Magistra et Mater

One of the most interesting ideas in Mary Douglas' 'How institutions think', about which I have been blogging intermittently, is her argument that institutions are stabilized by being naturalized (p 48):

There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it not seen as a socially contrived arrangement.

Her argument is that it is only this sense of 'naturalness' that gives an institution strength, making it seeming reasonable and putting it beyond discussion. But this 'naturalization' has itself to be a hidden process, because otherwise it defeats its own object: you can't have naturalness created, it can only be discovered.

Douglas provides examples of how such models are used: for example, right and left hands to model complimentary roles of men/women, king/people etc, and appeals to the ancestors to prevent violence within a group. It's easy to start thinking, therefore, that such use of 'natural symbols' is only applicable to the 'premodern' world (whether tribal societies or historical periods). But I'm increasingly coming to see this as an idea that's still surprisingly relevant. For example, the idea of the social construction of all kind of concepts, norms and behaviours (whether it's childhood, or gender roles, or homosexuality or ideas of human rights) is still not widely accepted, even though it's a commonplace for many academics in the humanities. The tendency to think that our culture's institutions and practices are the only natural/normal ones is very widespread.

In particular, the question of gay marriage (especially as reflected in the debate in the US) seems to me to raise interesting ideas about natural symbols. Why are so many Christians in the US so opposed to the idea of legalised gay marriages? It can't be simply because such marriages are, in their eyes, sinful, because they're not trying to prevent the legal remarriage of divorced people (which is an equal sin in the New Testament). Instead, gay marriage is often seen as undermining marriage as an institution in some way. Usually it is claimed that this is because it breaks the link between marriage and procreation, but this does not explain why marriages between heterosexuals who are unwilling or unable to procreate (e.g. because they are too old) are not condemned.

Some feminists claim that Christian conservatives condemn gay marriages because they raise the threat of equal marriages, in which one of the partners in the marriage is not automatically superior (as male) and one automatically inferior (as female). But not all those who are anti-gay are anti-female equality. At least in the UK, there is a strong contingent of female evangelicals, who are nevertheless anti-gay. (Evangelical Anglicans have overwhelmingly accepted female priests, for example).

So I am now wondering whether one (though not the only reason) for hostility to gay marriage is that it undermines one current 'naturalistic' view of marriage, by showing its constructed nature. If you look at the Christian-influenced 'traditional' ideology of marriage, the key ideas seem to me to be:

1) Marriage is a pairing of opposites (man/woman)
2) Marriage is fruitful, like nature
3) Marriage is eternal and unchanging – like God and the world

If gay marriages are accepted as true marriage, that does attack all these 'natural' concepts of marriage, but it's important to note that our changing views of Nature in the modern Western world have already severely weakened those concepts.

Firstly, the idea of man and woman as eternal opposites has been greatly weakened in both scientific and cultural terms: no more claims that women's bodies are fundamentally different, no separate spheres for men and women. Secondly, the idea of the simple, peaceful, fruitfulness of nature, in which, for example, birds happily pair off in marriage, is no longer current. Evolutionary ideas show nature's fruitfulness as ruthless and amoral competition for survival, with procreation bound by no institutions or rules. Finally, evolutionary thought also shows that nature is not unchanging, but constantly developing to seek individual advantage. In other words, you can't ground monogamous, lifelong, faithful marriage in Darwinian nature.

So the opposition to gay marriage is really a side-issue: you can't preserve 'natural marriage' just by keeping it heterosexual. Should the idea of natural symbolism for marriage therefore be discarded altogether, and the institution be seen just as a social arrangement chosen for a particular society? But then the problem arises of why one particular set of social relations should be privileged over another: in that sense, the conservatives are right to say that it raises the question of why polygamous marriages shouldn't be allowed.

I think we therefore need a natural symbolism of marriage that incorporates gay marriage, but also preserves its monogamous and eternal character. And we actually do already have such a symbolism, in the idea of twin souls. The use of this image of partnerships is very old: it goes back to Plato's Symposium and Aristophanes' joking comments about how primordial humans were split up by the gods and now seek their 'other half', whether same-sex or opposite sex. Such a myth also relies on the key natural symbol of twins, whose potency again has survived for millennia.

A non-heterosexual naturalized view of marriage could rest on this idea of soulmates/twin-souls, and fit comfortably with a slightly sentimentalized idea of nature as full of animals seeking/striving for what they truly need, with stability and meaning emerging from this individual seeking. If the proponents of gay marriage want to capture the naturalistic high ground, they may need to stress the romantic nature of marriage, the finding of and clinging to the one true love, even if that now seems old-fashioned for many heterosexuals.

Jon Jarrett has already blogged about Chris Lewis's IHR paper on 'The ideology and culture of government in Anglo-Saxon England', but I think it's a rich enough paper to get blogged on twice. While Jon gives a good overview of the paper, I want in this post to try and put Chris' paper into two different historiographical contexts: among the Anglo-Saxonists and among the Carolingianists.

Some of Chris' comments only really begin to gain their full import when I went back and re-read my seminar notes alongside James Campbell's 'The late Anglo-Saxon state: a maximum view' (in The Anglo-Saxon state, London, Hambledon, 2000, 1-30. In particular, there is a resonant passage in Campbell's article:

Late Anglo-Saxon England was a nation state. It was an entity with an effective central authority, uniformly organised institutions, a national language, a national church, defined frontiers (admittedly with considerable fluidity in the north), and above all, a strong sense of national identity.

Chris seems to me to be reacting to that view in two important ways. In one sense, he was challenging it. The institutions weren't entirely uniform: not all of England was shired, for example. Regional identities were still significant: although Campbell talks about the existence of national saints, most cults were very local. At the level of the thane, most men were only local landholders, not trans-regional. The Benedictine reforms did not cover the whole of the England, but were concentrated in a particular zone. The unity stressed by rulers was of the English people, not that of a state.

But Chris wasn't being purely negative about this vision of late Anglo-Saxon England. He was also indirectly raising the question: to the extent that Campbell's ideas are true of the Anglo-Saxon state, how did they get to be true? How did this state get to be this way? Campbell's picture is implicitly about Engelond at the people's command arising from out the azure main (or at least the mists of the seventh century), and Chris was arguing that nowadays Englsih unity was taken for granted. Instead, he was trying to show how late Anglo-Saxon political culture got actively built. Because building political cultures is an important part of politics: persuasive images are vital, even if they don't match reality. There might not have been uniformity in institutions, for example, but it was thought that there should be (and indeed imagined that there was).

So much of Chris' paper was looking at the many ways that rulers and those associated with them created this political culture, because it does look to have been created in many ways. Some of these are relatively well-known, such as the cultural role of coinage, and the use of titles such as 'king of the English'. Chris also argued that there were probably mechanisms developed for allowing the temporary partition of the kingdom (as in 957-959 between Eadwig and Edgar) to avoid conflicts between the elite.

He was also bringing in intellectual developments which connected to this development of political culture. For example, Mechthild Gretsch has argued for the deliberate attempt by men such as Aethelwold of Winchester and Dunstan to create and spread an academic vernacular culture, a 'Winchester vocabulary' that enables discussion of politics and theology in Old English. Chris added that such promotion of the vernacular was most stressed in times of external threat, such as under Alfred and Aethelred the Unready. The reform ideology was deeply influenced by clerics and monks, but one of its key ideas, uniformity, was also implicitly a political idea: uniformity went inextricably together with one king leading one people. Chris was also stressing how reform ideology was closely linked to practical government throughout the period. For example, he saw the penitential kingship of Aethelred the Unready, as expressed in some of his later charters, as reflecting a partisan coup at court. Despite what Athelred may have expressed about wishing to undo wrongs to the church, only some Benedictine houses got favoured.

Chris was also looking hard at the timing of the reform project and how it was reproduced socially. He was arguing that the tendency to uniformity was greatest in the 970s and that after 1000 the impetus of the project wasn't continuing (although some of the individual ideas continued on even after the conquest, such as standard Old English). He saw social reproduction as important in embedding some of the practices (for example the training of moneyers), but thought that the continuity of Benedictine teaching was broken. He saw the key moment here as the stresses of Aethelred the Unready's reign, when intellectuals either had to enter politics fully or retreat to the schoolroom. After the death of Wulfstan, there was a further break as Cnut then took political culture in a different direction, drawing more on Ottonian models. The full-blown project, as Chris saw it, lasted only around fifty years, from the 970s to the 1020s (he saw Cnut and Edward the Confessor's kingdoms as having different cultures). Even at the time, other ideologies co-existed: Chris thought that distinctive local minster cultures outside the Benedictine Zone existed, for example, although it's very difficult to recreate their details.

As the blog posts show, Chris' ideas were wide-ranging and innovative, and yet a lot of them were also strangely familiar to me as a Carolingianist. After all, historians have been discussing Carolingian political culture for getting on for eighty years (really ever since the time of the German 'new constitutional historians' of the 1930s), and there are a lot of parallels: when Chris was talking about the handful of men with national landholdings, for example, I was thinking Anglo-Saxon Reichsadel.

But my point here isn't to do a typical Carolingianist manoeuvre and dismiss the late Anglo-Saxon state as just a very late Carolingian one. It's to suggest that we can start doing comparisons on how political cultures are created (and possibly even three-way ones, adding in David Pratt's ideas of Alfredian political culture). How long are such cultures sustainable? The central impetus for the Carolingian reforms looks a bit longer than fifty years, but not much: it's really only three generations (Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald). Did the Anglo-Saxon concept of renovation, which Chris mention differ from the Carolingian concept? What other different aspects can we see? I mentioned that the Anglo-Saxon ideology of lordship was noticeably different from the Frankish one. Chris was wondering whether the continuity of Benedictine influence was due to a lot of young kings coming to the throne; the Carolingian experience suggests that adult kings could deliberately choose such an ideology for political reasons. How important was the use of the vernacular to political cultures? (Some of the new studies on Louis the German might be useful here). Chris' paper is obviously the start of something very interesting in Anglo-Saxon studies; but I think it's potentially also very useful for those of us working on other early medieval societies.

One of the stereotypes of gender history that the Pauline Stafford symposium in May knocked fairly firmly on the head was a supposed contrast between male freedom and female lack of freedom. This view of men as essentially free seems to be based on some assumed continuity between Roman republican ideas of the true vir, mastered only by himself, and the ideas of the rights of man (but not woman) developed from the eighteenth century onwards. This conveniently ignores over 1700 years when elite men took it for granted that they were constrained by a variety of social pressures. Even rulers themselves rarely had free rein: they had to respond both to the demands of God and those of their secular elite or risk falling from power. The constraints on male behaviour were not as stringent as on female, but to pretend they didn't exist is misleading.

This theme of male constraint and restraint kept on recurring as an undertone in papers at the symposium. I've already mentioned Julie Mumby's paper on transmission of property in Anglo-Saxon wills. David Bates in his paper on 'Norms, rules and a biography of William the Conqueror' addressed the theme more directly. He argued for William as a man who pushed the boundaries of acceptable royal behaviour to the limit, for example by his use of intimidatory violence, but who could be brought back 'into line', for example by Lanfranc. It's also important that we need to think more carefully about where the boundaries were at that period. David argued that anger was part of what kings did, and that William of Poitiers always implies in his vocabulary that William's anger was rational. On the other hand, when you get stories like William pinning a knife between the fingers of the abbot of La Trinité Rouen when the latter asked how firmly the charter he'd just been given would stick, you realise just how much norms of acceptable behaviour can change.

It's when we get to violence, however, that the question of a possible contrast between male and female constraints becomes most acute. The question isn't just whether medieval women were substantially more vulnerable to violence than men. It's also whether women were significantly less able than men to inflict violence.

A number of papers at the symposium indirectly addressed these two questions. I've already mentioned John Gillingham's paper, which certainly implied women's vulnerability to violence (although someone queried afterwards whether it was really worse in such situations being a woman and enslaved than being a man and slaughtered outright). And we also got a reminder of male vulnerability to violence in Simon Keynes' paper on 'The cult of Edward the Martyr during the reign of Aethelred the Unready'. (This was similar to his paper at the IHR, which Jon Jarrett has already blogged on).

As an example of greater female vulnerability to violence, however, Régine Le Jan's paper on 'Gender and mediation in 11th century Lombardy' was revealing. It discussed how Countess of Liutgard of Valenciennes acted as a mediatrix (female mediator) between Bishop Baldric II of Liège and Count Lambert of Louvain. At one level this was showing the important political role for women in the period (there are other examples of such female mediation outside the family). But there is a twist: Liutgard acted as a mediator because Lambert had first ambushed and captured her. Women might act as peace-weavers, but that didn't mean they necessarily enjoyed peace themselves. Since this paper came just before Anneke Mulder-Bakker's one on Gertrude of Ortenberg, I was left wondering whether all Anneke's metaphors of warp and weft of the social fabric only work till some men decide to rip the whole thing up with a sword.

As for the extent to which women can inflict violence, this is a question which I've debated on this blog before and there's no simple answer. Some women quite clearly did act as lords and control military forces (as was pointed out, Liutgard probably had an entourage to protect her, even if they failed in this case). Was it harder for them to do so than men? It's very difficult to be certain on that, because some women clearly did manage it successfully. But one pointer is the emphasis in so many sources and over many centuries of the personal prowess of lords and rulers: their strength, skill in battle, courage etc was both announced and demonstrated in hazardous ways (tournaments, hunting etc). All this implies that such an image did matter to their troops, whether or not the ruler always personally led them on campaign. Even powerful women could not project this warrior image and rarely tried to.

And this gets us back finally to another of the messages from the symposium on gender similarities and differences. You can often see powerful medieval men and women behaving in quite similar ways. However, even if their practice could be similar, the medieval image is normally of difference between men and women (unless men succumb to effeminate long hair), and this concept of difference itself affected expectations and hence behaviour. The medieval reality of women could not easily dislodge the medieval ideology of women, and nor can it easily dislodge our own ideologies of medieval women.

Jon Jarrett had been doing most of this term's blogging on IHR earlier medieval seminars, but we felt that Claudia Rapp on 'Ritual Brotherhood in Byzantium: Origins and Context' was really more in my field of interest. Claudia was talking about the ritual of adelphopoiesis ('brother-making'). This ritual was brought to general attention by John Boswell's book Same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe, which made the deliberately sensationalist claim that these were akin to gay marriages. Byzantium is the only medieval society with both evidence of the ritual and narrative sources discussing ritual brotherhood, so it's revealing to look at the evidence rather more carefully.

The ritual itself is very well-attested, with over 60 Greek manuscripts from the late eight century onwards, plus an Old Church Slavonic version. Claudia was thinking about it in the context of other rituals which create 'fictive' kinship (non-biological ties): marriage and godparenthood. Marriage affected inheritance rights and marriage prohibitions (you may not marry your desceased wife's sister etc); godparenthood affected marriage prohibitions, but not inheritance rights, ritual brotherhood had no effect on either. (In questions Claudia also said that the adelphopoiesis ritual doesn't look much like the marriage ritual, and isn't normally found in liturgical manuscripts together with it). She saw ritual brotherhood as a very flexible relationship that was an additional strategy for building alliances.

Claudia's main focus in the paper was on looking for the origins of the ritual: she thinks it came from early monasticism (C3-C6). Those who work on the west in the Middle Ages tend to think of monasticism in Benedictine patterns, but early eastern monasticism had three main patterns (with monachos and monasterium terminology used for all three). One was eremitic (hermits), cenobitic (communal) and the third was semi-anchoritic (living in small groups of two or three). In the Benedictine Rule, these are the monks that Benedict condemns as Sarabaites.

There are a lot of texts which discuss such monastic pairs or triples: Pachomius had his brother with him, Anthony and Macarius each had two disciples, John Cassian and John Moschos both travelled with a single friend. Some of the bonds were hierarchical (with master seen as father, and disciple as son) and some non-hierarchical, seen as brothers. They shared 'spiritual capital', as Claudia put it: for example one motif was that when a pair went into a village to sell their handicrafts, one sinned sexually with a woman and they both did penance, or the 'brother' did penance for the other. There was also often a desire to die together and be buried together: one story has a monk telling his sick 'brother' that he's not going to outlive him, and then lying down and dying first. We also have monastic documents which show brotherhood, such as letters to 'X and his brother' and even one sixth-century papyrus which shows some kind of formal legal settlement of a dispute between two brothers.

But what really got most people's attention was the archaeological evidence of twin-occupant hermitages (for a hermit and his disciple): Claudia had plans for several of them, such as at Kellia in the western Nile Delta. A look at some of these (the plans here look very similar) had some members of the audience afterwards making favorable comparisons to the average London flat. Together with a reference to monks inheriting rock-cut hermitages (which assiduous readers of this blog may already know about), it reminds us that the realities of monasticism may not necessarily correspond to the ascetic virtuosity described by hagiographers. I asked Claudia later on why the monks were still admired, when there life didn't seem so much more austere than the rest of the population: she thought that the hours spent in prayer was probably one important factor.

But if the Sarabaites led less ascetic lives than we might imagine, how far did that go? Pairs of monks might lead some modern thought into yet more gay monk fantasies. But when I asked about why sarabaites were criticized by St Benedict (and others before him, like Jerome and John Cassian), Claudia though their real concern seemed to be about economic practices. The semi-anchorites seem to have been nearer to the lay world in economic terms than hermits or cenobites (and their letter collections show quite a lot of presents being exchanged).

There's inevitably the problem of negative evidence, but I can't believe that if such institutions were hotbeds of vice Jerome, for example, wouldn't have mentioned it. Syneisaktism (where a man and woman lived together chastely) came in for an awful lot of late antique criticism, after all. (This isn't to deny the existence of some gay monks in Byzantium, any more than some gay laymen or some gay clergy, just their concentration in particular institutions). If the evidence from Egypt and Syria challenges our images of monasticism, we have to let it do so, whatever those images of ours might be.

As I said in a previous post, I've been trying to get to grips with Mary Douglas' 'How institutions think' and finding my usual problem with her stuff. There are some very good individual insights, but it's hard to work out the overall shape of her argument. (It also doesn't help that she's not very good at defining her terms). But I'm increasingly coming to think that the book might most usefully be understood as a way of thinking about discourses without using Foucault's ideas. (She does refer to Foucault, but only in passing).

If Douglas' 'classification' corresponds to the idea of a discourse (and it's a bit hard to be certain on this, because she doesn't define the term), then two of her key questions become: why are there discourses, and why are discourses of some types and not others? After all, why should individuals decide to share a particular way of thinking/speaking, and how do particular ideas win in a marketplace of them? If you're Foucault (or Edward Said or the like) at this point you bring in power. Power produces a discourse and forces it on others, classifying people into criminals, madmen, homosexuals, wily Orientals, etc.

Mary Douglas, however, is implicitly interested in groups (which she tends, rather confusingly, to call institutions) which don't have this kind of coercive power. A lot of her examples are from tribal societies, scientific communities and egalitarian religious sects, none of which can get too coercive without a subgroup breaking away and going off to found a new tribe, science or religion. So why do some, but not all discourses succeed here?

On the 'why discourses' question, her answer is basically for cognitive ease: institutions and classifications/discourses are useful shortcuts to avoid extra thinking for oneself. At this point it's easy to start thinking that it's only the intellectually lazy who do this, but in fact it's frequently convenient for all of us. As one minor example, I probably save 5-10 minutes every morning by limiting my consideration of what I should eat for breakfast to 'suitable' breakfasts, rather than the totality of foodstuffs in my house. At a more abstract level, I remember getting told early in my mathematics degree that original mathematical thought was like a cavalry charge – very expensive in resources and to be reserved for emergencies. It's almost always better to adapt an existing technique than invent one from scratch. And as Douglas herself points out, such institutions/classifications aren't just used for trivial decisions: in times of famine, in most societies available food gets preferentially distributed to those classified as 'most important', without frantic efforts by the marginalised to preserve themselves.

As to why particular discourses, Douglas' view is that the classifications that seem 'natural' are the most effective, and most likely to be accepted. I put natural in quotes, because her point is that such 'natural' analogies are actually the projected reflection of existing institutions. So kingship is justified by the relation between the head and the rest of the body. But seeing the relation of the parts of the body in this way is not inevitable: it is the dominant image because it 'makes sense' in a hierarchical society. In this way, institutions and practices are justified by hidden circular reasoning. This use of natural analogies is particularly prevalent in gendered ideas, for example. Culture is to nature, as mind is to body, as man is to woman, as human is to animal, etc, etc.

She also points out how institutions are responsible for remembering and forgetting for individuals, which is a less novel idea for historians. Though she does have a nice point about institutional memory generally being shorter in competitive groups/societies, because memory gets rewritten each time another faction gets to the top. This is one of several points where she looks at whether particular social structures are particularly prone to some kinds of thinking. And her preferred groups for discussion (tribal societies, scientific communities and religious sects) would obviously fit into her schema of grid-group, though she doesn't mention that concept in the book at all. (There is a short piece by her on grid-group theory that I have found useful on the web).

Apart from the lack of grid-group stuff, the book does seem to be a summary of many of her earlier interests: the classification theory and its social purposes underlies a lot of 'Purity and Danger', and the stuff on natural analogies is also in 'Natural Symbols'. And the whole principle that traditional and/or small-scale and/or religious social groups are actually much like 'moderns' in their thought processes is basic to all her work. Whether there is any change in her understanding of these ideas, I'm less sure – because she's sometimes vague about ideas and terminology, it 's hard to be certain about shifts.

How useful is Mary Douglas for the Middle Ages? Her work seems to have led Eamon Duffy to become an ethnographer of medieval Catholics, which is a benefit in term of providing thick descriptions, and a loss in terms of any attempts at historical objectivity.

The two big problems with her style of functionalism remain: it ignores the issue of power and it requires 'knowing better' than your subjects: 'you may think that you're doing this because of X, but actually you're doing it because of Y'. (For this reason, her ideas about pollution pissed off some environmentalists a lot). A related problem with ideas of 'natural symbols' is that because of structuralism, it's easy to think it's all just about binaries. But though the pairs of man/woman, mind/body, sacred/profane often seem to line up in the expected way in medieval thought, medieval society isn't as simple as that in practice and other institutions presumable get naturalised in other ways. If we're using Douglas, we're going to have to be careful and not just assume that any reference to the body politic, for example, means exactly the same.

But I also think that Douglas' ideas have some interesting current applications. If I get round to it (among other posts and the stuff I'm actually meant to be writing), I want to look at Mary Douglas' ideas and the current US debate on gay marriage. (Now there's a teaser for you...)