The title does not refer to additional borgs, but lists inspired by Carl Pyrdum’s recent challenge to sum up the Middle Ages in seven words (or more precisely seven concepts). There have been many excellent suggestions made in response and I’m not sure that I can add sensibly to them. But what did get me thinking was Carl’s comments summing up the results. As he points out: ‘the most skippable medieval centuries were the sixth, seventh, and tenth’. For the early medievalists among us, then, how about seven words/concepts to sum up each of those centuries? Here are my attempts:

Sixth century:
Ethnonemesis
Avars
Justinian
Gregory the Great
Pottery analysis
Radegund
Boethius

Seventh century:
Islam
Formularies
Microeconomies
Christological controversies
Isidore of Seville
Double monasteries
Austrasians

Tenth century [updated due to second thoughts]
Hrotsvita
Danegeld [replacing Battle of Maldon]
Apocalyptic thought
Cluny
Hungarians
Cordoba
Towns [replacing castles]

Add in your suggestions (though please, if possible, avoid having King Arthur appear in more than one century).

Kate Cooper’s The Fall of the Roman Household (CUP, 2007) is a very interesting book, but its title is misleading and because of its structure it takes quite a while to work out what its subject actually is. It’s best described as ‘An analysis of late antique senatorial Christianity with special reference to the treatise ‘Ad Gregoriam in palatio’’, but that’s not a title to sell many copies.

Kate Cooper has worked on the text ‘Ad Gregoriam’ before (both in The Virgin and the Bride and in several subsequent articles: see her list of publications), but her main focus has previously been on the gender aspects of the treatise. In this work she looks at in connection with a number of other late antique texts by and addressed to western aristocrats in the late fourth to early sixth century, Her argument is that there was a sustained attempt by authors to inspire men and women in such circles to a Christian life, while respecting their cultural traditions. In a world where traditional Roman values were under threat from economic, military and social problems, such texts aimed to show how the good aristocrat could also be a good Christian. These men and women did not need to abandon their literary culture, their marriages or their households, as the ascetics claimed: instead they could remain in the world, yet sufficiently detached from it.

The parallels in principle with my own work on Carolingian lay nobles are striking, and yet when I look for actual connections, there are hardly any. Carolingian authors of lay mirrors and other moral texts addressed to the laity do not draw on these earlier works, nor come to the same conclusions about the most important moral precepts such people must obey. Kate Cooper argues that the texts she discusses are poorly transmitted, with early medieval monastic librarians tending not to preserve them, but I think there is a more significant reason and that the discontinuities in texts for the Christian laity lie further back.

There are at least two other earlier attempts before the fourth century to produce moral guides for a Christian lay life. One is Clement of Alexandria’s Paidagogus, from the late second century, the other, even further back, is the pastoral epistles of St Paul (or one of his followers), with their ‘household codes’. Cooper mentions St Paul briefly, but not Clement, which I suspect reflects the lack of influence of these earlier works on her texts. Why don’t these texts for the laity form more of a tradition?

Cooper describes ‘Ad Gregoriam’ as a ‘time-capsule’ and contrasts the cultural specificity of Cassiodorus’ work (very firmly mid-sixth century) with the timelessness of the Benedictine Rule, written at about the same time. I think that may provide the key. Texts which discuss how to live a Christian life in the world must of necessity discuss that world and one’s role in it, in a way that inevitably binds the text to a specific culture. Once that culture changes substantially (as in the post-Roman world), the content may become meaningless to a new generation.

In contrast, it is far easier to write a ‘timeless’ work which focuses on detachment from the world, as most of the great spiritual classics do. Some ascetic authors indeed seem to have deliberately striven for such a timeless, non-specific quality in their work, such as John Cassian or Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, works which as a result could be appreciated by readers for centuries. It is possible to write such works for a lay audience (John Bunyan did it with Pilgrim’s Progress) but only at the cost of saying nothing about the realities of lay life. The minute an author starts talking about marriage or families, they are liable to fall back into the specificity of their age and to lose some of their connection to later readers. Only the literature of world rejection can, at least sometimes, remain outside the currents of time, in its own disconnected eternity.

As I indicated in the first part of my discussion, I think medieval history still keeps quite a lot of prestige in the UK. Why then, are British medievalists not dancing around in a merry England kind of way, but instead staring gloomily into their drinks, in between writing defiant or bracing blog posts?

One obvious problem is that even if an activity is prestigious, people are not necessarily eager to do it, if it is difficult, ill-paid or both. This, however, is not a problem restricted to medieval historians. The great prestige of stylite saints in late antique Byzantium, did not, I suspect, lead to vast numbers of pillar-climbing wannabe ascetics. Most people, given a choice, will prefer easily-gotten gains.

Greater problems come from the two social groups who are anti-medieval history: those who think it is not useful, and those who think it is fuddy-duddy. Oddly, those who think history is not useful are not, on the whole, the avid Thatcherites. This is because on an individual level studying history at university is useful, in that it often leads one to well-paid positions. Top employers like history graduates; all the guff about transferable skills is actually right in this case.

Those who consider that history is not useful are usually those looking in an equally utilitarian but broader sense: that it does not bring economic advantage to UK plc as a whole or to an individual university. Unfortunately, it is people of this kind who tend to predominate in those who make decisions on funding at both the national and university level. At the national level, medievalists have also recently suffered from the prejudice certain ‘progressive’ people have against the subject, seen as irremediably old-fashioned. Such an attitude has been visible for at least 50 years: when Kingsley Amis wanted to show the futility of academic life in Lucky Jim, he made Jim Dixon write articles on medieval ship-building. It is epitomised by the comments of an Education Secretary (Charles Clarke) a few years ago about medievalists as ornamental (for which he got a deserved ticking off from Jinty Nelson).

But I think possibly more significant in the long run is the collapse of historical consciousness in British culture (more particularly English culture). I don’t mean by this that fewer people are interested in history or that they know less about it (though this may be true). I mean that there is no longer a widespread sense that everybody *ought* to know some history, particularly the history of their own country. And the common stock of historical facts that ‘everybody’ knows has similarly declined greatly. For most people, ‘1066 and All That’ (the baseline of ‘memorable’ British history) would now require substantial glosses on every page.

This cultural change is not just due to factors such as the increasingly multicultural nature of British society, or a ‘modernist’ urge to ignore the past. I would say that a more significant factor is that there is no longer a shared historical sense of what it means to be British and/or English, and as a result history (in schools and in the media) has lost this important cultural and educational role.

It is easy at this point for right-wingers to blame trendy liberal schoolteachers and historians who rejected the traditional ‘kings and battles’ form of history teaching. But speaking as someone who got the tail-end of traditional teaching during my limited study of history at school (3 years at secondary school, 1976-1979), I don’t think that is the main reason.

Instead, I’d say the main reason is something I’ve talked about before: the failure of myths of Britishness, and of the Whig narrative of history. The key pillars of this narrative (crown in parliament, reformed religion, empire, Saxon liberties, the British navy) have lost all their resonance, and whatever the right-wingers may think, their power can’t be revived. Referencing Magna Carta when you talk about civil liberties now just seems ludicrous. All that survives generally is a vague sense of Britain threatened by European tyrants, which is equally applicable to Napoleon, Hitler and the EU (with the Spanish Armada and the Normans as outliers).

Because this Whig narrative has collapsed and no-one has thought up a widely-accepted alternative, when people do learn history (either at school or on their own), it tends to be in unconnected islands of interest, and the emphasis is largely on recent history (basically, most people study Stalin and Hitler for A level).

All this is a challenge for medievalists (and indeed early modernists), which of course, in true business style, means there is also an opportunity. University medievalists have to rethink how they advertise their subject (both before people get to university, and when they get there and choose their options). Lecturers can’t now rely on people automatically assuming that the history of Parliament or the Reformation ‘matter’, or knowing much about anything pre-twentieth century. Instead those who teach those subjects have to provide a pitch as to why people should do their options rather than more familiar recent history. (And of course, if we can make our option become popular again, it automatically becomes ‘useful’ to the university administrators and government ministers: the market has spoken and how can it be wrong?)

On ‘relevance’, we are always going to be struggling against the modern historians. What this means is that medieval historians must unashamedly embrace the weird and thrilling side of their subject. Do you want to study Hitler yet again? Or do you want to find out about dog-headed men, tomb-dwelling monks, the Fall of Rome and the rise of Islam? Or why decisions in the fourth century mean there are fewer female than male students at Oxford today? It is time for medievalists to promise to reveal all in glorious technicolour illuminations.

In a discussion over on Medieval and Modern about outreach by medievalists, some of us blogging medievalists touched on possible differences in attitudes to the Middle Ages in particular the US and the UK. This is my first attempt to take the topic a bit further, with an examination of attitudes to medieval history in the UK and what this might mean for professional or would-be professional medievalists. (I’m concentrating on historians here, but with occasional parallels for those studying medieval literature).

My first contention is that medieval history still has a lot of prestige. This is shown in two ways: at what one might call the cultural commentator/pundit level and among a more general public. Firstly, the commentariat. Basically, medieval history as a university level subject is prestigious because it’s both a ‘proper’ subject and it’s taught by ‘proper’ universities. Both of these need some explanation.

Subjects at UK universities tend to get unofficially ranked by how academically rigorous they are perceived to be. The most prestigious subjects (not necessarily in any particular order) are (I would say): classics, history, law, philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, medicine, languages. In contrast are ‘Mickey Mouse’ subjects, seen as trendy and easy: the typical example of this was once sociology, but is now media studies. (There is a more indeterminate group in between, including such things as English, geography, biology, economics, computer science and engineering).

This supposedly objective assessment of subjects is, in fact, heavily influenced by the prestige of the universities which teach them. The basic grouping (which I give for those not used to the UK system) is by when they were founded, with the oldest as the most prestigious:

1) Oxbridge
2) Red Brick universities (+ London, Durham), founded in nineteenth and early twentieth century (Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds etc)
3) Universities founded in 1960s (‘plate glass universities’) e.g. Sussex, Warwick
4) Post-1992 universities (mainly ex-polytechnics) e.g. de Montfort, Anglia Ruskin).

(There are all sorts of complications and exceptions to this list, but it’s a useful initial guide). The prestige of universities, in turn, influences how many applicants they get and thus how high they can set their entrance standards, so there can be genuine differences in quality between the tiers.

As a result of this, the most prestigious subjects, are normally those which Oxbridge has traditionally taught (and, of course, taught traditionally) and the least prestigious are those which ‘trendy new’ universities (once category 3, but now category 4) pioneered the teaching of (even if Oxford now does have a Business School).

Roughly speaking, the amount of medieval history taught in a university correlates with these categories of university. It is a compulsory part of Oxbridge history courses (indeed the Oxford ‘Modern History’ course still starts with the fall of the Roman Empire) and there are strong research clusters in many red brick universities, while post-1992 universities rarely teach any medieval history at all. There is a similar correlation for the teaching of medieval literature in both English and Modern Languages departments.

Medieval history is therefore an ‘academic’ subject taught by ‘top’ universities and as such prestigious. This is particularly significant because in the British system Oxbridge humanities graduates are over-represented in positions of influence. Many cultural commentators (as well as politicians) will thus either have studied medieval history or literature themselves or at least have had friends at university who have done so.

Along with this cultural prestige, medieval history also does quite well on what one might call the ‘party test’. If you are talking to someone random at a party and you say you study (or teach) a particular subject, what is their reaction? I’d say that it is largely positive and that this is made up of two factors: its prestige, but also, paradoxically, its accessibility.

The prestige factor of history as an academic subject is important, but this is increased for a more general audience by the fact that you need to be able to read things in other languages for medieval history. The successful learning of any foreign language is now a sign of intellect to the British. If you say you have to read documents in Latin, this is particularly prestigious (which also has to do with hierarchies of schools, into which I won’t go today).

However, at a party, intellect is not all. When I was studying mathematics (undeniably a prestigious subject), I tended to get people edge away from me at parties, with the apologetic comment that ‘I could never do mathematics at school’. If I say I study medieval history, in contrast, most people feel that there is something relevant they can say in response. Even if they have no coherent sense of the Middle Ages (about which more next time), they have a few images of cathedrals, knights, Black Death, naughty monks, Henry VIII (subsumed into the Middle Ages for these purposes), about which they can talk.

I have also developed a personal ‘research summary’ for public consumption. This consists of saying that I work on moral instruction for early medieval noblemen. I add, if there’s more interest, that I look at how they’re being told to behave in warfare, sexual matters, their use of money, and that I work on eighth and ninth century France and Germany, which is the time of Alfred and the Saxons in England. (I deliberately avoid mentions of both ‘Carolingian’ and ‘gender’: any discussions at this level should not include terms that people may not understand, and it’s also useful to give some hook of what’s going on simultaneously in some kind of history that they may know). I then try and be positive in discussing anything on history that the other person wants to talk about, however ill-informed and unrelated to my specific subject it may be. All this, means (I hope), that I can leave those I meet with a sense that what I do is intellectually worthy, but also interesting.

This is why I think that medieval history is, at many levels, still prestigious in the UK. But prestige alone is not enough, as I want to discuss in part two.

I don't want this blog to turn simply into a recital of 'weird things monks do', but there are things that just have to be noticed. Such as Elisabeth R. O'Connell, 'Transforming Monumental Landscapes in Late Antique Egypt: Monastic Dwellings in Legal Documents from Western Thebes', Journal of Early Christian Studies 15 (2007), 239-273, which looks at the occupation by monks of sixth- and seventh-century Thebes of the necropolis there. As well as archaeological and hagiographic evidence, she also discusses monastic wills, which show the inheriting of tomb-caves:

The wills demonstrate that these tomb/cell/homes were legally treated like private property; just like oikos/domus, they were owned and inherited by the monks who lived in them. These documents are almost identical to contemporary wills concerning property inherited through biological families; however, extant wills dictated by monks living in the Theban Mountain describe the transmission of topoito members of a spiritual family.

O'Connell's comment:

Monks living in the Theban Mountain used precisely the
same legal means and strategies as their contemporaries to maintain their
property within the "family." But where the monks lived and the vocabulary they used to describe their dwelling places differ significantly from their neighbors.

Make your own jokes as seem appropriate... I'm just staggered again by how what we think we know about the Middle Ages is really far less extraordinary than the reality.