#ellis Peters

[victusinveritas]

Sir Derek Jacobi as the retired Crusader Knight come Benedictine Brother, Cadfael. Jacobi actually had his hair shaved into a tonsure during filming, instead of wearing a bald cap wig. Some actors felt that was a little too far; others had their own heads shaved.

Beside Sean Pertwee as Sheriff Hugh Beringar.

Great series of stories based on the novels written by the linguist-scholar Edith Pargeter (1913–1995) under the name "Ellis Peters."

In my family we always watched Cadfael on Christmas Eve. A) because it was on the local PBS station and B) because it had a monk and was therefore deemed Christmas adjacent. That it was also usually a murder mystery was just extra fun.

[moxiebustion]

I'm not even remotely religious in any way, but I am begging people who are going to write about a character going into a monastery/nunnery whatever to please, please, please read some of the Cadfael Chronicles before you cast an entire population of people as fire-and-brimstone, self-mutilating, repressed, fanatical zealots.

For the uninitiated, the Cadfael Chronicles was a long series of medieval-set (specifically set in the 12th century) murder mysteries where the gumshoe role is taken by a monk who is well into middle age, a skilled herbalist and a former soldier and sailor who joined the Order late in his life (which for one, did happen!).

Now, there are some dated things about the writing that bears some examining; Ellis Peters (psued for Edith Pargeter) first started writing then in the late seventies (the last book was published 1994, a year before her death), and while she was a fantastic amateur self-taught scholar (she was so good she got an honorary degree from Birmingham University, having never even been to any higher education than high school) she is writing about the time of the Crusades and the Crusaders who invaded Jerusalem and she doesn't really delve that deep into the implications of her characters being involved in that, even though the characters are portrayed as the good guys, especially the titular one. But it's very possible most of the scholarship she had available for research at the time was all Western perspectives, which, you know, history is written by the winners, etc. She has a writers bias towards her protagonist, so of course he is framed fairly glowingly, though not without flaw.

But whether she had a view on the moral implications of the Crusades or not, the way she wrote medieval Britain and medieval Wales is absolutely textually fascinating because she doesn't flinch away from the fact that yes, Britain at this time was a feudal serfdom with slaves included, and was hard on marginalized people, chock full of patriarchy that did affect the lives of her female characters or that the Church was a big landowner themselves, and there was plenty of political tension and violence due to an ongoing civil war, but nonetheless the town the Chronicles are set in and the monastery where Cadfael lives is portrayed as a community.

Seriously. They don't just pray and whip themselves for 'bad thoughts'. The monks can be funny, snarky, and shy, and ambitious. They can be irreverent - yes, even about God, that thing that they are meant to be the most reverent about. They can have petty rivalries, they can annoy one another, even the Abbot, and not be sent for a backbreaking penance. They aren't thumping on bibles and telling people that if they don't make the cut that they're going to burn in hell.

They care. They take care of the children left in their charge, whether they're rich scions there to get an education or some poor thing left on their doorstep. One monk, in charge of the children, expresses real and genuine concern over a new novice that is having horrific dreams, worried that he has suffered a tremendous hidden trauma (he's right) and they're all concerned about what they can do to help him. A pair of teenagers literally fuck on one of the altars and the reaction from Cadfael is rueful amusement at young people's folly, not disgust or anger. They collect alms for the poor, redistribute everything given to them to help people survive. They crack jokes and show each other kindness and...

... look, I'm not saying that there weren't and still aren't zealots in religion. No religion is really innocent of that. And yeah, those zealots have done some pretty heinous things when they're put in charge - see Witch Burnings, Various Inquisitions, Crusades, Terrorism, etc. But I do wish writers wouldn't write about religious life like everyone who ever entered it was either a complete bag of bible-thumping assholes or just miserable all the time.

For one thing, that's really boring. Religion is a way we can tell stories about the complex reality we live in and the rules we think are important when dealing with other people. To reduce all that potential down to Miserable, Repressed, Self-Harming, Witch Hunting Jerks is intellectually lazy at best.

For another thing, you are losing the opportunity to portray a fundamentally queer experience. I don't mean they were all fucking (although some of the proscriptions that they felt the need to write down would rise your eyebrows - hand holding was apparently banned at one point); I meant that this was a group of people that took themselves out of the amatonormative status quo entirely and dedicated themselves to something that wasn't marriage, children, mercantile endeavors or anything 'normal' like that. That was, at the very least, a queer experience with clear queerplatonic overtones (not to mention, there were FTM trans monks that literally went on to sainthood, chosen gender kept intact).

And also? It just isn't historically accurate. Plenty of men and women actively chose a life outside the norm because they wanted to serve god and the community. They're just a group of people, all living together, making space for one another, all trying to serve people in whatever way they can. These people were less raging witch-burners and more Jedi without the lightsaber.

In the Cadfael books, they have brushes with zealots and they're reviled as bad guys every time. One (in the very first book) more or less fakes a whole-ass vision to manipulate the order to go to Wales and try and acquire a Welsh saint's bones and ends up doing even worse things because he believes he is destined for greatness and will get it by whatever means necessary. The head of the mission (who edges close to zealot territory himself and fully buys into the con for his own benefit) tries to buy the saints relics and causes a massive diplomatic incident as a result of this insult that makes him look like an idiot.

The other zealot that gives them trouble is a priest appointed to run the church. This man is as big a bible thumping, hellfire and brimstone dickhead as you might always picture a medieval priest to be and he is uniformly despised by both the monks and the township at large because his zealotry and strict adherence to only the letter of religious law and nothing else actively harms the community.

He's so hated, in fact, that when he (spoilers) dies, the reactions of all and sundry is mostly just relief that he's gone.

The Catholic Church has a lot of sins that it forgets more than it reckons with, but that doesn't mean that life in a monastery was all hair shirts and self-mortification, every abbot a little dictator. People have lived just fine in small communes for a lot of human history and they didn't all have small-minded tyrants continually cracking the whip. Most of them didn't.

I know it's an easy shaft to mine angst from, shoving people into an oppressive environment that they must either endure or overcome. And yes, the way we write about religion is sometimes a product of working through a complicated and traumatic relationship with it. I'm not trying to say any writer can't or shouldn't write that because your art is always supposed to be about putting parts of yourself out there, about telling the world a story about how you see it; and if you're working through something, if you need to tell a story about the scars that zealotry absolutely have and do leave, go for it, more power to you. That's a story that should and must be told.

But if your character is going into a monastery, try to remember that humans are social creatures. We make friends more than we make enemies. Even under intense tyranny, we make allegiances and form bonds and find ways to make the world were in a little bit more bearable wherever we can. And we tend to show each other compassion and mercy, even when we don't always like each other. It's true today, and it was true then too.

Monastic life was a queer experience that happened right under the noses of the dominant power structures for centuries. I think there's a story or two to be mined from that as well.

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Ellis Peters - A Morbid Taste for Bones - MacMillan - 1977

[rhetoricandlogic]

A MORBID TASTE FOR BONES by Ellis Peters

RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27, 1978

A Mediaeval Whodunnit."" And so it is, with Brother Cadfael of the Benedictine Monastery of Shrewsbury--once a rough sailor, now a sleepy skeptic--as sleuth. Because he speaks Welsh, Brother C. is enlisted for Prior Robert's expedition to appropriate the bones of obscure St. Winifred from a remote Welsh village; the ambitious prior's game-plan for advancement requires a saint, any saint. But the villagers don't want to lose St. Winnie, and then the leader of this resistance is found with an arrow in his back and a stab wound in his front. Would Prior Robert--or his lackeys--really go that far? Or is the motive domestic? (The dead man's daughter has two suitors.) Brother C. traps and dispatches the loony killer (disposing of the body with great wit), matches the daughter up with the right swain, and encourages a restless monk to drop out and enjoy the flesh. Considering the materials, this polished Ellis Peters pleasantry could have been much duller, cuter, and talkier than it is.

[quotelr]

Every man has within him only one life and one nature ... It behooves a man to look within himself and turn to the best dedication possible those endowments he has from his Maker. You do no wrong in questioning what once you held to be right for you, if now it has come to seem wrong. Put away all thought of being bound. We do not want you bound. No one who is not free can give freely.

Ellis Peters, The Potter's Field

[brigittemarlt]

Cadfael, the hero of my youth. The medieval Sherlock Holmes in search of truth was a huge influence to me in my law career. His humanity and his wisdom have helped me to grow up. In addition, his anti-conformist personality and his scientific knowledge make him a pioneer In a society frozen by the beliefs and superstition. He is a man beyond his time as a forensic scientist and investigator. Derek has a great gift to play masterfully ordinary men who have extraordinary destinies. He gives to his character a bright melancoly that touches us to heart. His performance has left me indelible memories. What he does In this part is just brilliant.

[burnsopale]

Cadfael in every single book: *hides another young couple under his habit*

"Mine now. Must protect and nurture."

[hiidenneiti]

He looked down, flashing out of his preoccupation with a sudden mischievous smile, combed the fingers of one hand through the hedge of bushy greying hair that rimmed Cadfael’s sunburned tonsure, leaving it bristling like thorn-bushes, snapped a finger painfully against the nut-brown dome between, and took his departure with his usual light stride and insouciant bearing, which the unwary mistook for the mark of a frivolous man. Such small indulgences he was more likely to permit himself, strictly with friends, when he was engaged on something more than usually grave. Cadfael watched him go, absently smoothing down the warlike crest Hugh had erected.

Saint Peter's Fair. Ellis Peters. 1981.

[hedonist-aesthete]

A Morbid Taste for Bones has been getting me through my lunch breaks the last couple weeks.

[kenstewytruther]

where is the Cadfael themed met gala. everyone dresses like a Benedictine monk from the 1100s who would for sure have been a Franciscan except the order wasn’t invented yet. where is Jeremy strong in a monk’s hood, freshly shaved tonsure, as if he has only just made the life-altering decision to become a man of the cloth. Everyone has a sprig of some herb behind their ear but it has to be an herb that Cadfael himself would have grown in his herbarium

[cha-mij]

Seriously tempted to write something like Outlander which is less romance, time travel and drama but more a Sharpe/Aubrey-Maturin/Cadfael/Shardlake of the Jacobean era.

Does anyone know of any modern books that already exist so I don't have to write it? 🤣

[the-great-elwisty]

Pentiment Easter Egg

Pentiment has a Cadfael Easter Egg! 😍 I've just had Andreas break into the library, and he comes across a book of herbs: "The author's called Cadfaellus of Salopia (i.e. Shrewsbury). He doesn't sound familiar."

But he does to me! Read most of the Cadfael books when I was around thirteen. They're lovely. Ellis Peters also wrote novels about the Welsh Princes, which have been on my reading list for decades and which I am absolutely going to read next year.

ETA: And just hit the Name of the Rose Easter Egg!

[julesofnature]

Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.

Ellis Peters

[fiction-quotes]

“Girl,” said Cadfael, breathing in deeply, “you terrify me like an act of God. And I do believe you will pull down the thunderbolt.”

  —  The Devil's Novice (Ellis Peters)

[graaaaceeliz]

I'm reading Cadfael but deciding what music to play whilst I read is so difficult. I love Cadfael, and Brother John, and Jerome is just as delightfully awful and annoying and slightly insane in the books as I'd hoped - I've watched all of the ITV series ft Derek Jacobi at least three times.

It's delightful that Ellis Peters was just as fond of commas as I am.

[ranaraeuchle]

Re-reading Cadfael.