The Invention of Hell
Gone Medieval
This episode of 'Gone Medieval' explores the evolution of the concept of hell during the Middle Ages, challenging the notion that it was a f
Key takeaways
- Hell as we know it was not directly derived from the Bible but was largely reinvented during the Middle Ages.
- Apocryphal texts like the Vision of St. Paul and Gospel of Nicodemus were widely popular and shaped medieval understandings of the afterlife.
Main topics
- Medieval depictions of hell
- Apocryphal texts and their influence
Notable quotes
"All hope, abandon ye who enter here." – Dante's Divine Comedy and its lasting impact on modern visions of hell.
Conclusion
The episode concludes that medieval visions of hell were not monolithic but constantly
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:01) From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarnagher, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week exploring... everything from the ancient world to World War 2. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe Speaker 1 (0:41) Hello, Speaker 4 (0:42) I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonica, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and Speaker 1 (0:56) the Speaker 4 (0:56) latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. All hope, abandon ye who enter here. Those famous words from Dante's Divine Comedy have helped shape how generations of people have imagined hell. A vast, terrifying realm of fire and punishment, where sinners are tortured for eternity and demons lurk in the darkness. Speaker 4 (1:43) But Dante didn't invent hell. And much of the classic fire and brimstone schtick doesn't come from the Bible. In fact, scripture says surprisingly little about what hell actually looks like. So where did it come from? Like most things, the answer is the Middle Ages. In the early medieval period, new Christians searching for answers on the afterlife turned to a host of different stories and traditions. Speaker 4 (2:15) Apocryphal texts like the Vision of St. Paul and the Gospel of Nicodemus proved hugely popular. They offered new and surprising visions of the afterlife, becoming the medieval equivalent of New York Times bestsellers. And as these stories traveled across medieval Europe, they changed. Speaker 4 (2:38) Irish writers wove Christian teaching about the afterlife together with their own ancient traditions. Old Norse authors imagined Christ's descent into hell through the mythology of their own world. And in England and Wales, poets turned the underworld on its head, imagining hopeful hells, where even the damned might one day rise again. Hell, it seems, was not one fixed place. It was being reinvented. Constantly. Speaker 4 (3:12) I'm Dr. Eleanor Jannecke, and this is Gone Medieval. Today, we're descending into the medieval underworld to uncover how the hell we think we know came to be. And to help guide us down into the deep, dark depths, I'm thrilled to be joined by Stephen Hopkins, Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia and author of the amazing new book, Translating Hell, Vernacular Theology and Apocrypha in the Medieval North Sea. Speaker 4 (3:45) Stephen, welcome to Gone Medieval. Speaker 3 (3:47) Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here. Speaker 4 (3:49) I'm really excited to have you here because I love this book. I'm obsessed with this book. Everyone, stop what you're doing and go read this book. But if you aren't going to stop listening to this, go ahead and listen first and then go read it. But I think that I'm obsessed with hell, right? I'm obsessed with depictions of hell at the back of my... business card is the Hellfresco in the Bologna Cathedral. You know, for me, this is one of my big medieval loves. I think it's interesting because I think there's a tendency for us to think that they are particularly obsessed with Hell. And maybe actually it's us kind of being obsessed with it and going to look for it. But I mean, is it fair to say that they're quite interested in it? Or is this just sort of the stuff that hangs around, I guess? Speaker 3 (4:41) I think that's a fair question. I think it's good to interrogate our biases, right? And ask, like, are we projecting on the Middle Ages? That's always a good move. Although I will say that in this case, I don't think the stereotype is totally wrong. If we want to imagine medieval people as sort of morbidly obsessed with hell, I think I would quibble with the morbid part, but not necessarily the obsessed part. I Speaker 4 (5:04) think that's fair. Speaker 3 (5:05) You see manuscript images of lots of hell mouths. You see all sorts of texts about hell. Some of the medieval bestsellers. I mean, like Dante is sort of the culmination of this tradition. Inferno especially is a tour of hell. So, yeah, I think it's fair to say that they are extremely interested in hell. And I'm getting at why. I think it might help us understand why I would say maybe not morbidly, but definitely. Speaker 4 (5:32) Well, I guess that brings me on to my next question, because you mentioned the Inferno, which, again, you're completely guilty of being obsessed with that particular text. And I think that it has done this great job of molding the way that we think about hell and the way that we talk about it. But how is hell depicted? in artwork or literature in the medieval period more generally because there isn't really one size fits all you do certainly i love to see a hell mouth i'm excited every time i see one they're absolutely brilliant but presumably that's something that comes in at a point in time no Speaker 3 (6:08) Yes, that's right. I mean, again, I think it's worth remembering that Dante might be an iconic medieval writer, but he's right at the end of the Middle Ages, basically. If you run into someone who studies Italy, they're going to say, actually, he's either the last medieval author or the first Renaissance author, something like that. So he's right on that cusp. He sort of summarizes and synthesizes the traditions that came before, and he does it magnificently. But before him, in the centuries... But prior to that, you know, hell's depiction varies by region. There's all sorts of local influences that go into how hell is depicted. Sometimes, you know, it's drawn as, like we said, a hell mouth full of souls that are sort of seething in this mouth, like you see in the Winchester's altar. Or sometimes it's. a hell mouth, like a beast's head, and you see Christ pulling Adam and Eve out of it, you know, for the harrowing of hell. It might be more like Bosch, where you see a bunch of naked people who are being tortured in very colorful and stomach churning ways, you know, demons are poking them with pitchforks and things like that. Those images really exist. It could be, you know, one of my favorites is actually the hours of Catherine of Cleves, where hell, like the gates of hell are depicted as a giant cat's face. And I mean, I have a cat so that that checks out. Speaker 3 (7:30) Yeah. So, so often what I think I love about this project in general and why I study it is they're often remaking hell in their own image or in ways that speak to very local interests and concerns. There's not like a monolithic depiction of it per se. There are some details that float that get shared across, but for the most part, like fire is important, but there's a lot of room for customization. Speaker 4 (7:52) Fire is important. Sometimes weird little guys are important. I love a demon. I like to see a demon. I like it when the Hellmouth has legs. That really does it for me. I lose it when the Hellmouth is a little guy who's walking around. Fantastic stuff. Yeah, the Speaker 3 (8:07) Hellmouth might be English in origin and it it seems to emerge from English manuscripts first. And there's at least a theory out there that it starts as a whale, actually, which if you are really into your obscure Christian medieval exegesis makes sense because I Speaker 4 (8:25) am. I Speaker 3 (8:27) mean, even, you know, Christ himself in the gospel says that he's about to, I'm paraphrasing obviously, but he says he's about to pull a Jonah, which means that when he is crucified and goes to hell, he is going to, he actually says, you know, he will have the sign of Jonah, which means he's going to go into the underworld, which is, you know, allegorically the whale that Jonah gets swallowed by. And he's going to be down there for three days like Jonah or a while. And then he gets spat out. So he references that prophecy. So, so. There's this sort of exegetical tradition where like the whale is a metaphor for hell and then people start drawing that beast. And sometimes, you know, especially I love the first person perspectives of these that are really strange where the beast's face is kind of like flattened where, yeah. So it starts looking, it starts out as being a whale and then it stops looking like a whale. And then people are like, well, we can just make it whatever animal we want to, a lion or something intimidating. Dragon. You Speaker 4 (9:21) know, and fair enough. I like to see, well, I like the dragon ones a lot, but I just like to see a dragon. So that's fair enough. But well, you mentioned exegesis. And I think that it is important to kind of take it right back to the Bible. What's the Bible got to say about how fun trick question? Speaker 3 (9:41) Exactly. That's really the thing. I mean, that question is basically what got me started on this path in the first place. Early in grad school, I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy, as you do. Speaker 3 (9:54) You know, it wasn't the first time I'd read it, but it was, you know, I was in grad school. I was paying attention in new ways. And I just wondered, how did we get from the handful of scriptures that say anything about hell to this rich, complex tradition, like this symbol? There's so much symbolism and symmetry, so many gory details in Dante. None of that's in the Bible. There's really only. half a dozen or so verses in the New Testament, especially. I think it's worth separating the New Testament from the Hebrew scriptures or what medieval Christians would have thought of as their Old Testament. There's really only a half a dozen verses in the New Testament that unambiguously refer to hell. Many of them are spoken by Christ, and many of those are in parables. So how literally are you supposed to take them? So he says something about how there is darkness and the fire, how there is a worm that devours them. He talks about the sheep and the goats being separated in Matthew 25 and 26 at the final judgment, you know? So the goats are the people who didn't take care of the poor, didn't visit people in jail, didn't take care of the sick and things like that. They're cast into the outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth, but that's not very specific. There's also a parable about a rich man and Lazarus, who is a poor man who's always lived in front of the rich man's gates. And the rich man spent his whole life ignoring this person who clearly needed help. And so when they both die, the rich man finds himself in a fiery place and he's miserable. And apparently he can even see Lazarus across this chasm. And he's begging Lazarus to just give me one drop of water. Christ's parable sort of implies that that gulf is unpassable. And so, yeah, again, there aren't very many details. Like there's just these few little touchstones that sort of obliquely hint at that there's this fate that awaits a lot of people after death. It's going to be really uncomfortable, probably going to have something to do with fire and worms eating you. But there's not like there's not a lot of specifics about duration, location or any like specific tortures or anything like that. Speaker 4 (11:58) And I think that this is a really important point because fundamentally, the idea of hell almost, it's sort of like a folk thing that kind of builds up over time. And medieval people do my favorite thing. I love biblical exegesis, right? You know, my entire PhD thesis is about... you know, a preacher's weird apocrypha and the things that he likes to find in the Danielene prophecies, right? So what I love to watch medieval people do is how they comb around in the Bible for hints at things and then they blow it up into something huge as a result of these tiny, tiny little hints. But there's also a whole world of... I suppose, apocrypha of like pseudo biblical texts that are also feeding these ideas, right? Speaker 3 (12:54) Yeah, exactly. And I think what you're pointing to, like that pattern is the fact that these are smart people who are doing intelligent, close reading. They're paying attention to the Bible and taking the stories in it seriously. And so when the canonical account. It sort of implies something or has weird details in it that are unlike what we see in real life. It's natural to have questions about them. Adam lives to be 930. What's that life like? What do you do for that long, for God's sake? You know, and then lo and behold, there are Apocrypha that kind of answer that question. So again, same for hell. Hell is very, very thinly sketched. Could we hear more about that? It seems kind of important. Voila, Apocrypha appear to fill that gap. And that's really, you know, for listeners who are unfamiliar with the term Apocrypha, they're non-canonical scriptures. So they look and sound like the canonical scriptures. They're written in many of the same genres, epistles, gospels, things like that, apocalypses, but they were not universally revered or held as divinely inspired or authoritative, or maybe they were temporarily or in some traditions, but not all. Right. So they look and sound like scripture. They're not. And this leads to a really interesting dynamic that I think you gesture at. That is that they occupy what I would say is a liminal space in medieval taxonomies of knowledge, which is just a jargony way of saying they're in between. They look and sound like scripture. So some people felt free to revere them. If you don't have many books to read in general, the Gospel of Nicodemus does sound a lot like the canonical gospels, especially because it borrows so many verses straight from them. So on the one hand, some people felt free to revere Apocrypha, but because they're not actually scripture, some people felt free to revise them. And if I make changes to the gospel of Nicodemus, what's to stop you as an intelligent reader from taking my changes as