The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (review)

This volume emerged from the Wiles Lectures delivered at Queen's University, Belfast, in 2006, and the four chapters of the work retain their original character. The tone is light and breezy throughout. Complex problems are rendered accessible, such that the book might work well in advanced undergraduate courses dealing with medieval science, intellectual culture, or magic. The topic Bartlett tackles is obviously enormous, and in the scope of four short lectures, he can only begin to address the many profound issues that arise from serious consideration of what the Middle Ages meant by "natural" and "supernatural." Experts will not find much new ground broken. Neither is the work a systematic overview, focusing more often on well-chosen examples rather than presenting a coherent survey, but it succeeds admirably in providing clear illustrations of major trends.

Bartlett addresses the basic issue of medieval conceptions of the natural and the supernatural in his first chapter. He notes that nature is a vast and mutable concept that must always be defined against something. His real focus falls on the thirteenth century, where ideas of the supernatural first clearly appear. Earlier medieval centuries had classified various things as being supra naturam, but only in the thirteenth century did the idea of some things being supernaturalis become common. The developers of this notion were scholastic theologians like Thomas Aquinas; as Bartlett notes, "the mendicants, high Scholasticism, and the supernatural were born together" (p. 16). He goes on to discuss scholastic efforts to distinguish supernatural miracles from natural marvels, and to designate monsters as natural, albeit rare and wondrous, occurrences. The emphasis of the chapter tends to be on the natural more than the supernatural, examining scholasticism's new respect for a comprehensive and coherent (ultimately Aristotelian) "nature."

In his second chapter, Bartlett highlights the idea of a mechanistic physical universe most commonly associated with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then argues that some aspects of this mechanistic thinking existed in earlier centuries as well. Exactly how medieval "mechanism" differed from later mechanical philosophy is not really the point. Rather, Bartlett mainly wants to illustrate that the Middle Ages understood certain natural and mechanical links of causation—presenting a more "rational" medieval mind than some modern readers might expect. This point is most entertainingly illustrated when Bartlett quotes the nineteenthcentury novel King Solomon's Mines, in which, at one point, the European colonialist heroes, using a simple almanac, predict an eclipse and so convince the African natives that they possess powerful magic. Medieval Europeans also understood and could predict the movements of the heavens mechanistically, and the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus is reported to have used a similar subterfuge to astound the less sophisticated Pechenegs, against whom he was warring, in the eleventh century (pp. 59–62).

Chapter 3 focuses on demons, witches, and "dog-heads," in order to illustrate medieval conceptions of beings and of being. Medieval thinkers were very concerned to understand the nature of demonic existence, the potential reality of demonic bodies, and above all the natural possibilities of demonic power. Most demonic actions were understood as illusions (Bartlett's principal example is the famous canon Episcopi, so important for later notions of the witches' sabbath), but how those illusions were produced needed to be understood, and demons themselves were no less real (or threatening) just because they operated mainly by deception. Dog-heads are Bartlett's main example of the medieval tendency to posit monstrous hybrid creatures, typically living in the exotic orient, but nevertheless to understand these beings as fully natural and potentially fully human. As Europeans came into greater contact with the East after the eleventh century, it became increasingly difficult to sustain belief in such creatures (as their supposed natural habitats were being explored and none were being found), but this was not an example of natural thought overcoming supernatural; rather, it was simply a case of an aspect of nature becoming more fully understood through exploration...