Transcription
What happened in a medieval village when one of the villagers wasn't like everyone else? I think we assume that person would get exiled or accused of witchcraft, but that actually isn't what happened. Turns out people in the Middle Ages understood neurodivergence even if they didn't necessarily have a specific term for it. The actual term autism was originally coined by the German psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911, but it wasn't until the early 1940s that it was conceptualized as a distinct neurodevelopmental condition. That's not to say it hasn't always existed though. I think it's important to note here that we can't go back in time and diagnose anybody from the past with anything specifically. You can see why that would be pretty irresponsible, but what we can do is look at individuals who displayed traits we now associate with the autism spectrum and see how people a thousand years ago understood them. A lot of that understanding happened in a religious context, but this was medieval Europe, so literally everything happened in a religious context.
Let's meet Brother Juniper. We have no idea when he was born, but he died in 1258 and he's known for being one of the OG companions of maybe the most famous figure of the whole Middle Ages, Saint Francis of Assisi. Because he was tight with Francis, we actually have a ton of details about his life, most of which were recorded in the early Franciscan text, The Little Flowers of Saint Francis. When you start reading about Brother Juniper's personality, it starts to sound kind of familiar. He was known for, let's see here, taking everything extremely literally, having an absolute lack of social awareness, and, I quote, a complete absence of malice or guile. Juniper sounds like the sweetest guy ever, but just like today, if you're different from everybody else, it obviously makes you stick out like a sore thumb. Thankfully, he was friends with one of the holiest men who ever lived, and Saint Francis protected him kind of like an older brother. Francis actually famously said about Juniper, "Would to God, my brethren, that I had a whole forest of such Junipers." Do you get the play on words there? Like his name is Juniper, but also juniper trees, forest, pretty clever.
Anyway, you've probably heard of the monastic vow of poverty, and not every monastic order takes this vow, but the Franciscans do. This caused some problems for Juniper. That's because he took the vow so literally that he would give away his clothes to anybody that asked him to the point that he actually had to be ordered by his superior to stop walking around naked. Even then, there was a time where a beggar asked him for help, and Juniper replied, "My superior has forbidden me from giving you my tunic, but if you tear it off my back, I won't stop you." There are tons of stories like this, including one that involves pigs' feet, and another where Juniper decided one day that he wasn't going to speak for 6 months, and then he didn't. He did not say a word for 6 months. Overall, he was beloved by his brothers, even though he was so different from them, and he is sometimes referred to as the renowned jester of the Lord. Ooh, that doesn't sound so good. That actually sounds kind of insulting. The weird thing is that it wasn't at all. It's kind of this strange example of how definitions change over time. Brother Juniper was known in the Middle Ages as a fool for Christ. Let's zero in on this because the whole concept might be one of the earliest examples of autism spectrum traits that we can find in medieval history.
Now, in the modern sense, fool has a pretty negative connotation, like, "I pity the fool." That sort of thing. >> No, I don't hate bear bull, but I pity the fool, and I would destroy any man who tries to take what I got. >> But foolishness for Christ in the Middle Ages was different. The idea originally stems from the New Testament, where foolishness is this total rejection of worldly cares, and this obsessive desire to imitate Christ. In 1 Corinthians 4:10, St. Paul writes, "We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are honorable, but we are despised." So, the basic idea is, "Hey, there's this guy in the village who walks around with no shoes and prays to himself constantly. We might typically think of that behavior as foolish, but he's actually a fool for Christ. So, this isn't strange behavior, it's holy behavior. Even then, I don't want to paint an overly rosy picture that holy men who exhibited potentially neurodivergent traits were all venerated or something because that certainly was not always the case.
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Let's meet Nicholas the Pilgrim, also known as Saint Nicholas of Trani, who was born in Greece in the early 11th century. It was apparent to pretty much everyone that Nicholas was different from birth, and at age 8, he suddenly started repeating the Greek phrase Kyrie eleison over and over again, which means Lord have mercy. He was doing this all day, every day, and it wasn't like a thing where he was whispering to himself. It was basically something that he was shouting constantly. Nowadays, we know this is a manifestation of what's called echolalia or the repetition of words or phrases, and Nicholas was clearly using it as a vocal stim. His daily routine was super rigid, too, and he never deviated from it. He would walk around carrying a heavy wooden cross, shouting his prayer. It was this intense kind of all-consuming hyperfixation that became his whole life. One of the most defining characteristics of autism is an intense resistance to having a comforting routine disrupted even in the face of immense distress or danger. People in Nicholas's life tried everything to get him to stop chanting. His mom beat him, local bishops found him so annoying that they cast him out of the monastery. When he entered the city of Taranto, the local bishop was so pissed off by the noise he was making that he ordered a crowd to rough Nicholas up. There's no happy ending here, unfortunately, and Nicholas died at 19, most likely from a combination of exhaustion and exposure to the elements due to his homelessness. The world can be a very cruel and nasty place, and I guess the only consolation is that just 4 years after his death, the church recognized that his hyperfixation was actually a rejection of worldly logic and a singular devotion to Christ. Nicholas was canonized by Pope Urban II in 1098, [music] and today the gorgeous cathedral of Trani, in Italy, stands as a monument to his memory, and he's actually buried beneath it. I don't know, that's nice, I guess, but it doesn't really fill me with the warm and fuzzies. It's like people didn't even want to see this guy as human until he died tragically, and then they felt bad and changed their minds.
I actually kind of feel like Nicholas and Juniper are two sides of the same coin, except Juniper was lucky enough to get in with a group of fellows who recognized the beauty in his different nature and accepted him for who he was. But I want to meet somebody else totally different, a medieval personality who perhaps exhibited some similar traits but lived a totally different life. Some of you have probably been sitting there fuming, wondering why I haven't mentioned a certain German abbess yet. So, let's talk about her. Meet Hildegard von Bingen, maybe one of the most impressive human beings who has ever lived. If someone like Brother Juniper represents the vulnerable, hyperliteral innocent who needed a protective community shield, Hildegard is more like the high-functioning, fiercely independent systematizer, maybe hyper systematizer. She was an abbess, a writer, a philosopher, a composer, a mystic, a visionary, a medical practitioner. I mean, literally name a thing, I would bet good money that Hildegard did it and was incredible at it. Okay, no, she could not dunk a basketball from the free throw line, but I bet if you gave her a ball and enough time, she would figure out how to do it. Basically, this woman was a neurodivergent powerhouse who bent the entire medieval establishment will.
Oh, you want an example? How about the fact that she came up with her own language, which is called the lingua ignota, Latin for unknown language. Just the language itself wasn't impressive enough, so she also invented a completely custom 23-letter alphabet. No, it wasn't just random gibberish. My parents will have to confirm, but I'm pretty sure I tried to come up with my own version of pig Latin as a kid, and it was just total nonsense. Not for Hildegard. This was a structured secret glossary of over 1,000 words, most of which were related to medical or religious or sometimes even botanical terms. The modern definition of her would be a conlanger or a constructed language creator, which is basically an exhibition of deep hyperfixation on linguistic classification and cryptography. Did I mention that she experienced synesthesia? Yeah, she was famous during her lifetime for these intense visions she had, but unlike other medieval mystics, the visions didn't happen while she was asleep and dreaming or after she had worked herself into a sort of trance state. They actually happened while she was wide awake. It's difficult to understand exactly what she was experiencing, but Hildegard describes the visions as this kind of overwhelming brilliant blast of sensory input that she called the living light. From what she wrote, it seems like her mind kind of cross-wired these intense sensory experiences with the complex theological and scientific concepts that were bouncing around in her head all day. I mean, this was a woman who literally wrote music where the structural geometry of the universe matched the literal intervals of the chords. This highly visual, but also highly organized way of thinking, like, I don't know, mapping the entire cosmos into interconnected geometric diagrams, is incredibly common among visual thinkers on the spectrum, usually those who exhibit the autistic genius profile.
Now, Hildegard was of course a woman living in the Middle Ages, so at first the fellas tried to box her in. The medieval establishment was a little put off by all this. But the trick was to present your cognitive differences as a direct unmediated transmission from God. Basically, to put a label on it before other people could accuse you of being crazy or demon possessed or something. This is exactly what Hildegard did, and so instead of treating her with pity or being afraid of her, the medieval community treated her with this immense awe and even kind of like a political deference. Pope Eugenius III actually read her writings out loud to a synod of bishops and gave her official papal approval for everything she was getting up to. For those not well versed in medieval Catholicism, once you got papal approval, you were untouchable. Hildegard had arrived, baby, and she had more than a few things she wanted to get done. So, she founded not one, but two independent convents. She went on a massive public preaching tour across Germany. She wrote letters to emperors, most famously to Frederick Barbarossa, and also to popes, and in the letters she would scold them for their bad behavior.
So, I guess if we take a step back, what we're seeing here is that the medieval approach to neurodivergent traits wasn't really a one-size-fits-all model. It kind of depended on the individual. If you were more of a natural fool, you might get treated with lighthearted indulgence, or you might get beat up. If your unique brain structure manifested as a systematic hyper-productive genius, medieval society wouldn't just accommodate you, you would be elevated to the absolute highest tiers of spiritual and intellectual authority.
Maybe you've also heard of Bernard of Clairvaux, more commonly known as Saint Bernard. I'm so deep off in medieval history at this point that I sometimes can't tell if certain people are just household names to me or if everyone knows them, but anyway, Saint Bernard. Basically, through pure force of personality, he rose from leadership of a small French monastery to the Catholic conscience of medieval Europe in the 12th century. He was this larger-than-life figure who, just like Hildegard, became an advisor to popes and kings and one of the most significant religious figures of the entire Middle Ages. He also preached and supported the disastrous Second Crusade, but it says something about how elevated his status was that even a catastrophe like that didn't really put a dent in his public sway. Bernard also displayed behaviors that we would today label as profound sensory detachment and monomaniacal hyperfixation. And also, just like Hildegard, he turned these into his superpowers.
There was the so-called Lake Geneva incident where Bernard spent an entire day riding a horse along the shores of Lake Geneva with a group of companions. I've never been to Lake Geneva, but if you look at pictures, it is massive, it's stunning, and most importantly, it seems pretty impossible to miss. That evening, when his traveling companions started discussing the beauty of the lake that they had spent the whole day riding next to, Bernard looked at them in total confusion and asked, "What lake?" A chronicler also once noted that he lived in a monastic cell for over a year and couldn't remember if the ceiling was vaulted or flat the room even had windows. He basically didn't process physical environments if they didn't align with his internal focus. Bernard also struggled a lot with sensory overload to the point that he overhauled the whole monastic system as part of his need for sensory minimalism. At the time, the dominant monastic order was Cluny, which was all about massive, ornate churches filled with stained glass, gold statues, intricate stone carvings, really loud, complex music, the whole kitten caboodle. To Bernard or anyone with sensory difficulties, it was kind of a complete nightmare. So, he championed the Cistercian order, which stripped all of that stuff away. He banned stained glass and statues, and made sure the churches were all about plain walls and absolute silence. Now, Bernard had other theological reasons for this as well, and the changes in Catholicism that happened throughout the 11th and 12th century are a fascinating story for another video. But anyway, now in the 21st century, we recognize autism traits, and we definitely have a broader communal awareness of what it all is. But what about a thousand years ago? I'm so glad you asked. The Middle Ages were weirdly progressive in some ways, and if you look through contemporary chronicles, you can find some remarkably compassionate systemic frameworks for handling what we would now call neurodivergence.
Let's talk about the town of Geel, you know, the 13th century community care haven. It's definitely not the first thing you think of when you hear the word medieval, but maybe it should be. >> And somebody's >> dog is going crazy. >> I think having a dog in an apartment complex is cruel. Like this is These are studio apartments. Dogs need a backyard. Anyway, Geel was a town in modern-day Belgium, and it was basically the gold standard for community-based care in the 1200s. According to local history, and my Catholics out there are probably already familiar with this, an Irish princess named Dymphna was murdered there by her crazy dad, and her burial site became associated with miraculous healing of madness and pretty much any other cognitive conditions. Nowadays, Saint Dymphna is the patron saint of everything related to mental health, and I think we need her intercession now more than ever. Anyway, this holy history turned Geel into a pilgrimage site, and pilgrims from all over Europe flooded to this tiny village that was pretty soon completely overwhelmed. In response, the local church, aptly named Saint Dymphna's Church, had to build a room to house all of these people, but even that filled up super quickly, and there were still more people coming. But the good folks of Geel, instead of just turning away all the surplus pilgrims, actually absorbed them into their homes. Wow, I mean, these folks were the real deal. This was true Christianity on display. Over the course of a few years, there was a border system that developed, and local farming families took these pilgrims in as boarders or foster family members. Now, keep in mind the kind of people that would be making a pilgrimage to Saint Dymphna's Church. These were people who were suffering from some kind of mental or emotional condition, whether it was autism or something else. The families who took them in allowed them to live and eat and work alongside the members of the household. Some written accounts record that if a boarder started shouting unprovoked, like a Nicholas of Trani situation, or exhibited repetitive behaviors, or self-isolated, the community's explicit policy was to ignore the strange behavior whenever possible, and give as much leeway as they could for what they called impairments. This system passed down through generations of Geel citizens, and it was so successful that it actually survived the Middle Ages entirely intact. It transitioned into a modernized version with psychiatric backing in the 19th century, and remains an active, internationally praised model of care today. Maybe there's a lesson we can learn from the citizens of Geel about compassion and open-mindedness.
But let's put the finishing touches on this medieval masterpiece. As always, we've got to challenge our chronological snobbery. No, people in the Middle Ages didn't have terms like autism or echolalia. But just look at the village of Geel that did a better job of organically absorbing and protecting their neuro-divergent neighbors than most modern industrial societies. Also, before modern capitalism, a person's value wasn't entirely tethered to their efficiency at their nine-to-five job or whatever corporate social script they're supposed to be following. Medieval society accommodated the brain to fit the environment instead of forcing the brain to bend to the machine. Also, the spectrum existed then just like it exists now. Neurodivergence in the Middle Ages isn't just one thing we can point to and say, "See?" You have the vulnerable ones like Brother Juniper, the hyperfocus forces of personality like Bernard of Clairvaux, and then the incredible genius visionary polymaths like Hildegard. Because there are tons of others that have been lost to time. Basically, what I want to say is that neurology is ancient. Our brains are basically the same as they were then, and only our cultural coping mechanisms have changed. There's something to be said for radical acceptance and structural protection. But, what do you think? Did the Middle Ages have better cultural coping mechanisms for neurodivergence than we do? Or are we still more advanced than our ancestors? Let me know in the comments. As always, I'm John. This has been Medieval Mindset, and remember, the past isn't gone. It's simply waiting to be rediscovered. Don't forget to scan the QR code and use code MIND19 to get your MyHeritage kit for just $19. You'll also get a 30-day free trial and free shipping. >> So long. So long. So long.