Sometimes in history, behaviors seem to repeat, but closer study shows they can be driven by wildly different impulses. Self-harming in our society today arises from a variety of causes, such as feeling unheard or feeling a sense of self-hatred. But in the Middle Ages, deliberately causing oneself physical pain had a very different origin. This image shows a group of people involved in the act of whipping themselves with tough, metal-tipped leather thongs. They were doing this out of an act of religious devotion.
These people were the flagellants, and although they made an appearance before the mid-14th century, their numbers greatly increased after the Bubonic Plague. By lashing their exposed flesh, they were attempting to atone for their sins and the sins of their community, and in doing so, they hoped that God would put a stop to the sickness devastating their lands. As the contemporary writer John Froissart recorded:. “In the Year of Grace 1349, the penitents went about, coming first out of Germany. They were men who did public penance and scoured themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes. Some made themselves bleed very badly between the shoulders and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying it was miraculous blood . . . The object of this penance was to entreat God to put a stop to the mortality, for in that time there was an epidemic of plague . . . “. In a time when the causes of such distressing illness were not understood, perhaps self-mortification could have brought these people a sense of control that made the pain seem meaningful. Certainly, the desire to feel a sense of control is common to the human condition, even if the phenomena of the flagellants seems incomphrehensibe on another level to us today.
Source(s): Image from alamy, from “The flagellants at Doornik (Tournai) in 1349, from a miniature from _The Chronicle of Aegidius Li Muisis” in the Brussels library, from H.G. Belmont, <History of the World_, vol VII, Dodd Mead 1902, plate between pp 178-179. Quote from Jean Froissart, _Chronicles_, selected and translated by Geoffrey Bereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 111-112 DOI: historyfuide.org/ancient/flagellant.html .
