Turlupin: A Kind of Mysterious, Feral, Heretical Nudist, of Sorts
By: Jim Dee
Tags: Writing, Words, Religion, Language, History

Here’s a word you’re almost certainly not going to run into anytime soon. The OED considers it obsolete, and rare. And there’s little mention of it online, save for a few lacking dictionary entries and a scant, two-paragraph write-up on Wikipedia. I wouldn’t advise following the Wiki link, as it’s fairly worthless, aside from a reference to an interesting 1957 book by British academic Norman Cohn called The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages.

“Mystical Anarchists,” writes Cohn in his book title. I like the sound of that, and think that’s an appropriately strange image to bear in mind as we look at the word turlupin.

Our pup, Lupin. :-)

Admittedly, I first stopped at turlupin because my family’s Australian Cattle Dog is named Lupin and I wondered what a turlupin might be. We adopted Lupin, so we can’t say for sure what her name refers to. Professor Lupin comes to mind for Harry Potter fans, of course. But, we should remember that the Lupin character surely got his name from the Latin lupus, meaning wolf.

In French, a wolf is a loup (or a louve if female). And it’s from French that we get the word turlupin, although the meaning and etymology (beyond it being French) can be unclear at times (perhaps why the OED calls the origin uncertain).

As for the precise meaning, it seems to vary depending on where you look. The OED’s primary definition is that Turlupin was the name of an obscure 14th century heretical group holding that “one ought not be ashamed of anything that is natural.” That’s not exactly the definition found in many other places, oddly. But, it’s close enough, I suppose.

Scan from the History of the Holy War, 1639.

If you research the earliest usage citation in the OED, from a 1639 book called The History of the Holy War, by English historian Thomas Fuller, there’s a mention of the Turlupins that basically defines their name as literally meaning “dwellers with wolves,” presumably because they weren’t part of mainstream (if you can call it that in the 1300s) society, and chose or were forced to exist in the fringes of the city, off in the forest.

Other texts suggest that the name stemmed from these highly poor people who subsisted on wild foraging, which would have included lupin beans (a commonly found legume in the Mediterranean region).

Either way (though I prefer the wolf-related origin), the Turlupins existed and were a group of very poor (probably by choice) religious people living a near-feral existence on the fringes of medieval French society in the second half of the 14th century. Their reputation for nudity (likely also by lifestyle choice but possibly also by circumstance) apparently led to some awful fallout, as might be expected.

For one, their leader Jeanne Daubenton was burned at the stake in 1372. There’s not much available online about her. But, if you visit this link to the French version of Wikipedia and translate it to English, there’s some interesting history of the Turlupin ways. Though no source is given, that article mentions three teachings of Daubenton, which I’ll quote here:

the ideal of Christian perfection is to be poor and to go (almost) completely naked;

all religious duties must be reduced to a simple mental prayer; and finally,

for the saints (that is, the followers of his ideas), there is no sin in satisfying all his passions and all the desires of his senses.

So, you have nudists running around — in the atmosphere of society governed by a nearly omnipotent version of medieval Catholicism — not only preaching heretical ideas but openly participating in a Dionysian level of hedonism. Yeah, there were going to be some issues there, and it’s said that King Charles V had them all wiped out.

Many sites note that the word turlupin eventually became a derogatory term for the poor — a name one might call a beggar, lowly member of society, or someone deemed of no value.

The above meanings stuck for a few centuries, until a famous French actor, Henri Legrand, came to some notoriety in the early 1600s. He often played lively merry-andrew characters in farces at the time, and became known as Turlupin, which gave the word a newer meaning, though mostly in the French language, of a jester, punster, or fool.

So, Is Turlupine a Word, and What Does it Mean?

I realize that was perhaps a lot to digest, and even arguably a bit much for a word that probably isn’t considered a modern word, or even a usable one by most people. But, you know, I just like the ring it has. I like the idea of referring to someone as a turlupin, in the same judgmental way that we might call someone a yahoo, for example, though with a healthy dash of all of the above history rolled into it. It’s a good, interesting word that needs to be reintroduced into modern usage (and damn it, I have just the place for it!).

That’s all for this whole week. I’ll leave anyone interested with this article, which you’ll have to auto-translate from French. It’s a pretty good (though at times jumbled) read, and one of the very few online that discuss this subject.