Gone Medieval - Origins of the Forbidden Fruit Myth

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

How did the apple become the dominant symbol of temptation and sin, when it isn’t even mentioned in the Bible story of Adam and Eve? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets Professor Azzan Yadin-Israel who has pursued this mystery across art and religious history, uncovering where, when, and why the forbidden fruit became an apple. He reveals that Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in 12th-century French art. But why?Visit Professor Yadin-Israel's website database of the forbidden fruit in Western art:http://treeofknowledgeart.com/This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss 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 Jarniger, 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 forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I'm delighted to be joined today to try and answer a question you might not ever have actually asked. I wasn't particularly aware of this debate though my youngest daughter tells me that she was. Now we all know the biblical story of the origins of humanity, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the snake tempting Eve to eat the apple that sees them driven out of paradise. It's a pretty

ubiquitous image, but there's something wrong in it, potentially a mistake, and today's guest is here to help pinpoint this into the medieval period. Okay, so I'm keen of saying that everything is medieval, so I guess I have to allow that mistakes and misunderstandings can be too. My guest is Professor Azan Yadin Israel, who is professor of Jewish studies and classics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Azan's book, Temptation Transformed, the Story of How the Forbidden and fruit became an apple probably gives away what we're going to be talking about. Thank you very much for joining us on medieval Azan. Thank you for having me, Matt.

It's an absolute pleasure. I'm really interested to get into this. Like I said, I mentioned this to my youngest daughter. It was an argument I wasn't particularly aware of. And she was like, yeah, I know about that. So it seems like something some people know about and some people perhaps don't. And I definitely fall into the didn't know about it category. So what first led you to question the received wisdom that what Eve was tempted with

in the Garden of Eden was an apple. Well, I think the most basic issue is the fact that the biblical text does not mention the species of fruit. So we have, as you say, this ubiquitous image of the apple, which is now part of popular culture and temptation and forbidden knowledge and so forth, that actually has no textual grounding in scripture, in Genesis 3. Scholars know this. I mean, this is not a secret. I mean, you simply need to read the text of Genesis 3. But what is interesting is that even the early readers and commentators on Genesis don't introduce the apple.

In other words, you have the earliest translations, the Septuagint into Greek, the Vulgate into Latin, the Targums into Aramaic, and they follow the biblical text quite faithfully and simply say a fruit. Whatever language that's in, Carpos in Greek, fructus in Latin, and Ebe in Aramaic. And that's very straightforward. But among the earliest commentators, whether they be the rabbinic commentators, among Jewish readers, or early church fathers, among Christian readers, there you do find a fairly wide range of species who are introduced as possible candidates. You have grapes, you have figs, you have pomegranates, you have the citron, many, many, many various species, but no one mentions the apple.

So even when they do begin to discuss it, the apple is not one of the candidates. So it forms this very interesting historical rupture where in antiquity, nothing. In late antiquity, you do have various fruit, but none of them are the apple. And for us, the apple is not only the recognized fruit, it's completely ubiquitous. It's self-evident. And the question there is, what exactly happened? How did this come about? So when writers or commentators started thinking about the fruit, were they particularly concerned

with what type it was? You mentioned that several suggestions were made. Was it kind of a fairly heated debate or was everyone fairly relaxed about what it might have been? It's interesting because on the one hand, first of all, they're trying to make some sense of the story. Whenever there's a biblical lacuna, interpreters see this as a challenge of sorts. They actually see this as something that needs to be addressed and they do so in fairly plausible ways. In other words, the fig, the fruit that is maybe the most dominant candidate, until the appearance of the apple, is in some sense based on the biblical text

in that as soon as Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit, they realize that they're naked and they cover themselves with fig leaves. So there's a plausible interpretive logic at work that says, well, in that case, maybe they were standing next to a fig tree. If they immediately covered themselves with fig leaves, I guess the forbidden fruit was a fig.

Now, that's not to say that this is exactly what the Bible says, but at least you can see the logic. The same thing is true of the grape, which is anchored in the idea that the fruit is associated with sin, as we know from the biblical narrative, and that the grape is associated with sin because it produces alcohol. So there you have a kind of cultural logic at work, but in any case you see that there's some justification.

and so forth with other texts as well. What's interesting is that people debate it, but there seems to be an ability among interpreters to have a peaceful coexistence. Some people say X, some people say Y, and no one is attacking the other. In other words, they all know that the Bible doesn't say what the fruit is.

So if my interpretation differs from yours, it doesn't mean that your interpretation refutes scripture or transgresses a scriptural sense. So it's not too violent a debate, so to speak. When the apple appears, all the other candidates disappear. And that's one of the remarkable things about it. And I'll get to that a little later in our conversation. Unlike the situation that held for a thousand years,

where there were various traditions, various views, and various interpretations, once the apple appears, one of the mysteries of what happens when the apple appears, involves the fact that all the other fruit, even ones that had a thousand years of pedigree immediately disappear, as we know today. Because today it's all apple all the time. It's one of those things. Everybody knows it's an apple. Exactly. It's one of the things that are so self-evident that we never even reflect on them and then wonder about the background, the history.

But as you know, every historical development has its own history, has its own background, has its own motivation. And this particular symbol, as ubiquitous as it is, and as self-evident as it is is no exception. Or as someone who is entrenched the arguments and stories around Richard III, you don't need to talk to me about re-examining things that we tend to take for granted. So this for me kind of aligns with that quite nicely. You mentioned in the book that prevailing wisdom put the emergence of the idea that the fruit was an apple down to a Latin kind of play on words.

Can you just tell us a little bit about that version of how the apple came about, please? Absolutely. This is the dominant explanation. it's in fact become received wisdom to the point that within scholarly circles, among Bible scholars, among scholars of art history, really anyone who talks about the fall of man, and that's a topic that, of course, pervades so many aspects of culture

that it is discussed in artistic and literary and many, many other contexts, anyone who's working in these fields basically states without any attestation, any footnote, anything like that, as is well known, This is because of a Latin play on words. What exactly does that mean?

It's an interesting aspect of Latin that the word for apple and the word for evil are hominims, malum. In both cases, the word is malum. So the scholarly interpretation is that since the forbidden fruit brought about this terrible evil, this terrible theological evil, the fall of man, the expulsion from Eden,

the introduction of death, all of these. What better fruit to explain the biblical malum, then the malum, the apple. Now, this is a lovely interpretation. I personally am a big fan of it. I study rabbinic midrash, rabbinic biblical interpretation. So I'm very sympathetic. This is the kind of interpretation that I come across in my readings of the rabbis.

It's wonderful. It does have one, I think, fairly significant drawback. And that is that it has no basis whatsoever. What do I mean by that? I mean that this is presumably a play on words that emerged from Latin interpreters, and you would expect to find it among Latin commentators. And the reality is that you don't. In other words, it's so self-evident that nobody discusses it.

Look, I found this comment, this explanation, going as far back as the 1650s in Thomas Brown's book, Seudodoxia epidemica, which is, I believe the English version of that is like uncommon errors, that was written in 1658. And in it, he says, there are those who say that the forbidden fruit is an apple because of the malum, malum homonym. So this explanation has been circulating now for almost 400 years at least. He's the earliest I found, but he discusses it as something that's already well established.

So maybe 400 years, maybe longer. It has no basis. There are no Latin commentators. I mean, I spent a year reading through all the Latin commentaries I could find on the book of Genesis, and you just don't find it. So not only do you not find it, but even into the 14th century, commentators who do discuss the species of fruit that tempted Adam and Eve will say, well, there are those who say that it's a fig, There are those who say that it's a grape, and these are their justifications. They don't even know that the apple is a candidate. They don't even list the apple as a possible species.

So in that sense, the prevailing wisdom about why this happened actually leads us into a complete dead end. Not only can we not verify this Latin pun hypothesis, this Latin play on words, it's not even clear at what point Latin authors became aware of the apple being even a candidate for the forbidden fruit. So really any kind of critical scholarly engagement with that hypothesis leads us into more questions and answers. We end up asking ourselves not only why did this identification take hold, but at what point did this happen and where? So those are the questions that as we proceed from this commonly accepted view, actually these are the questions that we have to confront that are actually much more fundamental and much more historically challenging.

So it's quite striking how these myths are being built on top of other myths. So the myth that it was an apple has become so ingrained that people are explaining it with another myth that then becomes so ingrained that it's almost accepted that not only is it an apple, but that it's a Latin play on words, even though there's very little evidence to back that up at all. That is one of the distressing things that I found in terms of speaking as an academic scholar. It's one thing to look back on medieval texts

or on early modern texts and say, look, they were laboring under a misunderstanding or there were theological considerations that came into play. That's not surprising. That's to be expected. To see contemporary scholars reproducing reproducing this error was very unfortunate, and I think it's something that we need to be aware of

in terms of our own scholarly need for critical self-examination. I'll give you one example. A very prominent handbook of medieval art has an entry on the apple that states, quoting a little freely here, though the biblical text does not identify the species in question, it has always been represented as an apple. Now, that is empirically incorrect on every possible level. I've collected hundreds of images of the fall of man and the forbidden fruit,

and there are centuries of artistic representation where the iconography assumes that it's a fig or a grape. So to find that kind of statement in the Oxford handbook of medieval art and architecture is terrible. You need to undo these things. You need to undo these assumptions. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. It's one thing to say, look, these ideas existed at one point. It's another thing to keep building on them without basis. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.

And on my podcast, not just the Tudors from History Hit, I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dunghill up against your neighbour's wall, you're going to cause rising damp. Would Henry the 8th ever consider executing his wife, the Queen of England, and Berlin? I'm not even sure if the Billins took it seriously, because why would they have any reason to suspect Henry the 8th would really get rid of his queen? And why do men grow beards? During puberty, the male body heats up and a smoke rises in the body, pushes out the hair in the face.

So the beard is actually a form of excrement. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Twice a week every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. The idea behind your book is to go looking for a more plausible or a more reasonable explanation of why the forbidden fruit became an apple. So setting aside the Latin wordplay and things like that, where did you go looking to try and find a real explanation for why it became an apple? So as I said, when we were talking about the Latin wordplay, basically that led to a dead end. It led to a kind of aporea where you couldn't find any way forward to advance your investigation.

So at that point, I switched methodologies, and I began looking into the iconography of the forbidden fruit. And the idea behind this was to try and find where and when artists begin representing the forbidden fruit as an apple, with the hope of having a somewhat firmer and better established historic setting or historic framework in which to investigate this. I have to confess that when I started this project, I thought that this would entail my closely analyzing the two or five or ten art history books devoted to the iconography of the forbidden fruit and the fall of man. To my shock, I found that the number of books devoted to this topic is zero. There was no book that just went through the forbidden fruit, even though it's a very, very central iconographic theme. So I had to roll my sleeves up and create a database of these images for myself.

I collected about 550 images from early Christian sarcophagi, all the way up to the Renaissance. By the way, these images are now available, open to the public, on a website called Tree of Knowledgeart.com. So anyone who so desires can go and look at these images. They're divided by country. They're divided by type of fruit and so forth. What I found was that the representation of the forbidden fruit follows the texts up to a point that is to say, early representations have the forbidden fruit as a fig or a grape, sometimes a pomegranate, sometimes a citron, and we really don't find apples throughout the late antiquity and through most of, let's say, the Carolingian period, there are no apples and so on.

And then suddenly in the 12th century in France, apples appear. And once they appear, a fascinating thing happens, which is they completely take over the iconographic landscape in France. They conquer France within 50 years. And then they transition into Germany and into England and into the Netherlands. And they very quickly become the dominant food, even though the other fruit, the fig, the pomegranate at the grape, have hundreds of years of pedigree. They simply more or less disappear. Interestingly, that does not happen in Italy. Italy continues to represent the forbidden fruit as a fig. And it doesn't change in the 12th century.

It doesn't change in the 13th or the 14th or the 15th. In the middle of the 16th century, you begin to find kind of a regular fig tradition in Italy. So we don't have an answer to our question at this point, but we certainly have a much clearer set of criteria for our investigation. In other words, we're no longer asking a question such as, oh, why do we have an apple? because that's such a vague and historically undifferentiated question, it's very hard to address it. We now have a question that says, why does the apple appear in France in the 12th century? Why does it spread so quickly? Why does it not appear in Latin texts that are written in France at this time?

Why is its diffusion so quick and successful in Germany and England, but not in Italy? So at least we have some parameters for our historical interpretation. investigation. That's at least a big step forward. And now the challenge is, can you provide an explanation that really answers these questions? Can you find a historical development that adequately responds to these challenges and provides kind of an overarching image of what happened or an overarching explanation of what happened, given all of these various parameters? It's such a fascinating way to attack it. And great that all of those images are available for everyone to look at online as well. I mean, I guess my first thought, as you say that, is that

the apple is a much more common fruit in Northern Europe. So around France, Germany, England, it's a more recognisable thing than a fig or even potentially a grate by the time you get to Northern Europe at least. And so perhaps people were just searching for something in a fruit that was common that you could see in your own garden, perhaps, or in an orchard nearby. I guess I'm probably just being way too simplistic about this. Well, first of all, not to bury the lead, I don't think that's the explanation. You know, I'm going to give a different explanation. But what you're suggesting is by far the most common response. There's a very natural idea behind that, which is we're talking about fruit. So the availability of the fruit reflects what people are representing in art and so forth. So it's very plausible. It's very straightforward. And as I say, it's the response I've heard the most from people when I've presented talks or discussions and so forth. I'm not glad that I'm wrong, but I'm I'm glad that I'm not on my own. No, no, you're not on your own.

You're in very good company. I'm off on an island with my thesis. But I would say that aside from the fact that I think there's a different explanation, there are also some methodological challenges to that view. Let me just lay out a couple of them. One of them is that I don't think that would explain why the other fruit disappear. In other words, if you were to say, look, people are more familiar with the apple. So naturally, that's what they represent.

Wonderful. But why would they stop representing species that have already been in circulation, so to speak, within art history for centuries? So that's one challenge. The second challenge is that you don't find that with other fruit. In other words, apples and pears are both very common. They grow in similar climates. And in fact, they appear regularly together in medieval texts. In other words, there are many Middle English texts that talk about apples and pears.

There are many old French texts that talk about apples and pairs together, and yet we don't have a single pair representation of the forbidden fruit. There's a very odd imbalance there. There's a very odd asymmetry where you would have only apples and zero pairs. Right. Finally, there doesn't seem to be a very strong correlation between the local produce and the iconographic representation. For example, in northern Germany, for centuries,

grapes are the most common representation of the forbidden fruit, even though that's not really an area that's known for its grape harvest. It's certainly in medieval times before species could be engineered for different climates. There were not many vineyards in northern Germany. There were not many vineyards in Russia. And Slavic art represents the forbidden fruit as a grape as well. So those are all challenges to that view. The second, I think, most common response that, again, has to do with something biblical or theological.

The apple is delicious, so it's tempting, or maybe the roundness of the apple somehow alludes to Eve's breasts, and therefore it kind of suggests a sexual temptation. You know, those kinds of ideas that are also understandable and quite common. But one of the most interesting things about what I think transpired is that the explanation actually has nothing to do with the Bible. It has nothing to do with theology, and that's one of the reasons that it's been hidden from the eyes of scholars for this long, because we've all been looking, because it's a biblical theme, because it's such a prominent biblical image, we've all been looking within the theological, biblical, the commentaries on the Bible, and so forth, and I don't think that's correct. I think the answer, it's actually tied to linguistic changes that are completely independent of the biblical text. So we're perhaps not a million miles away from the Latin homonym idea that it's a linguistic factor that plays into the development of the apple, but it isn't the one that everybody thought it was. That's right. And it's not the one that everyone thought it was in a significant way because I locate this change, this linguistic factor in the vernaculars. I say that that's significant because generally, at least with literary studies of medieval texts, there is maybe for understandable reasons a tremendous emphasis on high culture, on literary culture. and much less attention is paid to the vernaculars. Certainly in biblical studies, Latin reigns supreme in terms of how you approach these sources.

And in this case, at least, that is an error because the change took place in the vernaculars. Specifically, it took place in Old French. And basically, I have to step back a little bit and give a bit of Latin background. One of the challenges to the Malum hypothesis that I did not mention is that Latin authors do refer to the forbidden fruit in any way as a malum. So therefore, how could you even have a play on words or how could you even have this punning emergence of the apple if it's never mentioned in those terms? The term that is dominant, it's not exclusive, sometimes it's referred to as fructus, sometimes it's referred to as quibum, but by far the most dominant pervasive term is pomum.

Pomum is a Latin term for fruit generally, for tree fruit. Sometimes orchard fruit is how lexicographers refer to it. And that's it. That's a good translation. It's fruit in Hebrew, so they call it the pomum. Now, separately from the biblical narrative, old French does not take over any Latin term derived from malum involving apples. Old French has words from malum meaning bad or evil, as modern French does with mal and words that have entered English, maladrois. and so forth. But the word Malum Apple never enters Old French. There's no later Old French reflex,

as it were, from Malum Apple, probably because of the homonym with evil. People just didn't want to say, oh, can you give me a bite of that evil? Or something that could be interpreted, you know, in those ways. Old French, for a period, had an interesting semantic situation. Latin Malum had not entered into it. so there was no word for apple. The word poem, the old French poem, and it meant fruit, as did the later old French version of fructus and so forth. Over time, the old French word poem underwent what historical linguists call a semantic narrowing.

The meaning of poem started out very broad. It started out meaning fruit without differentiating the species. And over time it narrowed and came to mean what it means in modern French, poem is an apple. That's the key development for this. And I'll explain why. In the early stage of Old French, biblical translations as well as a wide range of vernacular discussions of the fall of man,

almost exclusively referred to the forbidden fruit as a poem. They did so because they understood that word to mean fruit. In other words, when the first translation of Genesis into Old French was produced, and it said that Eve took a poem and gave a poem to her husband, and all of that was in keeping with the meaning of the Hebrew and more relevant to the language of the land translation, of the Vulgate. Similarly with poems that spoke about, the forbidden fruit, similarly with narratives, historical retellings, all of these areas where the forbidden fruit came

into play, it was referred to as a poem. Because it meant fruit. However, once this semantic narrowing occurred and the word poem came to mean apple, the readers of the Bible in old French, vernacular readers, the readers of these histories, the readers of these poems, even people who were unlettered, but learned about biblical stories through plays. There's a very important medieval French play called the Jude de Adam, the Adam play, and it refers to the forbidden fruit as poem, and the troop would go from town to town in France and perform a play about the fall of man referring to the forbidden fruit as a poem. Once that change occurred and poem came to mean apple, all of these literary and theatrical sources were understood by readers and audiences as plainly and explicitly identifying the forbidden fruit as an apple.

Because poem at this point meant apple. And once that happened, you find the artists beginning to represent the forbidden fruit as an apple. You can actually juxtapose the linguistic evidence with the, art historical evidence and find that the emergence of forbidden fruit as an apple in art corresponds directly to the emergence of poem meaning apple in old French. So that's really a wonderful development because it means that something that is very distant from the biblical source. It really is indifferent to the biblical text has this impact and basically shapes the way we, 8,000, hundred years later, and for centuries, have understood the forbidden fruit.

Now, that's not the end of the explanation, because I did raise several questions when we talked about the art historical evidence. And one of them was, why did the apple find a more hospitable environment in Germany, in England, and in the low countries, than it did in Italy, for example. Why was it received there, but not in Italy? And the answer is that a similar linguistic occurrence takes place in English and in German, but it doesn't take place in Italian. The word apple in Middle English was originally a generic term for fruit.

I myself did not know this when I started this project. And other than people who work on Middle English semantics, no one that I've spoken to knows this. We really don't use the word in that sense at all. There's one interesting place where it occurs. and that's the word pineapple. The word pineapple originally meant pine cone. In other words, it was the apple of the pine tree, which is to say the fruit of the pine tree.

When Europeans reached South America and the Caribbean and they came across the pineapple, the triangular pattern on the rind of the pineapple reminded them of the closed pine cone. So they called it the tropical pineapple. In other words, the tropical pine cone, and we still call it a pineapple today. That's the only place, to my knowledge, that the word apple still serves in the generic sense of fruit. It's kind of a fossil.

It's a linguistic fossil from the earlier sense of pineapple, meaning pine cone. But no one's aware of this. But historically, that is the case. Historically, Apple was a generic term for fruit and probably under the influence. of French. French was very, very dominant in England, certainly post-1066, probably under the influence of French semantics, the word narrowed in the same way as Pome did, and Apple came to mean what we mean by today, that specific fruit, the apple. And the same thing happened in German. In Middle High German, again, under the influence of French semantics, the Middle High German word narrows and

comes to mean what we mean today, simply an apple. And so all of these earlier translations, all of these earlier discussions, poems, historical accounts, everything that deals with the fall of man that refer to it as an apple, i.e. a fruit, now is understood to mean an apple, what we mean by apple. Where did this semantic narrowing not occur? It did not occur in Italy. The Italian word for apple is mella, and that comes from Latin Malta. Mela never meant fruit generally. It never narrowed to mean apple, and the Italians don't know anything about the apple tradition,

art historically speaking, and they continue representing it as a fig into the 16th century. The situation is a little more complicated because there are differences in languages in northern Italy, but I don't want to get too technical. What is the case is that where you have this semantic change, where you have a word that at one point means fruit, narrowing to mean apple, the apple tradition appears in that art. Where you don't have it, it doesn't appear. It continues to be a fig

as it does in Italy, as it does to a great extent in Spain and so forth. I think that's such a fascinating explanation of it. And I think perhaps for me, the most interesting aspect of that explanation is that this change is being driven by the vernacular. So we tend to think that the Latin Malum tradition relies on it being led by an elite who speak and understand Latin. And it being driven by the art requires those commissioning the art to be driving it, which is necessarily the elite again. But what we're actually finding then is that it's the vernacular language that is driving the change sort of upwards towards the elite. So they're commissioning art that represents an apple because people are expecting to see an apple. The people that will view it expect an apple.

Absolutely. It's such a wonderful reversal of what we generally assume. And I can even sharpen this point because I said earlier when we were talking about the Malam hypothesis that there are interpreters, Latin commentators, who into the 14th century are referring to the tradition as involving figs or involving grapes. They're not even aware of the apple as a candidate. What's fascinating about many of these authors are writing in Paris. And at this point, in Paris, artists are representing apples. are representing forbidden fruit as an apple. So they're actually behind the curve, so to speak,

for the simple reason that they are consulting their Latin texts. They're writing from within an elite tradition. Latin pomum does mean fruit. It doesn't mean apple. I mean, it can mean apple. A pomum could be an apple in the same way that, you know, fruit could be any particular species, but it doesn't specifically mean apple.

So they are not aware, or at least they don't reflect in their writings, any awareness of the emerging apple tradition, even though it's taking place in their city. Even though Parisian artists are already representing the forbidden fruit as an apple, the Latin authors haven't caught up because it is a vernacular phenomenon. Because the artists are getting their information from plays, or even if they're literate, they're getting it from texts that they're reading in the vernacular and not in Latin. And once they do that, they're seeing that the forbidden fruit is a poem, i.e. an apple,

and representing it as an apple. So exactly as you said, it's coming from the bottom up. And the broader vernacular and popular culture is kind of pushing this in a way that is ultimately going to be recognized by the elites, but it takes time. Such a fascinating example of something like that happening against what we would expect to be the normal flow of this kind of event. I mean, I could talk to you about all this all day as I'm off, and it absolutely fascinating. But how vital do you think it is in a situation like this to be drawing on all of those different disciplines? So you looked at the art, you looked at the traditional history of this, you looked at the

vernacular history in the language. Is it a case of marrying all of those together and looking at the timeline and seeing which one goes back the furthest? Or do they all need to work together to some extent? Well, I think for me at least, the interdisciplinary aspect of this project, it's absolutely vital because if we take each discipline on its own, we're not going to be able to get a full picture. That is to say, the people who look at, let's say, the Latin commentary tradition,

they might recognize that there aren't really discussions of the Malum Malum hypothesis, but they would assume that it just emerges at some other point, or they'd have no tools with which to go further than that. You know, they wouldn't have any ability to say, well, in that case, what does that? If you look at the art historical evidence on its own, then you simply see that the apple appears in 12th century France, and you could assume that that's because of the Latin play on words or whatever, but you would have no tools to provide an explanation for that. It's only when you look at the absence of the Malum Malum explanation in medieval sources,

and you look at the art historical material. and then you marry that to the semantics of the vernaculars, only then can you put them all together and offer this explanation. So I think, I hope that this project, aside from potentially solving this thousand-year-old riddle, which is wonderful, I'm very excited about that, it also has some broader applications to historical study in the humanities more broadly.

one which we've just mentioned is the vital importance of the vernacular culture, not ignoring the vernacular, not ignoring popular culture, and immediately going to the Latin, immediately going to the great authors, and looking at, you know, Abelard or I don't know, some prominent French writer of the 12th century, but rather looking at the broader, fuller context of the lived life at that time. And the other is this interdisciplinary, perspective, that you simply could not get to this explanation looking at any one of these

areas on its own. It's only by bringing these three together, by looking at medieval Latin commentaries and the iconography and the vernacular semantics that you can actually provide this historical explanation. Absolutely fascinating. I genuinely could sit here and listen to hours and hours of this. But I hope everyone listening has found that as interesting as I have and as thought-provoking as I found it. It is, as Azaan says, a great example of the importance of questioning the things that we think are beyond question. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much. Azan's book, Temptation Transformed, the story of how the forbidden fruit became an apple, is available now if you'd like to explore these topics even further. Don't forget to subscribe

to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help a new audience to find their way to us. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.