The World Moves on a Woman's Ship

It is a commonplace of dissing the Middle Ages to state that we moderns would be more at home with a citizen of ancient Rome than with a European of the twelfth or thirteenth century. We’d have more to talk about, we’d be more alike. We could relate. In a landmark work of scholarship, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his Autumn of the Middle Ages (a 1924 book called The Waning of the Middle Ages on its American publication in 1949) argued that medieval man was, indeed, different from us, given at any moment to unbidden accesses of tears, sudden cruelties, childlike enthusiasms and the like. And God wasn’t his co-pilot; He was alongside before and after the journey, too. Always.

That may be true. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I know it to be true.

Why? Because I have actually seen the Middle Ages.

This requires explanation, no?

I’m not talking here about seeing people living in pre-industrial conditions (which I have seen in subSaharan Africa) or enjoying out-of-time sacred hospitality to the stranger who must be honored (accorded to me by farmers on the border of Turkey and Iran), I’m talking about glimpsing the Middle Ages… the European Middle Ages. Okay, perhaps the Reformation era, or the Early Modern, but let’s not quibble.

So let us tell this correctly: For one of my summer trips back from my freelance home in France to my childhood home in Canada, I found out about a Polish ocean liner, the Stefan Batory, that went from Gdynia to London to Rotterdam to Montreal. This was shortly before the walls of Cold War came down. I boarded at Tilbury Docks in London.

The 250 or so passengers were a diverse lot. About half were Poles emigrating to North America. Then there was a large contingent of aimless curiosity-seekers like myself. Just as large was the group of people who dared not speak its name: the fear-of-flying crew. It took only a few conversations to suss this out: “When we dock in Montreal, we’ll jump right on the Amtrak to New York, then take the train the next day to LA. Best way to travel.” Or: “From Montreal we take the train to Windsor, get a cab across to Detroit, then a Greyhound to Cincinnati.” Other passengers were unclassifiable, like my berth mate, Albert, an Englishman somewhere between 55 and 90 years old. In the morning he looked the latter, but by night as he was rejuvenated, pommaded to the max, cutting the rug with any available lady.

But this isn’t about middle age, it’s about the Middle Ages.

The most striking contingent of passengers were about 80 or so Amish women. Ten matronly chaperones and the rest very young women from about 16 to 20 years of age. They wore the bonnets and the long dresses. They traveled in packs. They were inscrutable. Passing a score of so of them on the deck, I said lamely, “I hope we don’t hit an iceberg,” and then they looked at each other, paused, then burst into delighted applause.

Try as I might I couldn’t connect. I tried to detach the prettiest one from the pack (I know, I know… ), but no luck, no way. At last I learned from a chaperone, in stilted English, that they were from Pennsylvania and had just toured the ancestral places of their faith, as a sort of Anabaptist Grand Tour before settling down for good. It was pretty obvious… they were the future of their community. To put it more harshly and more medievally, the ovaries.

That anachronistic thought crossed my mind, but I didn’t get the impression of having bumped into anything that unusual, or having time-travelled. The Amish girls faded into the background as other events occurred: whales putting on a show mid-Atlantic; smelling the pines of Newfoundland before seeing land on the horizon; a Polish tall ship (on its return from a regatta at Quebec City) emerging majestically from the fog in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as the Batory’s Polish crew and passengers went berserk; and upstream from Rivière du Loup on the St. Lawrence, the south shore lighting up in fireworks and music to salute the homecoming of a tearful young Québécoise widow on board (her mother, her traveling companion, had secretly alerted us all to the surprise in store for her daughter).

At last we got to Montreal. As tugboats fussed and lines were played out, I saw them on the dock, just beyond the customs shed. The Amish men.

Let’s stop here for a second. I have seen reunions. As a boy, it was an early summer ritual to go to Montreal’s Dorval (now Pierre Trudeau) Airport to welcome visiting aunties and uncles off the plane from Shannon. These reunions were always warm, witty and talkative to the point of over-Irishness. But I remember seeing crowds of other people greeting their relatives (this was when airports were human) arriving on planes from Lisbon, Rome, Athens and Tel Aviv: the drama, the big-fat-Greek-wedding, the mezzogiorno, the is-that-you-Esther-or-am-I-dead? theatrics and shouting and squealing and tears. I was embarrassed by it all, but a little bit jealous, too.

But at least it was something I understood, that I could identify, the gestures, the hugging…

The Amish men barrelled straight out of time. They were tearing the beards. Literally tearing at them, removing clumps of hair with two hands. Their horses reared. Some of the men were stomping the ground. Not hillbilly stomping, but jumping up in the air and landing with a two-footed stomp, again and again and again and again. I think one may have been eating his hat.

The girls lined the rails. They were crying. No, they were weeping. For joy. Unadulterated, unmediated, unmodern. Not only that, there was a weird trilling sound emanating from them. Not like the ululations of Arab women, but more like a panicked group of starlings. It was as unmissable as the antics of their menfolk were compelling.

The curiosity-seekers, the fear-of-flying crowd, the Polish immigrants, we all looked at each other. We were, at last, all in the same boat: nobody had ever seen anything like it. Because we had, up until that moment, all lived in the twentieth century.

And now, for a brief, far too brief, quarter-hour, we were living in Huizinga country.

I try to remember that moment when writing about the Middle Ages.