I’ve started reading a very interesting book: William Ian Miller, ‘Humiliation: and other essays on honor, social discomfort and violence’. A very readable blend of anthropology, medieval history (he’s an expert on Icelandic sagas) and psychology and I think potentially useful for my project. It brings together three things I’m currently thinking about in respect of masculinity: emotions, honour and violence. I need to think about gendered honour in the Carolingian world, but it’s such a slippery concept, especially when ‘honor’ is a word of such multiple meanings. I’m not sure whether in itself talking about ‘honour societies’ is helpful, or whether it’s just a black box explanation: one that slots in an anthropological concept without actually giving much more insight. There’s an awful lot of difference between bushido and chivalric codes, even if they’re both codes of honour. I think to be useful, you need to look at the details of honour: what events count, who counts and what the response ought to be. The problem is how to do that when the sources don’t often specifically discuss honour. This is where a comment by Stephen White in a paper in ‘Anger’s Past’ (edited by Barbara Rosenwein) comes in. He suggests:

‘One important step to taking in explaining lordly anger during the central Middle Ages would be to treat “the sense of honor” as something that mediates between the inner emotional worlds of upper-class males and the outer world of politics, where, at critical junctures, anger and other emotions have the potential to become powerful political forces.’

If honour is a filter through which emotions and reactions (such as violence) are expressed, then working back through such expressions (which narrative sources do often give) may help reconstruct at least the outlines of any code of honour. It seems one approach at least, so I’m off to look at texts and trace emotions.

I have been struggling again about the concept of masculinity and its usefulness to an analysis of the early Middle Ages. This is fairly basic, given my thesis was about it and I’m hoping to write a book on Carolingian masculinity. What triggered my concerns was a very good paper by Lynda Coon in the collection ‘Gender in the early medieval world: east and west, 300-900, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia Smith (CUP, 2004). [Quite a lot of interesting material in the whole collection, though it shows as usual, that ‘gender’ still predominantly means papers focusing on women]. Coon’s paper is about the ideas of Hrabanus Maurus on the mystical bodies of priests and their powers of spiritual procreation. It shows clearly that masculinity is a meaningful concept for the period: Hrabanus’ comment (which gives the paper its title) is ‘What is the Word except semen?’ The problem I’m having is to what extent masculinity in the period can be seen as an ideology, i.e. shared and promoted views. Were Hrabanus’s views shared? It’s not a topic that Coon goes into and I’d need to explore more of her source material (Biblical exegesis) to see if I can find traces elsewhere. It’s not in the material I’ve looked at, which is work largely for a lay audience, but I had to omit exegesis from the thesis for lack of time.

This leads me into two wider problems for my work. One is whether there is such a disjunction between ideas of clerical/monastic masculinity and lay masculinity that there’s no commonality between them. The other is to what extent I can infer ideas of masculinity from texts which deal with the topic only very indirectly. The problem with the divide between clerical and lay masculinity is that it’s not useful to model it on the standard view of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities. This may work OK for the post-Reformation world (and the classical one), but not for a world where the male elite is institutionally split into two supposedly very different lifestyles. I need to try and find a model that reflects this.

My bigger problem, in some ways, is with some of the texts which I’m using to make my arguments about lay masculinity. It’s not necessarily a problem that they don’t explicitly mention masculinity: narrative sources can show a lot about expected/applauded/derided models of male behaviour without any explicit mention of masculinity. The difficulty is with the non-narrative sources I’ve used: moral tracts and legislation. In these masculinity is everywhere and yet nowhere, in the sense that most of them are addressed to the universal layperson, assumed, however, to be male. Laws, for example, often start: ‘Si quis…’, (if any man…). Is it valid, as I have done, to deduce ideas about masculinity from such texts, or should I conclude that gender is unimportant here? Did masculinity matter to the ninth century or I am imposing my own twenty-first century framework in which gender must everywhere and always be significant? I don’t have answers to this at the moment: I’d welcome any comments.

A difficult couple of weeks: L had a cold and then a stomach bug which meant, with a certain inevitability, that a couple of days after her I had a cold and then a stomach bug. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life been ill so often as since I’ve had a small child. Nothing major, but repeated colds, coughs etc all winter and a fair bit of the summer too. I don’t know a way to avoid this: L of course picks up stuff at nursery and it’s then almost impossible to stop it spreading when I spend so much time wiping her nose and bottom. The most difficult thing is that she recovers far more quickly than I do. So I then have to look after when she’s feeling bouncy and I feel like lying in bed ill all day. Which of course slows my recovery, as I’m not getting the rest I need. The only good thing is that I don’t have the same pressure of deadlines as before I submitted, but it’s another reminder of just how having children interferes with the rest of your life.

I have finally got round to reading Philippe Buc’s The Dangers of Ritual, which got a lot of early medievalists upset a couple of years ago. (There is a stinging review by Geoffrey Koziol, one of Buc’s targets, in Early Medieval Europe 11 (4) and it’s pretty much justified). Buc paints an unrealistic picture of naïve historians, taking on trust Durkheim’s functionalist views that religion’s purpose is to foster social cohesion. (As Koziol points out, Buc very much identifies ritual with religion, which is problematic in itself). He then traces the sociology of religion/ritual back to theological origins of the Reformation. Buc sums it up (p 194): ‘The idea that ritual has an inherent ability to constitute, maintain, and disrupt order depends genetically on a specific conceptualization of the relationship between “religion” and “society” - a configuration in which the two are essentially coherent.’
My particular take on this has been modified by having helped create a ritual, taken in the wide sense of a set of regularly repeated actions that have a symbolic significance beyond their practical use. L has a routine for getting up, but the procedure for bathing her and getting her to bed has developed fairly rapidly into a ritual. If the ‘wrong’ one of us tries to get her undressed or we suggested she cleaned her teeth before she had her bath rather than after, there would be woe and desolation. The ritual isn’t static, it’s clearly a created and mutated thing, but it continues to exist because it has the function of constituting and maintaining order. I suspect such need for reassurance and the resulting ritual has been a constant factor for small children.
Most adults, of course, don’t have such a pressing need for ritual, but it’s still fairly obvious that these help create group cohesion and bring satisfaction to people. Think of the purely secular rituals that have developed around a big football match [This means soccer, for the hard of English]. The rules of the game don’t prescribe things like how the teams come onto the pitch, or what happens at half-time, but standard practices develop, and it would be thought somehow wrong or even anti-social if, say the members of the team wandered out onto the pitch as they were ready rather than coming out together. Similarly the crowd (or rather members of it) create their own rituals, such as particular chants. These obviously must have an inventor, but that doesn’t stop them being a ritual (or at least a tradition) very quickly.
In other words, you don’t have to think any complex thoughts about religion and society to see how ritual can function, you merely have to look around and see examples. Medieval historians aren’t naively following sociologists and forgetting the political aspects of ritual. If anything, they’re more conscious of the fact that rituals have origins and are manipulated. But if they see rituals as binding societies together and creating cohesion, that’s because that is what they are intended to do, by their creators and developers. After all, the exemplary Christian ritual, the Eucharist, is explicitly shown as historically created (admittedly by God). Jesus tells his disciples collectively (not individually) to repeat particular symbolic actions in memory of him. The Eucharist is to be a holy act, but it’s also surely intended to bind the community of believers together. Rituals may be created, but one of the reasons they’re created is because of their social effectiveness. Buc sees the concept of ritual’s purpose as being to create social cohesion as being possible only after the Reformation, with a Protestant view that some rituals were not sacred. But there’s nothing contradictory between creating a ritual for its social effectiveness and because it pleases a god. Many gods, after all, are shown as wanting their believers to be united together. Buc’s theories, in this and other ways, don’t stand up.