Avian Flu and St. Hubert

If you live in the US or NL, it is unlikely that your government has reserved a Tamiflu shot for you. You’ll need to find your own solution in case of pandemic. What I always tell my students is that one of the reasons to study history is that it often provides models for problem solving that can still be applied today. So let me recommend to you an early sixteenth-century solution to animal-borne disease.


A few years ago in the rare book room at the library in Ghent, I photographed this print, which only appears to have survived in one copy. The print is dated at the bottom “xv c . xvj” (ie, 1516) and has an image of St. Hubert at the top. St. Hubert was a hunter who was out one day pursuing the deer when he had an epiphany: the deer upon which he was about to release his dogs suddenly sprouted a crucifix from its antlers. This is the moment we see in the image. St. Hubert called the dogs, dropped his weapon, knelt before the deer, and promised to become a vegetarian.

Hubert was thought to hold sway over dogs (because he was able to call off them off?); although they are curiously not represented in this print, they appear in most fifteenth-century depictions of the saint. He therefore became associated with rabies, which medieval people realized were transmitted by dog bites. A shrine in his honor was built in the Ardennes, and people who had the “dog bite disease” would visit Hubert’s relics. There they might also buy a print, such as this one.

The text at the bottom describes what to do if you contract rabies. I won’t transcribe/translate the whole thing for you. It says that someone with the disease should go to the Hubert altar to be “cut,” meaning that he should have his forehead incised and a piece of the relic inserted into the wound. He should sleep for 9 days on fresh, clean sheets, drink white or red wine cut down with water, and eat white or brown bread, and the meat from a pig or a chicken that’s more than a year old, and hard-boiled eggs. He should keep his head upright for 9 days and not comb his hair (presumably so the relic stays in place). Most importantly, he should honor St. Hubert.

Let me know if it works.

Acrostics for Erie

You'll notice that we've drifted from the fifteenth century. Be reassured that the last word on late medieval hospitals has not yet appeared on these pages. But for now, a brief step into the twenty-first.

I heard John Hegley, my favorite poet, performing in London the other day. Not only is he funny to watch and listen to, but he's good for my development of understatment, a necessary skill for living in the UK. During one of his previous shows, which I attended with my mother in Milton Keenes, he inspired these acrostics, which my fabulously talented mother wrote about her home town, Erie, Pennsylvania:

Elasticized raingear inflates egos.
Expect rain in eternity.
Excavate radiant iridescent emeralds.
Eliminate racial intolerance everywhere.
Exude radiance; infuse energy.
Elvis remains icon extraordinaire.
Extremist religion insults existence.
Eat raisins if expecting.
Eggs rationed in eighths.
Extra rations induce energy.
External reality internalizes everything.
Excessive ripening incubates excretion.
Eradicate repulsive industrial epicenters.
Erase reprehensible inbound e-mails.
Exit research institutions exhumed.
Erotic ritual involves elves.
Excitable rotund implants explode.
Eggy recipes inspire epicures.
Exhibitionist removes incriminating evidence.
Evil restaurateur invents escargot.

The Church in Veere

[Try as I might, I can't get these images to load vertically; just tilt your head to the left.]

The Church in Veere is monstrous large, much larger than one would think that the small Zeeland village would need. The exterior of the church, as well as its late medieval tower, are still in relatively good repair, while the interior has been stripped and has undergone numerous transformations. Like most churches in Zeeland, this one was the object of iconoclasm: in 1572, it was dismantled, the religious sculptures stripped away, and the wall paintings whitewashed.



This image, for example, shows one of the side chapels along the north aisle. Until 1572 it was dedicated to St. Christopher, and the niche, now empty, most likely had a sculpture representing the saint. The altar was sponsored by the guild of masons and woodworkers. The leatherworkers and shoemakers also sponsored a chapel along the western aisle, theirs dedicated to St. Crispin. The oldest guild, that of the fishermen, had a chapel dedicated to St. James.

The church fell into desuetude for two centuries, and in 1812 the French forces annexed it as a military hospital. It continued to be used as a hospital for most of the nineteenth century. In 1833, during a cholera epidemic, for example, the church became a refuge for those suffering cholera. The side chapels were turned into rooms for the sick, each housing 7 people.



You can see in this picture that the nave was divided into a three-storey complex, and the windows were added to correspond to this new partitioning.



The west façade similarly reveals this nineteenth-century adjustment, with the original archway over the entrance dismantled to made way for the new three-level plan.


The most recent adjustment to the interior reveals a much different approach to health: the nave has now become a concert hall.



The view from the top of the tower reveals why the fishers’ guild was so powerful in Veere.

The Church of Our Lady in Nisse

Like Veere, Nisse is in Zeeland, that is, the province of The Netherlands that lies in the very south western part of the country. The consolation for growing old is that I might some day retire in Zeeland.

Nisse’s village plan follows a layout common in Zeeland, based on a series of nested circles: the church stands at the very center. It is surrounded by a green commons, which comprises the center of the village. The one in Nisse has a small pond that freezes in the wintertime, thereby turning into a skating rink. The houses are arranged around the periphery of the green, so that each house faces the church. The backyards of the houses are wedge-shaped, so that the footprint of the entire village is round, with a church at the center, and the gardens shaped like pieces of pizza with one bit taken out of each.



The tower of the Church at Nisse was built in 1421, and the first part of the nave quickly followed. The whole thing is made of brick. What interests me in particular about the Church at Nisse is that it has several wall paintings, which all date from the last decades of the fifteenth century, but were painted over during the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century (probably in about 1572). The whitewash was lifted in the 1920s to reveal a giant image depicting St. Christopher.



The mural is painted on the north interior wall of the church’s original nave (the building was extended in the sixteenth century). The image is difficult to make out now, because it has been severely damaged since its discovery in the early 20th century. Above all, direct light from the windows in south wall has bleached the bottom of the mural. The image depicts St. Christopher ferrying the Christ child across a raging torrent. At the upper right side of the image, a hermit holds a lantern to guide the giant to the other side.

The image of St. Christopher probably appeared on most pre-Reformation church interiors: gazing upon the saint promised extraordinary spiritual and physical benefits and therefore provided great impetus to come to church. Such promises are codified in a rubric prefacing a prayer to St. Christopher in a 15th-century Dutch prayerbook (which I’ve translated for you):

rub: "The Privileges of St. Christopher. St. Ambrose describes that St. Christopher the holy martyr converted more then 75,000 people to believe in Christ. Therefore, anyone who looks at his image in the honor of Christ, and in honor of his divine service reads a pater noster and an Ave Maria every day, on that day he will not die unconfessed, nor without the sacrament, nor a bad death. Furthermore, he will be protected on water and on land against all Turkish weapons, against enemies, against bad air, against pestilence, against hunger, against hail, wind, thunder, lightening, bad diseases, and against enemies’ spiritual and burning machinations, both seen and unseen, and against anything that might harm him."

St. Christopher became the patron of travelers, not only because he safely transported the Christ child across a dangerous river, but because he promised all kinds of protections against perils that might befall a traveler. It’s not wonder that cab drivers in many countries (mostly Catholic ones) hang an image of St. Christopher on the rearview mirror, even though the saint was decanonized. The only church still dedicated to him—tellingly—is one right near the Citroen plant outside Paris.

Saint Dymphna

According to hagiography, Saint Dymphna, an Irish princess, fled to Flanders after her deranged father pursued her sexually. Sniffing her tracks by the Irish coins she spent along the way, he and his henchmen caught up with her in the town of Geel, not far from Antwerp. After struggling to preserve her chastity, she suffered a bloody demise typical of medieval virgin martyrs, and her body was buried in a church named in her honor. She is usually depicted vanquishing her father, who appears as a lizard-like demon below her feet.

Honored as a saint, she became the protector of those with mental illness. From an early date, the sick, and especially the mentally ill, came to Geel to seek cures, although it was not until around 1270 that Hendrik III Berthout founded a hospital, or gasthuis, at Geel, under the spiritual patronage of the Virgin Mary and Saint Dymphna. Willem van Henegouw, the Bishop of Kamerijk (the diocese to which Geel formerly belonged), acknowledged the foundation in 1286 and granted statutes to the brothers and sisters there who cared for the sick.



The hospital was called the Sint-Dimpnagasthuis and was adjacent to the Sint-Elisabethgasthuis, with which it later merged. A fire destroyed the Church of Saint Dymphna in 1489 but it was rebuilt and consecrated in 1532. The church, as well as the hospital for housing the sick and convent for housing the Gasthuiszusters, still stand. The buildings date from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century, because the cult of Saint Dymphna and the hospital grew continually, and the buildings, correspondingly, had to be augmented. Geel continues to attract mentally ill people from Flanders and is considered very progressive in its care for the mentally ill.

Pilgrims traveled to Geel to see Dymphna’s relics. There they were able to obtain lead-tin stamped pilgrim badges. One, for example depicts the saint holding a sword and vanquishing her father in the form of a deranged beast. Christ, crucified between Mary and John, appears over her head like the choir screen in a church, while the structure of the object as a whole is reminiscent of the cross-section of a church, with a nave and flanking side aisles.


One of my favorite objects still housed in the church of St. Dymphna is this reliquary in the form of an ostensorium, to display a piece of red stone found in the tomb of St. Dymphna. Made primarily of silver, it was produced some time in the sixteenth century. The red “stone” (which is really a piece of earthenware baked from red clay) has some letters carved in it [apparently “DI(M)P”] and a hole at the top so that it can hang from a cord. According to legend, a priest would hang the object around the neck of a sick person and pronounce certain words with supernatural power in order to affect a cure.

This is the first in a series of blogs about Zwartzusters in the Low Countries.

Many cities in Flanders had a Zwartzusterklooster in the late middle ages. Zwartzusters (black sisters) usually took vows of the Rule of St. Augustine then lived in semi-enclosure. I say semi- because they ran hospitals, and therefore had necessary and continuous contact with the world outside the convent. Their habit was usually white with a black veil (more on that topic later). In Leuven the grounds of the Zwartzusterklooster, as well as some of the original buildings, now form a residental college at the Katholiek Universiteit.

The Zwartzusterklooster in Leuven, also called the Nazareth klooster, was founded by Elisabeth Ymbrecht, a Jew from Luik (Liege) who converted to Catholicism. She rented a house in 1438 in Leuven on the site of the current convent. Surrounded and helped by a few other women, she began to take in the sick. As she began to buy the land around her house, her informal house evolved into a hospital. Meanwhile more young women were joining her to care for the sick. In 1462 the bishop of Luik gave her permission to build a chapel on the premises and to adopt monastic vows. Like most other hospital complexes from this period, the sisters opted for the Augustinian Rule. The chapel that they commissioned was finished by 1478, when the altar was dedicated. Elisabeth Ymbrecht died in 1482.

Most of the fifteenth-century origins of the complex have been covered over by later additions. The overall plan with buildings surrounding an open courtyard, as is visible in this photo, probably reflect the original layout of the hospital. The convent continued to function as a hospital through the French Revolution.


The greater part of the complex dates from the seventeenth-century, including the group of buildings along the Zwartzustersstraat, all made of brick. These baroque buildings include the chapel, which dates from 1687-93. The brick façade, articulated with white stones, is crumbling and provides an elevated structure some grasses and other plants that take advantage of the morning light.

The last sisters left the convent in 1969.