The Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, has caused a lot of comment with his recent article Breaking faith with Britain. The Guardian even produced a rather hopeless leader that describes the article as ‘potentially dangerous’ and calls on Rowan Williams to condemns the bishop's views, without actually providing any coherent reasons for why they should be rejected.

Having read the full article, I would say it is wrong-headed, (though not dangerous) largely because it combines a rather poor knowledge of history with a rather poor grasp of ethics. Nazir-Ali’s main point is to show how the many of the current ‘liberal’ values in the West (and particularly the UK) are derived ultimately from Biblical principles. Now, in a broad sense this is justified, and I get fed up with the more militant atheists who try to deny this. But it’s important to remember that for hundreds of years many of these Biblical principles were simply ignored by the church of all denominations. It’s disingenuous for the bishop to refer to the Dominicans discussing the natural rights of native Americans and ignore widespread Judeo-Christian acceptance of slavery for thousands of years. And to say that anti-immigrant feeling in the 1960s was due to a breakdown in Christian hospitality is to ignore 700 years or more of violent anti-immigrant behaviour (that’s excluding the St Brice’s day massacre, but including thirteenth-century treatment of the Jews). There are also Biblical ideas (like holy war or stoning women), which are now rightly rejected.

It is also bending history till it breaks for him to talk about the existence of an ‘Evangelical-Enlightenment consensus’ in Britain from the eighteenth century onwards. While the church may have preached the theoretical equality of all men, it was deeply opposed to many of the attempts to obtain their practical equality, as to many other Enlightenment ideas. The church has historically always been disproportionately represented on the side of reaction and oppression.

Nazir-Ali claims essentially that you can’t have these liberal values without Christianity. There is a historical argument that some ethical values are fairly religiously (and hence regionally) specific. The principle of equality developed in Christianity (and Jainism) but not in Hinduism. The Buddhist tradition of non-violence has few parallels among the Abrahamic religions. But it doesn’t follow from this, as Nazir-Ali claims, that Christianity is therefore necessary to sustain such values. The disestablishment of the church of Wales has had no discernable effect on liberal values there. The principles of the English legal system survived their implanting into a US without a monarch. A commitment to scientific discovery once frequently sustained by a desire to understand the wonders of God’s creation has survived most scientists becoming atheists. The ‘values and virtues by which we live’ do not now exist in a vacuum, as Nazir-Ali claims. Equality can be based on the belief that all humans are similarly evolved apes, just as much as on the belief that we are all divine creations.

The most controversial (and weakest part) of the bishop’s argument is when he argues that this ‘moral and spiritual vacuum’ provides no resources with which to resist radical Islamism. Here there seems to be complete intellectual incoherence. In what way is radical Islamism a threat that UK secularism cannot withstand? The radical Islamists have no hope of military victory sufficient to take over the UK. Demographic claims are the same paranoia about being ‘outbred’ that have been proved malignant rubbish for the last 100 years. What is left is the possibility of mass British conversion to Islam, which is frankly ludicrous. If fiercely held ideology can always defeat a less committed and more apathetic majority, why isn’t Britain Nazi, Communist or indeed Catholic today? (His complaint that the church simply gave in to liberal values in the 1960s also ignores the fact that the Catholic church (and other very traditional denominations) didn’t achieve a much better position by digging in their heels against social trends).

What Nazir-Ali wants is more religion in politics. I’m not against that in principle (my religion does influence my political views), but he seems to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. While he rejects coercion and theocracy, he says:

But there is room for persuasion; to argue our case in terms of the common good and human flourishing, and to show how these depend on our spiritual vision.

This is precisely the wrong way round. Britain is now a largely non-Christian society and I cannot see this changing in the near future. To tell non-religious people that they need our religion to sustain values which they already hold is ludicrous if not downright offensive. If we Christians are going to play a useful role in politics, it needs to be by showing why policies and values we support on Christian principles (e.g. care for the poor or the environment) are ones that non-Christians should support in terms of their own non-religious values. If there isn’t a good non-religious reason for a policy (e.g. opposing homosexual equality), then Christians are wasting their time and credibility in arguing for it. Christians (and other religious people) in the UK need to spend less of our time demanding respect from others and more demonstrating practically that we deserve it. And I don’t think the Bishop of Rochester is helping us much in that.

One of the things that any historian of masculinity comes across when listening to papers across a very wide time span (as at the Birkbeck conference) is recurrent norms and models. (This can lead to what Chris Fletcher memorably referred to as the ‘earlier than thou’ tendency, especially among medievalists). There were some interesting discussions about how much continuity there was in norms of masculinity, as opposed to change, with the tendency being to argue for greater continuity than has previously been acknowledged. In particular, Henry French and Mark Rothery, in their long-term study of gentry masculinity from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, were arguing for relatively slow changes of norms in masculinity as transmitted within families, in contrast to the rapid changes seen in conduct literature. They gave examples of how fathers might suggest their sons read improving works that were written decades or even generations earlier. (The suggestion of distinctively family traditions of masculinity within the elite seemed to me to have interesting parallels to the discovery of crusading historians of particular family traditions of crusading).

But family influence doesn’t seem to be sufficient to explain the really long term recurrence of norms. There isn’t any meaningful continuity between masculinity in classical Rome and eighteenth century England and yet there are parallels between the ideals of manhood being promulgated. Which is why I pointed out that we need to consider another method of transmission: the continuity of the male archive.

By that I mean that history and literature are full of the deeds of great men. As a result, those men with access to such written material (which goes increasingly far down the social scale with widening literacy) can take inspiration from a wide range of previous models of historical masculinity. If you’re an eighteenth century gentleman you can read the life of Cicero. If you’re a Victorian and you don’t like current models of manliness, you can find something in chivalric romance or Ancient Greek philosophy that does inspire you. Men (or at least elite men) have the resources available to re-imagine masculinity in this discontinuous way relatively easily. This is in stark contrast to women. As has often been pointed out by women’s historians, women had to go to considerable lengths to find intellectual foremothers; such women rarely appear in traditional histories. As a result, women have traditionally not had the opportunity to rethink their self-image in this way. Even as we accept that there is considerable continuity in norms of both female and male behaviour, we should remember the gendered differences in intellectual options here.

Several speakers at the Birkbeck conference (particularly John Tosh and Harry Brod, who have a very long history in the field) were urging that the history of masculinity reconnects with its roots in the politics of the New Men’s movements, and political engagement was also one theme of an extra lecture associated with the conference: the inaugural lecture for the Birkbeck Institute of Gender and Sexuality. This was given by Judith Halberstam, whose book on ‘Female masculinity’ I’d heard about, but haven’t read; she’s also written on transgender issues. Her lecture was on ‘Bees, bio-piracy and the queer art of cross-pollination’: I found it interesting and accessible, but ultimately frustrating.

Judith Halberstam saw herself as producing ‘alternative political imaginaries’, and was drawing on two sources: recent work on transbiology and animated children’s films on animals (a current interest of hers). She was focusing particularly on bees, which she saw as ‘wonderfully queer’, and pointing out how often they had been used as a political metaphor for many different purposes (both historically and in recent films). Such political ideas turn up even in films ostensibly for children: she showed extracts from Jerry Seinfield’s Bee Movie which came close to communism, where Barry the bee realises how humans exploit bees by taking their honey. (Though, as she points out, the movie then retreats from this political position).

But her discussion of this movie also shows the political problems of a position based on postmodernism. Halberstam was rightly indignant about Bee Movie showing bees as living in heterosexual families, but elsewhere in her talk and the questions afterwards she was saying she didn’t want to privilege the natural. She’s not trying to figure out what happens in nature, she’s not trained to do that and there are no right narratives anyway.

In that case, I wondered, what is wrong with the conjugal family bee? If you’re not going to ‘privilege the natural’, then showing bees in nuclear families or in largely asexual swarms is surely just a matter of preference: there is no reason to choose a more accurate version. And what can academics bring to politics, in that case? Halberstam sees the role of the intellectual as ferreting out alternatives, but it’s not clear that academics are best placed to do that. Her other main case study was the work of the Austrian artist Ines Doujak on biopiracy: see here and here for her artwork ‘Victory Garden’. Doujak is protesting about the exploiting by commercial companies of the genetic resources of the Third World (patenting indigenous plants etc). If the role of the intellectual is largely to show alternatives, isn’t a creative artist better placed to do so than an academic? They can imagine more exotic things, they have a training in hunting for influences and fragments and mosaicing them. What is an academic’s role in this?

And yet Halberstam said that Doujak wasn’t just producing an artwork, she was also producing an ‘archive’, and she’s recently published a book on biopiracy. In this book, she includes details about what companies are doing round the world. In other words, for an effective political project, you need things like e.g. facts, details and all the other knowledge that postmodernists don’t think matter, but which other academics are actually rather good at researching.

So for those of us historians of masculinity who still live in the past-reality-based community, what can we bring (if anything) to the progressive politics of gender, and should we be doing so? There is the obvious possible problem of distorting our research to fit our political ideology, but assuming we can avoid that, is there anything useful we can do (particularly those of us working on pre-modern periods)? I’ll focus here on our effect on how individual men think about gender (as in the New Men’s movement), on the grounds that the personal here is, as usual, political.

I want to go back again to my distinction of masculinity as subjectivity, practice and ideology. John Tosh, as I’ve already remarked, was urging us to study male subjectivity more, but paradoxically, I think that’s the least politically useful topic. The study of male subjectivity tends to be politically useful only when men can see their own feelings reflected in the past, so that they’re led to realise that they’re not the only person who has ever felt like that. (Finding that men had different feelings about a situation in the past is only useful if you’re going to try a kind of historical cognitive-based therapy: ‘that man didn’t feel humiliated by his wife’s betrayal, therefore I needn’t either’). This identification with men in the past may well have been important for some men at the start of the men’s movement, particularly for those, like gays, who had been ‘people without a past’. But now I’d say that such finding of kindred spirits is far more effectively done via internet discussion groups than by a search for emotional predecessors.

The historical study of male practice, in contrast, seems to me politically useful both positively and negatively. Other men have in the past raised their children on their own, and this is how they did it. Other groups of men in the past have chosen to be sexually restrained rather than sexually voracious; we could do so to. The problem is that historical practice can’t easily be disentangled from historical circumstances. It’s very hard to have the same kind of father-son relationship in a modern era where the majority of time is spent in separate institutions (work/school), than it is an early modern period when a father is training a son in a profession in his own household. Pre-modern male practice therefore isn’t particularly helpful for everyday modern life, except for those prepared to drop out of the system completely.

In fact, the most politically useful aspect of masculinity to study is ideology, even though John Tosh thinks that we study this too much. It’s useful firstly, because historians can demonstrate that the ideology of masculinity is an ideology, it’s not just natural and inevitable. For a very neat demonstration of a historical debunking (not by a historian) of an evolutionary psychology paper, see Ben Goldacre on pink. Just showing that masculinity has changed in the past is an important step to showing it can be changed again. And secondly, we can present past images of acceptable masculinity that may be liberating for men: John Tosh mentioned the acceptability of male crying in early nineteenth century culture. How much we contribute to each part of this ideological investigation may vary: I don’t think that the study of medieval masculinity is going to contribute many positive role models for men, but it is extremely useful for demolishing myths about the eternal male. Historians of gender can have a political role while staying within a traditional framework of academic standards, but they do need to understand carefully exactly what it is they can contribute.

One of the themes that kept on cropping up in discussions at the Birkbeck conference on masculinity is the extent to which historians of masculinity should be exploring all-male institutions/relationships as opposed to male-female interactions. To some extent this reflects different research traditions within particular periods: a lot of Victorian masculinity study, for example, has concentrated on public schools, while early modernists have focused on the patriarchal family. But it also reflects deeper tensions within the field. On the one hand you have medievalists (in particular) arguing that changes in masculinity as an ideology are being driven by conflicts between men far more than any change in women’s social position. On the other hand, you also have those coming from a women’s history perspective (or those with an activist bent) seeing the danger of eliminating women again from historical discussion.

I found some of Ruth Mazo Karras’ ideas very useful here. On the one hand, she was criticizing the tendency of some feminist historians to imply the existence of a ‘patriarchal cabal’ (a group of powerful men who in every age gather together to plot how they can keep women down this time). On the other hand, she was also making a point which made me rethink some of my ideas: you can’t just dismiss the misogyny that appears prominently, for example, at the time of the Gregorian reforms, as not ‘really’ directed at women. She made me realise that I do have to think harder about misogyny, and its motivation in particular, and this is my first attempt to do this.

There’s an obvious immediate problem with the terminology. Misogyny, in one sense, already announces its own motivation in its etymology: a hatred of women. But the use of ‘sexism’ instead doesn’t seem strong enough for many of the medieval examples: it’s a rather bloodless term. If I use misogyny here it’s as a shorthand, and I’m open to suggestions of any better terms to use for this kind of serious prejudice against women.

There seem to me four usefully distinct motivational categories of misogyny (with the obvious provisio that motives may be multiple/mixed). Again, the labels are very provisional, and I’d be interested in suggestions for more expressive labeling (or a different typology).

1) Psychological misogyny. An irrational hatred and fear of women. I don’t here want to go into discussions of whether it’s caused by personal trauma, socially or politically induced.

2) Privilege-holders’ misogyny. This is the kind that the ‘patriarchal cabal’ theorists tend to be focusing on: men trying to prevent female competition for their opportunities/privileges, whether it’s well-paid work or the control of society.

3) Instrumental misogyny. This is using misogyny to achieve other (often political) aims in competitions between men. For example, while there has been misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton as a presidential contender (and thus a competitor), she was also subjected to much misogynistic criticism as First Lady, and there has been much criticism of Michelle Obama. The aim of much of this criticism has been to attack the husbands of these women: implicitly (or explicitly) they have failed to keep their wives in ‘the proper place’, and instead have been unduly influenced by them/subservient to them. (Kate Cooper’s work, particularly ‘Insinuations of womanly influence: an aspect of the Christianization of the Roman aristocracy’. Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992):150-164, shows the long, long, history of this tactic). At a more general level, the competitive celibacy of both the late fourth century West and the Gregorian reforms relied heavily on such misogyny. The most superior men were precisely those who had least to do with the inferior and viler sex.

4) Institutional misogyny/sexism. In an organization or other structure, even if individuals do not consciously intend sexist outcomes, they can nevertheless repeatedly. In particular, any institution with very few (or no) women in it is likely to make many institutionally misogynistic decisions because it doesn’t know about/consider women’s points of view: it is run by men and its image of humanity is a man. For example, the limits on women’s hours of work in factories imposed by the nineteenth century Factory Acts have been seen negatively by some feminist historians. Such work, they point out, was relatively well-paid, while there was no attempt to set limits to the longer hours worked by women in domestic service. Yet it seems unlikely that Parlimentarians were genuinely concerned to keep women down. Their aim was surely to benefit women, but in an all-male government, it is not surprising that their plans were ill-thought out and unsuccessful.

This typology seems to me to allow us to talk about intentions and effects of policies more sensibly than a blanket use of ‘misogyny’. But it is important to remember two provisos. One is that the ‘badness’ of the motivation does not necessarily correlate with the harmfulness of the effect. Provisions that are planned from sheer hatred of women may be ineffectual; provisions that are actually intended to ‘benefit’ women may in practice have more significant negative effects. And secondly, that although instrumental and institutional misogyny are not motivated by the same urge to oppress women as the other forms, they are based on the fact that women have already been oppressed in the past. It is because women have already been judged as inferior that for men to be associated with them is negative. It is because women have already been excluded partially or totally from institutions that their interests are not considered.

So where does this leave the study of all male institutions and relationships? I think that we do need to study them and acknowledge their significance to the development of masculinity. Such ideologies aren’t developed just in relationship to women. But, as was pointed out at the conference, even in such all-male institutions, we mustn’t forget women. Many supposedly all-male institutions (such as the historic university) actually had many women at the margins (servants, prostitutes etc). And when no women at all were present (as on naval ships), masculinity could be contested between groups of men only because women had already been excluded from an institution. Women are still there in all of history, even when they’re not.

Given that the title of the Birkbeck conference included the question ‘what is masculinity?’, it’s not surprising that there was so much discussion of definitions and approaches, until at times my eyes started to glaze over. Should we be looking at masculinity or masculinities or gender history or men’s history or ‘critical studies of men and masculinities’ (which was Harry Brod’s suggestion, taken from the title of one of the journals in the field)?

My normal take on masculinity is that what I am studying is an ideology, and that therefore my work comes under cultural history, but John Tosh, among others, made some quite pertinent comments about too great an emphasis on the ‘cultural turn’, as though masculinity and gender was purely a rhetorical effect. So I am coming to think that maybe masculinity’s better seen as a matter of three components/levels: ideology, practice, subjectivity. (This breakdown isn’t exactly the same as anything discussed in the conference, though it owes a lot to Joan Wallach Scott, among others).

The ideology component of masculinity is relatively easy to see in most historical periods: a cluster of norms about what men ought to be like and ought to do. As Judith Butler and others have pointed out, however, gender needs to be performed: men and women need to act like men and women in order to be accepted as such. So you get a second component/level of masculinity: practice, how men (individually and in groups) actually behave. Finally, there’s subjectivity: the ideology only really ‘works’ if it gets into men’s minds (or at least some men’s minds). But this doesn’t necessarily happen: norms can be (to some extent) ignored or resisted or subverted, practices can be purely external.

I think John Tosh is right that the main emphasis in the historical study of masculinity has been on ideology, and that male subjectivity has been neglected. There are two reasons for this: the origin of the field and the nature of the sources themselves. The history of masculinity, as was pointed out several times, developed from women’s history. Women’s history to a large extent started from an exploration of women’s past experiences: the urge to discover what previous women did and also what they thought. Women’s subjective experience was thus embedded in the field from the start. (In contrast, I think conceptually the study of men’s subjective experience has always suffered from a) the vague feeling that men don’t have much of an observable internal life (coming from the stereotypes of men as less emotional or emotionally self-conscious) and b) the rather more substantial point that part of male privilege may be not having to think about one’s own gender, just as in societies where whiteness is normative, whites don’t need to think about their colour to the same extent that blacks do).

If women’s history started with female subjectivity and practice, the link to the history of masculinity was via ideology. Once you move from the reality of women’s subordinate position to explore historical ideologies of why women are subordinate/inferior, it’s obvious to link this to ideologies of why men are dominant/superior. (There is still intense debate in looking at how ideologies of masculinity relate to ideologies about women: I’ll discuss that more in a further post).

Looked at like this, then women’s history has moved from the personal to the political (which makes obvious sense in the light of feminist slogans), while the history of masculinity still tends to stick at the political level, and needs to look more at the personal. The problem in doing this is the sources (at least for medievalists and early modernists).

It’s relatively easy to study dominant ideologies of masculinity in most historic societies. If there are subcultures that have their own ideology, but that aren’t writing it down, this can be far harder to see. We don’t know, for example, what a peasant ideology of masculinity might look like, until at least the early modern period.

With the second component, the practice of masculinity, there are even bigger gaps. We know things about some aspects of some men’s lives, but there is an awful lot that we don’t know. I’ve tried to look at what happens in ninth century marriage disputes, but this relies on a handful of cases from elite men. If you want to look at medieval father-son relations before very roughly 1000 AD, you’re limited to discussions about kings/rulers; for the high middle ages you can start discussing noble/knightly families, from the late Middle Ages you start to have sufficient information to look at gentry families (there was an interesting paper by Rachel Moss on the Cely family).

As for male subjectivity, I’ve argued before that we just can’t get access to it for the medieval period. You need to be able to compare substantial collections of personal documents (such as private letters or diaries) to be able to say much useful. There’s a team down at Exeter University looking at seventeenth to nineteenth century gentry in this way, but I’m not sure you can get much further back. (My impression is that medieval private letter collections, such as the Celys, the Pastons etc by and large don’t give you much in the way of emotions beyond the conventional).

What all this means is that the study of medieval masculinity is inevitably going to be the study of the elite (although this elite gradually expands) and that it’s not going to get as ‘personal’ as we might like. But it does challenge those of us working in the field in two ways. One is to see if somewhere, somehow, we can squeeze a few case studies or even an emotion or two our of our recalcitrant sources. The other is that even if we can’t answer these questions about practice/subjectivity, we should at least remind ourselves of them occasionally. Derek Neal asked the question of whether it mattered to (late) medieval clerics if laymen made them feel unmanly? He didn’t have an answer (and I’m not sure there is the evidence to find one), but it’s still one of the many questions worth thinking about.

The conference at Birkbeck I’ve just been to on ‘What is masculinity? How useful is it as a historical category?’ was fascinating, if rather overwhelming at times. I wasn’t the only person who felt serious intellectual overload by the end, and I am likely to end up blogging a lot about this, partly just to try and sort out in my own mind what I heard. But there was one issue that particularly bugged me as a scholar.

We had the usual implicit attitude from John Tosh (one of the plenary speaker, who studies modern history) that the history of masculinity is really the history of masculinity from the eighteenth century onwards and that nothing significant happened before. I knew that there were a number of medievalists speaking at the conference, so that didn’t really worry me. But then we got the medievalist plenary speaker, Ruth Mazo Karras. She gave a really good talk, starting with the comment about how the Middle Ages tended to be a static other in many discussions by modernists.

She was also attempting to periodize the history of masculinity (and made the really important point that unlike women’s history, it’s not likely to produce many very different periodisations, because traditional historical chronology is already based on what changed for men). To her, however, medieval masculinity started...with the Gregorian reforms in the late eleventh century. (She saw it as ending in the mid-fifteenth century, but that’s a different matter).

Professor Karras wasn’t alone with this: a number of other papers on medieval masculinity started with the eleventh century, against an (implicit) background of a first millennium AD of nothing much happening (even as St Anthony and John Cassian got referenced). I raised this issue, and people did take the point, but I think there is still a conceptual issue of where the early Middle Ages fits into the longue durée of masculinity (or even pre-modern masculinity).

The argument for putting the turning point at the Gregorian Reformation is essentially that this is when clerical celibacy starts. Except, of course, that clerical celibacy becomes the official ideology of the Western church at the end of the fourth century, and this never wavers. You can say that celibacy’s not enforced...except that it is, by the Carolingians, and if you say that the Carolingians don’t enforce clerical celibacy successfully, how successfully is it enforced after the Gregorian reformation? There’s also the problem that however you look at Carolingian masculinity, it’s pretty near impossible to see it as anything like classical or even late antique masculinity. Charlemagne just would not look right in a toga.

I think it does make sense to make clerical celibacy play an important role: it is significant that for the whole of the medieval period, the ruling elite is institutionally split. My argument then would be for continuity at the broadest level between the conversion of the Roman Empire and the Reformation: the idea that there are two ways of life/forms of masculinity possible for elite men. (As Peter Brown points out, this wasn’t inevitable: Islam, for example, manages without a ‘priesthood’ distinguished by lifestyle). Then I’d argue for three sub-periods within this: very roughly, c 300 AD-sixth century, sixth century-Gregorian Reformation (c 1050), and 1050-Reformation.

I would see the first sub-period (late antique) as ending with the decline and disappearance of the ideal of the elite Roman civilian/senator. You can argue when in the sixth century such men vanished (or all became bishops), but it’s very hard to claim they continue beyond 600. If all the lay elite are expected to have a military role, that makes a clear difference from both the classical ideal of the leisured senator and the sixteenth century rise to dominance (at least in England) of a gentry class that did not expect to fight routinely.

If in the first sub-period the main choice for elite men was between the life of a senator and that of a cleric, in the second sub-period the contrast is between warrior and clerical roles. It’s tempting to say that the differences between the two roles disappear at times, but that goes a little too far. At the ideological level, counts and bishops always remained clearly distinct. Even when clerics behaved like laymen, they did not discard most of the trappings of clerical office: their titles clearly meant something to them. And I think there’s also an argument that even in the case of clerical marriage, the aim was not to destroy the difference between lay and clerical life. Instead, clerical marriage for higher religious (abbots, canons, bishops) tended to be aimed at creating dynasties. It was thus an alternative way of keeping a separation between the church and the lay world, by creating a hereditary class of churchmen.

Finally, my third sub-period would be Professor Karras’s medieval masculinity (though I’d see it as extending a little longer), with clerical celibacy now established as the sole way of keeping church and state separate. It also sees the development of the lay masculine ideal from the warrior to the knight. You don’t have to go as far as Stephen Jaeger’s claims about a new refinement to accept that ever more complex class-based codes of conduct for elite men do profoundly alter how masculinity is understood.

Put like this, I think I’m back to being a researcher of medieval masculinity, albeit early medieval masculinity. Now I just have to persuade everybody else of this.

An interview and writing a conference paper have kept me from blogging for a bit, but they’ve once again got me thinking about why my research and my interest in early medieval history matters, or more specifically why it should matter to people who aren’t into medieval history. I came across a very interesting blog post on this a few weeks ago, by Timothy Burke of Swarthmore College, which tries to list broad justifications for writing history as a whole. I wanted to take his categories and see what early medieval topics might fit into them. I’m choosing topics, rather than specific books, since a book may often fit into several categories.

1. The past is prologue: a contemporary issue or practice has its roots or determinants in the history we are studying.
2. The past is not prologue: a contemporary issue or practice that is commonly understood to be determined by history is not, and we’ll demonstrate that by telling you about that history.
I’m putting these together, because for most of the themes below you can argue either for continuity or discontinuity with the early Middle Ages, and people have done both: ethnic/national/European/Western identity, English constitution, practices and beliefs of the Catholic church

3. The past is analogue: a contemporary issue or problem resembles some past issue or problem; the historical example has just enough distance from our own situation that we understand ourselves better.
The Roman empire as analogue (particularly to the US), relations between different religions and cultures (whether positive or negative)

4. The past is another country: our own times are made more particular by looking at just how different the past really was.
Most of early medieval history falls into this category, but there are some areas where this is particularly significant: mentalities and intellectual history (particularly political thought), gender, demography (when you realise just how nasty, brutish and short life was).

5. The past helps us make N as big as possible: it is a source of data for making generalizations, formulating models, constructing claims about human universals.
These kind of models are mainly useful in socio-economic history, for example, in looking at pre-industrial societies or the mechanics of empire. Ideas of human universals are also less usefully evoked e.g. in models of gender roles as eternal.

6. The past challenges generalizations, models and universals through attention to particulars and microhistories.
I don’t know of any microhistories for Europe for the early medieval period (though there’s Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou for the late medieval period). Anyone know of any? There has been useful recent work done in demolishing some of the early medieval ‘universals’ e.g. ideas about ‘barbarians’ or ‘Germanic culture’ or ‘the church’.

7. The past is procedural: we study it to learn how dynamic processes or change works out over time (without worry so much about the consequences of the history we are studying).
I think a lot of recent work on both the ‘Transformation of the Roman World’ and the ‘Feudal Mutation’ could be described in this way: there is less emphasis than in earlier works on such events as being about the roots of our own society and more about why change happens.

8. Hindsight is 20/20: we study a frozen moment in time because we can understand far better the total spectrum of social relationships, causal relationships, etc. than we can understand the present (here we choose richly knowable examples to study).
Not sure there are many such moments in our period.

9. Nothing actually ever changes in history; change is an illusion; some systems or practices always remain the same. We study the past the same way we would study the present, to understand a single system which is continuous over time.
This is now limited mainly to the more doctrinaire Marxists and feminists, who want to discuss the eternal oppression of the lower classes/women.

10. The unknowability of the past is humbling: we study it to learn about the permanent limits to our knowledge, or about the difficult range of epistemologies involved in knowing the past.
Given the fragmentary sources, just about every topic in early medieval history explores this theme at some point.

11. The past is ideology or discourse: we don’t really study it, we just build powerful contemporary claims from our representations of history.
Since medieval history was one of the first subjects seriously studied (and we are still sometimes using editions printed in the 16th century), there has been a lot of work done on the historiography of the Middle Ages over the past 400+ years.

12. The past is detection: we study it because we like solving puzzles and mysteries.
There is a particular concern in the study of the early Middle Ages about what our sources are lying about or concealing from us: the narrative of Carolingian history, for example, is interesting because of the efforts at systematic propaganda by the regime. The construction of genealogies and chronologies is also full of these puzzle-like elements, in a way less often seen in better documented societies.

13. The past is entertainment or personal enlightenment: we study it because it has great stories, or because of the pleasures of narrative.
Because early medieval historians liked strange and memorable stories, early medievalists have some of the best of them at our disposal.

14. The past is heritage: we study it to form or enforce national, ethnic, religious or personal identity, or to combat attempts to destroy heritage.
15. The past as it is known in modern Western society is anti-heritage: it is associated with imperialism or domination, and we study historiography to combat or contest that domination.
The early medieval period is significant for many Europeans as the moment when ethnic identities and histories (from Scots to Slavs) first appear in written sources. But it’s also the age of the ‘first English imperialism’, among others. And much of the early drive for early medieval women’s history/gay history came for the wish for ‘a history of our own’, which was simultaneously combating the dominant belief that women and gays had no history (or no ‘important’ history).

One reply to the original blog post wanted to generalise 15 to ‘history as a call-to-action, as motivation to change the future’. I don’t think much early medieval history is motivated by this (or rather, I think people who want to change the future don’t normally start from early medieval history), but you might put something like John Boswell’s work on homosexuality in here.

16. The past is memorial: we study (recite it, really) it to honor what people did or sacrificed on our behalf.
This is most common now in some forms of religious history, with an emphasis on saints (particularly missionary saints or founders of religious orders) as creators of ‘our’ church. I think it’s now less common for political or ‘national’ heroes to be memorialised in this way, though possibly the cult of Clovis still reveals this.

I would add another category:
17. The past as possibility: the road not taken
Even though I’ve done some speculating myself, I’m not a great fan of early medieval counterfactual history, which often seems not to get much beyond the level of Edward Gibbon’s idea that if it hadn’t been for Charles Martel we’d all be Muslims. But I do think there has been some useful work done on ‘alternative’ church history, which has pointed out that the development of many doctrines in their particular forms was not inevitable. (One example is Mark Jordan’s ‘The invention of sodomy’.)

I would say that my own research predominantly ends up being under heading 4 (the past as another country): gender then was different, which also has implications from heading 2: our current gender system is not simply derived from earlier culture. But I also see my work falling more generally into 3 (past as analogue), as a study of how Christianity is adapted to the moral norms of a particular society. I was writing a chapter on attitudes to war in the Carolingian period in 2002, and couldn’t help but be struck by parallels on the justification of war. And I’ve written in most of the other categories at some time in this blog.

So for readers of this blog, are there any important early medieval examples of the categories I’ve missed (it obviously focuses more on my particular fields of interest)? And why do you write (or read) history, whether it’s medieval or not?