largely irrelevant, and, in the world of the medieval workshop, religion and craft were often indistinguishable. In the next section we will discuss what this means for folio 103r and Ms. Fr. 640.

Folio 103r and Medieval Systems of Knowledge

Any statements about folio 103r as an example of religion and craft co-operating, as in the medieval understanding, need to be highly qualified. This recipe is not medieval. The manuscript having been written in the late sixteenth century, the religious, political, and social realities of the author-practitioner’s workshop were necessarily different from those of an earlier, medieval craftsperson. Toulouse, from the 1560s to the end of the century, was a center of religious conflict in the Wars of Religion. After a narrowly-failed Protestant attempt to take the city in 1562, the Catholic nobles of the city became known for their “intransigence and zeal” in their defense of the Catholic League.³⁰

While the author-practitioner was likely Catholic, judging by his references to Catholic devotional and liturgical items, he nevertheless lived through a time of great change in religious practice, even among devout Catholics, and of widespread bitterness and disillusionment between religious groups.³¹ During the Reformation in particular, the distinction between religion and craft became much more defined, and elements of Catholicism like holy water or spell-like prayers cane to be labeled as “superstitious” or “occult” and in some social circles lost popularity and perceived power. Ms. Fr. 640 as a whole reflects this shift; folio 103r stands out because it is the only recipe to include religious practices.

This being said, we can see that the recipe for burn salve integrates material and spiritual processes. The fact that holy water was specifically called for demonstrates that the sacred material was in some way integral to the final outcome of the recipe. The constant repetition of the paternosters, even if serving a functional purpose of timing the washing, nevertheless makes the washing process an active meditation for the maker, as I experienced. And as the maker washes the salve, the salve’s becoming fluffy and white in conjunction with the spoken prayer is both a manifestation of divine power onto the wax and oil itself and also a reminder of the transformative power of the divine for one’s self.

Reading the salve for burns as an example of this medieval integration of religion and craft changes the way in which we understand this recipe. In the context of the manuscript, the entry on folio 103r represents a new type of knowing, a spiritual knowing, which co-exists with the author-practitioner’s experiential knowledge. The two types of knowing simultaneously play a role in this recipe—the author-practitioner mentions, to prove its efficacy, that the gunpowder maker who taught him the recipe showed “no sign” of his burns, suggesting that the spiritual knowing and experiential knowing were not in opposition to one another.

On the other hand, the spiritual elements of this recipe could be seen as a type of “unknowing” in opposition to experiential knowledge. Where the author-practitioner’s experiential knowledge derives from his own or others’ experiments, the directions to include holy water and recite paternosters derive instead from a shared set of cultural beliefs and practices. The group, not the individual, holds and shares that knowledge. Furthermore, when the transformation of the wax and oil into a fluffy white salve is ascribed to the holy water and paternosters, the person responsible for making the salve changes. Rather than the person physically creating the mixture, the divine power becomes the maker: like the priest consecrating the Eucharist, the person in the workshop is a vessel through which the spiritual graces flow onto the materials. The agency, in this recipe, changes hands entirely, and the original maker (the person physically present) is transformed as he becomes this vessel for the spiritual power to come into the workshop space.

Even as the only recipe of its kind in this manuscript, the recipe for a burn salve nevertheless supports the idea that medieval systems of knowledge did, in fact, influence the development of early modern systems of knowledge. Its presence suggests that, even into the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (or even today, as I experienced), religious ritual practices did not entirely lose their place in the workshop. Historians of science need not place craft knowledge in opposition to religious knowledge. As the spiritual materializes and material practice becomes devotional, the two can, and indeed do, become one.

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