Abstract
The purpose of the present paper is to analyse the mental and cultural attitudes of early medieval people towards one celestial “unidentified” phenomenon: aurora borealis. Celestial signs were often – but not always - interpreted on the basis of biblical prophecies, as visible words through which God forewarned humanity of future major events like the death of a king, pestilence, or famine. Attention will be mainly focused on the latter aspect, and specifically on the potential connection between the signs associated with the end of times in the Gospels, and actual records of aurorae, which were in turn interpreted as proving and confirming biblical prophecies. Aurora borealis seems to have generated anxiety about climate and hunger and to have enjoyed a particularly bad reputation, the reasons depending either on the moral purposes of related records, the rhetorical strategies they offered, or the actual emotional impact they had on the observers.
Highlights
Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é analisar as atitudes mentais e culturais das pessoas da Alta Idade Média perante um fenómeno celestial ‘não identificado’: a aurora boreal
If celestial ordinary phenomena such as meteors, comets, bolides, eclipses, solar haloes, parhelia and others were known to early medieval intellectuals and can be tracked in the sources, there is no scientific medieval classification of aurora borealis (Dall’Olmo 1980; Martínez Usó, Marco Castillo 2017)
Various terms were employed to indicate possible aurorae, which are quite indicative of the observers’ mental attitude, even though some of them might have referred to other phenomena, at times: since northern lights in continental and southern Europe were mostly associated with the colour red, aurora might have been confused with the reddening of the sky at dawn or sunset, for instance
Summary
16 “Et nocte diei succedente, caeli pars prodigiose flammis erumpentibus in septentrione ardere visa est. It seems fair to conclude that McCluskey’s idea, according to which in early medieval times the Bible replaced natural philosophy as the main key to the understanding of nature, may be dismissed as incomplete On the contrary, both these perspectives were probably endorsed (Foot 2010: 39), with their respective role depending on the writer, his context, and the purposes of his work. Palmer’s statement that “eschatology and apocalypticism thrived on immediate personal experience” more than on abstract elements such as dates or other escalating patterns of signs (Palmer 2014: 146): northern lights had an emotional dimension, behind the filters of historiography, textual borrowing and biblical prophecies This means that a literary reading alone does not do justice to our sources: chroniclers and annalists did engage with early medieval astronomy Northern lights primarily belonged to the realm of experience, an emotionally engaging experience, by all odds
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