Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Mediaevalia Transilvanica 1999 (3. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)

Mentalităţi

Mentalităţi

Between the Sacred and Profane: The Trial by Hot Iron Ceremony Based on the “Regestrum Varadinense”

Mária MAKÓ LUPESCU

“O God, the just judge, we humbly pray you to deign to bless and sanctify this fiery iron, which is used in the just examination of doubtful issues. If this man is innocent of the charge from which he seeks to clear himself, he will take this fiery iron in his hand and appear unharmed; if he is guilty, let your power declare that truth in him...”1 * *

With these words medieval priests initiated one common form of trial by ordeal. The medieval ordeal is a subject of great intrinsic interest and fascination. It is one of the most dramatically alien practices of medieval society and, such as, it requires explanation. To offer a plausible meaning of the ordeal is not an “easy” question because just as anthropologists seek to understand the inner rationale of strange and apparently incomprehensible practices and beliefs among people of other cultures, thus the medievalists are confronted with the issue of a custom which has no familiar counterpart in the modem West, in the modem world. For some scholars, the ordeal is a hurdle and a challenge." For others, ordeal represents a case of the disengagement of the sacred from the profane: “For if ever there was an area where the sacred penetrated into the chinks of the profane and vice versa, it was in the ordeal.”'1 In around 1225, for instance, in the Cathedral from Oradea it was possible, in the same saintly “house of God”, both to be baptized as a Christian and, as a litigant, to undergo the ordeal of carrying the hot iron to discover the truth about issues in a purely secular law suit. The ritual would be converted from its sacramental to its judicial function with the minimum of contradiction. “In all these confusion” writes Southern “there is something barbaric.”4 The withering of the ordeal in the course of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries has, therefore, been viewed in terms of the clearing up of a “barbaric confusion.” For a third group of scholars,

'János Karácsonyi, and Samu Borovszky, eds., Regestrum Varadinense examinum ferri candentis ordine chronologico digestum, descripta effigie editionis A. 1550 illustratum. Az időrendbe szedett váradi tüzesxaspróba-lajstrom az 1550-iki kiadás hű másával együtt (Budapest, 1903), 146. This book represents the best critical edition of the Oradean register. In the first part of the book the writers republished the facsimile of Ritus explorandae veritatis, the first edition of the Oradean register from 1550. The second part of the book is a very useful research tool for those who wanted to deal with this subject. The authors offered an archontologia of the most important dignitaries from the period related by the records. In fact it is a list of kings, archbishops, bishops, chancellors, voivodes, etc. for each year when ordeals had been organized. In this part of the book was also included the critical edition of the Oradean register. The authors had to use the printed edition from Cluj 1550, because at the beginning of the 20th century the original manuscript was already lost. The critical edition contains the records from Oradea structured year by year. This was an important contribution of these two scholars, because until their time the records of the Oradean register were used without dates. Their conclusions concerning the date-problem and the methods used for the establishing the years of the records, were included an another, bilingual (Latin-Hungarian) chapter.

2 Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water. The Medieval Judicial Order (Oxford, 1990), 1.

1 Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,” Daedalus 104.2 (1975): 135.

4 Richard William Southern, Saint Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1963), 265.

Medieevalia Transilvanica, tom III, 1999, nr. 1-2.