While I always find the International Medieval Congress fascinating, it’s also a gruelling event. Partly, that’s just the intellectual and physical pace - a lot of ideas to take in, combined with insufficient sleep. But it’s also hard emotionally - I rarely get through the congress (and I’ve been a number of times) without having at least one emotional crisis, arising from some mixture of depression and envy. There are times when I start to wonder whether there isn’t something intrinsic to history (or at least the academic study of the humanities) that tends to provoke these kinds of reflections. Somebody quoted to me the claim that the collective noun for historians was ‘a malice of historians’; I’ve certainly heard a fair amount of bitchiness at seminars over the years. Yet I don’t think that historians are intrinsically any nastier than other professions and I know some extremely nice ones. I think much of the problem arises from the nature of historians’ careers.

There are some obvious issues: it’s very competitive to get an academic job in the humanities and many academics and would-be academics feel underpaid and undervalued. But there are other professions like this. I think more of a problem is how the prizes (whether in terms of jobs or just prestige) get handed out. If you’re an accountant who gets promoted, most other accountants won’t really have a clear idea of how good an accountant you are; at most some of your close colleagues. If (as in most humanities departments in the UK) you are judged mainly on your research, there will be a number of academics all over the world able to read your material and decide whether or not they think you’re any good.

Yet humanities academics aren’t the only people who can be judged ‘publicly’ in these ways: so can many other professions, such as barristers, actors and scientists. It’s not just the public judging in this way: it’s the fact that the process is semi-objective. If you’re an actor or a pop musician or an artist who doesn’t get the breaks, you can argue that it’s just because your work isn’t to someone’s tastes: there are few objective criteria to judge ability in these fields. If you’re a scientist or a sportsperson or a barrister, on the other hand, there are some objective criteria of performance you can agree on: it’s relatively easy to justify rankings of people or why some succeed and some don’t.
For humanities and historians specifically it’s far harder. Who succeeds isn’t simply arbitrary: there are some people at the top of the tree who we all know are there rightly. Similarly I’ve had several friends whose seemingly effortless rise upwards is justified by one simple truth: they are brilliant. But at the level below these, there are lots of good historians (and a few less good ones); rankings here are far more subjective. As a result, it’s easy to feel that the ‘wrong’ person won out, when in fact it may just be their work is not to your taste. In the same way, at a micro-level, there can be some agreement about the really good and the really bad article/seminar/book. In between, the argument is often less about the technical aspects of the work (is its argument right?), but its importance (does it matter?) When there’s little agreement about historians about what the important questions really are, it’s not surprising we can’t agree about who answers them best.

This combination of public judging and semi-objectivity seems to be particularly likely to arouse feelings both of depression (when you know your work is inferior) and envy and malice (when you know your work is not). I don’t know the answer to this (success in itself clearly doesn’t remove these insecurities, as I can see from some other historians), but there was ironically an interesting insight from one of the papers at Leeds this year. Richard Kieckhefer, who’s a very distinguished historian of late medieval religion and magic, gave a lecture on ‘Mystical Communities in the Late Medieval West’. I learnt less about mysticism from it than I’d expected, but more about community. His focus was on how religious communities dealt with the ‘spiritual virtuoso’, the mystic with a particularly close relationship to God. How could such ‘stars’ provide an inspiration and model to a community, rather than disrupting it. Kieckhefer looked at the ‘sister books’ from fourteenth and fifteenth century Germany, collections of hagiographical lives from specific convents (for more on these see http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/women/biogs.html). He argued that at some points in these texts you can see what he called deliberate ‘inattention to difference’, that mystical experience could be deliberately extended to include others. Among other examples, he discussed how one nun saw angels taking Eucharist to a sick nun in the infirmary. The first nun described her vision and asked the other if she had seen anything: the sick sister said no, but then added that she had felt inward sweetness earlier on. A modern reader might see this as humouring another sister; to the writer of the book it was a shared mystical experience. In another example, one nun was unable to weep along with the rest of her sisters: but one of them saw a vision of how a single tear from her was carried up to heaven by angels. The quantity of tears was thus deliberately made not to matter as a sign of holiness.

Kieckhefer is of course aware that ‘inattention to difference’ in medieval texts can easily be used to mask unequal power relations, but even so, he sees it as a strategy that could be used to bind a community together and mitigate the possible problems of virtuoso mysticism. Some of this same ‘inattention’ seems to me a useful strategy for historians as well, concentrating on the common interests we share, not simply our differences in status. Maybe in that way we can combat the demons lurking round our conferences and seminar rooms.

There were a couple more papers from IMC that also got me thinking about Carolingian matters, ironically by concentrating on fifth and sixth century material. One was a very interesting session on gender and narrative in the early Middle Ages, which included papers by Julia Smith on Venantius Fortunatus and St Radegund and Jennifer Robbie on Gregory of Tours and the nuns of Poitiers (Radegund’s old convent). Smith’s paper was looking particularly at some of Fortunatus’ poems on Radegund, showing how he was ‘condensing’ ideas in the late antique treatises on virginity (such as the virgin as bride of Christ) into narrative form, providing complex works for the nuns to ruminate on and absorb this teaching. Robbie, meanwhile, was talking about how Gregory was making the revolt of the nuns of Poitiers in 589 into an apocalyptic sign, by describing it using terms drawn from Old Testament prophets. Both papers together showed the persistence of the female virgin as a key symbol into the late sixth century, which raised again a question I have: why does virginity lose so much of this charge in Carolingian times? (Julia Smith reckoned that there was no new literature on virginity between Aldhelm and the eleventh century).

One part of the answer was suggested by a paper from Kate Cooper on marriage in 400-600 AD, which was arguing that Christian writers were trying to strengthen the marriage bond then, partly as a reaction to the excesses of the ascetic movement (particularly Jerome). Augustine (and even more so Fulgentius of Ruspe) argued that marriage vows were to be taken very seriously (no separation to enter a convent without mutual agreement) and that marriage was a good in itself. There was therefore a counter-tradition (though probably not a very well-documented one) to the early Christian noisy exaltation of virginity.

I’m still trying to work out the patterns here: what we really need is the equivalent of a second volume of Peter Brown’s ‘The Body and Society’ which covers 400-800 AD. One key factor is obviously child oblation, which develops from the sixth century. Once the main form of recruitment is child oblation rather than adult entry, the relationship between ascetics and the laity changes considerably. There is far less benefit for the promoters of monasticism in simply denigrating the lay life: instead the emphasis moves to redeeming family life via the offering of a portion of its ‘fruits’. Oblation also potentially makes instilling ideas of celibacy easier: oblated children can be raised in an asexual environment, till they possess their own ‘internal cloister’. This in tern has a gendered impact: it allows the production of virgin males in far greater numbers than adult recruitment does. The symbolism of virginal bodies that clustered around convents got spread onto monasteries as well (or even focused on them). The most prominent sex scandal of Carolingian monasticism, after all, were ugly rumours about sodomitical monks that Charlemagne heard.

So the lack of Carolingian literature on female virgins may be partly because writers have now lost interest in them and want to think about male monasticism. But it may also reflect a wider feature about female asceticism: that it’s not so obviously competitive as male asceticism is. This seems to me for practical as well as political reasons. The practical reason is that there’s nowhere obvious to go beyond female virginity: if almost everyone in a convent is virginal, there’s no higher level to take it to. (Perhaps this is why female food asceticism has a role later). The other thing is that it’s becoming increasingly clear that a lot of early Christian writing about male asceticism is about claims to power and authority: I live a more austere life than you and so therefore I deserve to tell you what to do. Given far fewer opportunities (though there are some) for female ascetics to gain such authority, competitive female asceticism is likely to be less developed, because it’s not playing for such high stakes.

If there isn’t competition within female asceticism, once the principle of virginity as being superior has been established in a particular society (and the recruitment problem is solved via oblation), then there isn’t really a driving need to keep on pressing the point and create new virginity literature. One of the things I must examine some time is if the dating of virginity literature in different early medieval kingdoms fits this: an initial emphasis and then a tailing off. I think it does in both England and Francia, but I need to explore more.

Male asceticism, however, remains potentially more competitive, both for physiological reasons (even Cassian doesn’t think you can eliminate wet dreams) and because the prize of authority is higher. But I think here too, there is a change after the fourth century. Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser have argued convincingly that Augustine ridiculed Cassian’s ideas of focusing on nocturnal emissions so effectively that it lost its power and emphasis switched onto male control of speech. Competitive asceticism, however, obviously had a revival with Columbanus and his followers. I think, however, the focus was slightly different; because so much of the emphasis is on penance for sins (including sexual sins), there is less call to stress the heroic ability to resist temptation. The male ascetic body doesn’t become defined again by its determined sexlessness.

As a result of these developments, it seems to me that the Carolingian body isn’t anything like as charged as it is in many earlier periods. The dazzling aesthetics of the ascetic body has largely been lost (although Lynda Coon sees some aspects visible in Hrabanus Maurus). The converse of this is that the sinful body is rarely as potent as symbol of absolute wrong, but simply of human frailty. Neither the female nor the male body seem to have been so ‘good to think with’ for Carolingian thinkers as for those of other eras.

I was too tired to blog while at the International Medieval Congress this year, so here is the first of several reflections on the event. This isn’t systematic coverage of the sessions I heard, more ideas that arose from papers (or particularly juxtapositions of papers). The first arose from a paper on Hrabanus Maurus by Marianne Pohlheimer crossed with one on Dudo of Saint-Quentin by Michael Gelting. Pohlheimer’s paper was about Hrabanus’ writing of a homiliary for Lothar I, arguing that he tried to position himself in a prophetic tradition, using readings from Isaiah and Joel. Gelting, meanwhile, was discussing the purpose of Dudo’s Historia Normannorum, which to the annoyance of historians of early medieval Normandy, is not a conventional narrative. Gelting argues that the work is actually intended for a scholastic setting, at the cathedral school of Rouen. One of its main aims is to provide models of courtly behaviour to emulate and the Norman dukes are described in such courtly terms.

A lot of this paper was following Stephen Jaeger’s ideas about the rise of courtliness in the tenth century. I’ve never been entirely convinced by Jaeger’s arguments, and I still think he’s wrong about the ‘civilising’ effect of courtliness on knights. But Gelting’s paper did include one interesting quote from Dudo about Duke Richard I: ‘Thus made all things to all, none did he harm but did good to all.’ This is a courtly ideal in the classic Jaeger mode, but it’s also building on an idea of St Paul’s about his own conduct. What this (combined with Hrabanus Maurus) got me thinking is that maybe the real change in the tenth century is about how bishops in particular chose to present themselves. (In contrast, Jaeger’s emphasis on a different recruitment pattern for high clerics and a changed educational culture in the Ottonian period doesn’t hold up). The contrast of the inflexible prophet and the adaptable courtier is certainly striking. Hincmar, for example, is undoubtedly a courtier bishop without being a courtly bishop, and he (like Hrabanus) often tries to position himself as a prophetic voice who must speak out, even rebuking kings. Looking in more detail at the ideological relationship between kings and bishops in the Carolingian and Ottonian period might be one way to get a new handle on the rise of courtliness in Jaeger’s sense.

This post will return to the Latin poem ‘Waltharius’ (my current obsession) yet again in a short while, but it starts from a more modern question. If someone e-mails you a joke is that an example of oral or literate culture? The obvious answer is that it’s literate culture: after all, it wouldn’t be much use if you couldn’t read the e-mail. But what if what you’re sent is an audio file of someone telling a joke? How does this differ from someone telling you a joke over the phone or in person? How different is the same basic joke in .wav and .txt form?

If it’s not simply speech v symbols that distinguishes oral and literate culture, what about permanence? The (traditionally) transient speech is contrasted with the (traditionally) permanent writing, which would push audio and video clips towards literate culture. But in that case what about intention? Many e-mails are intended to be read once and then deleted - you don’t normally save all the jokes you receive. In contrast some oral forms are intended to preserve information over sustained periods of time, ranging from mnemonics to ballads. If ours is a purely literate culture, why do people still give lectures or speeches or even read papers? Thinking about the functions of different kinds of communications is important here.

What has prompted these musings is reading scholarly articles on what ‘oral traditions’ possible lie behind ‘Waltharius’. Discussion between literary scholars on such matters soon gets into areas that I know little about, such as discussions of the relevance of Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s work on early twentieth century Balkan oral poetry to early medieval poetry. But what I am struck by, as an outsider in the field, is the extent to which oral tradition in these discussions of the early Middle Ages is very often implicitly regarded as being in a fixed format and a fixed register. It is seen as existing in the form of poetry/song and as being high status, solemn, edifying and possibly having religious overtones. The reasons for this characterisation are partly that the surviving written down versions (or rather, the texts that look most like they may have originally been orally composed) tend to have these characteristics. But I think it’s also that there is a ‘Germanistic’ model (still influential) in which such poems are the way of transmitting tribal traditions, religious beliefs etc (see e.g. Reinhard Wenskus’ idea of ‘Traditionskerne’)

The problem is that the characteristics of this kind of oral tradition, the existence of which is not disputed, are then implicitly generalised to all forms of oral transmission of stories. So for example, Michael Richter, finding examples of Carolingian moralists condemning scurrilous songs, assumes that this reflects a fundamental hostility of the Frankish church to oral culture. He doesn’t consider the possibility that perhaps the songs concerned were actually obscene.

A similar problem is that where there is later evidence of an oral tradition about a figure, this is projected back as existing in a similar form from the beginning. For example, Alois Wolf, discussing the description of Count William of Toulouse in Ermoldus Nigellus’s epic ‘In honorem Ludovicii pii’ comments that some of the characteristics of William (the colour of his horse, his ability to give mighty blows with his fist) are also visible in twelfth century chansons de geste about William of Orange. He sees this as proving the existence of much earlier oral versions of the chansons, on which Ermoldus drew. While it seems unlikely that the chansons de geste derive this information from Ermoldus, and quite probable that they share oral sources, that is a long way from proving that the chansons existed as songs in the ninth century, let alone that Ermoldus drew on them. Ermoldus was writing less than thirty years after the siege of Barcelona, from which this description of William comes. It seems equally likely me to that he was drawing on ‘eyewitness’ accounts/memories and that these informal historical memories also fed songs (either at the time or later). Similarly, the Astronomer’s report in the 840s that the names of those killed in 778 were ‘well-known’ provides a shaky basis for constructing a proto-‘Chanson de Roland’ dating back to then. A lot of hagiography suggests that oral memories could be transmitted down a generation or two without being in song form or going via ‘professional’ memories. When Notker in the 880s quotes reminiscences he’d heard as a child from Adalbert about the Avar wars of the 790s, there’s no suggestion that this was in any form other than anecdotes. Thinking harder about the types of oral communication might avoid some of these potentially misleading assumptions and reassure historians more familiar with written texts that oral theory isn’t just a load of unproveable assumptions.