Oaths and Everyday Life in Peter Idley’s Instructions

In one of the best-known exempla of the later Middle Ages, a woman appears before a powerful man with a child in her arms. The man sees to his horror that the child has been grievously wounded: his sides, his back, his hands, feet, arms, legs, eyes, mouth, and nose are all torn and bleeding. “Who are you,” the man asks of the woman, “and who has hurt your child?” “You yourself have hurt my dear child,” she answers, “with the oaths that you swear.” Though they go unnamed in many instances of the exemplum, it would be obvious to most readers from the outset that the woman is Mary and the child Christ. As though to dispel any confusion, the woman usually goes on to explain that the child has already suffered for the rich man’s sake, having been crucified and pierced to the heart for love of all mankind. But now the rich man does worse than the Jews who martyred him in the first place: he crucifies him daily with his profane oaths. In many versions of the story, the man begs for mercy, which Mary grudgingly grants—on the condition that he abandon his sinful swearing.¹

The exemplum conveys a sense of language’s power at once figurative and intensely literal. Invoking the parts of Christ’s body is the same as hurting them, it suggests: the child’s wounds index specific profane oaths. Prescriptive devotional writing sometimes spelled out that logic explicitly, with or without the imaginative license of the exemplum. The Pore Caitif, for instance, held that idle swearers “not oonli taken [Christ’s] name in vein, but also dismembren him & crucifien him.”² The same logic underwrote wall paintings of a bloodied Christ, his wounds programmatically inflicted by profane oaths, and Chaucer’s Pardoner’s description of his “riotoures thre,” whose “othes ben so grete and so dampnable / that it is grisly for to heere hem swere.”³ This “grisly” mode of thinking can seem naive from a modern perspective. Jonathan Michael Gray’s thoughtful study of oaths in the Henrician Reformation, for instance, remarks that images like the bloody child “suggest that many medieval people believed that oaths by Christ’s members really did tear into his corporeal body,” contrasting such popular attitudes with intellectuals’ more figurative understanding.⁴

Of course, credulity is only one side of the story. With its tortured Christ, its script of horror and moral knowledge, and its kneejerk anti-Semitism, the bloody child exemplum is cousin to the Eucharistic miracles and more vicious stories of host desecration that have been the subject of recent critical accounts of medieval faith and doubt.⁵ We know now that miracle stories are challenging, provocative, participatory.⁶ In the new miracle studies, the unlikely apparition of a Christ child torn by oaths invites skepticism and belief, properly understood as “the will’s action upon the mind and the mind’s response,” in Steven Justice’s words.⁷ Read this way, the thudding literalism of the violent oath elicits a deeper, more searching act of faith and penitential self-scrutiny: the willingness to believe that one’s own words carry such force. It asks that we assent to the improbability that our everyday profanity crucifies Christ all over again.

What, then, to do with a retelling of the bloody child narrative that ends with this admonition?

I counceill you, be ware, þat kepe ony houshalde,For ye shall for your seruauntes hoolly answere And all her dedis on your bakk ye shall heuely beere,And specially if ye suffre hem swere a grete othe––It shall be remembered whan ye wolde be lothe.⁸

These lines come from Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son. They mark Idley’s major addition to the exemplum as he would have found it in his source, Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne. With these lines, the exemplum’s challenge to personal faith—its invitation to affirm that swearing per membra really dismembers—is replaced by a reminder of the responsibility to govern others. In Mannyng’s...