#medievalcities

Blog Post #4: A Body Preserved

The fact that some bodies do not go through their natural process of decaying fascinates me. Whether it is something unexplained or a scientific oddity, there is something intriguing about the idea that certain bodies evade decomposing and therefore leave their bodies available for people to find/study thousands of years later. 

Though Lady of Dai’s body wasn’t untouched, leading some to suspect divine intervention in some way, the article explains, “According to records, Xin Zhui’s body was swaddled in 20 layers of silk, immersed in a mildly acidic liquid and sealed within four coffins.This vault of coffins was then packed with 5 tons of charcoal and sealed with clay.The tomb was made watertight and airtight so bacteria wouldn’t be able to thrive — but it remains a scientific mystery just how the body was preserved so well.” The ancient Chinese people were clearly dedicated to the preservation of their monarchs, though the article says that all these measures doesn’t explain the level of preservation that took place within this body. The article went into detail concerning the corpse, pointing out, “her skin is soft, her arms and legs can bend, her internal organs are intact, and she still has her own Type-A blood, hair and eyelashes.” It is completely amazing and obscure to me that a body over 2,000 years old is still intact to the extent she is. The article also tells us, “ According to an autopsy, Xin Zhui was overweight, suffered from back pain, high blood pressure, clogged arteries, liver disease, gallstones, diabetes and had a severely damaged heart,” which inevitable led to her death at fifty due to a heart attack, which scientists seem to think is the oldest case of heart disease. The fact that she is preserved well enough for them to learn all of this about her seems to be a scientific anomaly. 

One of the murders on the London Murder Map stuck out to me as quite sad. A baby girl, named in the article as Alice of London, of three months old, was found in a ditch. It is said that a beggar-woman called Nicola of Cardiff had sat down on the bank of the river, pretending to bath the infant, and drowned her without catching any passerby's attention. It is said if Nicola, “The jurors had no idea what became of her. She had no worldly possessions. They did not suspect anyone else of causing the baby’s death. The body was viewed, but no wound, hurt or bruise appeared on it.” 

It does not explicitly who is parentage of the child was, so the language of this article confuses me a bit. Regardless of whether or not this Nicola was the mother of the child or not, this act does seem to be rooted in class. The title of “Alice of London” tells me that the woman, who is explicitly said to be of Cardiff, could possibly not be the mother of the child, but I am not certain as to whether the infant would be considered a Londoner in the time period simply because she was born there. If this child isn’t of Nicola than I suspect she was doing out of some kind of vengeance towards the parentage of such because of some wrongdoing. If she was the child’s mother, it is even more sad to consider, because that means she drowned her child who appeared to not be ailed in anyway. The woman is named a beggar and poor enough to not have a single worldly possession to herself, so I feel obliged to lean towards the idea that perhaps Nicola couldn’t care for the child and/or felt the child, growing up in the lowest level of citizenship, was better off dead. 

After reviewing the Anglo-Saxon poem “Andreas” from Thursday’s class, I have come to one simple conclusion: the hero of the story, Andrew, is not who saves Matthew and the rest of the prisoners in Mermedonia. In fact, one can argue that the “Savior”, the “Son of Man” himself was the true hero in this tale. Andrew appears to have no part in the actual destruction and resurrection of the city besides being the living face for Jesus’ acts.

From the very beginning, though Andrew agrees to do as his Lord commands and takes on this quest, the act itself is impossible without the divine hand in the matter. He is days away from the city until he falls into a mystical sleep and is whisked there by Christ himself; if he hadn’t been transported there and taken the sea (the only human possibility to get to the city), he never would have been able to complete his task. Then, once he reaches the city, he is concealed by the divine, who is once again assisting him, so he is not discovered. When he reaches the prison, the guards immediately fall dead before him, followed by the “hand-grip of the Holy Ghost” (21) breaking down the door of the prison. He then does the work (at least) of breaking out all of the imprisoned people. After such events, Andrew sits back and watches the citizens turn on each other first before they eventually going after him, inflicting him with tortures, which his Lord heals and assures him will end. 

One of the concepts that de Certeau seems to be working with in his essay “Walking in the City” is the idea that people seem to be following social norms by going about their normal day in an urban setting. In any given space, de Certeau seems to be suggesting, there are underlining ‘norms’ set down by the way that society has been conducted that seem to subconsciously suggest a person to act a certain way, perhaps despite their personal inclinations. In class, for example, we talked about how society has set down normal gender roles for men and women based on their biological sex announced at birth. A man might not be interested in sports and a woman might not be interested in make-up, but society seems to be telling them that it is the normal things they are supposed to enjoy and, therefore, if they do not than they are acting ‘abnormally’. While de Certeau doesn’t go as far as to include anything as controversial as gender theory, he does seem to be suggesting that, similarly to stereotyping gender, our social environments, such as cities, seem to be setting down specific ways people should be living.