The Invention of Hell

"All hope, abandon ye who enter here." These words from Dante’s Divine Comedy may shape our modern vision of hell, but did you know that the Bible says surprisingly little about it? In fact, hell as we know it was constantly reinvented during the Middle Ages. Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Stephen Hopkins as they descend into the medieval underworld to uncover how apocryphal texts, localised mythologies, and religious anxieties shaped the terrifying, and occasionally hopeful, realms of the afterlife. MORE How to Get to Heaven: Papal Indulgences Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-get-to-heaven-papal-indulgences/id1564113746?i=1000750332025 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5RdwAjNzXQGT3p3swsj3XA Medieval Apocalypse Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/medieval-apocalypse/id1564113746?i=1000643496929 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5ucwLvFTdbNd0C8OBcfqsX Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Want even MORE history? Watch Eleanor and Matt's new film Medieval Summer on History Hit. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  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 Yanega, 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 II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:16Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanega, 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 gob-smacking details, and the 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.

• 1:53Eleanor Janega?

  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. But Dante didn't invent hell, and much of the classic fire and brimstone schick doesn't come from the Bible. In fact, Scripture says surprisingly little about what hell actually looks like. So where did it come from?

• 2:36Eleanor Janega?

  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. 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.

• 3:12Eleanor Janega?

  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.

• 3:47Eleanor Janega?

  I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanega, 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.

• 4:19Eleanor Janega?

  Stephen, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here.

• 4:24Eleanor Janega?

  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, okay, 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. The back of my business card is the hell fresco 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.

• 5:08Eleanor Janega?

  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?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:39Eleanor Janega?

  I think that's fair.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  You know, you see manuscript images of lots of hellmouths. You see all sorts of texts about hell. Some of the medieval bestsellers, I mean, 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, might help us understand why I would say maybe not morbidly, but definitely.

• 6:07Eleanor Janega?

  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. Certainly, I love to see a hellmouth. 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?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  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, you know, he's either the last medieval author or the first Renaissance author, you know, something like that. So he's like 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 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 hellmouth full of souls that are sort of seething in this mouth, like you see in the Winchester's altar.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Or sometimes it's a hellmouth, 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 checks out.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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 get shared across, but for the most part, like, fire is important. But there's a lot of room for customization.

• 8:27Eleanor Janega?

  Fire's 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.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, the hellmouth might be English in origin, and 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

• 9:00Eleanor Janega?

  But I am.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  I 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 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.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  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 could just make it whatever animal we want to, a lion or something intimidating. Dragon.

• 9:55Eleanor Janega?

  You 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, 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 hell? Fun trick question.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Exactly. Um, that's really the thing. I mean, that, 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, and 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,

• 11:00Speaker 03

  or what medieval Christians would have thought of as their Old Testament. There's really only a half 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 like, how literally are you supposed to take them? So, you know, he says something about how there is darkness and 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, uh, 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,

• 11:42Speaker 03

  who is a poor man who's always lived in front of the rich man's gates. And, um, the rich man spent his whole life ignoring this person who clearly needed help. Um, 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. But Christ's parable sort of implies that that gulf is unpassable. And so, yeah, again, there, there aren't very many details, like there, 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 gonna be really uncomfortable, probably gonna have something to do with fire and worms eating you.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  But there's not like, there's not a lot of specifics about duration, location, or any of like specific tortures or anything like that.

• 12:33Eleanor Janega?

  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, that kind of builds up over time. And medieval people do, my favorite thing, I love, 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, in the Danieline 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.

• 13:15Eleanor Janega?

  But there, there's also a whole world of, I suppose, apocrypha of, of like pseudo biblical texts that are also feeding these ideas, right?

• 13:29Speaker 03

  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. Uh, 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.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Uh, and, 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 are, 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.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  You know, 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 gospel truth? Uh, this sort of process allows apocrypha to answer questions that the canonical scriptures can't. But then what I love is there's sort of a snowball effect where you may have answered one question, but your answer is weird enough that it raised 10 more.

• 15:37Eleanor Janega?

  And thank God for that, right? Or medieval historians, we'd have nothing to do, right? So we, we love that.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Except for my personal employment. That's really great.

• 15:45Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I know, right? We need that. We at least, you gotta keep me busy somehow, idle hands, et cetera, you know, but. So within your book, you kind of, when you went down, there's sort of two incredibly important apocryphal texts that really feed into the invention of hell. And, and what are those?

• 16:06Speaker 03

  So I focused on the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Vision of St. Paul in particular. These are two texts that are wildly popular in the Latin tradition especially. If you look at like, you know, there's, there's a, there's an organization called NASCal. It's one of the longest acronyms ever, the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature. You can edit that out if you want. But, you know, we have this online database of apocrypha that viewers could go out and check out if they want to. And it lists over 300 entries, like there's more than 300 New Testament Christian apocrypha. Only a few of those are about hell, but when you think about manuscript attestation and which texts are copied most often, you know, use that as a metric for popularity.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  It's a no brainer to focus on these two apocrypha about hell. The Gospel of Nicodemus survives in more than 450 manuscripts. And the Vision of St. Paul survives in more than 400. Compare that to like Beowulf's one, right? These were ubiquitous, and that's just what survives, you know? Scholars sometimes say that like 90% or 95% of what was produced in the Middle Ages is lost in terms of manuscripts. So like, who knows? They were everywhere. And that's because people want, were curious and they had questions about the afterlife and they wanted these answers. Now, I focus on these two texts in particular because they offer very different stories about hell. I would say that they're basically the good cop and the bad cop of hell.

• 17:31Eleanor Janega?

  Right.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  The, yeah, the Gospel of Nicodemus is the good cop hell. Um, it has good news for you, uh, from hell. And the Vision of St. Paul is the bad cop hell. Uh, it is there to scare the hell out of you or scare you out of hell, I guess. So the Vision of St. Paul, we'll start with that one. It's, uh, it's a very early text. Um, it seems to be an evolution of an earlier Greek apocryphal text called the Apocalypse of Peter, uh, where Peter is shown heaven and hell, but it sort of peters out. Paul steals his thunder. It gets translated into Latin and the Pauline version becomes extremely popular in the West. Um, so in the, in the Vision of St. Paul, Paul basically is taken on a tour of heaven and hell.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  And it's not very, it's not unlike what we see in Dante. In fact, Dante borrows the sort of shape of his vision from this particular vision. But in hell, this is the first time where we see sort of symmetrical punishments for sin. Uh, we see, Paul sees people hanging from a tree by their tongues. You know, they're nailed through their tongues and they're naked and they're on fire. And Paul is like, hmm, what the heck is that? And his guardian angel, uh, his psychopomp says, oh, those sinners were people who were liars. That's why they're hanging from their tongues, right? Or he sees people immersed up to their belly buttons, the text says, uh, in fire. Uh, and of course, the Latin umbilicus there is a polite euphemism for the regions very close to your belly button that would get you in trouble for fornication.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  And the angel says, those were the fornicators. That's why they're there. So we see this, uh, symmetrical version of God's divine justice. Whatever sin got you in hell, your hell is going to mirror that sin in some way. So that's the Vision of St. Paul. It is basically the proto Dante tour of hell. And it seems to be designed to, like I said, scare people away from the bad behavior that puts you in hell. Uh, it's the turn or burn apocrypha, if you will. I don't know if, uh, viewers around the world will be familiar with that terminology.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  But yeah, but it's repent or go to hell, turn to burn. Whereas the Gospel of Nicodemus actually starts with, I think the premise of it is basically another one of these smart questions that people might have about the gospel narratives. You know, as a kid, I remember thinking, wow, Easter is full of all these interesting holidays for like every day of the week. We have Good Friday, we have Easter Sunday. What happened on Saturday? Why don't we have anything going on there? What was Christ doing? Was he asleep in the tomb? And so the Gospel of Nicodemus also answers that question. No, he was not just in there twiddling his thumbs. He actually left his body and went down to hell and smashed the gates of hell and liberated all the Old Testament or Hebrew scripture prophets and patriarchs.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  So basically all the Old Testament main characters, if you were worried about them, they can't logically go to heaven because they were all lived before the incarnation, before the crucifixion and all of that. It doesn't seem very fair for them to be trapped in hell, but it also doesn't seem logically like there should be anywhere else for them to go yet. So this text resolves that conflict, shows Christ going down and doing what we call the harrowing of hell, right? Which is a word that comes from Old English. It basically means like a military raid, right? Like Vikings might harrow or harry the English countryside. So Christ harrows hell, he kicks down, smashes the gates of hell, and he leads out all of these Old Testament figures by the hand, and then he comes back just in time for Easter Sunday service.

• 20:59Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I really like the harrowing of hell. This is one of these things that I'm quite interested in, but I think it's again, one of these things that happens when you're a medieval historian who is interested in exegesis, because medieval scholars are really attached to the concept of the harrowing of hell because they are desperate to get Aristotle out of hell. Like clearly they don't want, they don't want Aristotle and Plato down there, right? And so they're like, no, I'm sure JC came and got, it's not their fault. It's not their fault that they, they were, they were pagans. And it's an interesting one because, you know, Dante very firmly, he's got this vision of the worthy pagans. They are in hell, but they're in the bit that it's, oh, it's not your fault part. But you do see a lot.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, he makes it the limbus patrum, right? There's like.

• 21:45Eleanor Janega?

  And then they all came and they all told me that I was as good as them. Like, yeah, sure they did, buddy. Okay. But, um, I do, I do really enjoy seeing these scholastics wrestle and they, they want their, they want their philosophers out of hell. And so I really appreciate the harrowing for that. But I think that's what's really interesting is that, you know, these apocrypha allow for people with different cultures or different priorities to relate to hell in different ways.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Again, since hell is so thinly sketched, it winds up being very malleable. You can reshape it to address all sorts of cultural needs or concerns that, you know, someone in the first century wouldn't have made any sense to them. But because there's so little to go off of, as long as you include the fire and the punishment part, you can, there's room for creativity there.

• 22:41Eleanor Janega?

  Absolutely. Right in, in the book, you cover Ireland really extensively, which I simply love to see always. And it's, it's really interesting to look at Ireland because they're one of these first regional places to convert, like as opposed to, you know, just the conversion within the Roman Imperium more, more largely. So how do we see early Christians there reacting to the apocrypha? And are there any particular Irish flavored adaptations that we see?

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a hard question, but especially because they convert so early, you know, it's the tail end of the Roman Empire, uh, when St. Patrick is doing his thing. Uh, I think Patrick probably would have thought of himself as a Roman citizen, basically. So.

• 23:29Eleanor Janega?

  Oh God, yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like, we don't have eyewitness accounts of how they react. What we have are stories that are, you know, a couple of centuries later, like from the sevens, eight hundreds, nine hundreds, talking about Druids confronting St. Patrick. At any rate, what we can answer about your question is how did the Irish react to apocrypha in general? And what did they do? What did they use hell to do? One of the most fascinating things about studying early Irish writing, right? Old and Middle Irish is that they basically have the biggest storehouse of apocrypha of pretty much anyone in the Middle Ages. And they specialize in collecting exotic apocrypha too. We don't totally understand how and why. It's still a very open question in scholarship, but sometimes like we will find apocryphal

• 24:14Speaker 03

  texts attested in Old Irish and only in Syriac or only in Coptic. And we are like, how did that text get there without intermediaries? We don't totally know. It seems, it's hard to prove because it was so long ago and so little survives. And also like Rome was busy doing its, you know, crumbling thing. But it seems like, you know, at the very least, we could say that these pan Mediterranean networks of contact were still at least somewhat intact by the five, five and six hundreds when texts somehow moved across, maybe through Spain up to Ireland. It's somewhat controversial to say that, but, but it's definitely a thing. So in the, in the book, I jokingly call the Irish doomsday preppers. They're collecting all these apocrypha to help them prepare for doomsday.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  They're very worried about the second coming of Christ. They're, they've converted early enough that there's still a very large school of Christians who think that basically following St. Augustine, you know, the idea that there are seven days of world history, just as there were seven days of creation. When Christ came back from the dead, that started day six, which means that we are in the last day, which is fun because, you know, here we are still talking about the last day, a thousand, more than a thousand years later, right? It's a long day. But yeah, so they saw themselves as like in the final day, Christ could come back any minute. We need to be ready, just like the parable says, uh, it could be in the middle of the night, like a thief in the night. So apocrypha were one way for them to, to get ready because, you know, they were studying

• 25:39Speaker 03

  scriptures fastidiously, um, and they had lots of questions and they couldn't be answered by the canonical texts. And so they start amassing this storehouse of strange apocrypha. There are apocrypha in Irish that are not, there's no parallels anywhere else for them. So maybe they made them up. In Tengabithnoa is the ever new tongue. And it's the only text that tells us that Philip was martyred by having his tongue cut out and it grew back so he could keep preaching. And so they cut it out again, and then it grew back. So he kept preaching and then they cut it out again. I think it's nine times. That story is unparalleled.

• 26:09Eleanor Janega?

  Well, you know, they say ninth times a charm, you know?

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, seriously. It's bad that I've burned my tongue on a Hot Pocket, right? This is again and again, this is serious martyrdom. At any rate, so they have all these apocrypha about hell specifically. And what I find fascinating is if you look at what, what texts they gravitate towards, I think that they were sort of preoccupied with questions about who is delivered at the harrowing of hell? Or another way to think about it is how far does God's mercy really go? Or another way to think about it is, is there a purpose to hell? Is it, you know, mindless sadism? Is it just punishment forever for the sake of punishment? Or is there a recuperative aspect to it? They get this question from Origen, a church father, you know, in the second, third century,

• 26:56Speaker 03

  who is asking these sorts of questions and, you know, to later authorities like Augustine, sort of smacks of universalism. But Origen famously asks, can even Judas be saved? And so what we see in Irish apocrypha is they take up that question quite literally. There's a whole bunch of apocrypha about Judas and about whether he can get to hell, whether he stays in hell and how he's treated afterwards, because he's the arch sinner. So he's sort of the test case, the logical test case for like, what happens to the absolute worst person who was ever born? Like if anyone deserved to be in hell, surely it's the guy who sold Jesus for pocket change.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  And one of my favorite instances of this is in the Leverbreak Book of Homilies, uh, which is actually 14th century, but it has a lot of older material in it, or, um, maybe it's 15th century. Yeah, sorry. It's actually 15th century and it has older material in it. But there's a homily about Judas where he somehow seems to know that the harrowing of hell is coming. Like this is set during Good Friday. The crucifixion has happened and in the text, he knows that the harrowing of hell is coming. I guess Christ spilled the beans on that one. And so he deliberately, the text says, he deliberately hangs himself so that he can hurry up and get to hell before Christ, because he is under the impression that when Christ gets to hell, Christ is going to let everyone out. So he is, I mean, it's basically like Wile E.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Coyote and Road Runner here. He is trying to trick Jesus into letting him out of hell, even after what he did. But Jesus is very clever and he finds out about this. And the text says that he freezes Judas's soul in stasis. Just long enough so that he can finish the harrowing of hell. And then he unfreezes Judas just in time for Judas to go into hell and then the gates of hell slam shut behind him and he's the first soul that's trapped forever in hell. Mwahahaha.

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• 30:19Speaker 04

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy, and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out, Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:11Eleanor Janega?

  Well, that'll show him. So it's interesting how to watch these very intricate explanations, because it's sort of like people are really wanting revenge on Judas. And I think it's an interesting question when we are considering hell, right? And what it's for, right? And so here, the answer there is, yeah, mindless punishment, revenge. Yeah, that is what we want. We're not looking to redeem Judas or anyone else. And that's just simply not what's going on here, right?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  And apparently enough people were worried about that, that someone bothered to write a homily about it, to address it. You can sort of hear the latent interest in universalism. And my book chapter talks about other instances that seem to suggest that there were at least some people in Ireland who really thought that everyone would be saved ultimately. Now, Judas may deserve it, but there are other texts that really take up the question of just how awful it would be to witness vast swathes of humanity being tormented brutally forever and ever. And it seems that that was too much for some people to take. So on the one hand, yeah, Judas might deserve it, but it's also hard for us as humane humans

• 32:25Speaker 03

  to look at that and think, like, what kind of loving God would allow that? So there's a lot of tensions at play at once.

• 32:33Eleanor Janega?

  Well, within the Irish canon as well, and the way they look at these things, do we also see anything particularly culturally Irish come out of this in terms of these conceptions? I suppose here, I'm kind of thinking more particularly about discussions of vengeance, because we do know that there is kind of, you know, an Irish tendency, for example, on the death of kings, to seek vengeance, right? And do you think that that comes into play when Irish people are then talking about hell?

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's a poet called Blathmug, who is writing in the 8th century. He's one of our earliest Old Irish poets. And this is why I called my book Translating Hell. He takes the idea of the harrowing of hell, he takes that narrative and translates it, not just from Latin into Old Irish, but culturally, he does what I call localizes it. He talks about the injustice of the crucifixion. You know, Christ is the only sinless man who ever lived, so logically, original sin didn't apply to him. He did not deserve to die, period. But then there's the extra layer on top of the injustice of slaying someone who was so good and only wanted to bring good things to humanity. The poet

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Blathmug winds up talking about him, I mean, he calls him a king. This isn't thinly veiled metaphor or anything. He calls him my king, and he says that it's a grave injustice that his king was murdered. And then what's interesting, and frankly, I always find it disheartening to read, is that once Blathmug's king is slain, Blathmug launches into this huge, long, hundreds of lines of just invective against the Jews and against Jerusalem as a city, the people that he holds personally responsible for murdering his king. And he basically, you know, he minds Josephus and Eusebius for the horrors of what happened during the 70

• 34:32Speaker 03

  C.E. siege of Jerusalem under Titus Ambespatian. And he basically lists those off very gleefully and says, you know, "They deserved every bit of this because they murdered my king." And it basically is invoking the sort of logic of how you would avenge a king in medieval Ireland.

• 34:51Eleanor Janega?

  I find that, as you say, it is incredibly disheartening, but it's also one of these things where I always have to remind myself when I'm looking at those things that this is sort of our job as historians, is to sit with this discomfort. And I'm often like, "No, medieval people, they're my weird little friends." And they say something like this, and I'm like, "Hmm."

• 35:12Speaker 03

  My weird Facebook friend, maybe?

• 35:14Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, maybe not. Maybe not that one, but.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was totally vibing with Blathmug for a while.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  And he made it weird.

• 35:25Eleanor Janega?

  Maybe he did. It got odd, right? Well, so what happens in turn with the ongoing translation, right? So we've got the apocrypha and this notion of hell. What happens when it comes into contact with the English, right? Because they also seem to have a pretty lively interest in apocrypha as well. I think that that's fair to say.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  I think that's fair to say as well. If you are anything like me, you often find yourself reading Old English homilies on a weekend night, right? Because that's a party.

• 35:59Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, yeah, I am cool. Thanks. Thanks for noticing, Stephen.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  I'm sure all of our listeners find that deeply relatable. But yeah, if you read homilies, for real, you'll see that a lot of them, like, a lot of them, have a similar rhetorical pattern, where they talk about whatever scripture or passage that week is based on, and then they, again, do the turn or burn move rhetorically, where they're like, "I know we've been talking about this one thing, but let's also talk about hell and why you need to basically look to the cross and get your crap together so that you don't wind up going there. All praise to and glory to Christ, amen." And so in general, that's in the air, is sort of hell exists in their rhetorical world, specifically to call people to repentance. It's often used that way in their homilies.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  But they are very interested in thinking about hell in local terms that evoke, again, not unlike what Blathmug is doing, although it plays out differently because of the cultural logic, they want to think about God as their king, or their atheling, their ruler. And so you get the Old English vision of St. Paul, that's just a fragment, unfortunately, we don't have the whole thing in Old English, but the fragment treats the part early in the vision of St. Paul, where it turns out that we all have guardian angels who watch over us day and night, and every evening, the guardian angels go up to God to narc on us, basically, and tell God all of our sins.

• 37:23Eleanor Janega?

  It's not good, is it? They're like, "Oh, yeah, I was watching."

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they're miserable. I mean, they hate this job because we suck. And in the Old English version of this, it's actually in the Latin as well, but the various parts of the creation of the cosmos, the constituents, the citizens of the cosmos, the earth, the moon, the stars, they all have their complaints against humanity as well. And the earth basically says, like, "I see these horrible people doing horrible things every day. They're sleeping with each other. They're being too fruitful, if you know what I mean. So, God, will you please let me withhold my fruits so that they can just starve to death?" And all the elements of creation also have their own little custom complaints and want to

• 38:06Speaker 03

  kill us in equally poetically fitting ways. And God just responds the same way every time in this text. He says, "I hear you. It's bad. It's hard to watch. But I'm having patience for them so that they have time to repent, so that as many of them can repent as possible. But then I'll come back and judge them with the hardestest dome," he says in Old English, "with the harshest doom or judgment." And so we basically get a reenactment of an early medieval English court scene. This is how court would have worked if you were suing someone who had done you wrong in the kingdom. You go to your local lord, and you present your complaints, and then it's up to the lord's dome, his judgment,

• 38:49Speaker 03

  to decide how justice is going to be meted out. I saw a lot of the terminology used in that translation really resonates with some of their legal terms in ways that would speak to them, I think, specifically, and they would find particularly interesting. It reassures them that God works like one of their own best judges, one of their own best lords. So it sort of comforts them in that way, which I think is really interesting. That's one, I would say, rather conventional use of hell in Old English, but it's fun to see the sheer variety of uses that they find for hell, because that's just one.

• 39:22Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, because Bede gets into the act, right? Not even the venerable Bede is...

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Even Bede.

• 39:28Eleanor Janega?

  Even Bede, he's just like me. He wants to hang out. He wants to talk about hell, right?

• 39:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have that thought all the time.

• 39:38Eleanor Janega?

  It's just my way.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I was delighted when I was reading the ecclesiastical history and right at the end, you know, Bede sort of has this reputation for being a sober minded historian who, you know, for the eighth century at least, is a better historian than anyone else around at the time.

• 39:58Eleanor Janega?

  Again, just like us, just like us. Yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He does his homework. He actually tries to verify his sources. And so in general, I think we assume that Bede is not sensationalistic. I mean, he does get caught up in his own rhetoric and drama sometimes, but who amongst us does not, right? At any rate, I was pleasantly surprised and shocked to find that at the end of the ecclesiastical history, he makes the same rhetorical move that so many Old English homilies does, turn or burn. He brings up three visions of hell that he claims real people in his day really had. So these are basically visions of the afterlife. This is someone who dies, or one of them actually dies and sees a vision of hell and he comes back. And which,

• 40:44Speaker 03

  you know, this genre still exists today, fascinatingly enough, in certain circles of American Christianity. And Bede indulges in it. He says, you know, this, this man came back and he saw hell. And even though he was already a good guy before he died, Dricthelm decides to sell all of his worldly possessions and divide his entire property into three parts, which is something that your family does with your estate after you die. But he basically symbolically declares his death to the world. He's going to spend the rest of his days in a monastery being extra, extra devout, even though he had already been pretty devout by any standard. And he gives the money, a third of it, like, I think he gives a portion to his wife, a portion to his kids, and then a third to the poor.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  So that he is left with absolutely nothing but his pure devotion to God. That's one of them. That's the happy one. There is a drunken carpenter, who shall not be named, Bede says, who was given to too much drink and game. And basically, it sounds like, he doesn't say this, but to me, it sounds like the monastery couldn't really stand this guy. And they just kept him around because he was really freaking good at making sculptures. And anyway, so this jerk also has a near death experience and he reacts differently. He seems to believe in weird. He seems to believe in fate. He seems to think that he cannot escape his fate. So he sees a vision where demons are like, standing at his head and his feet. And they've got these like burning blades that they're cutting into

• 42:11Speaker 03

  him from both extremes. And they're moving towards his middle, towards his belly button. They're going to saw him in half slowly. And he sees that vision. And instead of taking it as a warning, he's like, that's my fate. I can't help it. I'm going to go to hell. And he refuses to repent all the way to the bitter end. And so Bede says that they take his body and bury it at the extreme north of the churchyard, where only the most cursed criminals are buried, because north is traditionally the direction of hell.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy, and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost, and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out. Dan Snow's History Hit, for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 43:45Eleanor Janega?

  So I find that that really interesting because I'm, I'm very, one of like my, my particular pet interest is the sort of invention of purgatory. And, you know, the ideas or visions of a hopeful hell, right? So, you know, purgatory being more or less hell with a timer, where you sort of learn your lesson and you, and you burn off the, the bad things so that you can become better, right? But this sort of posits a sort of person who feels the exact opposite. That's never possible. There's never going to be a way of expiating your sin. So you may as well just go for it. Like, get drunk now

• 44:27Eleanor Janega?

  because maybe the rest of eternity is getting sawed in half, I guess.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's Bede's way of epitomizing, I think, the sin of despair is what it's been called in different times and places. The idea that, you know, it's basically Dr. Faustus. He knows what's coming. He's heard about hell and, and sin and punishment. And he feels like he can't change. And so rather than having faith, or hope, or joy, or any of the other fruits of the spirit, he just get wallows at it, right? And just says, I know what my fate is. I can't be saved. Which various church authorities have weighed in on that. But that's another way of saying that Christ's sacrifice isn't enough for me, right? Like somehow my sin is too important to be paid for. And Bede holds this up and he explicitly says, like, learn from this guy's example, right? It's never too late unless you want it to be.

• 45:15Eleanor Janega?

  And maybe he just did, you know, like, what can I say?

• 45:20Eleanor Janega?

  So what do we see to, in terms of ideas about hell, when we would go over to Wales? Because we have such an incredible literary tradition among the Welsh. And that really kind of informs the way they write about hell, right?

• 45:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the case in Wales is unique. And frankly, I found that chapter hard to write because so many of my other chapters start with like, well, let's look at their conversion and how they reacted to this new faith, you know, what, what local identity challenges did Christianity, what, what identity crisis did it spark for these people? And how did they use hell to like, make a custom answer to that problem? That's basically the, some of the other book chapters in a nutshell. In Wales, they also converted very, very, very early, just like the Irish, which makes sense when you think about where Roman Britain was and where Christians in Roman Britain were. They were them. It was them. But unfortunately, we have no writing from Wales that survives before, we have almost

• 46:21Speaker 03

  no writing that survives before 1100, which is wildly late. Think about the grand scheme of things. There's a few Latin texts here and there. But even those, like the lives of the early Welsh saints are pretty much all written in the 11 and 12 hundreds about people who lived like half a millennium before. So there's so little to go off of in terms of like, early reactions. So instead, I focused on, well, what do we do have? We do have a lot of writings, starting around the 1100s to 1200s, about the time where, one, we've got the Anglo Normans rolling in and bullying them constantly. They've finished their dirty work after the conquest in 1066. And so now they're turning their attention to Wales and trying to continue to expand. And they're having a lot of trouble because of the mountains

• 47:05Speaker 03

  and because of the people. They're building castles all over the place. But along with this French influence, in the form of aggression, there's also French influence of courtly ideals, courtly tastes, courtly romance becomes really popular. And the Welsh can't resist that, just like no one else can. Of course, like, we see that, we see an amazing adaptation of that in the Mabinogi, the four branches of the Mabinogi, which are courtly tales, but they're adaptations of much older Welsh oral tradition and lore. And we don't really know about most of these mythological characters, except for from the Mabinogi, which is a very late version. At any rate, at the same time that, that all of these outside cultural

• 47:47Speaker 03

  influences are, I guess you could say, being imported, there's also the idea of purgatory is becoming more and more popular. And that is where, I think, that, that's where a lot of our Welsh apocrypha about hell, or else just weird stories about hell, that maybe not technically apocryphal, but we get weird stories about hell and about purgatory at this time, that do some interesting cultural work, I will say.

• 48:13Eleanor Janega?

  Again, this is the sort of stuff I like. And I was really kind of taken by the legend of Ca, the giant, and, and, you know, this idea of the hopeful hell that they have. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we get this life of Saint Caddagh, who goes up to what would, what we would call Scotland, while it is still unconverted. And he's trying to do his missionary work and he's having a hard time. It's taking longer to convert these people than he wanted it to. So he needs a more permanent base of operations. He starts building a monastery and he's doing it by hand. And it turns out that is hard to do. So he's digging and he accidentally finds a gigantic collarbone buried in the dirt. And the text tells us that this collarbone is so freaking huge that a horse and a rider can pass through it, like a tunnel. And they don't have to duck or anything. That's how big this is. And the saint marvels at it, as one would. And I like to think he found a dinosaur bone.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  But, um, but he asks God, what might this mean? And in a vision that night, an angel tells him, you know, go to sleep. God will show you what it is. He will raise a giant from the dead tomorrow morning. And that giant will help you build this monastery. So Saint Caddagh goes to sleep. And when he wakes up, sure enough, Cal, this huge giant, is standing there. And they have a little conversation before they get to work. And Caddagh asks, you know, what's your story? Like, why are you here? Why are you helping me build this? And Cal basically says, I was once a native prince, and I was very good at warfare, and I was very successful. You might have heard of me. Nobody has. And,

• 49:56Speaker 03

  but he was a big deal in his day. And he killed a lot of people. And by all outside metrics, he lived a good life, as far as warrior princes are supposed to. Nevertheless, he found himself in hell for his sins. And, you know, he talks about how awful it is. And he says, but then I got this weird offer, that if I come back up here and I help you build this monastery, then I can maybe go to heaven. So that's what he does. He starts single handedly digs, does all the digging. And he's a giant, so it's easy for him. And he helps put the monastery together and the mission is successful. And there's a happy ending for everyone. And then he's allowed to die. And when he does, he gets to go to heaven. So I look at this story, this strange, strange story, and think about, I think,

• 50:41Speaker 03

  it really shows how

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Not only Welsh lords in general, but like how medieval noble people generally could try to have it both ways. They could try to have successful careers as worldly rulers, doing the things that worldly rulers do, waging war, kidnapping people, plundering, pillaging, all the fun stuff, all the naughty stuff. And, you know, none of those things really squares with Christ's teaching to love your neighbor as yourself and take care of the poor and all of that. So it's a bit of an ethical dilemma. It seems like you could maybe either be a noble or you could be a Christian. But a tale like Cao's shows how you might be able to do both. And what it really resonates with sort of

• 51:28Speaker 03

  the shape of a lot of these nobles' lives, where they do live their secular life, doing secular things, waging warfare and so on, conquering. And then when they die, they leave all a ton of money to the church. And the church uses that to build a monastery or fund a monastery. And voila, now you've got monks who can pray for you and get you out of hell. And eventually you'll get to go to heaven, just like Cao did. So it's a really interesting way of modeling this option that exists for some very wealthy people, but not everyone.

• 51:59Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose the good thing about it is that most of us aren't going to go to hell because we waged a bunch of war and killed a bunch of people. Because, baby, I was just getting the harvest in, right? Like, my people are all peasants. We weren't doing that, you know?

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:15Eleanor Janega?

  That's not me.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Okay, you can try. But I know your guardian angel saw you looking at that other peasant in the field.

• 52:20Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, probably right.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  Nice try.

• 52:22Eleanor Janega?

  Probably right, yeah. Well, I could keep going for ages, but I suppose we have to eventually wrap up. I mean, this book is incredible. You go over Dante in more detail. I really enjoyed the section that you do on the Old Norse authors grappling with this, but there's no time. You're simply too interesting. So I suppose just kind of to help us wrap up, what would you say the medieval tradition of really translating hell, you know, translating hell to different cultures, translating hell literally out of other languages and into one's own? How does this end, right? Because medieval people

• 53:03Eleanor Janega?

  are really, really into it. They're really into finding these ways of adapting hell for their everyday life and their own culture. I mean, is this the sort of thing that goes out with the Reformation? Is it that when we have like this larger trans-European culture that is helped along by things like cheap pamphlets, does that destroy our little local hell?

• 53:27Speaker 03

  I think, well, okay, I think what the Reformation does is it rains on the parade of apocrypha specifically. Apocrypha becomes sort of a minefield in Reformation rhetorical fights over whose version of the Bible is better. You know, you can't trust the Catholics because they've got all these fake books in there. It's sort of a Protestant polemic. And so the apocrypha in general, like people start to get suspicious of them because all of a sudden their providence comes into question. And people start saying, yeah, who actually wrote those things, right? And sort of textual scholarship becomes a thing. And so now the pedigrees of these texts are being questioned. And it turns out, of course, Paul didn't write the Vision of St. Paul, things like that. So that is sort of a casualty of the

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Reformation. But I would say that like, the idea that we can tell stories about hell and we can make hell speak to modern concerns or contemporary concerns is a tradition that's completely active and vibrant today. Now, it depends on which tradition, you know, you're paying attention to. I can only speak for what I've seen. But in, you know, American circles, they're still writing books about, oh, there was one that was like a bestseller 10 or 15 years ago called like, was it Five Minutes in Hell or something like that, about a little boy who died and saw heaven and hell. And he comes back and he tells his story. And it's supposed to like, again, turn to burn. It's supposed to warn you to like, get your act together and take this seriously. Or I think one of my favorite

• 54:53Speaker 03

  modern adaptations is probably the 2016 remake of Doom, where you have someone, his name doesn't rhyme with Elon, but it should, who builds a colony on Mars. And he finds out that hell is actually a perfect endless energy source. And so he and his scientists make an AI and start worshiping demons so that they can extract unlimited energy. And it's your job as the Doom Slayer to keep hell from breaking loose on Earth. But, you know, in that retelling, it's like this, this AI-driven tech bro future is hell. So, you know, we're very much still today reshaping hell to speak to like our concerns in the moment. And I think people always find it compelling. Not everyone always takes it

• 55:36Speaker 03

  literally, but that probably was true back then, too. But there's a lot of power in how we, how we, you know, the stories we tell, shape our relationship with others today.

• 55:47Eleanor Janega?

  I think that you're bang on there. I think that there is always going to be this human desire to discuss the way that our world works and possibly hope to an extent that there is a hell. Because in a world that is unjust, in a world that does privilege certain people over others, you kind of want there to be some way of getting justice. You know, you want someone to just sort of notice that the wealthy seem to be able to run roughshod and nothing really happens. So I think that's what is so compelling about visions of hell is that, you know, we still see ourselves in them as much as medieval people did.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. And justice has always been around. The problem of theodicy, you know, how could a good God allow evil to flourish? These are perennial questions. And hell is sort of the perfect laboratory to experiment with answers to those ideas that are somehow logically and emotionally compelling, even if it's, you know, beyond our grasp.

• 56:49Eleanor Janega?

  Well, speaking of things that are logically and emotionally compelling, everyone, go retranslating hell, I'm telling you. I can't get enough of this book. Stephen, thank you so, so much for coming to geek out with me today. I actually think it is really cool to read sermons on a Saturday night and no one gets to tell me different. So.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me. This has been a real treat.

• 57:13Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks so much to Stephen, once again, for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you want more medieval fire and brimstone, and who could blame you, then you haven't got long to wait. Keep an eye on Matt's upcoming episodes, because he is going to be talking about what Stephen and I hinted at a bit in this episode, Dante's Divine Comedy. So make sure that you go and join him in his dungeon soon, as he embarks on the fiery journey to eternal damnation and explores the most famous depiction of hell in existence. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access

• 57:57Eleanor Janega?

  to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent documentary with Matt on Medieval Summer, as well as ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.

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