Bones, fire, and falcons: Loving things in medieval Europe

Abstract

In three loving encounters between humans and nonhumans, this article explores different approaches to material love in medieval Europe. Beginning with an English bishop who attempted to eat the bone relic of Saint Mary Magdalene, it first considers how a series of medieval thinkers imagined God's love as mediated primarily through the consumption of matter. Further, it shows how the medieval commercialization of relics enabled a subversive, quasi-mystical counter tradition that located loving experiences within the unmediated physicality, or thingness, of Christian artifacts themselves. Moving next to Saint Francis of Assisi (d.1226), the article explores a curious case of self-negating devotion to fire. While contextualizing the saint's love against a background of scholastic materialism and ecstatic mysticism, it explores how fire gained a unique onto-theological status as the material essence of both love and the heavens in the 1200s. Finally, turning to love for animals, the analysis explores the astonishing care shown to falcons by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (d.1250). While surveying a series of trends in medieval ways of loving creatures, the article stresses how the emperor's radical empathy for beasts allowed him temporarily to surrender his sovereignty, melding the interest of king and bird. Just like the mystical theology that underpinned much of medieval devotion, it argues, these three loving encounters were all essentially structured as self-annihilating journeys into a “oneness” with the material landscape. Considering the ongoing threads of this forgotten type of self-erasing love, these medieval encounters can have intriguing implications for debates in the environmental humanities today.