When I visited the thirteenth century monastery church in the city of Ystad close to Malmö this summer, I almost ran into three life-size mannequins representing three fourteenth-century siblings, two brothers and a sister, from the important Thott family. They had met in this church in 1378 to plot an uprising against Queen Margarete, who was Queen of both Denmark, Norway and Sweden at this time. I was impressed by the fact that not only was all of Scandinavia ruled by a woman in the late fourteenth century, but another woman had met with her brothers to plot the overthrowing of the Queen.
But when I read a bit more about the three Thott siblings, I was horrified. Kirsten Axelsdatter Thott, the sister, had died a few months later, in the same year, in 1378. She had died at the age of twenty-five!
There was more. Nothing is known about what she died of. I take that to mean that she wasn't murdered or executed. No, she almost certainly died of natural causes. At twenty-five! And no one seemed to think that that was a big deal!
Today people die at twenty-five here in Europe and America, too. But when that happens, we are almost always shocked. It's amazing to think what brief lives people lived here in Europe during many previous centuries. Sure there were people who lived long lives back then, too, but they were so unusual.
When I was younger, I hadn't really thought of what it would mean to live at a time when death literally hung over you every moment and when you saw your friends and family die around you right and left. So when I first read Andrew Marvell's To His coy Mistress, I was irritated. Marvell, who lived in the seventeenth century, asked the woman he loved to have extramarital sex with him, because who knew how long they were going to live anyway? I thought that was a silly argument, and I really did know that there weren't any contraceptives at that time, and if the woman got pregnant there would be hell to pay for her. How selfish that man was to ask the woman to have unmarried sex with him and to risk pregnancy and social catastrophe!
But I have started thinking, more and more, about the briefness and uncertainty of life in earlier centuries. I've been thinking quite a bit about Kirsten Axelsdatter Thott this summer. When she died at twenty-five, she was married to a nobleman, Jens Holgersen Ugerup, from another important noble family. Did Kirsten love her husband? Maybe, but it is certainly possible, indeed probable, that her marriage had been arranged by her father or some other male relative, who wanted to use Kirsten and her husband Jens to bring the Thott and the Ugerup families together. Maybe Kirsten should have taken Marvell's advice and sneaked out at night to have sex with her secret lover. Who knows if she ever got to have sex for love in her short life?
Here is Marvell's poem:
To his Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Ann
