ABSTRACT
The changing relationship between official religion and popular belief is analyzed on the basis of an exemplum of Caesarius of Heisterbach from his Dialogus miraculorum (1219–1223).
A priest in a vision witnessed a troop of the dead in a tournament fight, calling out the name of a recently deceased knight. The story reached the author by way of one or several intermediaries. His spokesman was also a Cistercian monk. The fearful experience of the priest was immediately or during the process of transmission transformed into a report on a tournament of the dead. A contemporary living belief was thus used in the ‘interpretation’ of the original experience, the infernal tournament that knights that were damned had to join in after their death. In the story, as it appears in Caesarius, two beliefs are intertwined. On the one hand we read about the Christian idea of hell: the damned, Caesarius writes, will have to remain in hell forever; the living are only able to see images of them in visions. Conversely, Caesarius’ story expresses the belief that the dead continued to roam this world, a heathen belief that survived the Middle Ages alongside official Christendom and was incorporated into the official religion in the representation of hell or purgatory on (or just below) earth.
The idea of the tournament of the dead is part of the larger complex of ideas about fighters who return to the site of death. It also forms part of a greater tradition that the dead continued to roam the earth. In the course of the thirteenth century these kinds of beliefs were banished by theologians and lived on in popular culture – until our present times.
Caesarius held a position that was middle ground. For him, in accordance with the theological views, hell was clearly separated from the world of the living; on the other hand it also consisted of a set of ‘infernal events’ that were played out here on earth. The text contains traces of both beliefs.
Caesarius transformed this story into an exemplum, a story with a morally edifying twist, designed to discourage knights from participating in tournaments: those who die in tournaments go straight to hell (unless they had done penance for it before death). In the course of the twelfth century tournaments were banned by the Church authorities. Knights who died in tournaments were not to be buried in consecrated ground. However, the ecclesiastical ban could have had an unintended effect. The belief that the dead, buried without proper rites, failed to find rest and continued to roam the earth, possibly attached itself to these Church outcasts. The Church’s actions against tournaments may have strengthened the belief in tournaments of the dead, which the same Church sought to correct.
From now on the belief in tournaments of the dead – and in general in the return of the dead – became part of popular culture, in the sense of being a belief that was exclusively held by the common people and not subscribed to by the religious and intellectual elite. This belief continues to exist in our day, a remarkable example of a mental longue durée.
Viewing this phenomenon alongside the perspective of ‘in-depth’ Christianization, we can identify a remarkable juxtaposition of two developments. In-depth Christianization went through an important phase in the thirteenth century, when the Church strengthened its organization, including its parishes, and scholastic theology was expanded. But that century also witnessed the breaking away from the Christian faith of a complex of beliefs which until then belonged to the religious culture of both the laity and the clergy. These beliefs went on to lead their own separate, tenacious lives.
