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The Medieval Underworld
The book explores a way of life which is both extraordinarily modern and yet totally of its period. It looks at medieval times from the point of view of those men and women who either would not or could not conform to the conventions of a society whose insistence upon conformity was obsessive.
319 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1979
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
December 16, 2019
More of a history of how certain "indecencies" arose than the so-called atrocities themselves, it's still good history and, at times, good fun.
If you're looking for ribald criminality, you will find it here more by example than by leading framing. McCall digs into Christian ethics and morality , as well as its more exacting (at times) secular counterpart, to show how sin and crime were defined, before moving on to the nitty-gritty, usually in the form of condensed episodes from the historical record.
Poverty is, naturally, the driving force behind much criminality of this period, as was the need for release for the hordes of knights and mercenaries running around Europe. Probably the most interesting facet of medieval "crime", the religious-themed anti-establishment movements are discussed briefly here, too. Our gay friends, Jewish friends, and our witch friends all parade by on their way to their persecutory niches, and these parts, all too short, are the best, because it highlights still-existing, petty intolerances and gives you a sense of their stupid, senseless roots.
Much 'sha', not enough 'na-na', perhaps.
If you're looking for ribald criminality, you will find it here more by example than by leading framing. McCall digs into Christian ethics and morality , as well as its more exacting (at times) secular counterpart, to show how sin and crime were defined, before moving on to the nitty-gritty, usually in the form of condensed episodes from the historical record.
Poverty is, naturally, the driving force behind much criminality of this period, as was the need for release for the hordes of knights and mercenaries running around Europe. Probably the most interesting facet of medieval "crime", the religious-themed anti-establishment movements are discussed briefly here, too. Our gay friends, Jewish friends, and our witch friends all parade by on their way to their persecutory niches, and these parts, all too short, are the best, because it highlights still-existing, petty intolerances and gives you a sense of their stupid, senseless roots.
Much 'sha', not enough 'na-na', perhaps.
September 12, 2020
Part of this book does deal with what we today would consider society’s underworld, organized criminal gangs and individual murderers, thieves, forgers, and blackmailers. There are also chapters on people we would call outcasts: lepers, heretics, witches, prostitutes, homosexuals, and Jews. However, the book is most interesting as it describes the increasingly repressive methods the Papacy used to try to maintain its position in society, and how every attempt to assert control only led to further chaos and alienation from the people, rich and poor alike. The book is well researched and provides an illuminating look at medieval times, when lives were hard and frequently short, legal redress often unavailable, and the authorities themselves, including the priests, might be the biggest thieves and scoundrels around. I lost count of how many different offenses people could be burned at the stake for.
The early nation states were struggling to create and enforce laws, although they were mostly concerned with protecting the rights of the nobility rather than the people at large. Since kings were frequently at war and always short of funds, criminals were often granted pardons in exchange for military service or cash payments, and thus free to resume their depredations. It was not uncommon for men to be declared outlaws repeatedly, and be pardoned just as often. In addition, since the courts were notoriously corrupt and offered their judgments to the highest bidder, many feudal lords took matters into their own hands and maintained groups of thugs to carry out their own “justice”, men who when not working for their lord did freelance kidnapping, theft, and murder, knowing their employer would shield them from the consequences.
Merchants and large landowners also had to contend with attempts at extortion and could only protect themselves by making sure they had bribed the right officials. “Since the uttering of false coin was in most countries held to be a treasonable offence, it was not unusual for black mailers to accuse either royal officials or private citizens of debasing the coinage so as to make them pay a bribe to have the charges dropped.” (p. 149)
As the Middle Ages advanced the Church became richer, more secularized, and more corrupt, and men began to look for salvation in the intercession of Christ or the Virgin Mary rather than in formal religious observance. As a result
Along with this came gradual changes in how laws were implemented. “Medieval secular law was a mixture of Roman law and Germanic barbarian law, a combination everywhere interwoven with Christian doctrine and dogma but one in which the relative proportion of barbarian to Roman law varied from region to region and from one time to another.” (p. 41) Slowly, Trial by Ordeal was replaced with penance or monetary fines, but this offered vast new opportunities for corruption, and would become one of the outrages that spurred Martin Luther into open revolt.
The Papacy tried to reign in the sale of indulgences, but its motivation for doing so was primarily because fraudulent sellers were siphoning off money that the Church considered her own. It became obvious to most educated people that these pieces of paper had nothing to do with salvation and everything to do with revenue, and their growing contempt for the practice led to contempt for the Church and its priests.
In response, the Papacy redoubled its efforts to reestablish its authority and clamp down on dissent, and thus the Inquisition was born. As Will Durant says in The Age of Faith, “Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.” Outward conformity was enforced by fear, but it spurred men and women to wonder how this monstrous perversion could possibly be representative of the Prince of Peace.
The warning signs were everywhere. For instance, “whereas in the eleventh century the evil men against whom such men had railed had generally been Infidel pagans, Moslems or Jews, by the early years of the twelfth century an alarming number of prophetae were beginning to preach against the worldliness and the corruption of the Catholic Church.” (p. 216)
One of the most appalling – but now forgotten – aspects of the late Middle Ages was the repeated rise of mobs of thousands or tens of thousands of peasants spurred to action by self-proclaimed prophets, spreading across the countryside murdering priests, Jews, and anyone thought to have money, pillaging churches, monasteries, farms, and towns. Eventually each was suppressed, but only by terrible slaughter. Nevertheless, they kept coming and they always found a ready audience, because even the illiterate poor could see how the Church was neglecting its primary roles. “As more and more laymen seem to have come to the sad conclusion that the Church was more intent upon accumulating still greater riches than it was interested in fulfilling either its spiritual duties or its obligations towards the needy, so did increasing numbers of poor people hasten to follow popular leaders whose rantings against the ecclesiastical establishment tended to make the authorities regard them as heretics.” (p. 160)
Again the Church’s response was to try to assert even tighter control, and even attempting to live a simple, pious life could be seen as a threat to the established order. “[W]ithin a generation only of St Francis of Assisi’s death in 1226, the governing body of the Franciscan Order was demanding the execution, as heretics, of fellow Franciscans who had in fact done little more than try to practise to the letter the asceticism and self-abnegation advocated by their founder.” (p. 221)
The Church found itself increasingly battered by the winds of change. While it wanted to project a vision of piety and devotion it could not control the results, leading to such absurd incidents as
Ultimately the internal stresses became too much, and the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church in Europe was fractured by the Reformation. The publication of Bibles in vernacular languages would create a rift that could never be healed, but even before that, rebellious priests and monks had started questioning the Church’s mandate for leadership. “[I]n the Bible, as Wyclif, Hus, Martin Luther and countless other later medieval churchmen besides were to point out, there was no authority whatsoever for many of those things on which the Catholic Church had by then come to depend on for its livelihood.” (p. 237)
Under such circumstances even those who tried to live in accordance with the laws of Church and State could find themselves facing denunciation, torture, and gruesome death at any time, since those denounced to the Inquisition had no right to confront their accusers, or even to know who they were. Through it all, despite occasionally enforced draconian laws, prostitution went on as it always had, as did homosexuality. Men and women were burned at the stake for sorcery and witchcraft because fear and ignorance know no bounds. And the Jews, of course, were targets for everyone. Kings offered “protection” to them which was actually ownership, although the king’s soldiers never seemed to be around when the massacres started, and then, after extorting every coin the kings could extract, they expelled them from the realm.
The Middle Ages laid the groundwork for the Renaissance. New discoveries in math, science, and medicine, advanced metallurgy, universities, guilds, and modern banking all got their start. However, as this book reminds us, for many people life was hard and precarious. War, religious fanaticism, and intolerance shaped their lives. We should be grateful that, through it all, they managed to hang on until better times were at hand.
The early nation states were struggling to create and enforce laws, although they were mostly concerned with protecting the rights of the nobility rather than the people at large. Since kings were frequently at war and always short of funds, criminals were often granted pardons in exchange for military service or cash payments, and thus free to resume their depredations. It was not uncommon for men to be declared outlaws repeatedly, and be pardoned just as often. In addition, since the courts were notoriously corrupt and offered their judgments to the highest bidder, many feudal lords took matters into their own hands and maintained groups of thugs to carry out their own “justice”, men who when not working for their lord did freelance kidnapping, theft, and murder, knowing their employer would shield them from the consequences.
Merchants and large landowners also had to contend with attempts at extortion and could only protect themselves by making sure they had bribed the right officials. “Since the uttering of false coin was in most countries held to be a treasonable offence, it was not unusual for black mailers to accuse either royal officials or private citizens of debasing the coinage so as to make them pay a bribe to have the charges dropped.” (p. 149)
As the Middle Ages advanced the Church became richer, more secularized, and more corrupt, and men began to look for salvation in the intercession of Christ or the Virgin Mary rather than in formal religious observance. As a result
the authorities, seeing the Ideal threatened, tried to save it by making it more demanding. The only answer to unorthodoxy seemed to be insistence on still greater orthodoxy….[M]edieval society had begun to close in on itself. And the results were disastrous. Stringent measures against heretics produced more heretics; an hysterical fear of witches produced hysterical witches; attempts to coerce the more restless elements in society made those elements more restive.” (p. 16-17)
Along with this came gradual changes in how laws were implemented. “Medieval secular law was a mixture of Roman law and Germanic barbarian law, a combination everywhere interwoven with Christian doctrine and dogma but one in which the relative proportion of barbarian to Roman law varied from region to region and from one time to another.” (p. 41) Slowly, Trial by Ordeal was replaced with penance or monetary fines, but this offered vast new opportunities for corruption, and would become one of the outrages that spurred Martin Luther into open revolt.
The penetentials had tended to imitate the secular law’s rules...so that the ancient severities enjoined as earthly punishment might increasingly often be commuted in return for money payment or, in less serious cases, for the saying of so many masses or prayers; and from this gradual infusion of the principles of composition into the administration of penance there evolved the practice of granting ‘indulgences’.” (p. 35)
The Papacy tried to reign in the sale of indulgences, but its motivation for doing so was primarily because fraudulent sellers were siphoning off money that the Church considered her own. It became obvious to most educated people that these pieces of paper had nothing to do with salvation and everything to do with revenue, and their growing contempt for the practice led to contempt for the Church and its priests.
In response, the Papacy redoubled its efforts to reestablish its authority and clamp down on dissent, and thus the Inquisition was born. As Will Durant says in The Age of Faith, “Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.” Outward conformity was enforced by fear, but it spurred men and women to wonder how this monstrous perversion could possibly be representative of the Prince of Peace.
The Papacy under whose control the Inquisition was established, in particular, were to give their Christian flock cause rather to fear and even loathe than to love and respect them. Indeed, to some Christians it seemed that by countenancing such ferocious measures, the religious authorities were embracing the ways of the Devil and hence forfeiting any claim to their spiritual allegiance: and so, gradually, as violence begat more violence, was the spiritual standing of the religious authorities still further eroded. (p. 40)
The warning signs were everywhere. For instance, “whereas in the eleventh century the evil men against whom such men had railed had generally been Infidel pagans, Moslems or Jews, by the early years of the twelfth century an alarming number of prophetae were beginning to preach against the worldliness and the corruption of the Catholic Church.” (p. 216)
One of the most appalling – but now forgotten – aspects of the late Middle Ages was the repeated rise of mobs of thousands or tens of thousands of peasants spurred to action by self-proclaimed prophets, spreading across the countryside murdering priests, Jews, and anyone thought to have money, pillaging churches, monasteries, farms, and towns. Eventually each was suppressed, but only by terrible slaughter. Nevertheless, they kept coming and they always found a ready audience, because even the illiterate poor could see how the Church was neglecting its primary roles. “As more and more laymen seem to have come to the sad conclusion that the Church was more intent upon accumulating still greater riches than it was interested in fulfilling either its spiritual duties or its obligations towards the needy, so did increasing numbers of poor people hasten to follow popular leaders whose rantings against the ecclesiastical establishment tended to make the authorities regard them as heretics.” (p. 160)
Again the Church’s response was to try to assert even tighter control, and even attempting to live a simple, pious life could be seen as a threat to the established order. “[W]ithin a generation only of St Francis of Assisi’s death in 1226, the governing body of the Franciscan Order was demanding the execution, as heretics, of fellow Franciscans who had in fact done little more than try to practise to the letter the asceticism and self-abnegation advocated by their founder.” (p. 221)
The Church found itself increasingly battered by the winds of change. While it wanted to project a vision of piety and devotion it could not control the results, leading to such absurd incidents as
At Avignon, in May [1348], Pope Clement VI personally instituted flagellation sessions in which both men and women were encouraged to take part; but, only seventeen months later, in October 1349, the same Pope issued a Bull directing that all flagellants were henceforth to be treated as heretics and that the leaders, who had been deceived by their followers by preaching false doctrines, were to be arrested, examined and burnt.” (p. 228)
Ultimately the internal stresses became too much, and the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church in Europe was fractured by the Reformation. The publication of Bibles in vernacular languages would create a rift that could never be healed, but even before that, rebellious priests and monks had started questioning the Church’s mandate for leadership. “[I]n the Bible, as Wyclif, Hus, Martin Luther and countless other later medieval churchmen besides were to point out, there was no authority whatsoever for many of those things on which the Catholic Church had by then come to depend on for its livelihood.” (p. 237)
Under such circumstances even those who tried to live in accordance with the laws of Church and State could find themselves facing denunciation, torture, and gruesome death at any time, since those denounced to the Inquisition had no right to confront their accusers, or even to know who they were. Through it all, despite occasionally enforced draconian laws, prostitution went on as it always had, as did homosexuality. Men and women were burned at the stake for sorcery and witchcraft because fear and ignorance know no bounds. And the Jews, of course, were targets for everyone. Kings offered “protection” to them which was actually ownership, although the king’s soldiers never seemed to be around when the massacres started, and then, after extorting every coin the kings could extract, they expelled them from the realm.
The Middle Ages laid the groundwork for the Renaissance. New discoveries in math, science, and medicine, advanced metallurgy, universities, guilds, and modern banking all got their start. However, as this book reminds us, for many people life was hard and precarious. War, religious fanaticism, and intolerance shaped their lives. We should be grateful that, through it all, they managed to hang on until better times were at hand.
May 31, 2021
One of the problems about writing about the underclass is they seldom write about themselves, and indeed this perhaps overly broad overview of the subject of the criminal status within medieval society mostly demonstrates that they are seldom written about at all except in the context of the judicial system.
By far the most interesting section was on banditry owing to the fact that bandits, by virtue of being an armed force in society governed by a military hierarchy, could float in and out of basically every level of the social class, being alchemically transformed from criminal to aristocrat and back again by military expediency and real politic. These at least gave us something of a narrative story.
But for many of the other categories, we know the characters only by their executions or the laws passed against them.
The ugliness of the real 13th century is definitely on full display here, and that at least is worth the entry fee for anyone feeling romantically inclined toward the High Middle Ages. I left with the feeling that perhaps the 14th century is exactly what they deserved.
By far the most interesting section was on banditry owing to the fact that bandits, by virtue of being an armed force in society governed by a military hierarchy, could float in and out of basically every level of the social class, being alchemically transformed from criminal to aristocrat and back again by military expediency and real politic. These at least gave us something of a narrative story.
But for many of the other categories, we know the characters only by their executions or the laws passed against them.
The ugliness of the real 13th century is definitely on full display here, and that at least is worth the entry fee for anyone feeling romantically inclined toward the High Middle Ages. I left with the feeling that perhaps the 14th century is exactly what they deserved.
May 17, 2014
This book was interesting, but very painful to read because McCall tortures all of his sentences. In McCall's hands, for example, the previous sentence might read: "The sentences of this book, being tortured by McCall, were very painful to read, yet interesting did I find the book."Or some such nonsense.
Anyway, the content was engaging - the book opens with the context of the Middle Ages, the theory behind Church, State, and sin, then the nature of medieval punishment (cruel and unusual), following by a closer treatment of several strains of deviants in the Middle Ages:
* bandits, freebooters and outlaws
* richman, poorman, beggarman, thieves
* prostitutes
* homosexuals
* heretics
* sorcerers and witches
* Jews
The book ends with an analysis of the medieval conception of hell.
Again, interesting, but perhaps not worth the effort.
Anyway, the content was engaging - the book opens with the context of the Middle Ages, the theory behind Church, State, and sin, then the nature of medieval punishment (cruel and unusual), following by a closer treatment of several strains of deviants in the Middle Ages:
* bandits, freebooters and outlaws
* richman, poorman, beggarman, thieves
* prostitutes
* homosexuals
* heretics
* sorcerers and witches
* Jews
The book ends with an analysis of the medieval conception of hell.
Again, interesting, but perhaps not worth the effort.
December 28, 2014
McCall uncovers some of the nitty gritty of medieval society in Western Europe, though the book is let down by his misguided fascination for long sentences weighed down with subordinate clauses and unnecessary commas.
December 30, 2008
The Medieval Underworld explores social mores of the Middle Ages, their reflection in medieval law, and the groups of people who came into conflict with these mores. Packed with anecdotes, but skimpy on footnotes, this book seems solidly researched but suffers for dearth of analysis. Andrew McCall tells his reader lurid, interesting, ghastly and sometimes humorous stories involving thieves, bandits, prostitutes, heretics and any assortment of other denizens of the medieval "underworld". He describes the medieval legal view of such characters and their activities. He reconstructs medieval authority's view of social deviants. But he scarcely addresses the deviant experience itself.
Certainly, writing social history "from below" proves intensely difficult for a time period when those "below" were seldom written about and, even more rarely, wrote themselves. Nevertheless, historical methodology since the 1950s has proven exceedingly clever in seeking ways to study the lives of the lower classes, minorities and other ignored groups. McCall has not employed these methods. This fact does not impugn his scholarship, but rather reflects my disappointed expectations. Published in 1979, I rather anticipated The Medieval Underworld would grapple with the experiences of the economically weak, the politically powerless and the socially maligned. Instead it speaks to the experience of the authorities in relation to these groups. McCall situates deviants of all sorts within the framework of legal and moral thought of the day -- a useful project perhaps, but not a fresh or fascinating one, even in 1979.
The Medieval Underworld provides, then, a useful overview of the ways medieval authority sought to curtail the personal and social freedoms of Europeans and of the extent to which a crime was punished or permitted. It does not, however, bring the reader much closer to understanding what life felt like for an individual who challenged that authority, whose choices or very natures were excluded from medieval societal norms. It only peripherally hints at the circumstances of life that would lead a great many people to, for instance, take up prostitution or worship with an heretical sect. Those people remain largely voiceless in The Medieval Underworld, as obscure in its pages as they seem to have been in the Middle Ages.
Certainly, writing social history "from below" proves intensely difficult for a time period when those "below" were seldom written about and, even more rarely, wrote themselves. Nevertheless, historical methodology since the 1950s has proven exceedingly clever in seeking ways to study the lives of the lower classes, minorities and other ignored groups. McCall has not employed these methods. This fact does not impugn his scholarship, but rather reflects my disappointed expectations. Published in 1979, I rather anticipated The Medieval Underworld would grapple with the experiences of the economically weak, the politically powerless and the socially maligned. Instead it speaks to the experience of the authorities in relation to these groups. McCall situates deviants of all sorts within the framework of legal and moral thought of the day -- a useful project perhaps, but not a fresh or fascinating one, even in 1979.
The Medieval Underworld provides, then, a useful overview of the ways medieval authority sought to curtail the personal and social freedoms of Europeans and of the extent to which a crime was punished or permitted. It does not, however, bring the reader much closer to understanding what life felt like for an individual who challenged that authority, whose choices or very natures were excluded from medieval societal norms. It only peripherally hints at the circumstances of life that would lead a great many people to, for instance, take up prostitution or worship with an heretical sect. Those people remain largely voiceless in The Medieval Underworld, as obscure in its pages as they seem to have been in the Middle Ages.
March 26, 2019
I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book, but the cover was a grab from a Taddeo di Bartolo fresco (yes, I did just pinch that from the dust jacket) featuring a medieval demon terrorizing hapless sinners, so I thought I'd pick it up.
Perhaps I was hoping for some demon field guide, or the likes, but what this book covers is folk in medieval Europe who ended up on the fringes of society. Chapter by chapter McCall covers Bandits, the poor, thieves, prostitutes, homosexuals, heretics, sorcerers and witches and, finally, Jews, in general terms, with some historical and illuminating examples.
On the off chance you felt that living in European Medieval wouldn't have been quite that bad, and for whatever reason, you haven't read or watched 'A Game of Thrones', then this book should serve as a timely reminder that things really were pretty damn grim back there and then, especially if you were born into, chose or otherwise lived a life on the outskirts of society then.
McCall foregoes a smooth narrative style to instead focus upon accuracy and precise statements of research, which does lead to a longer reading experience, but perhaps a more rewarding one for all that.
This book does serve as a decent portal to various aspects of medieval European society and its (even more) darker underbelly, which, upon reflection, may be a more accurate description than underworld. There are any number of reading options to follow on from here, depending on your interests. Personal pics would be sorcerers and heretics.
Perhaps I was hoping for some demon field guide, or the likes, but what this book covers is folk in medieval Europe who ended up on the fringes of society. Chapter by chapter McCall covers Bandits, the poor, thieves, prostitutes, homosexuals, heretics, sorcerers and witches and, finally, Jews, in general terms, with some historical and illuminating examples.
On the off chance you felt that living in European Medieval wouldn't have been quite that bad, and for whatever reason, you haven't read or watched 'A Game of Thrones', then this book should serve as a timely reminder that things really were pretty damn grim back there and then, especially if you were born into, chose or otherwise lived a life on the outskirts of society then.
McCall foregoes a smooth narrative style to instead focus upon accuracy and precise statements of research, which does lead to a longer reading experience, but perhaps a more rewarding one for all that.
This book does serve as a decent portal to various aspects of medieval European society and its (even more) darker underbelly, which, upon reflection, may be a more accurate description than underworld. There are any number of reading options to follow on from here, depending on your interests. Personal pics would be sorcerers and heretics.
December 14, 2016
So... I'm dumb. And Andy McC knew I was going to be. Back in 1979. This was a well written compelling read from beginning to end. He broke down the subject into chapters dealing with specific types of crimes in the various Latin Christian kingdoms in the middle ages (a chapter on thieves, a chapter on heretics, a chapter on homosexuals, etc.). I didn't pick up on what he was doing until the end, when he laid it out for all the ding-dongs like me. His last chapter (Chapter 11) was a brief "epilogue" as he called it, to relate the torments of transgressors as imagined by medievals and described Dante in the Inferno. This, after ten chapters of his own book, each dedicated to a separate type of criminal element in medieval society, whereas Dante dedicated Ten concentric circles of hell to specific types sinners. I didn't pick up on it until the end, but then, I am very stupid. I give this book five out of five stars.
January 20, 2012
I had great hopes for this, having previously read a rollicking history of the Elizabethan Underworld. I was quite disappointed. Instead of detailed anecdotes about robber barons and outlaws, alchemists and astrologers, the book instead gave me a quick overview of medieval non-conformists - heretics, homosexuals, Jews and so on - over the entire stretch of the Dark/Middle Ages and across Europe. Detail was light. Amusement levels were low. But it was good to see that university student pranks were already alive and kicking in the 1200s (even if the authorities reacted to them with extreme violence). 1.5/5
December 14, 2008
Interesting look at various elements on the fringes of medieval society. Criminals, bandits, prostitutes, so called witches and sorcerors, Jews, homosexuals among others all have chapters dedicated to them in Medieval Underground. There is also quite a bit in here about punishment for various offenses in medieval society. Really harsh and gruesome stuff!
You could certainly go into further depth with virtually all of the subjects covered in this book but as far as an entertaining overview this is very good.
You could certainly go into further depth with virtually all of the subjects covered in this book but as far as an entertaining overview this is very good.
October 27, 2020
Insanely bad ass book imo
June 1, 2023
I love weird, niche Medievalism because amid all the pestilence and horror, you come across hidden gems like "the notorious riot of the nuns at Poitiers" that are just unintentionally hilarious.
June 7, 2026
McCall’s essential thesis is this: the Catholic Church, by insinuating itself into every facet of medieval life, shaped European culture into a deeply fraught one riven by hypocritical conservative anxieties, leading to outbreaks of violence, both controlled and uncontrolled, against anyone who transgressed boundaries.
It’s a pretty good and defensible position, tbh. McCall is heavily on the materialist side, and he clearly sees the economic and class dimensions of the period as an essential element of this as well. It might seem that a deeply economic model of societal change would clash with his idea that the Church and belief was the strongest cultural force shaping people’s concept of ‘otherness’ and the fear and anxiety thus ascribed, but he explains the tension by contending that the two are linked.
It boils down to a simple enough contention.
The Church gives you stories of hellfire and damnation. It shapes you into a person that sees punishment – as painful and vile as can be imagined – as not only justified, but divine. It fills you with moral demands, taking law from a device of maintaining social order to an invasive, personal sense of being watched and judged. You, necessarily, develop a sense of things that are right and good, and things that are wrong and bad. You are terrified of doing wrong and bad, and you are furious that other people might do wrong and bad, knowing that hellfire can be delivered at the community level.
Then you throw economic hardship, divisions of wealth, and the hypocritical rich pigs in power in the Church into the mix.
No wonder the medieval era at times can seem like a powder keg, ready to explode into rioting or war at the drop of a hat. No wonder orgies of cross-community violence are so common, where all this religio-economic anxiety is exercised by attacking anyone seen as ‘other’.
That, at least, is how McCall is explaining things. It’s pretty convincing, and there’s a good reason that fully half of the book focuses on the context of Church and punishment before focusing on the specific social categories to be found in the ‘underworld’.
McCall’s view of the medieval as a kind of ‘mega’ era spanning the fall of the Western Roman Empire up to the Renaissance is a bit out of fashion nowadays, but he does have a very strong grasp of how the Late Antique period developed into feudal practices and why. If you’re not strongly attached to periodisation, it’s a convincing argument to see the entire 1000-year period he deems a medieval as, indeed, one block.
McCall also shows a deft, if uncompromisingly materialist, view of how and why the medieval period began to shift towards the early modern:
‘To the more far-sighted rulers of the period [the Late Antique], the growing commercialism of the later Middle Ages offered a welcome opportunity to escape from their inhibiting dependence on their great feudal magnates. For by allying themselves to the new merchant class, by demanding taxes in lieu of knight service from their subjects, they could hope to accumulate enough money, not only to pay for a better equipped and a better trained army than the feudal levy could supply, but also to provide themselves with a more efficient bureaucracy, whose professional skills were vital to them if they were to succeed in wresting power from the feudal magnates and to concentrate it instead in the hands of a strong centralised monarchy.’
Yes, you may have noticed that that entire quote is only two sentences and yet took up a quarter of the page in the printed book. If you’re expecting me to count this as a ‘bad’, sorry – I like the writing style, for the most part. It’s a bit overwrought and sometimes the sheer number of polysyllabics starts to bludgeon you into submission, but what can I say. I’m a sadist. This totally works for me.
Another element of the writing style that I enjoyed was the anecdotes. McCall prefers to paint in broad strokes whilst using specific case studies as a garnish to a wider point. For example, when discussing the use of relics as items representing the Divine power granted to the Church, he gives this in a footnote:
‘…in 1199, while enjoying the hospitality of the monks of Fécamp Abbey, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, later to be canonised, upon being invited to worship a bone, supposed to have been a part of St Mary Magdalene, promptly borrowed a knife from his chaplain and tried to cut away the wrapping. The owners of the relic looked on in horror. The wrapping refused to give. Exasperated, the future Saint applied his teeth to the package, at last succeeding thereby in biting off two tiny fragments of bone, which he handed to his chaplain for safe-keeping: and, when the monks he had so despoiled of their treasure accused him of behaving more like a dog than a Christian, evaded them with the neat, if not altogether Christian, rejoinder that had they not all but a little while before partaken of the Host and had they not ‘passed Him on into our inward parts?’’
Lol. Lmao even.
McCall’s narrative is rich with such delightful windows in the medieval world, and they come to be something to look forward to every few pages.
Another enjoyable element of the book is McCall’s grasp on the intersection between many of the identities in question. He doesn’t quite push the idea as far as it could – see the Ugly section below – but it’s good solid basic analysis. The way the identities in question could interact is fascinating. Bandits, outlaws, heretics – each chapter bristles with examples of violence both towards these groups and committed by them too.
It’s honestly very interesting – and pokes some holes in McCall’s approach – that other groups did not or could not respond to being othered with any kind of reactive violence. Jews, gays, prostitutes, witches – none could mobilise the armies to defend their right to exist in the way that other groups could.
McCall doesn’t pursue this line but it’s a definite jumping off point from his scholarship. What made men willing to take up arms for, say, a heretical preacher? Even those who did not seem to want the fight.
As McCall notes:
‘Prominent among later medieval thinkers whose revolutionary ideas seem to have influenced the programmes of people more actively militant than themselves were two mid-fourteenth century writers, the Franciscan, Jean de Roquetaillade, and the English scholar, Wyclif.’
Even beyond the medieval era, Luther was also an example of this. He spoke against the peasant rebellions that were so inspired by his writing. How interesting that soldiers would fight to the death for ideas shared by men that they had never met, but to defend their fellow men – Jews being attacked in their own quarters, gays being burned by the church – they couldn’t be prevailed upon.
A close reading of McCall\s arguments would suggest that he would suggest that economic despair and a desire for change would be the push. Defending Jews or gays or women or witches wouldn’t put money in your pocket, but a preacher calling for hellfire could potentially lead to the fall of a noble or king, and the looting and redistribution of wealth after that event was alluring enough.
Again, it’s not something that the author is interested in in this book, but it would have been cool if he did.
Listen, this book was written in the 70s. Is it weird that ‘Teutonic tribal custom’ (actual quote) comes up so often as some kind of original barbarian nature that the Catholic Church slowly superseded? Yes. Is it ever justified other than the blanket assertion that the ‘Dark Age’ rulers who replaced the Romans across Europe were all non-Romans, and therefore ‘Teutonic’? No.
For example, when describing a 13th century English legal expert called Fleta who prescribed burning as the punishment for ‘sodomists’, he says that this ‘would seem to suggest that according to Teutonic law homosexuals were punished like cowards and ‘notorious evil-doers’, as Tacitus describes…’.
Does it? Does it. 13th century England is Teutonic now. Girl. What on earth is the basis of assuming that this belief comes from some tangential ‘Teutonic’ nature of a person like 800 years after Germanic tribes settled in parts of England????????????
God save me from history books that randomly throw in claims about the unique ethnic character of northern Europe.
Other peculiar elements that have aged poorly include some poor phrasing, such as describing people as ‘monstrously deformed’ when he means… disabled and describing people as ‘mentally deranged’ when he means… confined to an asylum.
He also takes the claims of a 1417 Ordinance of the City of London which claims that ‘the wives, sons, daughters, apprentices and servants of the respectable men of the City’ were enticed to go to brothels VERY seriously.
‘If even the wives and daughters of respectable citizens were in the habit of repairing to these ‘sinks of iniquity’ to quench their sexual appetites, and perhaps to earn a little in money…’
Ah yes, the sexual appetites of women. Typical! Let’s ignore the mention of men and the grouping together of figures in the source and assume it is definitely saying that respectable wives and daughters are going to prostitute themselves for ‘pin money.’
Perhaps he’s being tongue in cheek. I mean, he makes almost no other jokes or jabs through the book, but he could be mocking the source and its credulity!
Ah. A few pages later he describes any prostitute who left the profession in order to get married as a ‘reformed tart.’ Okay. Just misogyny then. Got it.
This is a richly detailed and sweeping history. There’s very little that’s truly ugly about it, in truth – but there is a gap, and that gap holds back the analysis and prevents McCall from being able to hit true heights in his narrative.
The gap is basically that McCall struggles to push to the next stage in seeing that the social categories he’s looking at – homosexual, prostitute, heretic, bandit, Jew – were not necessarily real. He gets close, at times, especially noting that accusations of homosexuality and witchcraft were most often spurious. He reaches this conclusion on the basis that recorded trials and punishments were very rare and often appear only to accentuate political drama – his example in the case of homosexuality is the Templars, who among a litany of offences were also accused of doing gay stuff in order to attach the right amount of social and political opprobrium needed to ensure conviction.
McCall does not, however, take this point to its conclusion. All of the social categories he discusses are plastic, malleable roles that could be assigned by others at will.
We are not talking about a society where individuals were likely to self-ascribe to most of these. Even in cases such as medieval prostitutes and Jews, where to claim the role as an identity would have brought greater community (and in many cases, political) security, many of the cases McCall cites are of people who had this label applied to them by others.
When the Spanish expelled all Jewish communities from their borders, they did not go around making sure everyone being banished fit clear criteria such as, for example, actually being Jewish. Many of those expelled were conversos, related to Jews either familially or socially, and were thus categorised into a role, not based on behaviour but on perception.
Thus it’s a sign that McCall isn’t pushing his analysis far enough when he says things like:
‘Stringent measures against heretics produced more heretics; an hysterical fear of witches produced hysterical witches; attempts to coerce the more restless elements in society made those elements more restive.’
The reality is that, for example, stringent measures against heretics created social conditions that led to more people being considered to be heretics, forcing confrontations where previously there had been none.
When the Church started the Inquisition and reaaaaalllly started trying to stamp out heterodox religious practices, this didn’t necessarily make some people more ‘restive’ or prone to fight back. In the case of the Cathars, for example, the early waves of prosecution were shocking and seemed to step on previously accepted rights and privileges. The people weren’t restive – it was the Church that changed.
This is a crucial point to pick up on, because it helps explain the conditions that led to the early modern era much better.
If McCall’s version – oppression begets rebellion – is taken as fact, then the events of the Renaissance and the Reformation are the rebellions that won. You’d be forced to try and justify why, as acts of rebellion against the status quo, so many elements of that status quo – princes, kings, barons, bishops, merchants – allied with the new way of thinking.
It all becomes a bit credulous to think that a strict and strident medieval Church made Martin Luther, a monk – someone within that system – so restive that he invented ‘reading the bible yourself’ and won that social rebellion without himself shedding a drop of blood.
If, instead, you see the power dynamic at play as the Church’s attempts to enforce orthodoxy by increasingly policing the ever-changing boundaries, with the preferred tool being social labels designed to ‘otherise’ and criminalise, it’s a much easier to explain social phenomenon.
Let’s stick with Luther because he’s my boy.
McCall’s approach supports the idea that someone within the Church system would be most subject to criticising it. From the inside, you can see just how hypocritical the Church was and how their teaching failed to match their actions.
But McCall would then have it that the Church’s actions made Luther and his latent unorthodox ideas so restless that he had to bring his ideas to the public, sparking the violence and conflagration of the Reformation. The Church’s inflexibility, and their rejection of Luther’s ideas, made the heretic that broke their power base so successfully.
But that’s quite a shallow way of seeing things. Luther did not think posting his thesis on the door of Wittenberg’s church was rebellious at all. It was quite literally a weekly activity that anyone working at the University did, publicising the regular scholarly debates.
It was the Church which decided to shift its boundaries to act scandalised at this accepted act, throwing around social labels like heretic and agitator in order to back their claims. Luther the day before he posted his thesis, the day of, and the day after, was the same man – not a heretic, not until he was finally labelled as such and expelled from the Church.
So Luther isn’t the heretic-at-heart that the Catholic Church made through coercion. He is the churchman whose ideas were quite suddenly subject to scrutiny, and then labelled as a heretic to continue redrawing the bounds where the Church hierarchy saw fit. As McCall notes elsewhere, St Francis of Assisi in another time, another place, might have been burned as a heretic. It benefited the church in the particular context to instead legitimise him. In another time, would Luther have experienced the same? Quite possibly.
The point is that McCall has gotten quite caught up in the reality of social categories. A homosexual man is a man who shags men! A Jew is a person whose mother is a Jew! A prostitute is one who accepts money for sex!
But that’s never quite been true. Behaviour certainly influences the social role that others assign to you, and it can at times be beneficial or psychologically important to claim a label yourself. But you don’t need to actually fulfil the necessary criteria in order for people to call you whatever they like.
Because these things are only labels, only words, that’s why they can be used as tools for violence as well as community.
This, and the way that those in power wielded this in order to, say, criminalise a group they had previously supported, is the key. The capricious use of labels in fact contributed directly to the anxiety-riddled society that developed, and seeing things in this way would actually support McCall’s central claims – if he could push on! Instead, he remains quite naïve.
Ultimately, The Medieval Underworld is a richly detailed and genuinely enjoyable survey of the dark, hidden corners of medieval Europe. McCall writes with stolid attention, paints vivid pictures through well-chosen anecdotes, and builds a compelling case for the Catholic Church as the architect of a society riven by anxiety and prone to explosive violence against anyone deemed ‘other’. The economic-religious synthesis is convincing, and the breadth of the material is impressive. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to keep reading just to see what bizarre footnote comes next.
But it is a product of the 1970s, and it shows. The credulity towards medieval sources and the odd bit of casual misogyny or ethnography are jarring.
More importantly, McCall never quite pushes his analysis far enough to recognise that the social categories he’s examining are not real, fixed identities but only labels wielded by the powerful to control. He gets tantalisingly close, but stops short of a true analysis of how these roles were performed, assigned, claimed, and contested. That missing step – the recognition that a ‘heretic’ or ‘prostitute’ was often simply someone the authorities decided was such – would have elevated this from a strong, entertaining history to a genuine classic. As it stands, it’s a solid 4 out of 5: well worth your time, but not the definitive, unskippable work in the field.
Read my full review here: https://jesswalsh23.substack.com/p/bo...
It’s a pretty good and defensible position, tbh. McCall is heavily on the materialist side, and he clearly sees the economic and class dimensions of the period as an essential element of this as well. It might seem that a deeply economic model of societal change would clash with his idea that the Church and belief was the strongest cultural force shaping people’s concept of ‘otherness’ and the fear and anxiety thus ascribed, but he explains the tension by contending that the two are linked.
It boils down to a simple enough contention.
The Church gives you stories of hellfire and damnation. It shapes you into a person that sees punishment – as painful and vile as can be imagined – as not only justified, but divine. It fills you with moral demands, taking law from a device of maintaining social order to an invasive, personal sense of being watched and judged. You, necessarily, develop a sense of things that are right and good, and things that are wrong and bad. You are terrified of doing wrong and bad, and you are furious that other people might do wrong and bad, knowing that hellfire can be delivered at the community level.
Then you throw economic hardship, divisions of wealth, and the hypocritical rich pigs in power in the Church into the mix.
No wonder the medieval era at times can seem like a powder keg, ready to explode into rioting or war at the drop of a hat. No wonder orgies of cross-community violence are so common, where all this religio-economic anxiety is exercised by attacking anyone seen as ‘other’.
That, at least, is how McCall is explaining things. It’s pretty convincing, and there’s a good reason that fully half of the book focuses on the context of Church and punishment before focusing on the specific social categories to be found in the ‘underworld’.
McCall’s view of the medieval as a kind of ‘mega’ era spanning the fall of the Western Roman Empire up to the Renaissance is a bit out of fashion nowadays, but he does have a very strong grasp of how the Late Antique period developed into feudal practices and why. If you’re not strongly attached to periodisation, it’s a convincing argument to see the entire 1000-year period he deems a medieval as, indeed, one block.
McCall also shows a deft, if uncompromisingly materialist, view of how and why the medieval period began to shift towards the early modern:
‘To the more far-sighted rulers of the period [the Late Antique], the growing commercialism of the later Middle Ages offered a welcome opportunity to escape from their inhibiting dependence on their great feudal magnates. For by allying themselves to the new merchant class, by demanding taxes in lieu of knight service from their subjects, they could hope to accumulate enough money, not only to pay for a better equipped and a better trained army than the feudal levy could supply, but also to provide themselves with a more efficient bureaucracy, whose professional skills were vital to them if they were to succeed in wresting power from the feudal magnates and to concentrate it instead in the hands of a strong centralised monarchy.’
Yes, you may have noticed that that entire quote is only two sentences and yet took up a quarter of the page in the printed book. If you’re expecting me to count this as a ‘bad’, sorry – I like the writing style, for the most part. It’s a bit overwrought and sometimes the sheer number of polysyllabics starts to bludgeon you into submission, but what can I say. I’m a sadist. This totally works for me.
Another element of the writing style that I enjoyed was the anecdotes. McCall prefers to paint in broad strokes whilst using specific case studies as a garnish to a wider point. For example, when discussing the use of relics as items representing the Divine power granted to the Church, he gives this in a footnote:
‘…in 1199, while enjoying the hospitality of the monks of Fécamp Abbey, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, later to be canonised, upon being invited to worship a bone, supposed to have been a part of St Mary Magdalene, promptly borrowed a knife from his chaplain and tried to cut away the wrapping. The owners of the relic looked on in horror. The wrapping refused to give. Exasperated, the future Saint applied his teeth to the package, at last succeeding thereby in biting off two tiny fragments of bone, which he handed to his chaplain for safe-keeping: and, when the monks he had so despoiled of their treasure accused him of behaving more like a dog than a Christian, evaded them with the neat, if not altogether Christian, rejoinder that had they not all but a little while before partaken of the Host and had they not ‘passed Him on into our inward parts?’’
Lol. Lmao even.
McCall’s narrative is rich with such delightful windows in the medieval world, and they come to be something to look forward to every few pages.
Another enjoyable element of the book is McCall’s grasp on the intersection between many of the identities in question. He doesn’t quite push the idea as far as it could – see the Ugly section below – but it’s good solid basic analysis. The way the identities in question could interact is fascinating. Bandits, outlaws, heretics – each chapter bristles with examples of violence both towards these groups and committed by them too.
It’s honestly very interesting – and pokes some holes in McCall’s approach – that other groups did not or could not respond to being othered with any kind of reactive violence. Jews, gays, prostitutes, witches – none could mobilise the armies to defend their right to exist in the way that other groups could.
McCall doesn’t pursue this line but it’s a definite jumping off point from his scholarship. What made men willing to take up arms for, say, a heretical preacher? Even those who did not seem to want the fight.
As McCall notes:
‘Prominent among later medieval thinkers whose revolutionary ideas seem to have influenced the programmes of people more actively militant than themselves were two mid-fourteenth century writers, the Franciscan, Jean de Roquetaillade, and the English scholar, Wyclif.’
Even beyond the medieval era, Luther was also an example of this. He spoke against the peasant rebellions that were so inspired by his writing. How interesting that soldiers would fight to the death for ideas shared by men that they had never met, but to defend their fellow men – Jews being attacked in their own quarters, gays being burned by the church – they couldn’t be prevailed upon.
A close reading of McCall\s arguments would suggest that he would suggest that economic despair and a desire for change would be the push. Defending Jews or gays or women or witches wouldn’t put money in your pocket, but a preacher calling for hellfire could potentially lead to the fall of a noble or king, and the looting and redistribution of wealth after that event was alluring enough.
Again, it’s not something that the author is interested in in this book, but it would have been cool if he did.
Listen, this book was written in the 70s. Is it weird that ‘Teutonic tribal custom’ (actual quote) comes up so often as some kind of original barbarian nature that the Catholic Church slowly superseded? Yes. Is it ever justified other than the blanket assertion that the ‘Dark Age’ rulers who replaced the Romans across Europe were all non-Romans, and therefore ‘Teutonic’? No.
For example, when describing a 13th century English legal expert called Fleta who prescribed burning as the punishment for ‘sodomists’, he says that this ‘would seem to suggest that according to Teutonic law homosexuals were punished like cowards and ‘notorious evil-doers’, as Tacitus describes…’.
Does it? Does it. 13th century England is Teutonic now. Girl. What on earth is the basis of assuming that this belief comes from some tangential ‘Teutonic’ nature of a person like 800 years after Germanic tribes settled in parts of England????????????
God save me from history books that randomly throw in claims about the unique ethnic character of northern Europe.
Other peculiar elements that have aged poorly include some poor phrasing, such as describing people as ‘monstrously deformed’ when he means… disabled and describing people as ‘mentally deranged’ when he means… confined to an asylum.
He also takes the claims of a 1417 Ordinance of the City of London which claims that ‘the wives, sons, daughters, apprentices and servants of the respectable men of the City’ were enticed to go to brothels VERY seriously.
‘If even the wives and daughters of respectable citizens were in the habit of repairing to these ‘sinks of iniquity’ to quench their sexual appetites, and perhaps to earn a little in money…’
Ah yes, the sexual appetites of women. Typical! Let’s ignore the mention of men and the grouping together of figures in the source and assume it is definitely saying that respectable wives and daughters are going to prostitute themselves for ‘pin money.’
Perhaps he’s being tongue in cheek. I mean, he makes almost no other jokes or jabs through the book, but he could be mocking the source and its credulity!
Ah. A few pages later he describes any prostitute who left the profession in order to get married as a ‘reformed tart.’ Okay. Just misogyny then. Got it.
This is a richly detailed and sweeping history. There’s very little that’s truly ugly about it, in truth – but there is a gap, and that gap holds back the analysis and prevents McCall from being able to hit true heights in his narrative.
The gap is basically that McCall struggles to push to the next stage in seeing that the social categories he’s looking at – homosexual, prostitute, heretic, bandit, Jew – were not necessarily real. He gets close, at times, especially noting that accusations of homosexuality and witchcraft were most often spurious. He reaches this conclusion on the basis that recorded trials and punishments were very rare and often appear only to accentuate political drama – his example in the case of homosexuality is the Templars, who among a litany of offences were also accused of doing gay stuff in order to attach the right amount of social and political opprobrium needed to ensure conviction.
McCall does not, however, take this point to its conclusion. All of the social categories he discusses are plastic, malleable roles that could be assigned by others at will.
We are not talking about a society where individuals were likely to self-ascribe to most of these. Even in cases such as medieval prostitutes and Jews, where to claim the role as an identity would have brought greater community (and in many cases, political) security, many of the cases McCall cites are of people who had this label applied to them by others.
When the Spanish expelled all Jewish communities from their borders, they did not go around making sure everyone being banished fit clear criteria such as, for example, actually being Jewish. Many of those expelled were conversos, related to Jews either familially or socially, and were thus categorised into a role, not based on behaviour but on perception.
Thus it’s a sign that McCall isn’t pushing his analysis far enough when he says things like:
‘Stringent measures against heretics produced more heretics; an hysterical fear of witches produced hysterical witches; attempts to coerce the more restless elements in society made those elements more restive.’
The reality is that, for example, stringent measures against heretics created social conditions that led to more people being considered to be heretics, forcing confrontations where previously there had been none.
When the Church started the Inquisition and reaaaaalllly started trying to stamp out heterodox religious practices, this didn’t necessarily make some people more ‘restive’ or prone to fight back. In the case of the Cathars, for example, the early waves of prosecution were shocking and seemed to step on previously accepted rights and privileges. The people weren’t restive – it was the Church that changed.
This is a crucial point to pick up on, because it helps explain the conditions that led to the early modern era much better.
If McCall’s version – oppression begets rebellion – is taken as fact, then the events of the Renaissance and the Reformation are the rebellions that won. You’d be forced to try and justify why, as acts of rebellion against the status quo, so many elements of that status quo – princes, kings, barons, bishops, merchants – allied with the new way of thinking.
It all becomes a bit credulous to think that a strict and strident medieval Church made Martin Luther, a monk – someone within that system – so restive that he invented ‘reading the bible yourself’ and won that social rebellion without himself shedding a drop of blood.
If, instead, you see the power dynamic at play as the Church’s attempts to enforce orthodoxy by increasingly policing the ever-changing boundaries, with the preferred tool being social labels designed to ‘otherise’ and criminalise, it’s a much easier to explain social phenomenon.
Let’s stick with Luther because he’s my boy.
McCall’s approach supports the idea that someone within the Church system would be most subject to criticising it. From the inside, you can see just how hypocritical the Church was and how their teaching failed to match their actions.
But McCall would then have it that the Church’s actions made Luther and his latent unorthodox ideas so restless that he had to bring his ideas to the public, sparking the violence and conflagration of the Reformation. The Church’s inflexibility, and their rejection of Luther’s ideas, made the heretic that broke their power base so successfully.
But that’s quite a shallow way of seeing things. Luther did not think posting his thesis on the door of Wittenberg’s church was rebellious at all. It was quite literally a weekly activity that anyone working at the University did, publicising the regular scholarly debates.
It was the Church which decided to shift its boundaries to act scandalised at this accepted act, throwing around social labels like heretic and agitator in order to back their claims. Luther the day before he posted his thesis, the day of, and the day after, was the same man – not a heretic, not until he was finally labelled as such and expelled from the Church.
So Luther isn’t the heretic-at-heart that the Catholic Church made through coercion. He is the churchman whose ideas were quite suddenly subject to scrutiny, and then labelled as a heretic to continue redrawing the bounds where the Church hierarchy saw fit. As McCall notes elsewhere, St Francis of Assisi in another time, another place, might have been burned as a heretic. It benefited the church in the particular context to instead legitimise him. In another time, would Luther have experienced the same? Quite possibly.
The point is that McCall has gotten quite caught up in the reality of social categories. A homosexual man is a man who shags men! A Jew is a person whose mother is a Jew! A prostitute is one who accepts money for sex!
But that’s never quite been true. Behaviour certainly influences the social role that others assign to you, and it can at times be beneficial or psychologically important to claim a label yourself. But you don’t need to actually fulfil the necessary criteria in order for people to call you whatever they like.
Because these things are only labels, only words, that’s why they can be used as tools for violence as well as community.
This, and the way that those in power wielded this in order to, say, criminalise a group they had previously supported, is the key. The capricious use of labels in fact contributed directly to the anxiety-riddled society that developed, and seeing things in this way would actually support McCall’s central claims – if he could push on! Instead, he remains quite naïve.
Ultimately, The Medieval Underworld is a richly detailed and genuinely enjoyable survey of the dark, hidden corners of medieval Europe. McCall writes with stolid attention, paints vivid pictures through well-chosen anecdotes, and builds a compelling case for the Catholic Church as the architect of a society riven by anxiety and prone to explosive violence against anyone deemed ‘other’. The economic-religious synthesis is convincing, and the breadth of the material is impressive. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to keep reading just to see what bizarre footnote comes next.
But it is a product of the 1970s, and it shows. The credulity towards medieval sources and the odd bit of casual misogyny or ethnography are jarring.
More importantly, McCall never quite pushes his analysis far enough to recognise that the social categories he’s examining are not real, fixed identities but only labels wielded by the powerful to control. He gets tantalisingly close, but stops short of a true analysis of how these roles were performed, assigned, claimed, and contested. That missing step – the recognition that a ‘heretic’ or ‘prostitute’ was often simply someone the authorities decided was such – would have elevated this from a strong, entertaining history to a genuine classic. As it stands, it’s a solid 4 out of 5: well worth your time, but not the definitive, unskippable work in the field.
Read my full review here: https://jesswalsh23.substack.com/p/bo...
August 21, 2014
I just finished reading The Medieval Underworld by Andrew McCall. While not terribly in-depth the book was an informative and general look at the more disreputable parts of the middle ages. He did a wondeful job of de-romanticising the middle ages, painting it as a place or time, no one in their right mind would wish to live. McCall did a very good job of showing how things progressed throughout the middle ages, the reasons for what was happening, as well as showing differences between different countries, and the different roman, Christian and barbarian traditions. The book also had a ton of gorgeous medieval illustrations.
The first chapter was a brief overview of the middle ages, the main themes facing Europe at that time, crusades, plagues, threats from outside it's borders, and the rise of feudalism. The rest of the book looked separately at different groups that for a variety of reasons often found themselves outside of medieval law or convention. These chapters were, Church state and Sin, covering the rise of the catholic church in Europe. Crime and Punishment, looking at the ecclesiastical and secular courts and the roles of each. Bandits, Freebooters and Outlaws, how bands of these would terrorize the countryside. I must confess to getting a little bored during this chapter and at one point I found myself picturing the outlaws in medieval Chinese garb to make them more interesting. Richman, poorman, Beggarman, Thieves, which included an interesting look at the treatment of lepers. The chapter on Prostitution looked at the various laws were passed often trying to protect the women prostitutes which I found quite interesting, though the idea of making it illegal failed time and again. This was one of my favorite chapters and I wished it had been longer. There was a lovely bit when one of the Arab writers had been writing about the horrid prostitutes from France that had been throwing themselves at the crusaders and in his poetic prose came up with about 15 different euphemisms for sexual acts. The chapter on homosexuality was also quite good, depressing as it was to read about such prejudices, it was very interesting to see that it was a crime that was rarely persecuted. And there was a lovely part where an early monk was warning against the temptations of lust against other good looking young men. The chapter on Heretics was also interesting, looking at the different groups and movements, rather than individual cases. Sorcerers and Witches contained no real new information for me having studied the subject a bit. The last chapter on Jews was rather shocking at the horrendous prejudice, and in some cases genocide that was carried out against them in the middle ages. The last chapter was a look at Dante's hell. And showed the ultimate fate of everyone you had just been reading about, it was a very nice touch and almost upsetting.
The book used a lot of laws to illustrate it's points. But there were also plenty of stories and anecdotes, all documented from original sources, that were often very amusing.
The first chapter was a brief overview of the middle ages, the main themes facing Europe at that time, crusades, plagues, threats from outside it's borders, and the rise of feudalism. The rest of the book looked separately at different groups that for a variety of reasons often found themselves outside of medieval law or convention. These chapters were, Church state and Sin, covering the rise of the catholic church in Europe. Crime and Punishment, looking at the ecclesiastical and secular courts and the roles of each. Bandits, Freebooters and Outlaws, how bands of these would terrorize the countryside. I must confess to getting a little bored during this chapter and at one point I found myself picturing the outlaws in medieval Chinese garb to make them more interesting. Richman, poorman, Beggarman, Thieves, which included an interesting look at the treatment of lepers. The chapter on Prostitution looked at the various laws were passed often trying to protect the women prostitutes which I found quite interesting, though the idea of making it illegal failed time and again. This was one of my favorite chapters and I wished it had been longer. There was a lovely bit when one of the Arab writers had been writing about the horrid prostitutes from France that had been throwing themselves at the crusaders and in his poetic prose came up with about 15 different euphemisms for sexual acts. The chapter on homosexuality was also quite good, depressing as it was to read about such prejudices, it was very interesting to see that it was a crime that was rarely persecuted. And there was a lovely part where an early monk was warning against the temptations of lust against other good looking young men. The chapter on Heretics was also interesting, looking at the different groups and movements, rather than individual cases. Sorcerers and Witches contained no real new information for me having studied the subject a bit. The last chapter on Jews was rather shocking at the horrendous prejudice, and in some cases genocide that was carried out against them in the middle ages. The last chapter was a look at Dante's hell. And showed the ultimate fate of everyone you had just been reading about, it was a very nice touch and almost upsetting.
The book used a lot of laws to illustrate it's points. But there were also plenty of stories and anecdotes, all documented from original sources, that were often very amusing.
January 16, 2022
It's interesting but at heart it's a text book and like many such text books, while it is well written, it has utility rather than originality. It is a book which provides much learning and little entertainment. Which is a pity given that the underworld of thieves, beggars, con-artists, vagabonds, roguish priests, monks and nuns, and those tawdry dream peddling actors can often provide much in the way of anecdotes and shaggy dog stories.
I felt as if I had been back to school listening to dear old Mr Caldecott beginning his lesson with the adage: “History, boys, is his story. Who's story? Man's story.” They don't make teachers like that any more. I have to say that I didn't enjoy the book a great deal and its method of straight forward factuality, not unlike Kenneth Clark's Civilization, rather than teaching me history, taught me a lesson.
I felt as if I had been back to school listening to dear old Mr Caldecott beginning his lesson with the adage: “History, boys, is his story. Who's story? Man's story.” They don't make teachers like that any more. I have to say that I didn't enjoy the book a great deal and its method of straight forward factuality, not unlike Kenneth Clark's Civilization, rather than teaching me history, taught me a lesson.
November 25, 2014
Not a book about the afterlife (well, mostly), this is about medieval Western Europe's 'outsiders' - criminals, heretics, Jews, and those accused of witchcraft. The author does a very good job showing the interrelationships between these, and also has some interesting points about how the Church's support of strong royal power as a tool for the Christianization of Iron Age Europe fed directly into the conflicts between temporal and spiritual authority that define so much of the later middle ages right up to (and including) the Reformation.
February 20, 2023
An excellent dive into the outcasts, outlaws, and outsiders of the Middle Ages: criminals, beggars, sexual and religious minorities, and more. It's a big topic and a broad time period to cover in detail, but what does get in-depth coverage is really fascinating. The "king of the beggars" and his guild-like organization of beggars into a dozen specialized scams is interesting, as is the story of Francois Villon, poet and outlaw. Well worth a look.
February 3, 2008
Pretty cool book, detailing the ins and outs of medieval criminal society; the punishments for different vices and crimes, and which groups of society helped those vices flourish.
July 9, 2022
Pretty good read, full of interesting anecdotes. The writing still is a bit run-on, with the most confuddling use of commas.
August 22, 2018
the low rating isn't entirely the author's fault (and is more like a 2.5)—mccall presents interesting information, but it's hampered mainly by the fact that studies of social marginality have come a long way in the 40 years since this was published (especially evident, imo, in the chapter on "homosexuality," which predictably deals about 95% with what straight people thought of gay men). probably the best chapter is the one on jewish people, because it sticks to a chronology that doesn't imply social attitudes were interchangeable in 700 and 1300. the entertaining bits aren't really worth the shelf space for me.
April 14, 2026
Perhaps less categorical than one would expect from the title, but a good piece of research for the upstart medievalist. Well researched and wider in aspect than just high medieval Britain + France (although slightly biased to this datum as most English sources are), one finds a wide and frank view of the social systems of Europe at this time, without the romanticized whitewash that is often applied to it. The depth can almost be to a detriment here even beyond casual reading, but most things that time is taken to explicate wind up woven into the grander fabric of what is shown here (some anecdotes can run long atimes though..).
August 14, 2019
There are some fascinating snippets in here, such as an allusion to dungeons and dragons style thieves guilds, but the writing style can be hard work to get through, and I would up giving my copy away without finishing it completely.
March 21, 2013
The Medieval Underworld by Andrew McCall
My father had this book in his library when he passed away. I decided to keep it because of the beautiful artwork on the cover, and saw that there were illustrations from the time scattered throughout the text. However, this book was incredibly difficult to read.
I have studied the Medieval times, the plague, the Papal successions, and the history of England. I found this book difficult to follow. There were a few tidbits of information I had not encountered previously, but not enough to keep me reading. I gave up on page 76 (Hardcover Edition). The author was describing different types of bodily mutation for different crimes.
The author writes: "Not infrequently, people were mutilated by accident; and might, like the Englishman John de Roghton whose left ear was in the reign of Edward I removed by a horse kick, obtain a certificate stating that the injury in question had not been sustained as punishment for any crime.
I could not get past "....the Englishman John de Roghton whose left ear was in the reign of Edward I ....." The sentence was broken and the meaning obscured. A long sentence can serve a purpose, if correct punctuation is used and the standard rules of grammar are followed.
I can not recommend The Medieval Underworld by Andrew McCall. Some of his information is interesting, but I will seek it from other authors.
My father had this book in his library when he passed away. I decided to keep it because of the beautiful artwork on the cover, and saw that there were illustrations from the time scattered throughout the text. However, this book was incredibly difficult to read.
I have studied the Medieval times, the plague, the Papal successions, and the history of England. I found this book difficult to follow. There were a few tidbits of information I had not encountered previously, but not enough to keep me reading. I gave up on page 76 (Hardcover Edition). The author was describing different types of bodily mutation for different crimes.
The author writes: "Not infrequently, people were mutilated by accident; and might, like the Englishman John de Roghton whose left ear was in the reign of Edward I removed by a horse kick, obtain a certificate stating that the injury in question had not been sustained as punishment for any crime.
I could not get past "....the Englishman John de Roghton whose left ear was in the reign of Edward I ....." The sentence was broken and the meaning obscured. A long sentence can serve a purpose, if correct punctuation is used and the standard rules of grammar are followed.
I can not recommend The Medieval Underworld by Andrew McCall. Some of his information is interesting, but I will seek it from other authors.
July 7, 2008
Wonderful fun book but more of akin to reading the pulp trash of medieval Europe than a true research tome.
March 5, 2009
It has nothing to do with criminals.
February 3, 2012
Very interesting book on the evolution and practice of law and the criminal class in the Medieval period. good read - highly detailed with references.
February 28, 2012
Interesting book on the culture of 12th and 13th century western Europe and it's beliefs. A nice read.
January 27, 2013
A comprehensive survey of crime and punishment in the middle ages, by turns hilarious and sad and uncomfortably modern. For anyone who loves crime novels, this is a great change of pace.
February 19, 2010
Has plentiful secondary images, a good overview, a quick read.
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