God's Wounds

It is a paradox of medieval Christian society that, out of all the mysterious and wonderful properties of the divine, extending from the Creation to the Last Judgment, the central act of the redemption, the sufferings of Christ at the Crucifixion have become the principal focus of religious swearing. There are, admittedly, a few allusions to God’s creative power in phrases like “as sure as God made little apples” (really a euphemism) or the ancient asseveration “by God’s light,” but they are greatly outnumbered by those alluding to the Crucifixion. The gruesome invocations of Christ’s wounded body and blood, even the nails of the Crucifixion, seem as grotesque and bizarre to us now as modern genital, copulatory, and excretory swearing would have seemed to medievals.

The traditional medieval condemnation of such swearing was that such blasphemous oaths were regarded as a renewal of the Crucifixion. Nevertheless, the mode thrived throughout the period, being memorably reiterated by John Donne centuries later:

They kill’d once an inglorious man, but I
Crucifie him daily, being now glorified.
(John Donne, Holy Sonnet XI )

This motif took various forms. It could be expressed in a quite dignified and classical manner, as in by Goddes corpus! (using the Latin corpus for “body”) or by Cristes passioun! , used in the dominant medieval sense of “suffering,” still found in forms like “The Passion according to St. Matthew.” However, the more common mode was crudely physical. The entry for Chaucer discusses various classic and familiar instances in his Canterbury Tales (1386–1400), notably those in the Pardoner’s Tale , reiterating the traditional medieval condemnation, based on taking the gruesome oaths literally:

And many a grisly ooth thanne han they sworne,
And Cristes blessed body al torente—
[And tore Christ’s body all to pieces]
(ll. 708-9)

Many contemporary ecclesiastical authorities issued similar condemnations of dismembering oaths, some of them as extreme and hysterical as the swearing itself. Dan Michel, a brother of the Cloister of Saint Austin [Augustine] at Canterbury, wrote about 1340 in his major spiritual text, The Ayenbite of Inwit (“The Remorse of Conscience”) that in swearing “the Christians are worse than the pagan or infidel. They are worse than the Jews, who crucified Christ, but did not break any of his bones. But these mince him smaller than men do swine in a butchery” (Folio 19a, 64). The same point is made by John Bromyard in his major compilation of sermons, the Summa Praedicantium (ca. 1323–1350): “The Jews gave up Christ’s body unmaimed, but the Christians cut it up in pieces, limb by limb, with the devile’s sword, that is, their tongue” (I, 419).

Rosemary Woolf remarked in her major study, English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages : “The theme of a fresh wounding or crucifying of Christ seems to have occurred very early in a spectacular and popular form, that of the exemplum of the Bloody Child” (1968, 396). She traces the first appearance of the motif to another standard medieval spiritual text, the Handlyng Synne (ca. 1300) of Robert of Brunne, in which the Christ child is the victim of dismembering oaths. In the parable, the Blessed Virgin Mary shows the sinful swearer her child, hideously deformed. She upbraids the “rich” (powerful) man who, typical of his class, “commonly swears great oaths grisly”:

“Thou,” she said, “has him so shent [damaged]
And with thy oaths all to-rent [torn to pieces].”

Such severe condemnations, based on the literal interpretation of dismembering oaths, were repeated over the centuries. The same motif is found in the English version of the Gesta Romanorum (ca. 1440) where the Virgin dramatically accuses the sinners:

Why come ye hidder? For to shew thee my sone, lo!" she saide, “here is my sone lyeng in my lappe, with his hede, all to-broke, and his eyen drawen oute of his body and layde on his breste, his armes broken a-twoo, his legges and his fete also.”

(Woolf 1968, 396-97).

Even more imaginative and powerful is the transference of the speech to the Savior himself, a development found in a collection of homilies under the title of Festial by Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk; ca. 1450). Here Christ upbraids callous and insensitive swearers:

and what particularly grieves me is that you care nothing for my passion which I suffered for you, but I am affronted all day by horrible swearers, who swear by my face, by my eyes, by my arms, by my nails, by my heart, by my blood, and so forth, by my whole body.

(author’s translation, Early English Text Society vol. 96, 113)

Numerous instances of the same motif are to be found in medieval lyrics and the dramatic genre known as the miracle plays discussed in the entry for medieval period. Woolf also shows that the power of the metaphor of the dismembered Christ extended even to extraordinary visual analogues, for in some contemporary depictions of the Savior in ecclesiastical stained glass, parts of Christ’s body are actually missing, while “Around are a group of fashionably dressed young men, grotesquely holding the missing limbs” (Woolf 1968, 397-98). This class gloss is quite common, being found in the earlier comments cited from Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne. An Invective Against Swearing (1543) by Thomas Becon was one of the last wholesale denunciations of those who swear by “by all the members of [Christ’s] glorious body,” which are listed in detail and condemned: “The Jews crucified Him but once, and then their fury ceased; but these wicked caitiffs crucify him daily with their unlawful oaths…. It is not a rare thing now-a-days to hear boys and mothers tear the most blessed body of Christ with their blasphemous oaths” (cited in Montagu 1973, 129).

Despite these numerous and powerful condemnations, the mode continued to thrive. Although there were some early euphemistic variants, such as the medieval oath “by cokkes bones!” liberally used in Chaucer, the favorite oath of Queen Elizabeth was, allegedly “by God’s wound’s” (Montagu 1973, 139). However, toward the end of her reign the old gruesome invocations of the Crucifixion started to be supplanted by minced oaths, euphemistic and sanitized forms, such as zounds, ‘sblood , and ’snails , with the name of God truncated. As the forms became less recognizable, so their currency declined: thus the last recorded fragments of these powerful oaths were gadzooks (literally “God’s hooks”) in the 1650s, the variant godsookers about 1672, and ounds in 1706. The final ironic footnote is a discussion in George Farquhar’s Restoration comedy Love in a Bottle (1698) on “the most fashionable Oaths in Town,” in particular whether zounds should be pronounced zoons or zauns (II i). The answer is zauns , showing that the oath is no longer even recognizably derived from “God’s wounds.”