Magistra et Mater

Church growth, negative evangelism and beta churches

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:02:08 +0200

In a recent comment on my post on evangelical attitudes to homosexuality, Tony Carr claimed that: "Throughout history, the "appeasement" churches have declined, and the "fundamental" churches have grown." Putting that in a slightly less prejudicial way, it's frequently stated that in the modern West theologically conservative churches grow and theologically liberal ones decline and that statistics on changing congregation sizes backs this up. These statistics are often used either to attack theological liberalism in Anglicanism or to gloat/worry over the disappearance of liberal denominations. However, the definitional and statistical issues involved in this argument are particularly tricky, so I want to try and unpick some of them (and also draw on a very interesting website I found by a Christian mathematician).

One immediate problem is in defining theologically conservative and theologically liberal churches, especially because churches and denominations are often not internally homogeneous. This is particularly the case in the Church of England, which has a large theological spectrum with several different dimensions (e.g. Protestant versus Catholic practices as well as conservative versus liberal theology). For this reason, it's entirely possible for what looks like growth and decline in individual congregations to be largely a result of internal sorting.

For example, suppose in town X there are 5 Anglican churches, each initially with a congregation of 100. Suppose also that in each congregation there are 40 conservative members and 60 liberals, making an overall total of 500 Anglicans, 200 of whom are conservatives and 300 liberals. Suppose further that one of the churches (St Stephen's) now gets a new more conservative/fundamental minister who preaches exactly the old-time religion that all the conservative Anglicans like, but that repels the liberals within the town, and that members of the congregations then change churches to reflect this.

The end result would then be that St Stephen's, as a "pure" conservative church, now has a congregation of 200: its 40 original conservatives, plus 40 from each of the other 4 churches. Meanwhile, the remaining 4 liberal churches now have 75 members each: their 60 original liberals, plus 15 refugees from St Stephen's (assuming that those liberals leaving there move evenly to the four other churches). Therefore, St Stephen's has grown by 100% and the other churches have declined by 25% without a single person changing either their denomination or their theology. In fact, St Stephen's might show considerable growth even if they actually drive some people away from Christianity altogether. Suppose only 40 of the original liberals in the congregation move to other churches and 20 leave the church altogether. St Stephen's still grows to 200 and the other churches congregations fall even further (to 70 members each), even though it is St Stephen's that is the reason for these Anglicans leaving.

Of course, it would be equally possible for the statistics to go the other way round. If just one of the church in the town had a minister or policies that particularly appealed to liberals in other congregations (they are gay-friendly or have a particular enthusiasm for interfaith dialogue etc) then they may similarly grow at the expense of other churches. But I've put it this way round because it tends particularly to be theological conservatives who encourage the leaving of one congregation for a "purer" one. The example I've given also shows another important point: growth figures for relatively small churches can look very impressive without actually referring to many people.

If you're looking at figures for growth or decline of denominations, therefore, it makes sense to focus on ones which are large, relatively homogenous within themselves and which are quite dissimilar from other denominations (so that you're not just seeing people move between very similar churches). And once you do that the claim that conservative denominations are growing looks a lot shakier. For example, the Catholic Church has serious problems in the US and in Europe (its numbers are holding up or growing in the US only because of Catholic immigrants and are in slow decline in Britain). The largest Protestant denomination in the US, the Southern Baptist Convention is declining and so are some other evangelical denominations. This isn't to deny that liberal denominations are also in trouble (and in some cases their numbers are declining much more steeply), but they do show that theological conservatism alone is not the answer.

Which brings me to a very interesting website: Church Growth Modelling run by John Hayward of the University of Glamorgan. Hayward has developed several models of church growth, essentially adapted from epidemiology. Christianity here is something that non-believers "catch" from enthusiastic church members, but such enthusiasts do not keep on making new recruits. Their evangelical "infectiousness" declines and they became inactive as recruiters, even while continuing in the church. Hayward builds up several possible layers of the model, as shown in this diagram:

Hayward's model of church renewal

He then runs simulations using different parameters to explore both the short-term and long-term effects of two key factors: the reproduction rate of individual enthusiasts (bringing others into the church who then go on to bring more new members) and also the success of the church at retaining the children of believers to become committed adult members of the church (whether active or inactive). Hayward's models are particularly interesting because they suggest that short-term expansion can sometimes be at the expense of longer-term growth and that sustained long-term growth is very difficult to maintain (although a stable higher size can be maintained for longer). Hayward's models of long-term decline are also revealing: for example he calculates that on present trends the Church of England will be down to around 80,000 members by around 2100.

Hayward's models aren't the only possible way of looking at church growth (and he admits himself that there are some unquantifiable factors that he can't model), but they are very useful for thinking about how churches behave. They're also potentially useful for looking at other religious organisations; I immediately wondered whether a similar model would also explain the rapid growth and then decline/stabilization of new monastic orders in the Middle Ages.

Another paper by Hayward also provides an interesting definition of a strict church (p. 3): "A strict church is one that has a strict entry policy, a policy that prevents a number of people from joining the church who would have otherwise wished to join. Conformity is expressed through the recruitment policy. Thus a strict church will be pure in the sense that people are filtered out by some set criteria."

Hayward's criterion is interesting precisely because it reminds us that a strict church isn't necessarily a conservative one: a church that didn't care what you believed about Biblical inerrancy or evolution as long as you were willing to sell all your goods and give the money to the poor is an extremely strict one. But it does also apply reasonably well to many theologically conservative denominations and churches: if you have to sign up (literally or figuratively) to a detailed doctrinal statement or commit to attending several services a week or to avoid drinking alcohol, that is a deterrent to the less zealous. He goes on to show that under some certain assumptions about how strictness affects the enthusiasm of new members who are accepted, a strict policy may in the long-run be more effective than a more lenient one of letting everyone who wants to join a church do so. (Although a too-strict church may also die out, like the Shakers).

So why don't all churches do more evangelism and hence bring more people in? Is it just lack of belief or liberal wishy-washiness that prevents this? Here, I think there's one arrow missing from Hayward's renewal model (depicted above). Hayward pictures enthusiasts as having either a positive or neutral effect on unbelievers. I think he needs an extra arrow to explore the possibility of negative evangelism. Hayward allows for adults already in the church to leave it and become actively disillusioned with it (his "active reversion"). Such "hardened unbelievers" are temporarily resistant to all conversion attempts. But it's also possible to become hostile to a church/religion that you're not part of as a result of unpleasant contacts with its enthusiasts. Unbelievers can be turned to hardened unbelievers without going "through" the church first.

Such negative evangelism can take many forms. At its extreme, major events like the Catholic church's handling of child abuse scandals or the militancy of some Islamic sects can turn potential converts off entire denominations or the thought of any kind of religion. At the other end, door to door missionaries or just an unpleasant encounter in a church playgroup may make people reluctant to engage with Christians again. I'm not sure how you could quantify the effects of such negative evangelism, but they certainly do exist. I suspect that many people in more liberal churches have experienced such negative evangelism themselves and are therefore wary about too explicitly missionary an outreach.

The other point to make is that Hayward's model, because it's adapted from epidemiology, is a supply-side model; if there's enough of a supply of Christianity, some people will "catch" it. He doesn't model the demand for religion and particular types of religion. There's an interesting assumption shared by both the more conservative Christians and the more 'missionary' atheists, that there is only one real form of Christianity and that is fundamentalism. Any other kind is lukewarm, wishy-washy stuff that appeals to no-one. So if you don't believe literally in the Bible you can't really be a Christian and you're inevitably going to end up as an atheist.

That black and white assumption, however, goes against the whole grain of modern life. People don't just want to have two choices on anything; and as the metaphor of the religious marketplace suggests, religions and denominations are increasingly competing against one another. The evidence that there is no demand for liberal Christianity seems to me very weak. It may only be a niche product, but some people are still going to want it.

And it's possible to see where that niche might fit roughly into Hayward's renewal model. He assumes that the active and inactive believers (in terms of recruitment) are both within the same church or denomination. But the same model would also work if we presume that enthusiasts whose enthusiasm fades or inactive believers who are renewed move between two different type of churches: strict evangelical ones (call them alpha churches) and more lenient and less mission-focused churches (call them beta churches). If moving denominations or churches becomes standard practice (and it's already very common in the US), you are likely to see more of this happen.

I've discussed this idea before, in terms of hard and soft churches, and as commentators then pointed out, there is earlier work on the topic. What's new in Hayward's work is the attempts at quantification, and if I had more time and energy it would be interesting to combine Hayward's model with data on switches between denominations. I suspect this might show that some denominations (such as the US Episcopal Church might survive for longer than expected via influxes of disillusioned Catholics.

I'm less certain about what the future holds for liberal denominations within the UK: it would be perfectly possible for liberal Christianity as whole to survive while some individual denominations effectively disappeared. To an outsider like me, it's not clear whether there's enough distinctiveness between say, URC churches and Methodist ones to keep them both going. The niche for a lenient congregational-based church with a low-church style of worship looks overcrowded at the moment, and there are also new contenders for such markets, such as the Emerging church movement. But if strict churches are going to stay strict, they need the lenient beta churches to absorb the non-zealous or no-longer zealous. Despite the hostility of traditionalists towards liberals (and vice versa) there is real symbiosis between them and we ought to think realistically about that.

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496 and all that

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:53:59 +0100

Both the last IHR Earlier Middle Ages seminar of 2012 and the first of 2013 were on the Merovingians: first up we had Edward James on "Visualising the Merovingians in nineteenth-century France" and then Étienne Renard from Namur on "From Merovech to Clovis: what can we really know?"

Edward James' talk, as he explained, was really a companion piece to an article he's just published: "The Merovingians from the French Revolution to the Third Republic", Early Medieval Europe 2012 20 (4) 450–471. He started by talking about the changes during the nineteenth century in school history textbooks. There was a noticeable contrast between two of the most popular textbooks during the century. Laure de Saint-Ouen’s Histoire de France depuis l’établissement de la monarchie jusquà nos jours (1827) recounts the history of France as series of 71 chapters on kings from Pharamond to Louis XVI. Just over fifty years later, Ernest Lavisse, La première année d’histoire en France: leçons, récits, reflections (1884) (later entitled Histoire de France: Cours élémentaire and reissued up to 1950), after a chapter on Clovis and his baptism, states: ‘The descendants of Clovis were almost all bad kings’ and promptly goes onto the Carolingians.

Such changes were a reaction to the end of the French monarchy (after its restoration between 1814-1848) and also to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and drew on French revolutionary ideas putting the emphasis on histories of peoples rather than kings, and of the Gallo-Roman rather than Germanic roots of France. The latter is still intermittently a live issue: when Pope John Paul I went to Reims to celebrate the supposed anniversary of Clovis' baptism, protestors took to the streets in Paris shouting "Vercingetorix not Clovis."

In this talk, Edward was concentrating on visual evidence, looking at a tradition of French historical painting that he argued was inspired by possibly the "greatest historian of the early nineteenth century", Walter Scott. One of the key figures was Paul Delaroche, described by one contemporary as a "court painter of decapitated monarchs", such as in his famous picture of Lady Jane Grey awaiting execution.

Delaroche's more intimate style, influenced by Dutch genre painting, moved away from an academic style of historical painting that tended to be despised by critics as "arte pompier" (fireman art), because there was normally a man in what looked like a fireman's helmet lurking somewhere in the scene. After 1830, however, there were more serious attempts to use archaeological evidence to get costumes etc correct, while technological advances in printing, such a lithography and steel engraving made illustrated histories more widely available.

The Merovingian scenes that these painters were portraying, meanwhile, were often inspired by Augustin Thierry who wrote a series of articles (‘Nouvelles Lettres sur l’histoire de France: Scènes du sixième siècle’) taking the goriest bits of Gregory of Tours and increasing their luridness. (He also increased the barbarity of the Merovingians by using "Frankish" versions of their names e.g. "Hlodewig" for Clovis and "Hilperik" for Chilperic. (Charlemagne, incidentally, is "Karl-le-Grand").

The result of this mix of archaeology and enthusiastic narrative include paintings such as Laurence Alam-Tadema's The Education of the Children of Clovis where small children practice indoor axe-throwing:

Other artists also painted the Merovingians, such as the illustrations that Jean-Paul Laurens did for Thierry's book, described by Edward as including lots of images of conspirators in dark cellars. There were even pictures of non-existent Merovingian atrocities painted, such as Évariste Luminais' picture of ‘Les énervés de Jumièges’ (also known as "The Sons of Clovis II"), recording a legend that Queen Balthild had two of her rebellious sons hamstrung and left to die on a raft on the Seine.

Edward did point out that there weren't that many nineteenth-century paintings of the Merovingians; topics from the fifteenth to seventeenth century were far more popular. And the urge to do distinctly Merovingian paintings seems to have died out fairly soon: from the late nineteenth century, pictures showing Gallic and Frankish warriors become very hard to distinguish, merging into the general barbarian prototype of Asterix. This perhaps reflected the view, articulated by the historian Fustel de Coulanges, that seeing French history as a battle between the races of Gauls and Franks was unproductive. Instead, French history was seen as developing from a single barbarian phase before being civilised by the Romans and Christianity.

This study of the nineteenth century is part of a larger project by Edward on reactions to the Merovingians from the Carolingian period onwards. But the re-imagining of Merovingian history was already taking place under the Merovingians themselves. Étienne Renard's paper was an attempt to make sense of the information for Frankish kings before Childeric I, without assuming that we can just follow Gregory of Tours' account, given that Gregory was writing more than 100 years later and had no first person information on Childeric's predecessors.

We were given a fairly detailed handout, but Étienne was speaking in French and my knowledge of fifth-century history isn't brilliant, so apologies if what follows is scrambled. Most of the talk was about Chlodio and Merovech. Gregory says that Chlodio was king of the Franks and of very noble family (HF 2-9); we know both from Gregory and Sidonius Appolinaris that Chlodio conquered the Artois region, but according to Sidonius, he was defeated by the Roman emperor Majorian around 445-450. Chlodio was said to come from Dispargum and Étienne argued for this being Duisburg in Brabant, rather than in Thuringia.

One of Étienne's main arguments was an attempt to deduce information on the possible relationship between Merovech and Chlodio from two Merovingian genealogies. These were probably composed under Clothar II in the early seventh century, but survive only in three tenth-century manuscripts. Both include some early names in common: someone who might be Chlodio, his son (called Glodobaud or Chlodobaud), and then Childeric and Chlodoveus (= Clovis). One of the genealogies included three extra names between Chlodobaud and Childeric: Mereveus (= Merovech), Hildebric and Genniodus. Étienne argued these were maternal ancestors: Genniodus was possibly called something like Gennhildis and was Childeric's mother, Hildebric and Merovius are then her father and grandfather. One version of the genealogy had simply omitted these names, while another had attempted to fold them into a father to son list.

It's fair to say that this idea didn't convince the audience overall, but then that included a fair proportion of people (myself included) who tend to see authors of genealogies as quite happy to make things up as they go along rather than trying, however clumsily, to preserve earlier traditions.

Étienne also went on to talk about Childeric, but since by that point both my concentration and his time were running out, all I can add is that he was trying to put together Gregory's account of Childeric being exiled (HF 2-12) with Priscus' account of Attila having a Frankish prince as an ally and Childeric's pagan funeral to argue that Childeric may have stayed at Attila's court for some years. The significance of the burial, including the sacrificed horses, got some discussions going afterwards, especially when Jon Jarrett pointed out that Childeric couldn't have organised his burial himself, so what did this say about Clovis and his attitude to his father? Étienne wondered if there were Thuringian parallels, given that Childeric's wife Basina may have been Thuringian, and added that the nearest parallels for the burial in the period were from Moravia.

We thus ended with an event that we could be reasonably sure happened and can be fairly closely dated, but whose background and significance we're not at all sure of. It's also one marked by seemingly gratuitous violence (at least for the horse-lovers among us), but that had obvious symbolic importance to someone. Somehow that seems to sum up the fate of the entire Merovingian dynasty, doomed to spend the next 1500 years providing grisly material for fantasies.

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Humiliation and obscurity

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:13:04 +0100

Sometimes I find the most intriguing seminars in the IHR Earlier Medieval History series aren't the ones on immediately relevant topics, but ones that highlight a concept potentially applicable to many cultures. The next two seminars from the autumn term that I want to blog about both reflect this: Annette Kehnel talking about "Rituals of power through the ages: a history of civilization?" and Sinead O'Sullivan on "The sacred and the obscure: Greek and the Carolingian reception of Martianus Capella".

Annette's very wide-ranging talk was interested in the ritual humiliation of kings and other rulers during inauguration rituals. She started from a C14 source that discusses how the future Duke of Carinthia was dressed in peasant clothing and slapped in the face by a peasant before he could ascend the throne. She also commented on some of the elements of "weakness" displayed in ordines for making Christian emperors, especially the Mainz ordo found in the Romano-German Pontifical. In this, the king is fetched from his bed to the church, which he enters supported by the bishops. He must take off his weapon and lie on the ground before the altar. He is tested with interrogations as to whether he will fulfil his duties as a king. His anointing, while it sanctifies him, also makes him like a child, someone being baptized or someone who is sick. During it he kneels, with ritually bare shoulders; he is then dressed by the bishop. He has to bow to the person crowning him when he is crowned and the crown is literally too heavy for him to support: Annette reckoned the German crown weighed 3.5 kilograms and was so heavy it had to be replaced by a lighter one before the end of the service.

Annette went on to talk other rituals that seemed to includes elements of the same humiliation, such as Gerald of Wales' claim in Topographia Hibernica c 25 that one inauguration rite in Ulster involved the king having sexual intercourse with a white mare and then bathing in a broth made from its body. She also cited some non-European parallels and ended up with an image of the humility/humiliation of Barack Obama:

Barack Obama sitting on the steps of the US Embassy in Paris.

Annette briefly touched on the motivations for such displays: a warning to the ruler himself, an imitation of Christian humility, perhaps psychologically using the charisma of weakness, displaying a power that does not require external symbols of support. Simon Corcoran, afterwards, mentioned the apotropaic effect of averting evil in this way. There was no suggestion that this was an inevitable part of inauguration rituals, but it does sound plausible that such acts were part of the available language of ritual. We probably ought to look to see if there are other examples, even within rituals which overall exalt the powerful.

While Annette's paper roamed widely in time and space, Sinead's was extremely tightly focused, on around 20 manuscripts of Martianus Capella's allegorical work De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. Martianus' book is an obscure work, filled with rare words and Greek terms. The eighth and ninth century glossers added more Greek and Sinead was asking the question of the function of Greek in these glosses.

What she showed in a very clear manner for the non-experts among us is that the glossators weren't simply trying to explain the book to a less educated audience. Instead they were sometimes demonstrably trying to make the work more complicated, for example by using additional Greek terms to explain ones already in the text, or by providing "Greek" etymologies for Latin words. Even stranger were examples of hyper-Graecizing, where Greek letters which resembled their Latin counterparts were replaced by more "foreign" looking ones, so that (majuscule) eta was used for epsilon, theta for tau and omega for omicron.

Glossing of this kind, therefore, wasn't strictly necessary. But Sinead argued that it also wasn't being done solely for exotic effect or by scribes trying to show off. Instead, obscurity was being deliberately cultivated to sharpen the readers' wits, to make them think harder about a particular text. She quoted Augustine saying that obscurity was divinely pre-ordained, to stop intellects getting bored. There was a desire to clothe as well as uncover meaning; in the discussion afterwards Alan Thacker pointed out parallels to the pre-Carolingian Anglo-Saxon tradition of the opus geminatum twinned prose and poetical versions of the same text.

Sinead's paper was on a very specialist subject, and yet by making us think about why a particular text was written in the way it was it potentially opens our minds up more widely. It's easy to presume that glosses are always there to simplify, just as inauguration rituals are always there to exalt. Sometimes one of the most useful purposes of a seminar or paper is to remind us of the basic truth that makes history worth studying in all its complexity: "It ain't necessarily so."

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Slavery and early medieval economic growth

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:03:25 +0100

I am very slowly working my way through last term's IHR Earlier Medieval Europe seminars, and the next one I want to blog is Marek Jankowiak talking about "Dirhams for slaves: investigating the Slavic slave trade in the tenth century". Jon Jarrett has already written a report on an earlier version of this paper, so I can summarise the argument fairly quickly.

Marek's basic thesis is that in the ninth and tenth centuries, a massive trade in slaves underpinned Europe's economic revival. As he points out, this was a view popular among nineteenth-century historians and more recently eastern European historians, who saw the slave trade as the motor of the economy. More recently Michael McCormick has argued for a large-scale Mediterranean slave trade.

Marek's looking at evidence from the eastern European network, or rather two networks: one going to Umayyad Spain, with Prague as the key centre, plus another network from shifting areas in Gotland, Poland and Estonia to the Caliphate, on which Marek was focusing. One of his key points was trying to show the scale of this trade, deducing this from hoards of silver in the north. As far as I could note it down, his calculations were as follows:

1) He estimated there was around 1 tonne of silver dirhams in the known hoards.

2) Of this silver, around 2.5-5% were imitations: coins produced by the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, who acted as middlemen. Marek argued that these coins were produced solely for this trade, as a way of evening out trade flows: that is, when slaves were brought and there wasn't an immediate buyer, the Khazars/Bulgars minted silver to pay off the northern traders and then waited for the Muslim buyers to come.

3) Marek then used what I think was an argument from die chains in the imitations to argue for the total size of that coinage. He then used this to scale up the total inflow of silver into the north in the tenth-century via this route to 25-50 tons. (This is where my hazy notes meet my limited knowledge of numismatics, so if I misunderstood him, apologies).

4) He assumed that 75% of this inflow was for slaves, arguing essentially, that there wasn't much else worthwhile that the parts of the north he was interested in had to sell. Large fur production sites are visible in the far north, but there's nothing much in Poland, for example.

5) He therefore argued that in the tenth century around 5-10 million dirhams were paid for slaves, and given that around 100 dirhams was the price of a slave in the Bulgar markets, that would mean around 50,000-100,000 slaves sold in the tenth century.

As Marek said, that was probably a figure that erred on the cautious side: even if you added in slaves in the western trade, you're looking at around 1000 slaves a year. He then went onto argue for some of the large number of big hill-forts that appear in tenth-century Poland as being slave camps, places where caravans of slaves being transported could be kept for a night. He also suggested that signs of depopulation between the ninth and tenth centuries in e.g. the western part of Greater Poland might be entire tribes disappearing because they'd been captured and sold.

Jon's discussed some of the archaeological and numismatic problems with this hypothesis. I want to think about a more general question: is a slave trade on this scale likely and could it act as a motor for economic growth? One of the things that the Making of Charlemagne's Europe project is doing is providing a prosopography of everyone in charters from 768-814 and I can already say that there were a hell of a lot of unfree. I'm inputting a charter currently that lists 60 mancipia by name given to Wissembourg and though that's a big list, it's not the biggest there is and the donor is at most from the regional elite. Elipandus of Toledo claimed that Alcuin, as abbot of Tours, controlled 20,000 servi and that doesn't sound implausible.

The problem with the argument for slave-trading as the motor of the Carolingian economy, however, is there isn't much evidence for a large-scale slave trade in the Carolingian world. Even Joachim Henning, talking about a rise in Carolingian period slave shackles, admits that they're not found within the Carolingian empire. In addition, if slave-trading (i.e. selling on of captives to Muslim markets) was the best way to get rich in eighth and ninth-century Francia, you'd expect more discussion of it in the Carolingian sources. (Probably to justify it morally, given the way that Carolingian authors could justify practically anything rich noblemen did).

There is some evidence both for the resettling of "foreign" captives within the bounds of the Carolingian empire and of the normal taking captive of women and children in warfare that John Gillingham has discussed. But as Henning points out, the selling abroad of the western European rural peasant population by the Frankish nobility was exceptional. If we believe Marek, however, it wasn't in Eastern Europe at the same time. Why the difference?

Henning, in "Slavery or freedom? The causes of early medieval Europe’s economic advancement", Early Medieval Europe 12 (2003), 269-277 comments on McCormick's thesis (p. 273):

it is difficult to imagine that landlords of the west would have systematically destroyed their most effective rural production network – the manorial system – by selling their own peasantry into slavery only to buy silk and drugs in southern markets.

In a settled society, the agricultural use of captured slaves and the unfree who might have been "bred" on estates normally makes more economic sense than selling them for luxuries. But there are a few situations where such economic logic may not hold. One is if there is a shortage of agricultural land, so that having extra mouths to feed isn't compensated for by extra productivity. That's possibly the case for at least some parts of Scandinavia.

Secondly is when a short-term influx of money allows you to gain a major competitive edge. North-Eastern Europe at this point is having proto-states form (one of Marek's incidental points was that the Piast state in Poland appears later than previously thought). Is it possible that you've got a situation something like Steve Bassett's FA cup model of small kingdoms violently clashing and being absorbed? In that case it might be worth hoovering up a small tribe or two and selling them off for cash, because one of the things we know that is being bought by people in the eastern borderlands from the Carolingian empire is arms and armour. If you can get money to pay and equip warriors now, that may be a better bet waiting for better harvests six months or even longer down the line from an increased labour supply. Marek's argument that slavery provided the capital for creating northern states may be correct, but that wouldn't necessarily make slave-trading the motor for expansion in the whole of ninth-century Europe.

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Late antique Christianity and equal marriage

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:00:47 +0100

In some ways the title of this post is misleading: I'm not discussing the reaction of late antique Christian writers to same-sex marriage (there are rare examples of such marriages in Roman times: see Mathew Kuefler, "The marriage revolution in late antiquity: the Theodosian Code and later Roman marriage law", Journal of Family History 32 (2007), p. 363). Instead, what I'm interested in is how the arguments of (some) Christians in Britain today on same-sex marriage are drawing on ideas of marriage developed in the few five centuries of Christianity, rather than directly from the Bible itself, and yet ignoring elements of this "traditional" view that do not suit them.

One of the key arguments repeated in opposition to same-sex marriage is that marriage is intended for the procreation of children and that therefore any relationship in which procreation between the couple is impossible cannot be regarded as marriage. This is often extended in Catholic teaching to the claim that any sexual activity between a couple that is non-procreative is sinful.

However, the Bible says nothing explicitly about contraception (although there have been attempts to claim that the punishment of Onan in Genesis 38: 8-10 shows that all contraceptive acts are wrong). While the Creation account in Genesis 1 has God telling humans to increase and multiply, Genesis 2 has Eve created as Adam's companion and there is no mention of marriage as involving intercourse or bearing children before the Fall.

Overall, however, the Old Testament sees marriage and procreation as good and blessings from God; the New Testament is far more ambivalent towards both. In particular, St Paul's discussions of marriage (the most extensive in the New Testament) have almost nothing to say about procreation: when he says that it is "better to marry than to burn", there's no suggestion that this is only for those willing and able to have children.

The view that sexual activity is only morally acceptable for the procreation of children comes not from the Bible, but from Stoic philosophy, but it was taken up both by early Christian Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria and slightly later ones, such as Jerome in the fourth century. As John T. Noonan puts it in Contraception: a history of its treatment by the Catholic theologians and canonists (Harvard UP, 1965), p. 49: "The statement that the rational use of sexual faculties is a procreative one is not the same as the Old Testament statement that fecundity is highly desirable. The ideas do, however, harmonize".

As discussed in detail both by Noonan and by Peter Brown, The body and society: men, women, and sexual renunciation in early Christianity (Columbia UP, 1988), a developed theology of marriage and its purposes, embodied in the works of St Augustine, took place in the late fourth and early fifth century against a background of intellectual challenges from ascetics and sects regarded as heretical. Augustine attempted to assert the good of marriage against opponents who mainly saw it as vastly inferior to virginity and sexual abstention. Some, like Jerome, asserted that the only good thing about marriage was that it generated children who could become virgins. The Manichees, meanwhile, saw procreative sex as particularly evil, generating children who were caught in the body and the darkness of the material world. Some of them, at least, argued for efforts to ensure that any sexual activity was non-procreative. On the other side of the debate were Christian writers such as Jovinian, who saw marriage and virginity as equally good.

As Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser have discussed, this whole debate was also implicitly about authority within the church and within society. Renunciation of sex (specifically male renunciation of the sexual use of women) had become a symbol of the wider self-control that a man in authority needed to have, and a symbol that was particularly promoted by ascetics from a lower social position anxious to prove their moral superiority. This was a challenge to the other obvious claimants to Christian leadership in late antique society, the couple of senatorial social status.

Augustine attempted to steer a middle course, opposing the condemnation of marriage as heretical, but wanting to remain within a tradition that saw virginity as superior. The result was that he produced a distinctly ambivalent defence of marriage which described all sexual pleasure as sinful. It's also typical of his own limits of perspective that he argued that Adam and Eve must have been intended by God to have intercourse in Eden: if Adam had just wanted friendship, a man would have been a more stimulating companion (Brown p. 402).

Tangled up with this was another near-simultaneous debate about the virginity of Mary, discussed in most detail by David G. Hunter, Marriage, celibacy, and heresy in ancient Christianity: the Jovinianist controversy (Oxford UP, 2007). Had Mary remained a virgin while giving birth to Jesus (virginitas in partu), i.e. had God allowed some kind of miraculous painless birth, as various apocryphal Gospels claimed? Had she remained a virgin after giving birth (virginitas post partum), i.e. had she and Joseph been in a permanently celibate marriage? Neither were agreed doctrines in the fourth century. Ambrose of Milan, however, anxious to protect the consecrated virgins of his church from pressure to marry, and seeing Mary as a symbol both of such a virginal life and of the inviolable church, became the most influential supporter of Mary's perpetual virginity during birth and after.

This was the view of Mary that triumphed in the western church. However, it was also important to maintain that Mary and Joseph had been truly married, for obvious reasons. As a result of these debates, the doctrine that Augustine developed about the purposes of marriage sees multiple "goods" in it: offspring (proles), fidelity (fides) and symbolic stability (sacramentum, which didn't yet mean "sacrament" in the Catholic sense). The sacramentum, in the sense of an indissoluble bond, meant that a couple who could not have children together could not divorce so that one might remarry and have children. The procreational good of marriage could be dispensed with. This could be either on grounds of incapacity (the old could marry for mutual companionship) or on grounds of choice (continence in marriage was preferable to intercourse).

Reflecting this view, the medieval church almost always adhered to the view that it was consent, not consummation that made a marriage. The churches' current opposition to same-sex marriage on the basis that the nature of Christian marriage requires the procreation of children turns out to be based on extremely shaky historical and theological foundations.

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Civic identity and the B-word in sixth-century Francia

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:20:54 +0100

The Second IHR seminar I attended this academic year was Erica Buchberger from Oxford on "Romans in a Frankish world: Gregory of Tours, Venantius Fortunatus and ethnic identity". This started with the question of why Gregory of Tours, our most extensive source for the sixth century doesn't refer to 'Romans' as living in sixth century Gaul. It's sometimes been suggested that this was either because there weren't any Gallo-Romans anymore, or (as Helmut Reimitz suggests) that Gregory chose not to mention that particular ethnic identity because it undermined his Christian vision of unity and community.

Erica argued instead that Gregory was writing for a local audience and with a default that those mentioned were Romans. What he used therefore was more locally significant markers, referring to people as of senatorial family and sometimes giving the names of their fathers. While Gregory isn't consistent on giving details on ethnicity, he is on social networks: the trio of social rank, family and city are the standard way of identifying someone. When an abbot asked St Gallus his name, birth and homeland, for example, he got told his father's status and city.

Venantius Fortunatus' uses of ethnic identifiers is more varied: he doesn't use them in his hagiographical texts, but he does in his poetry. Erica argued that this was because contrasts of Romans and barbarians were expected in panegyric: indeed one woman (Vilatheuda?) was described by Fortunatus as "Roman by effort, barbarian by nature". Erica concluded that both Gregory and Fortunatus were using Roman models of identity that focused on mainly local classifiers and that they described the world as their ancestors had done, despite all the changes that occurred.

Erica's paper was a useful reminder that our ideas of "ethnic" identity can get too hung-up with one particular level of identity, that of "a people", and ignore other possible foci. Maybe it's because I'm a rustica myself (coming from a Sussex hamlet so small that only Chris Lewis has ever heard of it), that I tend to underestimate the importance of civic identities. It would be interesting to see to what extent such identities could be found, if we look hard enough, in other texts from the seventh century onwards.

(As for the B-word of the title, this arises from a comment in the discussion afterwards by Peter Heather: in the fourth-century, the Romans regarded calling someone a barbarian as very rude - the equivalent, Peter reckoned, to "nigger" or "wog").

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Early medieval comparisons: kings east and west

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 20:06:48 +0100

The IHR Earlier Medieval seminars restarted for this academic year (a mere four months ago) with Jinty Nelson talking on 'Shaping rules, making rulers: Carolingian and Abbasid inauguration-rites in comparative context', which, as usual with Jinty, made a number of subtle and fascinating points, while incidentally demonstrating some of the difficulties with comparative history in the early Middle Ages. She was focusing on the period around 750 AD when the Abbasids supplanted the Umayyad caliphate and Pippin III became the first Carolingian king of Francia. Although these events took place far apart (Jinty described it as being "about 4000 km from Soissons to Baghdad as the crow flies, but the crow never does fly") there had been contacts between Franks and Saracens since the early eighth century, and by the 760s there were embassies being sent between the two rulers. There were also shared cultural elements: monotheism, Jerusalem being seen as a holy city and David as the model war leader, worries about images in the Roman church and, more unexpectedly, a shared interest in sandal relics. (When Pippin and his wife Bertrada visited Prüm monastery in 762, there was reference to Christ's sandal as being there, while the sandal of the Prophet is a particularly well-documented Islamic relic).

Jinty's main interest was in inaugural rituals, comparisons of which are slightly hampered by the fact that the Royal Frankish Annals are probably lying about the events of 750 (as Rosamond McKitterick has demonstrated). But the continuator of Fredegar, a near contemporary source show Frankish rituals of anointing and submission by princes. The anointing (carried out by Frankish bishops, rather than the Pope) was a novelty, using the multiple religious symbolism of using holy oil in making new, healing etc. The rituals of submission, however, show continuity with the Merovingian period; in particular Jinty was arguing that Charlemagne demanding oaths of loyalty from his subjects may not have been new. She also pointed out that Bertrada was consecrated, further securing the line by excluding Pippin's brothers and nephew. Various methods of such 'dynastic slimming' became characteristic of the Carolingians – Jinty thought that Charlemagne probably killed his brother Carloman's young sons, since they don't appear later in the historical record (although, as Susan Reynolds pointed out in the discussion, there are a lot of reasons for people to die young at the period).

The Abbasids, meanwhile, were presiding over a huge empire, with central places to match: Al-Mansur allegedly built a mosque at Baghdad with room for 14,000 men, whereas Soissons church, where Pippin was anointed, measured 36x26 m. They Abbasids drew on Hellenistic, Roman and Sassanian traditions, but Andrew Marsham argues that the oath of allegiance was the key ritual and sees a tension between ideas of absolute succession and consultation/election of the ruler.

From the 860s there are oaths documented to the caliphs, and these were used to set up successors, in a system which, while it was hereditary, allowed close kin other than sons to succeed (uncles often had rights). There are interesting differences here between the (theoretical) monogamy and increasing exogamy of Frankish royal marriages and an Islamic system which had both polygamy and marriage to close cousins. Despite the Abbasid attempts to ensure the succession, there was still an element of the people's choice seen as needed and often a concern to buy off close kin with gifts.

Jinty then cited Wolfram Drews arguing that the Carolingians had more institutional ballast than the Abbasids, who suffered from a perpetual legitimacy deficit, with each caliph needing to claim a relationship to the Prophet and thus bypass his predecessors. As she pointed out, however, the Carolingians managed to take the 'dynastic slimming' a bit too far, and ended up with no legitimate adult males in 887. She ended by pointing out the word she'd never mentioned in the talk: 'coronation', and the contrast this made to late antique Rome. These weren't sacred monarchies, but all too human.

Overall, the talk confirmed the genuine advantage of a comparative approach to the early Middle Ages: it helps you see some of the other possibilities that were potentially available, but weren't taken in a particular society. It's for that reason that Chris Wickham, in particular, has stressed the need for the comparative method. But Jinty's paper was also a reminder that it's relatively rare you get such a neat line-up of subjects and sources for any early medieval topic in two different regions. There is enough commonality (and even some contact) in this case to make comparisons seem useful, especially for cultures with common Roman roots. But it's less clear how far apart you can go in chronological and spatial distance and still get interesting insights: it's something that enthusiasts for medieval world history haven't really answered effectively yet, that I know of. Comparisons aren't odorous, but they don't necessarily always give us the tool we may hope for.

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What's human about the digital humanities?

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:13:30 +0100

The first seminar I attended in the academic year 2012-2013 wasn't a medieval one but one organised by KCL's Department of Digital Humanities, which featured Alan Liu from UC Santa Barbara, a veteran of the digital humanities. (He started his Voice of the Shuttle catalogue of websites in 1994). Alan was talking on "The Meaning of Digital Humanities", and arguing that issues about the meaning of the digital humanities are really about the wider question of the meaning of the humanities themselves, and about how you get from numbers to meaning.

The talk was part of his putting together of an introductory essay on the digital humanities for the PMLA journal. Alan's background is in English literature, so one of the interesting things for me was hearing about literary attitudes to digital methods. He contrasted history, which is relatively used to working with big data, and literary studies which aren't. For history he was mentioning GIS projects, such as the Stanford Spatial History Project, but also pointing out that there was a much longer cliometric tradition, especially in economic history. Historians don't think that counting things is necessarily diminishing the humanities.

Alan also touched on the different techniques that digital projects could use: one aspect is quantification, with its inevitable problems of losing context. But he also pointed out the possible use of digital models and visualisation, as a way of reducing dimensions to see patterns (such as generating social network diagrams that aren't incomprehensible blurs).

As an example of the use of digital methods in the study of literature, both in its methodology and its problems, he mentioned a project from the Stanford Literary Lab: Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac , A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method . This focuses on finding clusters of words with the same usage trends, and Alan was discussing the possibility of the hypothesis-free initiation of analysis. That is, it's possible to use algorithms to "play games" and find patterns within your data, and only bring in the human interpreters and close reading at a later point, when you've got material that looks statistically significant.

The problem is that you may have to set up the parameters in a way that's already potentially rigged the game. For example, what this project did was start from "seed words", such as "land" or "country" and generate sets of terms that had similar usage trends to these over time. In practice, they had an oscillating dialogue between the empirical data of words that behaved similarly and words that humans thought were semantically linked. Alan suggested this hybridity of methods may be necessary, and quoted Stephen Ramsay: "the best digital humanities is the hermeneutics of screwing around". He also pointed out that one of the big problem of such projects is that they're often insufficiently documented: researchers need to provide more details of both how the data corpus is formed and how it is cleaned. (Cleaning up data at inputting stage is a major issue for most projects).

A project like that of Heuser and Le-Khac suggests the possibilities of digital humanities as one tool for scholars. But there's still the question remaining when you've generated this data: what is the meaning of changes in word-use frequency? And this links into the problem of the meaningfulness of the humanities as a whole – where is the residual space for humans in a world of scientific golems? Do we need Raymond Williams on culture if we've got http://books.google.com/ngrams">Google Ngram Viewer?

Alan concluded by saying that those working in humanities have to come up with wider answers about the significance of the humanities and also about new forms of digital pedagogy (especially with the rise of MOOCs). In the discussion afterwards, he referred to the possibility of humanists as being the repositories of the meaning that can't be extracted from the texts. It's a line that has interesting implications for the current Making of Charlemagne's Europe project and the tension between charter as data-source and charter as one-off textual and material object. Digital humanities sometimes oversells itself as a new paradigm for all humanities research, but it is making us think about how and what we study in some very interesting ways.

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The market for MOOCs

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 11:13:09 +0100

Various academics have been getting excited about MOOCs (massive open online courses) recently: especially Clay Shirky who's claiming that it will "disrupt" higher education. As someone who's old enough to have lecturers in library school telling us about how CDs would replace books, I'm sceptical. But given that some prominent UK universities, including my own, are now getting together with the Open University to create Futurelearn, it looks like we should be thinking more seriously about what MOOCS might mean for universities.

The involvement of the Open University reminds us that distance learning isn't new; the delivery mechanisms may have changed since the day of taping TV programmes, but the principles haven't. And there are many other organisations doing similar things: my husband has been working in legal distance learning for more than a decade. So what is it that makes MOOCS different from such courses? One basic answer: they're free. So why are universities, which do not have primarily philanthropic objectives, getting involved with them? How do they think they're going to get something of value from them?

The most useful piece of Shirky's article, amid the over-excitement, is in his reference to "unbundling" of education. If you look at the educational side of a university, it currently does three main things for its undergraduate students:

1) Provides teaching materials

2) Provides support for learners

3) Provides credentials.

Shirky is perfectly right that these three functions can potentially be separated out. You can buy a university textbook or Great Courses videos whether or not you're enrolled on a course. There are some university programmes (such as the University of London International Programme which have learner support provided by other bodies. And (at a lower level), examination boards such as OCR provide exams and credentialing of students without getting involved in their teaching at all.

The problem, however, remains the same: doing these things well costs money. (The Open University, for example, now charges 15,000 GBP in fees for a full undergraduate degree). It takes a lot of time and effort both to create good online content and to keep it updated. Learner support is more and more done by cheap postgrad labour, but it often can't easily be scaled up. It may not quite take 10 times as long to mark 100 essays as it does to mark 10, but there's very little economy of scale. And providing effective credentialing needs a lot of organisation. The dream of MOOCs is that they are available all over the globe. But in order to ensure quality, the University of London has to have a string of local exam centres. You can't simply use online testing for serious certification, because on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. More specifically, how do you know that the person taking the exam is who they claim to be and not a professional exam-taker? There may be ways to get round physical presence at exams, but they're not going to be cheap or easy. And any subject that can't be tested purely by exams, but needs practicals or some kind of coursework/portfolio is going to be even trickier and more expensive to administer.

So how can free courses work? Or perhaps a better question, what kind of free courses can be made to work? Firstly, in terms of teaching materials, Shirky's big idea (it might be slightly harsh to say his only idea) is that the internet makes videoed lectures easy and almost free to distribute. Let's ignore for the moment all the discussion about whether lectures are actually an effective form of teaching. What courses can be taught largely by lectures or books and what can't be?

Anything with a practical component (which means most of science and technology subjects) is hard to teach online effectively, and so are modern languages. The more feasible subjects are mathematics and IT, business studies, law, some of the social sciences and some of the humanities. Introductory courses generally tend to be easier to teach online than more specialist ones: more basic knowledge to be learnt, less sophisticated analysis required. The other advantage for introductory courses is that they're often more standardised: the ideal course is one for which there is global demand and which doesn't need frequent updating (which promptly makes law courses look a lot less appealing for the MOOC treatment, given different jurisdictions).

The next issue is the support that can be offered to students. The main thing that MOOCs can potentially offer is user forums and other opportunities for students to get together and help each other. Study groups can be very useful for motivation and assistance with basic problems. For example, I taught myself Latin via an internet study group back around 1997. At a point where I wasn't living anywhere with real-life access to such a course, an online group of people who shared the same interests was wonderful. That kind of easy interaction with fellow-students is an important change that the internet does make possible.

The question for universities, however, is whether there is also a market for paid student support services provided by them for free courses and if so how it could be priced. This would presumably work something like the support services provided by tech companies: if you want help from an actual human being, you either pay a subscription or you pay per enquiry. This would probably work better with subjects which had more right/wrong answers, i.e. possibly quite well for law and maths, but less so for the humanities. It's not quick and easy to explain how to improve a history essay.

My husband also suggests, probably rightly, that it's a lot harder to sell support services (where you're not getting anything terrible tangible for your money) than it is to sell course manuals, where his students get ring-binders full of printed detail and feel they've got their money's worth. He reckons that the time when people are most likely to want support (and be prepared to pay for it) is when they've got an exam looming: that's when his firm sells revision courses, for example.

So it might well make sense for universities to provide a combined (re-bundled) support/credentialing service. I suspect most students would expect to pay universities for credentialing, if they're going to get useful qualifications; the question is how much they would be willing to pay. But there are also important markets worth pointing out of students who don't need credentialing. One is the pure hobbyists. The other is fields where formal credentialing is not particularly important and the emphasis is on practical tests of competence.

If you put all these factors together, what sort of MOOCs have you got for which it makes sense for universities to invest time and money? Basic mathematics and statistics courses look like one of the obvious targets: taught by lectures, relatively easy to mark exercises automatically, global market and the content doesn't need to be cutting-edge stuff. The other big area in MOOCs so far has been IT courses, which again can be taught almost entirely via online teaching and exercises, and where everyone's used to getting help from online forums. There's also the advantage that external certification of IT skills is already available (as well as companies that are prepared to take on people without qualifications if they can display programming skills). The big problem here is going to be keeping courses up to date.

There are a couple of other departments that I think should be looking very hard at what MOOCs might mean for them. A lot of business and management education takes place via one form or another of distance learning (especially the self-help book). If anyone is going to work out how to make a profit via support services for MOOCs, I'd expect business departments to be able to do it. The other academics who I think should be taking MOOCS very seriously are those who teach "old" languages (and I'd include not only Greek and Latin, but also classical Hebrew, Chinese, Sanskrit, Old English etc). These are courses where it's often hard to collect enough students in one physical place to make a conventional course viable and which don't have the problem of students needing to learn to speak the language (which makes modern languages hard to study via the web). In particular, well-designed MOOCs might be a way of encouraging students to make a start on these languages for free and thus intrigue them enough that they want to study them further via a paid course.

In other subjects, I honestly can't see MOOCs being a disruptive force. I suspect that all most universities are going to end up doing is putting online a few short taster courses/lectures to encourage people to sign up for paid courses. I can imagine, for example, a slightly more interactive version of the Nottingham Theology video series coming, but that's a long way from a full distance learning experience. But, as usual, I'd be interested to hear from anyone who thinks that there are ways in which MOOCs can actually make sense for universities.

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IMC 2012 report 3: Hincmar and the rest

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 20:20:25 +0100

Wednesday at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in July 2012 was Hincmar day. (There was also a small over-run into Thursday morning, with a session that I had cunningly arranged for my fellow-organiser to chair, thus meaning I could attend most of the disco). Charles and I am hoping to get many of these papers published in a volume of essays on Hincmar, so I will merely give brief descriptions of them here (as well as a few mentions of the other sessions I went to on Wednesday and Thursday):

Jinty Nelson, The Bearing of Hincmar's Life on His Historical Writing
The room we had was completely inadequate for the number of people, but those of us able to get in the room heard Jinty give a typically subtle paper trying to tease out how Hincmar's own experiences filtered into the Annales Bertiniani and others of Hincmar's works – touching lightly on some old grudges that Hincmar maintained (such as against Prudentius of Troyes) and including the intriguing suggestion that Hincmar may have hoped to "turn" Gottschalk into a more orthodox scholar.

Marie-Celine Isaia, Hagiography vs. Rules (or not)? Hincmar, his Vita S. Remigii and Norms
Marie-Celine's paper was pointing out that the Vita s. Remigii is less a standard hagiography than an unusual way of communicating Hincmar's teachings on canon law and the behaviour of clerics. Hincmar turned theology into concrete stories of Remigius' dealings with simoniacs, heretics, penitents, etc, interspersed with quotes from patristic sources. She also suggested that in the long run this new form wasn't very successful: later manuscripts cut out most of the teaching and just kept the miracles.

Letha Böhringer, Hero or Villain?: Master Narratives of Archbishop Hincmar in the 19th and 20th Centuries

This was the Hincmar paper that got the most laughs, mainly for the picture shown above of Heinrich Schrörs, the most important C19 biographer of Hincmar; many of us felt it would have been equally appropriate as a picture of Hincmar himself. Schrörs was a Catholic priest and a legal expert and seems to have shared Hincmar's combative nature and politicisation. Letha contrasted this version of Hincmar with that of Jean Devisse, who also wrote a biography of Hincmar in the 1970s. Devisse was very fond of Hincmar, seeing him not only as intelligent, but having a deep sense of duty and the 'modern vision' that allowed a total analysis of his society. Devisse's vision of his soul mate Hincmar in turn contrasted with Horst Fuhrmann's disapproval of the archbishop and Devisse and Fuhrmann fought each other in footnotes: Fuhrmann called Hincmar a "little Artful Dodger". Letha wanted to move away from recent negative views of Hincmar towards a broader and more sympathetic view of him, getting beyond simple condemnation of him as a forger and distorter of sources. She argued that he should be seen as part of a wider political world.

Simon Corcoran, Hincmar and the use and abuse of Roman legal sources
Simon's paper was one of several on Hincmar's sources, but was particularly useful for making clear one point that the legally ignorant like me hadn't realised before: the "Theodosian Code" wasn't simply available to early medieval writers as one neat volume. Instead, there were collections of extracts in particular manuscripts and the books that had ended up in the Breviary of Alaric. Hincmar used a fair number of Roman law texts, especially on matters of procedure, but he would have been limited by what he could actually get access to.

Karl Heidecker, Picking a ninth-century author’s brain. Observing Hincmar at work on his treatise about King Lothar’s divorce
Karl's piece complemented Simon's by showing how Hincmar used his sources once he had got hold of them. Because we have a manuscript of the De Divortio and an earlier one of extracts on sources on marriage, we can see Hincmar first compiling a dossier of texts on the topic and then using it to produce his treatise. And we can also see the final stage of the procedure: Hincmar adding more to the text of De Divortio after he'd had circulated an initial version of it. The margins are filled with additional notes and notes to notes, all presumably written up so as to be handily accessible for Hincmar's next argument on a particular topic. Hincmar of Rheims: never knowingly outcited.

Elina Screen, An unfortunate necessity? Hincmar and Lothar I
Elina was arguing that Hincmar's improved relationship with Lothar I (after a rocky start) was less due to Lothar being impressed by Hincmar at their first meeting at Meersen in 847 (as Jean Devisse had argued) and more to Lothar's desire for political reconciliation with his brothers after the Saracen attack on St Peter's in 846. It says something for Hincmar's ideas of what a good relationship with a king should be that soon afterwards he was threatening to excommunicate Lothar for his support of Falcric.

Clémentine Bernard-Valette: We are between the hammer and the anvil’. Hincmar and the bishops in the crisis of 875
Clémentine's paper was a very interesting take on Hincmar's text from 875 De fide Carolo regi servanda, written when Louis the German had invaded Charles the Bald's kingdom in 875 (Charles was in Italy at the time, attempting to become emperor). She saw this as a text trying to work out what "fidelity" meant and how one could and should respond to the conquest of a kingdom: with resistance or collaboration?

Margaret McCarthy: Hincmar's influence during Louis the Stammerer's reign?
Margaret has notoriously been researching Louis the Stammerer's reign for longer than it lasted. Here, beyond the political history of the years 877-878, she was raising the important question of how we can know whether someone has political influence? We can possibly track Hincmar's appearances at court and we can read some of the texts he write to Louis, but how can we be sure that he actually made a difference to Louis' actions?

Sylvie Joye, Family order and kingship according to Hincmar
Sylvie's book on raptus has now appeared – here we got a small sliver from it, discussing how Hincmar in De raptu linked together kingship and marriage as social structures: kings had to prevent raptus because of the social disorder it caused, a disorder with cosmic consequences.

Rachel Stone, Hincmar and the nun: Carolingian gender order at the Synod of Douzy 874
In which I justified talking about topless nuns by invoking the patriarchy and a synodal judgement written by Hincmar.

Christine Kleinjung, To fight with words – Hincmar of Laon in the Annals of St. Bertin
Christine's paper neatly demonstrated a slightly different angle on Hincmar's well-known tendency to rewrite history. In the Annales Bertiniani Hincmar's nephew Hincmar of Laon doesn't start off as a villain (even though Hincmar ends up denouncing him), suggesting that there were limits to Hincmar's revisionism. However what we can also see from the two Hincmar's letters is that an awful lot of the conflict doesn't get into the annals, suggesting that one of Hincmar's political tactics may have been the use of silence and omission.

Charles West, 'Extremely good advice': Hincmar's view of the parish and its priest
Charles' paper neatly moved from an incident in which a congregation were wrongfully deprived of their priest to show not only that parishes existed in the diocese of Rheims, but that they mattered to Hincmar. Charles then very effectively connected this up to debates on later periods. Hincmar cared about the parish as a microcosm of the whole church; this is a contrast to Gregory VII who wasn't interested in the church at that kind of level of detail.

(It was also during this session that probably the best question was raised: Stuart Airlie asking whether amid all the things that Hincmar was concerned about, there were any things he didn't want to discuss. One of the responses we made was that in fact he said very little about monasticism, despite having been a monk himself).

Philip Wynn, Hincmar's adaptation of the Capitula diversarum sententiarum for his De regis persona
Philip was arguing that the ninth century manuscript Paris BnF lat. nouv. acq. 1632, a source for Hincmar's De regis persona which Hans Hubert Anton ascribed to Jonas of Orléans, had in fact been compiled by Hincmar himself. Philip didn't have the time to go into the full details of his argument in the paper, but if he's right (and his argument fitted neatly with some of the previous papers on Hincmar's way of working) then what we have is Hincmar's first ever work, compiled before he became archbishop in 845.

Andreas Öffner, 'Bos lassus fortius figit pedem': Hincmar's Late Attempts at Counselling (c. 877-881)
Andreas showed that a number of texts written in Hincmar's last years in different genres include the giving of counsel as a theme (as well as De Ordine Palatii, he also cited Novi regis instructio ad rectam regni administrationem addressed to Louis the Stammerer, the Visio Bernoldi and a letter of Hincmar discussing the vacancy in the see of Beauvais. He also pointed out that their collective vision of the ideal counsellor (a religious man, old and wise, one not seeking for honours) corresponded suspiciously closely to a job description for which Hincmar was the ideal candidate.

Philippe Depreux, 'A Man for All Seasons' in Carolingian Times?: Hincmar and the Law
Philippe rounded off the Hincmar sessions with a quick look at Hincmar's use of capitularies, showing how his use of them varied between different types of work. Some texts, such as De ecclesiis et capellis use only materials that are several centuries old. In others however, a series of capitularies from the time of Charlemagne onwards are used to place current royal behaviour ina long tradition.

I'd like to thank all the speakers and the audience for these five sessions; we had some really thought-provoking and intriguing discussions, which will feed into the proposed book.

And after all that (combined with a Wednesday evening spent listening to discussions of the People of Medieval Scotland database, which was followed by a party and the disco), I had one final session to attend on Thursday, going off to hear the last of the Text and Identities sessions. This has Dimitri Tarat arguing that Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum conceals the use of force by missionary efforts, following in a Carolingian missionary tradition that favoured Theodulf's methods rather than Alcuin's. (Dimitri's arguments relied heavily on Yitzak Hen's paper "Charlemagne's Jihad", which I among others have found unconvincing). We also had Ingrid Rembold arguing for the Poeta Saxo as being based at Paderborn rather than Corvey and writing his poem in order to gain Arnulf's favour at a point at which Corvey's success with Arnulf was threatening Paderborn's revenues. And the paper I found most interesting, which was Edward Roberts talking about Flodoard of Reims, suggesting that Flodoard was less of a "neutral" historian than has sometimes been suggested. Instead, Edward argued that Flodoard was hedging his bets when discussing the archbishop of Rheims Hugh of Vermandois. Flodoard had been stripped of his benefices for not supporting the election of Hugh in 925 (when Hugh was aged five!), and although Hugh was twice removed from the see of Rheims (he controlled it 925-931 and 940-946), Flodoard couldn't be sure whether he might return again, and so carefully avoided either referring to him as the legitimate bishop or criticising him.

And so, with the next IMC a mere six months away, my review of the last one finishes. It was an unusual experience having so much to organise this time, but I'm already looking forward to 2013, when we will have a new location and I will be talking on a subject new to me: I'll be discussing social network analysis of charters (or at least the problems we might find in doing so). I hope to see some of you then!

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Medieval social networks 2: charters and connections

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 22:25:18 +0100

As a follow-up to my first post on social network analysis, I'm now gradually reading some of the many books and articles on historians' use of network analysis that readers of my blog suggested. And having read a couple of chapters of Giovanni Ruffini, Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt, I'm coming to realise that one of the most difficult issues for those of us working with documentary sources is deciding what counts as a connection between two people and what links should therefore be included in the network.

The majority of the late antique/medieval network analysis studies that I've looked at work by hand-crafting links. Someone sits down, works their way through their sources and picks out by eye every link between two people (or two places). Often, they also categorise the link. For example, Elizabeth Clark, when studying conflicts between Jerome and Rufinus, divided links into seven different types: "marriage/kinship; religious mentorship; hospitality; travelling companionship; financial patronage, money, and gifts; literature written to, for, or against members of the network; and carriers of literature and information correspondence."

(Elizabeth A. Clark, "Elite networks and heresy accusations: towards a social description of the Origenist controversy", Semeia (56) 1991, 79-117 at p. 95).

Similarly, Judith Bennett did the same thing when looking at connections of families recorded in the Brigstock manorial court records:

The content of these transactions has been divided into six qualitative categories that collectively encompass all possible transactions. These categories are based upon whether the network subject interacted with an-other person by whether the network subject interacted with an-other person by (i) receiving assistance, (2) giving assistance, (3) acting jointly, (4) receiving land, (5) giving land, or (6) engaging in a dispute.

(Judith M. Bennett, "The tie that binds: peasant marriages and families in late medieval England", Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (1984), 111-129, at p. 115).

And for networks of places, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, "Networks of border zones: multiplex relations of power, religion and economy in South-Eastern Europe, 1250-1453 AD", in Revive the past: proceeding of the 39th conference on computer applications and quantitative methods in archaeology, Beijing, 12-16 April 2011 edited by Mingquan Zhou, Iza Romanowska, Zhongke Wu, Pengfei Xu and Philip Verhagen,. (Amsterdam, Pallas Publications, 2012), 381-393, combined existing geographical datasets on late antique land and sea routes with details of church and state administrative networks he's compiled from documentary sources.

Such approaches create very reliable networks, but they're hard to scale up. Clark looks at 26 people; Judith Bennett has 31 people and 1,965 appearances in extant records from 1287-1348. Preiser-Kapeller has around 270 nodes and 680 links in total. Rosé's study of Odo of Cluny, which I discussed in the previous post, had 860 links. For charters, such hand-crafted networks would probably only allow the exploration of small archives or individual villages.

What is more, researchers often want to carry out social network analysis as an offshoot of more general prosopographical work, such as creating a charter database. But it's hard to analyse links until you've first created a prosopography, because it's only when you've been through all the charters that you have a decent idea of whether two people of the same name are actually the same person. (There's a further issue here about whether you may end up with circular reasoning between prosopography and network analysis, but I'll leave that for now). So in theory, you'd need to go through all the charters first to identify people and then have to go back to assess whether or not they are linked in a meaningful way, doubling your work.

As a result, some researchers have started trying to see if there are ways of automatically creating networks from existing databases or files, developing methods for analysing charters that (in theory) can be scaled up relatively easily. In the rest of the post I want to look at the relatively few projects I'm aware of attempting to do this and outline how we might approach the problem with the Making of Charlemagne's Europe dataset.

The three projects I'm looking at are by Giovanni Ruffini, working on the village of Aphrodito in Egypt (see reference above), Joan Vilaseca, who's been experimenting on creating graphs from the early medieval sources he's collected at Cathalaunia.org and a controversial article by Romain Boulet, Bertrand Jouve, Fabrice Rossi, and Nathalie Villa, "Batch kernel SOM and related Laplacian methods for social network analysis", Neurocomputing 71 (2008), 1257-1273.

Ruffini is explicit about how he's creating his networks and the problems that may result from this (pp. 29-31). He's taking documents and creating "affiliation networks": all those who appear in the same document are regarded as connected to one another. As he points out, the immediate problem is that this method can introduce distortions if you have one or two documents with very large numbers of names. For example, one of the texts in his corpus is part of the Aphrodito fiscal register and has 455 names in it, while the average text names only eleven (p. 203). If such a disproportionately large text is included, analysis of connectivity is badly distorted, with all the people appearing in the fiscal register appearing at the top of connectivity lists.

The same effect can be seen in Joan Vilaseca's graphs. If you look at his first attempts at graphing documents from Catalonia between 898-914, they're dominated by the famous judgement of Valfogona in 913.

But Joan's graphs also show an additional problem. His first graphs also give great prominence to Charles the Simple and Louis the Stammerer, because they appear so often in dating clauses. When he starts looking for measures of centrality in his next post he initially finds the most connected people to be St Peter, the Virgin Mary and Judas Iscariot (who appear frequently in sanction clauses).

This brings us to the key question: what does it mean to be in the same charter as another person? The problem is that people are named in charters for so many different reasons: they may be saints, donors, witnesses, relatives to be commemorated, scribes or even the count whose pagus you are in. People may also appear as the objects of transactions: some of our early decisions on the Charlemagne project were deciding how we would treat the unfree (and possibly the free) who were being transferred between one party and another. Such unfree have an obvious connection to the donor and the recipient. But do they have any meaningful relationship to the witnesses or the scribe? At least with witnesses, there's a reasonable chance in most cases that they all physically met at some point, but I don't know of any evidence that the unfree would necessarily have been present when their ownership was transferred by a charter.

So simple affiliation networks, even when you eliminate disproportionately large documents and people mentioned only in dating or sanction clauses, can still be inaccurate representations of actual relationships. One possible response to this problem is to include as links only types of relationships that are themselves spelled out in the charters. Joan has some graphs showing only family and neighbourhood relationships, for example. Ruffini (p. 21) suggests the possibility of using data-sets where a link is defined as existing only when there is a clear connection between two parties in a document e.g. between a lessor and a lessee. But as he points out, we would then have much smaller data-sets. And for early medieval charters, in particular, focusing on the main parties to a transaction only would simply demonstrate that most transaction were about people donating or selling land to churches and monasteries, which is not exactly new information.

Are there any other ways to cut out "irrelevant" connections while keeping those we think are likely to show meaning? Another approach that Joan tries uses affiliation networks, but then removes links where two people occur together in only one document. For his interest in identifying key members of Catalan society, focusing on the most important links may well make sense. But they potentially distort the evidence on one question of wider interest: how significant are weak ties in charter-derived networks? Weak ties, where two people interact only occasionally, may paradoxically be more important for spreading information or practices. Given we have only a small subset of interactions preserved via charter data, significant weak ties may be lost if we start removing data from affiliation networks in this way.

Implicitly, at least, an alternative method for selecting links within what's broadly an affiliation network is given by Boulet, Jouvet, Rossi and Villa. As they explain in their study of thirteenth and fourteenth century notarial acts, they constructed a graph in the following manner (pp. 1264-1265):

First, nobles and notaries are removed from the analyzed graph because they are named in almost every contracts: they are obvious central individuals in the social relationships and could mask other important tendencies in the organization of the peasant society. Then, two persons are linked together if:

_ they appear in a same contract,
_ they appear in two different contracts which differ from less than 15 years and on which they are related to the same lord or to the same notary.

The three main lords of the area (Calstelnau Ratier II, III and Aymeric de Gourdon) are not taken into account for this last rule because almost all the peasants are related to one of these lords. The links are weighted by the number of contracts satisfying one of the specified conditions.

Though it's not clear why people are regarded as linked if they use the same notary, the other criteria seem to be ways of trying to filter out distortions that potentially arise from notorial practices. If men are routinely described in terms of their affiliation to a lord e.g. "A the man of B", then an affiliation network will derive from a sale between "A the man of B" and "C the man of D" not only the justified links A to B, C to D and A to C, but also links that in practice are unlikely to exist or at least are not proven to do so, i.e. A to D, C to B and B to D.

So how might we balance distortions from applying the affiliation network model to charter data against loss of data or an unfeasibly high workload if we don't use this method? The model for the Making of Charlemagne's Europe database allows inputting of relationship factoids, which will catch explicit references to people as the relatives or neighbours of others. Graphs using such data will be relatively easy to construct.

We are also, however, recording "agent roles", used to identify what role a person or an institution plays within an individual charter or transaction (e.g. witness, scribe, object of transaction, granter). At the minimum, any social network analysis application added to the system should probably allow a user to choose which of these roles they want included within the graphs to be created. There should also be some threshold (either chosen by us or user-defined) for excluding documents that contain "too many" different agents. We're still not going to get the precision graphs that hand-crafting links will give, but we can hopefully still get something that will tell us something useful about how people interact.

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Framing the Early Middle Ages 7: peasants going Galt?

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:20:12 +0100

As regular readers will know, my attempts at blogging my way chapter by chapter through Chris Wickham's monumental Framing the Early Middle Ages got bogged down when it got to the chapters on peasants. However, since I have now spent almost a year reading charters, I am feeling more interested in peasants (or at least peasants doing memorable things), so I thought it was time to go back and tackle Chris' chapter 9, "Peasant society and its problems".

The chapter's slightly odd in that, unlike most of the book, it focuses very largely at the West, and doesn't compare it with the East. The exception is one very useful section (pp. 551-569 on "Peasant social structures in the post-Roman world") which might be better placed elsewhere in the book, probably in chapter 7, where Chris is describing peasant societies. I've been known to complain that Framing has very little on women, but Chris's brief comments here on peasant women and families in particular are an extremely useful, if very brief, synthesis of a lot of research.

This part doesn't fit particularly well, however, with the rest of the chapter, which is essentially about the decline and later re-establishment of aristocratic control over peasants in the post-Roman west. This has a lot of interesting detail about attempts at aristocratic domination and peasant resistance to this, but seems to me to be flawed by Chris's neglect of a distinction between relative and absolute poverty and the odd decision to focus on a "peasant mode of production" (pp. 536-538).

I'll start with the "peasant mode of production" first. In one sense it's a fairly logical term to talk about an autonomous peasantry, who are essentially independent landowners producing for themselves, without having aristocrats skimming off surpluses either via regular rent or intermittent tribute-taking. The problem is that Chris introduces what he sees as a distinctive "economic logic". In peasant mode societies, according to him, surpluses are usually given away to kin, friends or neighbours, or consumed communally rather than accumulated, peasants don't work so hard and populations are deliberately restricted. Leisure time rather than surplus is privileged. Such societies have relatively little hierarchy and there's little productive specialisation, so the material culture is very simple.

There is an immediate problem with applying this model: it doesn't fit the early medieval evidence that well. Chris himself admits (p. 542) that there are few examples of it in a "pure" state – there are aristocrats almost everywhere, and social ranking within peasant communities is more stable than in his ideal-type. And some of the best evidence for population decline (which this model allows) are in the Île-de-France (p. 550), which is the area where aristocratic domination is most clearly seen throughout the period.

That in itself doesn't invalidate using the peasant mode as an ideal type, but the big problem comes in the place where Chris sees the model as most appropriate: in immediately post-Roman England. Chris asks (p. 549) "Could demographic decline be associated with the logic of the peasant mode? Peasants in eastern Britain in the fifth century generally found themselves having to pay out substantially less in rent and tax before...How would peasants react?" It's here that it becomes clear that the "economic logic" of the peasant mode that Chris talks about is an attempt to get round the big problem for him: if the state and the aristocrats have largely gone, why are the peasants so poor? The peasants have the chance to go Galt, now that the aristocratic moochers are no longer leeching off them. So why aren't they better off?

The "working less and consuming more" economic logic of Chris's mode is essentially there to explain away why the peasants don't look any more prosperous in the material record (which Chris rightly takes very seriously). They have less access to well-made artisanal goods (p. 534). Their forms of agriculture don't get any simpler, instead they maintain relatively intensive agricultural practices (pp. 547-548). Chris wants to argue (p. 539) that the early middle ages isn't marked by "failure" or "inferiority" to the Roman world, as signs of an "economic logic". But even if Bryan Ward-Perkins is from Oxford that doesn't in itself mean he's wrong about fifth-century Britain being a disaster. Robin Fleming has similarly argued that fifth- and sixth-century Britain was a desperately poor society.

And it's in terms of the population decline that Chris's economic logic takes its biggest hit. His abruptly liberated eastern British peasants suddenly eat more (p. 549). They can't spend more on artisanal products because the market's collapsed. Chris suggests that they work less and that this explains why they abandon the more marginal lands. They also (p. 550) choose "to restrict births". So, we have people who are working less, eating (and drinking) more and have no opportunity to buy anything, yet mysteriously they are either not having any more sex in their increased leisure, or they have suddenly got considerably more reliable birth control. I'm not buying that.

If you look at the evidence without trying to impose peasant "choice" on it, a more plausible model would be that this economic behaviour is the result of desperate poverty. We can see communities today in which no-one accumulates wealth and any money that is acquired is given out to family, friends and neighbours. It happens in the poorest and most marginalised communities, where it's almost impossible to accumulate enough to make an individual difference to your life, but someone else may help you later if you help them now. Declining population also suggests a community on the edge, that has little resilience to natural disasters or attacks from outside.

There's also a question to be raised here of how conducive to happy peasant life a collapsed state actually is. Chris has earlier (pp. 330-331) described how a Romano-British landowner might turn into a tribal leader in post-Roman Britain, by arming himself and his most reliable servants, and then controlling the local territory. Chris argues that such men would have to make more concessions to their "tribe", in order to gain their support and prevent them defecting, but it's at least possible that a lot of low-level skirmishing/raiding between different warlords could lead to overall impoverishment (as happens in most modern failed states).

Yet another argument against peasant economic logic is that even some of the peasants clearly aren't holding to it. The peasant household isn't egalitarian (p. 537): women and the unfree are subordinated. Peasant communities aren't egalitarian (p. 538): "People who aim at that local status [of community leadership] may indeed choose to work harder, or to develop their productive technology, for the rewards of status are sufficient for them to do so." Status was more sharply defined legally in societies such as England and Ireland where there was less material distinction between elites and peasants (p. 542). "Peasant mode" aristocracies are also visible – the fortunate and ruthless peasants at the top of the village heap who eventually became lords of whole villages (p. 572); many milites may also have come from the peasant strata.

The final argument against the existence of "peasant economic logic" is that early medieval elites aren't complaining about it. Rustici get accused of all sorts of bad behaviour, but specific claims of them being lazy aren't very common that I know of, which is the obvious negative view of such behaviour.

This isn't to say that such an economic logic isn't possible in some societies, or even in medieval dreams: Cockaigne is a medieval invention. But I would say that the early medieval evidence suggests that the feudal mode of production remained dominant in peasants' imaginations even after the end of the Roman Empire. What they mostly wanted (even if they had no hope of getting it) was to become rich enough to get someone else to do their work for them.

The concept of the "peasant mode" isn't strictly necessary to characterise the basic change discussed in this chapter: the balance between autonomous peasant communities and villages of dependent tenants shifted twice in the west. As Chris puts it (p. 570): "The simple fact that peasants lost ground to aristocrats in the second half of the early middle ages is doubted by almost no one." But that is an ambiguous statement. It could mean that peasants lost out in absolute terms: they became poorer as aristocrats became richer. But it could also mean that peasants became relatively poorer: as the economy grew between the sixth and eleventh century, the aristocrats captured proportionately more of the surplus. Peasants became richer, but not as fast as aristocrats did.

I think the evidence is that peasants did become richer in absolute terms – their material culture certainly looks superior in 1000 than in 500 AD. And population increases again suggest that the peasants are keeping some of their surplus. This is where the "peasant mode" comes back in, as an ideological tool. Chris wants to argue for the feudal mode of production as being bad for peasants and therefore he needs to show that peasants don't want to be wealthier. They'd rather have long boozy parties to celebrate being part of a free collective.

The real economic paradox of the early Middle Ages is that peasants can be more materially prosperous in times and places where the aristocracy and the state are relatively strong and taking increased surplus from them. As Chris himself says (p. 536), nobles as consumers were necessary for the creation of markets. The moochers do have a use after all, by helping stimulate the economy.

Chris is right, however, about the disadvantages for the peasants in increased noble domination – in the Carolingian period we can see them losing their freedom and having heavier labour services imposed on their tenancies: they are having to work harder then. And Robin Fleming, "Bones for Historians: Putting the Body Back in Biography,” in Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates (Woodbridge, 2006), 29-48, suggests that the health of Anglo-Saxon peasants worsened in tenth- and eleventh-century nucleated villages. But in what Chris describes (p. 546) as "the leopard-spots of peasant autonomy in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms", the free peasants were probably better off than they'd be in a more purely peasant-dominated economy – with their improved fortune, of course, partly derived from the misfortune of more subjected peasants in neighbouring areas.

All this means that Chris's view (p. 573) that "being domineering was simply one of the things that being aristocratic was about" needs modifying. Lords did try to use the opportunities offered to them to increase their control over others, but so did peasants as well. There probably wasn't that much class solidarity in most western peasant communities and that may well have helped aristocrats to increase their control over their neighbours in regions where relatively large-scale landowners lived near to autonomous peasants.

What it doesn't explain is how aristocrats came to dominate in Britain, starting from a much lower basis. Chris rather underplays this, by seeing the early fifth to ninth century as marked by low aristocratic domination there (p. 570). I think this is where an exclusive concentration on ceramics as a marker of complex exchange systems lets him down – there are still parts of eighth-century Mercia that are aceramic. If you use coinage as a marker, markets probably reappeared in the late seventh century, and the best suggestion I've so far seen for why aristocrats came to dominate again is that they had far better quality swords than anyone else. I probably still need to read Robin Fleming's book though, to get more details – but as I'm demonstrating, my track record on working my way through long books heavy on socio-economic history is not good. Still, even if Chris didn't convince me in this chapter, he still gave me a whole new set of questions to think about, and that in itself remains one of the most important uses of Framing.

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IMC 2012 report 2: an early medieval sandwich

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 23:02:28 +0100

My second day at the International Medieval Congress involved starting and finishing with attempts to remember that I am an early medievalist and ought to huddle together with the others, while in between I went off to listen to possibly relevant things that late medievalists were doing. On the early medieval front, Albrecht Diem had helped organised a number of sessions on monastic rules, partly to tie in with the excellent work he's done making accessible Hildemar of Corbie's commentary on the Rule of St Benedict. The session I went to focused on Hildemar, starting with Julian Hendrix arguing that Hildemar's work shows that Benedict of Aniane was less important to Carolingian monasticism than sometimes been thought and that there was less uniformity around. Hildemar's commentary shows more sympathy with Adalard of Corbie than Benedict of Aniane, and synthesizes a variety of views on the rule (as well as contributing his own authority on issues such as care for children). When you add the fact that the commentary circulated in several different versions, rather than one authoritative text, you end with rather more plurality and less unity than has sometimes been seen for ninth-century Frankish monasticism.

We then had Mariël Urbanus looking at chapter 63 of the Benedictine Rule on the order of precedence within the monastery. While the original rule had ordered the monks according to date of entry, merit of conduct and "as the abbot decides" and Smaragdus' commentary on the rule sticks fairly closely to this, Hildemar has two different principles. One is the decision of the abbot concerning merit; the other is the needs of the monastery. This means that monks could be brought forward in the choir if they were able to sing or read, but then returned to their original place afterwards. (Implicitly, this suggests that not all monks were in the choir – or maybe the less good ones were just standing in the background and had been warned to keep quiet). An emphasis on talent rather than good conduct marks a huge deviation from Benedict' s rule, and shows how seriously the quality of liturgy was taken in this period.

The session ended with Corinna Prior, again comparing the commentaries of Smaragdus and Hildemar. Corinna saw Smaragdus as focusing more on the inner man and being less concerned about bodily regulation (the preface of the rule and chapters 1-7 take up the first two books of Smaragdus, while the last books covers the remaining 66 chapters relatively briefly). Hildemar is more balanced in his concerns between the inner and outer monk, and also keener than Smaragdus on military metaphors.

Next up, I decided that I ought to hear something about charters, so went off to session 627 on new approaches to diplomatic. (I should say at this point that I'm mostly ignorant about old approaches to diplomatic, so this is a fairly impressionistic view). The session had four short papers, starting with Adèle Berthout doing codicological analysis of fifteenth century Cistercian archive books, followed by Isabelle Bretthauer looking at late medieval notarial documents in Normandy. She was showing that though regulations by the Norman exchequer had some effect on practice, they still left a lot of areas untouched, but that you can also see increased standardization in the documents arising from the spreading of particular practices (like dating formulae). After that we had Claire de Bigault de Cazanove using the surviving manuscripts of the Regensburg cartulary to try and get at how the monastery of St Emmeram maintained its archive (one possibility is that there was a central archive, but also outer archives in regional outposts).

The final paper was the one I found most interesting, and seemed most clearly a new approach. Jinna Smit was exploring the chancery practices of the counts of Holland in C14 and needed to identify documents written by the same scribe (to see if they were writing documents for different recipients and therefore were probably chancery-based). She was using GIWIS, a computer program developed for the forensic examination of handwriting, but which she adapted to use to look at historical documents. The result was a more objective measure of whether two hands are the same than examination by eye (although as Jinna pointed out, more objective didn't necessarily mean more reliable). She also said that you needed a training sample of at least 100 documents for automatic matching, and therefore this wasn't particularly useful for Carolingian documents, for example. Most of the time, early medievalists are still treating charters diplomatically like special snowflakes, and there's a sense that we may have to. It suggested that as usual, new approaches are only transferable to another period/area if you happen to have a similar kind of source-base.

After this brief attempt at being diplomatic, I then went happily back to gender and session 717 on its "rules". This session was down to two papers, and we started with Elena Woodacre on female succession. In a paper which ranged all over Europe, concentrating on the C12 and later, Elena was looking at the move towards laws of succession, but also showing how much rules tended to develop at times of crisis. There was a lot of variation between kingdoms in female succession. There were four successive queens of Jerusalem, for example, and they were also some in Navarre, but ruling queens were rare in Aragon. Precedent played an important role: Joan II failed to succeed her father Louis X in France after the death of her half-brother John I. There is no evidence that Salic law was used at the time to prevent her ascending the throne; Joan's supposed illegitimacy seems to have been more of a problem. But her failure to get the throne did set a precedent for the exclusion of Philip V's daughters from the succession in 1322.

Political considerations were also important: the Empress Matilda was seen as a foreigner, while Henry IV first instituted and then repealed a bar to female succession, because of his own claim to the throne of France via a female line. Even sisters could have different fates: Louis I of Hungary changed the rules of succession in both Hungary and Poland to allow his daughters to succeed. Maria was deposed as ruler of Hungary, and when restored, was essentially subordinate to her husband. Jadwiga, however, was far more successful in Poland.

The smoothest transitions, like that of Blanche of Navarre benefited from a combination of factors, including a clearly defined succession law, female precedents and no wicked uncles. Blanche was also a grown woman with experience as viceroy of Sicily, had a son and her husband had been designated as a consort, all of which probably helped. Women by the later Middle Ages may have had a right to succeed, but the obstacles to them doing so in practice were still substantially bigger than for designated male successors.

After a Europe full of queens, we then had Amanda McVitty on bits of Englishmen. Amanda was looking at late medieval knights executed as traitors, and the gendered implications of this – such as how such men might have their signs of knightly status removed, and they themselves be reduced to body parts. Favourites convicted as traitors, such as Robert de Vere might be described in feminised ways or accused of being sodomites. Such men were seeing as destroying the bonds of homosociality; they raised the fearful prospect of "false knights", men who outwardly bore marks of honour and yet were wicked inside. Knighthood as an elite form of masculinity was not a stable category: exposing those who did not live up to its standards risked undermining it even while trying to reinforce it.

For the last session of the day, I went back to being an early medievalist and went off to session 808 on political rupture in the early Middle Ages. This was another two paper session, and Lucrezia Pezzarossa from York talked about Alfredian and Carolingian war litanies, arguing that even though we don't have specific references to Anglo-Saxon war litanies (whereas we do have references from Frankish sources) the Old English translation of the Psalms sponsored by Alfred shows parallels to Carolingian war liturgies. Among other things, it adds new references to battle and God's protection during this in some of the translations and prefaces to the Psalms. Lucrezia also pointed out the use of Psalm 67:2 on a piece from the Staffordshire Hoard (it's the same text as Numbers 10:35).

As Lucrezia said, all this suggests a long tradition of Anglo-Saxon liturgy of war (although from my own research, we need to be a bit careful about exactly how much we can presume that the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon cultures of war are identical).

Lucrezia's paper was rather over-shadowed by Geoff Koziol on justifying insurgency, who was looking at the extent to which early medieval rebellions were about claims of a ruler breaking the rules. There's been a tendency to see early medieval kingship/politics as very "rule-based" (e.g. Gerd Althoff), but Geoff was arguing that you get a different picture if you look at rebels' propaganda. Instead, you see little about specific faults of the king and more generalities used to unite the rebels. Geoff was quoting theories by Leda Scotchpoll (?) on how revolutions begin with splits in the ruling group, and the weaker party then appealing to a wider audience by using broad grievances.

This was an intriguing theory by Geoff that unfortunately wasn't really sustained by the evidence. He gave examples where he felt his theory did fit the facts (such as Robert of Neustria deposing Charles the Simple in 922) and sceptics in the audience pointed out occasions such as the rebellion against Louis the Pious, which had some awfully specific comments on Louis' failings.

I'd put Geoff's problems down as an example of the three-two-five rule on early medieval sources: for an awful lot of theories about early medieval history, you find that all you have three pieces of evidence that support you, two that argue against your case and five bits of evidence that when you look at them closely aren't actually relevant. I don't think it's impossible to make such a case, but you probably need to be a bit more precise than Geoff's original thesis was. Still, the heated debate was an entertaining way to end the formal part of the day. After that, I went off to wine and dine the Hincmar speakers for Wednesday and Thursday, some of whom will be discussed in my final report.

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IMC 2012 report 1: rules, filth and gender

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:24:24 +0100

My experience at the International Medieval Congress in July this year seemed particularly fragmented. Partly this is because my research interests are getting increasingly broad, but also because a large chunk of my time had been spent organising a set of sessions on Hincmar of Rheims. So anything that wasn't Hincmar tended to be something of an after-thought. And Monday certainly was a day juxtaposing all kinds of papers.

I started with the keynote speeches, which reflected two very different examples of the rather vague theme for the year of "Rules to Follow or Not". Svere Bagge talked about when regicide went out of fashion, arguing that in Scandinavia it was 1286 (with the killing of Eric V of Denmark) but that it was earlier in the rest of Western Europe (although with some blips). He put this down predominantly to more agreed succession rules – and made a contrast with Byzantium, which although no less civilised, had fewer restrictions on who could become emperor, giving would-be regicides the chance of succeeding to the throne themselves. In the west, in contrast, murderers almost never came to the throne, but other methods of resisting rulers developed; kings who were killed were often not rulers at the time, but had already been deposed. Sverre said that there was always a tendency to give kings a certain leeway in order that they could rule the country and ensure stability. He also saw the development of the theory of the king's two bodies as aiding such resistance: kingship could be defended against a particular king. Practical concerns about the results of killing a legitimate authority also helped protect kings.

We then had Nicole Bériou on C12 and C13 monasticism and the tensions between rules and following Christ. Stephen of Marais (?) claimed "There is no other rule than the rule of Christ", and other theologians, such as Petrus Cantor worried that structured monastic rules might actually hinder monks in following Christ's precepts, e.g. those who had to remain in a contemplative life for which they were unsuited.

In the same spirit, Dominican rules were not made binding on the friars: their infraction was a simple offence, but not a sin. And the idea of a rule could itself be adapted: from the C13 the idea of the laity as an ordo was explicitly developed, with key parts of their "rule" being marriage and the Ten Commandments. The monastery could become a model for all society in this way.

After that session I went off for some filth, although on this occasion, mostly not of the sexual kind. Instead, the topic was hygiene rules. First up was Elizabeth Archibald on rules about bathing, who gave a quick canter through 1000 plus years of medieval bathing, demonstrating that the church wasn't against bathing on principle (though some individual religious men were). Indeed, Aelred of Riveaulx took up to forty baths a day when he had bladder stones, but that was OK, because he took no pleasure from it.

Elizabeth also gave some details about bathing that suggested the church may have had cause to be worried: the term "stew" could refer to baths or brothels, and in Germany there was apparently a tradition of taking off your clothes at home and then running to the public bath-house naked, to avoid having your clothes nicked. (Someone has to do an article on the history of the swimming-pool locker). During questions, we also had someone pointing out that while mixed bathing together in a hot tub may sound alluring (or alternatively an occasion of temptation), unless it was possible to drain the tub, the water would probably have got cold pretty quickly.

We then got even filthier with a couple of papers on latrines. Belle Tuten discussed Frankish monasticism and excretion, and pointed out that we don't know much about how monks dealt with or thought about bodily waste. On the other hand, we do know quite a lot about the latrines on the plan of St Gall, and there are hints in some of the monastic rules about the need for supervision when young monks went there. One of the most interesting points Belle made was that with a fixed routine of meals and diet, the monks' bowel movements might have been fairly predictable; she pointed out the possibility that going to the latrine at odd times might have been taken as evidence of "crapula" (over-eating ), condemned as a sin. (Though there could be other reasons for such irregularities: a number of the herbs shown on the St Gall plan were vermifuges, suggesting the monks may have had problems with intestinal worms).

Finally in the session, we had Martha Bayless bringing together two Anglo-Saxon texts. She was arguing that the solution to the Exeter Book Riddle 76 "Ic ane geseah idese sittan" (I saw a lady sitting alone) was that she was on the toilet, and then connected this to a complaint of Aelfric about women having drinking-parties in latrines. In practice, women might not be alone in the latrines – but they could be away from Aelfric and other male moralisers, which might have its own advantages!

My final session for the day (I was being wimpy and attending a mere three sessions out of a possible five) was 214 on narratives of masculinity. This started off with Joanna Huntington whom I had last seen glorifying rebellion in Huddersfield. This time, she was looking to explore how William of Malmesbury adapted his Gesta Regum Anglorum to reflect the patronage of first Matilda of Scotland and then the Empress Matilda. Her verdict was that William didn't adapt the work to make it empress-friendly and she also suggested that William simply didn't care about gender (in contrast to Turgot of St Andrews, who wrote the Life of St Margaret for Matilda, and who seems to have thought of Margaret as a model of monarchy for both men and women). As Joanna concluded: "It's all about the men in the twelfth century."

Eilidh Harris followed with contrasting ideas of chastity in the lives of two twelfth century male saints, Hugh of Lincoln and Gilbert of Sempringham. Hugh's life was shown as a battle for chastity and described in military terms, a trope that was common in the period. Gilbert, founder of a double order of monks and nuns, isn't described in such terms in his vita, though it does include an extremely peculiar dream in which Gilbert dreams he's put his hand into the bosom of one of the nuns and been unable to remove it. (According to his biographer, this was a sign of his sanctity and virginity, although I'm not quite sure how). Eilidh was arguing for Gilbert's male authority as coming from self-control. He was therefore able to control women by enclosing them; he could go into the women and they couldn't get out. (I should note at this point that typing my notes up four months later and post the Jimmy Saville revelations, Gilbert looks rather more creepy than I'd ever thought of him before).

The session ended with Katherine Lewis, looking at twelfth-century masculinity through fifteenth-century eyes, discussing Middle English hagiographical writings. These have tended to be seen as artistically worthless; for example, Laurentius Wade's life of Thomas Becket from 1497 was described in the early C20 as "this valueless work", partly because it wasn't written in proper rhyme royal.

All of the saints canonised in medieval England were men, Katherine said (I presume she meant post 1066) and there was a distinctive genre of holy bishops. She saw the Middle English versions of lives as increasingly aimed at the laity, and thought that Caxton's audience when printing such legends was the prosperous mercantile class. To these the saints could be presented as an exemplar model, especially of the "husbandry" described by Derek Neal: the prudent and honourable management of self and household. Thomas Becket, Katherine thought, was popular because he was a burgess' son and also an example of a man taking on respectability later on in life, changing his demeanour when he was made archbishop at age 44. She then ended with parallels to Henry V, whom biographer described in similar terms: a useful reminder that although we tend to separate out the masculinity of religious men/holy men and laymen, role models for others may have crossed these lines.

I finished up Monday with a tour of bookstalls, followed by the bloggers meet-up in the evening (about which my memories are oddly vague, although we did have a good time). And then it was on to Tuesday: monks, charters, more gender and Geoff Koziol arguing with everyone, of which more anon.

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Religious men 3: Gregorian reform and performance indicators

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:14:06 +0200

I've blogged a couple of times already on this summer conference at the University of Huddersfield on Religious Men in the Middle Ages: Day 1, Day 2). The final day was in fact a half-day, so I'll talk briefly about the papers I heard before going on to a longer discussion of changes before and after the eleventh century. The papers I heard were:

Parallel Session 6 , Strand A (Leadership)
Benedict Coffin, Independent Scholar, ‘Bishops as holy men in Anglo-Saxon England.’

Helena Vanommeslaeghe, Ghent University, ‘Abbatial leadership and reform in the Benedictine institutions of tenth to twelfth century Lotharingia.’

Matthew Mesley, University of Zurich, ‘Omnibus omnia erat: episcopal gender and religious authority in the narratives of the First Crusade.’

Plenary lecture
Dr Jennifer Thibodeaux Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. ‘The Discourse of Clerical Marriage: Masculinity and Sexuality in the writings of Norman clerics.’

We started off with Benedict looking at whether Anglo-Saxons thought bishops could be both holy and effective and arguing that they could be both. But ideas of what both "holy" and "effective" meant were very varied across the Anglo-Saxon period – Bede focused on the pastoral tasks, for example, while Wilfred was far more in the Merovingian tradition of an episcopal magnate (I thought this was a very useful comparison by Benedict). It was also interesting to hear how particular styles of "saintliness" could reappear, e.g. in parallels between the episcopal ideals of William of Malmesbury's Vita Wulfstani and Bede's holy bishops. This also once again suggests the importance of the male archive.

Helena was focusing on Abbot Poppo of Stavelot, looking at a rather different model of C10 monastic reform than that represented by Cluny or Gorze. Although Poppo established links with many other monasteries, what happened can't be seen as top-down reform. Instead, there were more informal links, with other abbots wanting to be connected to Poppo and absorb some of his charisma. It's also not clear how much long-term effect Poppo had on Stavelot-Malmedy. Helena was also making the intriguing suggestion that what mattered was less actual forms of abbatial leadership than the idea of it: Poppo as the perfect noble super-monk may have been more important than anything the real abbot did.

Finally, Matthew was talking about another religious man whose image may have been more important than his actual role: the titular leader of the First Crusade, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy. It's hard to be sure exactly what Adhemar's role was, although it appears to have combined spiritual and military activities. Matthew argued that later authors increasingly stressed both sides of this role (rather than omitting Adhemar's military activities, as Fulcher of Chartres does). In that way, the Crusades could be shown as a spiritual confrontation. Monastic writers also stressed the role of Adhemar in enforcing celibacy on the Crusaders' camp; the Crusaders submitted to clerical oversight, as Gregorian reformers wanted all laymen to do. (There are interesting parallels here to Joanna Huntington's paper the previous day on Hereward the Wake: secular males' martial prowess could be celebrated, provided it was subordinated to clerical control).

The last paper of the conference was the one that went furthest to answering one of my initial questions: was there really a difference between the church in the eleventh century and the ninth? Jennifer, in a fascinating paper, proved there clearly was one difference, discussing at some length late C11 and early C12 texts from the Anglo-Norman world in favour of marriage. These may have had a common source, in the "Rescript of Ulric". Jennifer argued that such texts showed a consensus, which did not attack the ideals of monastic masculinity, but defended an alternative practice as honourable. Such educated voices, however, were silences after about 1130, and (celibate) clerical masculinity became ideologically hegemonic (even though cleric al unions continued).

As compared to so many earlier controversies, where all we have is the voices of the winners, Jennifer's paper did suggest a real widening of the educated classes able to discuss such issues. It was also a reminder (along with Kirsten Fenton's paper from the previous day) that the imposition of celibacy was a slow and difficult process.

Some conclusions
One almost inevitable conclusion about hearing several days' worth of discussion about masculinity is that there's no core to it. There are recurrent themes in different periods, but there are no essential components (like self-control or domination of women) that are always there. Even the concept of hegemonic masculinity doesn't really work for the Middle Ages. One group of elite men were expected to be celibate, one group of elite men weren't. There are times when you wonder whether being "manly" wasn't just a synonym for "good" in a patriarchal system where men were always ultimately superior to women.

On the other hand, while there wasn't that much new theoretically that I learnt about masculinity from the conference, it did go a long way towards helping me with the other main question I wanted to consider: "what actually changed during the Gregorian reforms?" The rest of this post is therefore an attempt to prove very summary overviews of the ninth-, tenth- and eleventh-century Church and how it was changing. I also loop back to issues of masculinity in rather a different way, thinking about discourses on masculinity are influenced by varying levels of elite male co-operation and competition.

Ninth century
Our understanding of the Carolingian church has been transformed recently by two authors. Albrecht Diem has demonstrated the move of monastic ideology away from male chastity as a heroic and almost unachievable pursuit by individual ascetics (as in John Cassian) to a corporate virtue that could be maintained successfully by carefully enclosed and observed virgins (the model proposed by Caesarius of Arles for nuns and subsequently adopted in western monasticism). More recently, Steffen Patzold in Episcopus has shown the development of a collective sense in the Carolingian empire from the early 820s of what a bishop should be like, which de-emphasised an individual bishop's personal characteristics, such as nobility . In both the monastic and clerical spheres, therefore elite religious men were promoting an ideology of the collective virtue of the ordo as a whole.

Frankish religious life in the Carolingian period was also marked by restrictions on clerical careers. It was not yet possible for bishops to be translated between sees; at a lower level, it was regarded as unsuitably ambitious for a priest to want to change his parish. There was also a notorious distrust by Carolingian rulers of charismatic holy men and women, as reflected in e.g. few contemporary saints being recognised.

Finally, my own work has argued that this was a time when the elite view of masculinity was a relatively inclusive one and (homosexual) sodomy accusations were not used as a political weapon.

Tenth century
Tim Reuter's work has been key here, especially his article on "A Europe of Bishops", now available in English in Patterns of Episcopal Power, ed. Körntgen and Wasenhoven. Tim was talking here about the paradox of the similarity of European bishops to each other, across a fragmented political landscape (looking considerably more alike than European secular rulers). There was a shared elite culture and yet almost no formal structure: each bishop controlled his own little patch. (Tim, Theo Riches and Charles West have all referred to the concept of episcopal encellulement, and they all speak as scholars who have studied several different tenth century polities, so it's not just France here). Tim argued for bishops in this period as having charismatic rather than institutional authority. And as I said above, Helena Vanommeslaeghe was suggesting the same may be true for monastic reformers of the period.

It was also a period when there were new possibilities for career moves, as Conrad Leyser has discussed, with the translation of bishops between sees becoming possible. Gerbert of Aurillac became pope from humble beginnings, after moving round half of Europe. It's hard to think of any comparable Carolingian figures: we do have some lowly men raised by patronage (like Ebo of Rheims) and also foreigners brought in (like Alcuin), but not the same opportunity to move geographically and socially.

At the same time, we also get the development of new and larger monastic structures: Cluny and Gorze etc, may still be networks, not yet orders, but they're bigger entities and those at the top are more important than previous pluralist abbots. Like bishops, such abbots have trans-polity connections (and trans-polity donors to their monasteries).

Meanwhile, one of the key figures in this early reform movement, Odo of Cluny, is also the man who returns to the theme of chastity as a difficult individual struggle (including the need to struggle against homosexual temptations). And by the end of the late tenth century, accusations of homosexuality are being used against clerical reformers by married clerics.

Eleventh century
There are various social factors in the late tenth/early eleventh century that can be seen both as contributing to the Gregorian reform movement and to explaining its focus on the issue of simony. Simony wasn't a new concern; Matthew Innes has shown references to it as a heresy in Carolingian sources. But with increasing prosperity and monetisation of the economy, it was more blatant. The attack on simony also seems (as both Tim Reuter and Robert Moore showed) to be an attack by religious men on the principles of gift-exchange, allowing them to take from secular rulers and donors, without being beholden to them in the same way as previously.

The bigger question is why clerical marriage came to be one of the focuses of the reform movement. Often, this has been discussed in terms of purity: the urge to separate clerics from laymen and show the superiority of the clergy. Robert Moore has also suggested that the targeting of clerical wives, rather than reformers simply making demands for clerical continence, was to ensure that clerical dynasties didn't develop, and to leave the rural priest free to act as an arbiter on the parish, an independent person between newly-powerful lords and the peasantry.

But these explanations don't really hold water. Demands for the separation between religious men and the laity were a standard part of Carolingian (and earlier) reform. And clerical dynasties didn't disappear with the outlawing of clerical marriage, they just mutated. The distribution of married priests in western Europe had always been very region-specific, as Julia Barrow has discussed. The acceptance of married clerics was also combined for centuries with expectations of post-marital celibacy. Why was this solution no longer acceptable?

One partial answer is that new tactics were now available to reformers. Robert Moore (and more recently Conrad Leyser) have made much of the new role of the crowd in the eleventh century. As a result of urbanisation, a gradually more Christianised populus, and possibly the after-effects of millennial fears, you get groups of relatively lowly lay enthusiasts who can be used by the reformers as shock troopers to enforce boycotts (or more) of married priests.

As Jennifer Thibodeaux discusses, you also have a new church bureaucracy which can be used to enforce these demands on recalcitrant priests – officials such as archdeacons, procedures such as episcopal visitations spreading more widely, rather than in a few zealous dioceses as in the late ninth century. Conrad Leyser (again) makes a convincing argument that canonists in the post-Carolingian world were learning to argue with one another, something that's certainly visible in the tracts that Jennifer was discussing. (In contrast, much of Carolingian canon law consists of bishops called Hincmar arguing from detailed scrutiny of texts and everyone else ignoring them).

But even with these developments (and the more consistent commitment to reform you get from a papal monarchy) it was hard work getting rid of clerical wives. Legal training could be used to support their retention, as well as oppose them; the men who were supposed to be enforcers in the church might themselves be married (as Kirsten Fenton's paper showed me). And according to Jennifer Thibodeaux, some laymen reckoned that if a priest had his own wife, he would be less of a threat to theirs!

Given all the difficulties, why was this issue of purity chosen to be the key norm and not the other obvious one – sodomy? Peter Damian tried to create a moral panic about this topic and failed. As I've discussed before gays are a very useful target for religious reformers, both medieval and modern. Why weren't they the target this time?

I'm starting to wonder whether the Gregorian reform wasn't one of those rare occasions where the point was having a large target group of offenders, not a few lurking scapegoats. Bernard Gowers has suggested that there was more intense competition for monastic and episcopal posts in the late tenth and early eleventh century. One way of improving your chances was via erudition. But were some clerics getting on the band-wagon of being reformers, because it gave them a chance to get a large number of their potential rivals removed from their posts? As Robert Moore points out, clerical marriage was a clear-cut issue, unlike simony: one either was or wasn't married. That therefore surely makes it ideal as a SMART performance indicator.

This is where masculinity comes back in. You start with a Carolingian clerical world with relatively limited competition, together with an inclusive rhetoric of masculinity and an emphasis on the institutional authority of clerics over the laity. You then move to a more loosely networked world in the tenth century, with fewer constraints on competition. There's a new emphasis on chastity as a battle and on the charisma of particular holy men. Finally, in the eleventh century, you get an increasingly hierarchised church, intense competition, and reform rhetoric about the reformers' superior masculinity.

The usual view (e.g. in Maureen Miller's discussion of the 'lone manly bishop') is that rhetoric stressing the masculinity of the reformers was intended to contrast clerics favourably with laymen. But in fact the reformers' tactics (as some of their indignant opponents pointed out), were precisely intended to lower the esteem of "sinful clerics" in the eyes of the laity. As the Carolingian reform movement suggests, a social structure which wants to exalt "clerics" over "laity" doesn't stress competitive manliness: if clerics are manlier because they are celibate, then celibate laymen morally trump misbehaving clerics/monks. Odo of Cluny, in a more fragmented clerical world, might be prepared to show Gerald of Aurillac as a model for monks, but that wasn't Carolingian style.

Similarly, twelfth-century texts which want to show "the Church" as guiding for the laity (as discussed by Joanna Huntington and Matthew Mesley) have positive visions of laymen as capable of listening to wisdom, not as intrinsically disordered by any sexual activity (as suggested in the Vita Geraldi.

A shrill rhetoric of the superior masculinity of the celibate clergy, by contrast, looks more like a contest within the clerical ordo itself, with men prepared to throw their rivals under the bus of the populus just as long as this got them to the top. In fact, it looks rather like a re-run of the conflict in the fourth century, when Jerome was coming up with claims for the superiority masculinity of monk-bishops and denigrated marriage. David Hunter has suggested that in late antiquity, the monk-bishop didn't win out in the west; instead the preference often remained for senatorial men who committed themselves only to post-marital celibacy. In the eleventh century, however, it appears that the careerist celibates may have had rather sharper elbows than before and finally managed to get the upper hand.

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Religious men 2: who are the religious men?

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:33:36 +0200

I blogged the first day of the Huddersfield conference on Religious Men in the Middle Ages back in August (a mere month after attending it), and I'm now finally back to saying something more. Day 2 of the conference was jam-packed with papers, so I'm going to list the sessions I attended and then give very brief descriptions. I can give more details in comments for anyone who wants to know more about specific papers.

Parallel Session 3, Strand B (Laymen's devotions)
James MacGregor, Georgetown University, Qatar: ‘Dude prays like a lady? Varieties of male devotion to Saint George in Late Medieval England.’
Iain MacInnes, University of the Highlands and Islands: ‘Piety in a wartime environment: demonstrations of personal faith by English and Scottish warriors, c. 1332- c. 1357.’
David Harry, University of Bristol: ‘“Lordynges, prestes, clerkes, and prechours”: the pastoral responsibilities of lay men in fourteenth and fifteenth century England.’

Plenary lecture
Professor James Clark, Professor of Medieval History, University of Bristol. ‘The attractions of the monastic life for English men between the Black Death and the Reformation.’

Parallel Session 4, Strand A (Tears and cross-cultural constructions of gender)
Hannah Hunt, Leeds Trinity University College: ‘The Monk as mourner: Eastern Christian self-identity in the seventh century.’
Kimberley-Joy Knight, University of St Andrews: ‘”He could not restrain himself from melting wholly into tears”: gratia lacrymarum in male religious life in the thirteenth century.’
Elisa Pulido, Claremont Graduate University: 'Rabbi Gershom's ban on polygamy and Jewish accommodation in the Middle Ages'

Parallel Session 5 (Arms and the man)
Kirsten Fenton, University of St Andrews: ‘Gender and religious identity in the writings of William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon.’
Joanna Huntington, University of Lincoln: ‘Hereward the Wake: calamity’s child? Writing rebellion, ethnicity and lay masculinity in twelfth century England.’
John Jenkins, Independent Scholar: ‘Mendicant masculinity: a comparison of the treatment of gender in the lives of St Francis and the Buddha Gautama.’

In the first session we had a mix of late medieval papers on laymen, which were a useful reminder to me that it's not so much the overall types of devotion that change between the ninth and the fourteenth century, it's the social spread of those who do it and the types of artefacts they use. James MacGregor gave a very interesting paper combining manuscript study and liturgy, looking at Books of Hours with illustrated prayers to St George. There are very few of these, but those that do raise interesting iconographical issues. The iconography of St George increasingly moved towards showing him on horseback, fighting the dragon, with the princess he was trying to rescue watching him. Some of the prayers asked St George to rescue the person praying. How could a man pray such a prayer or appear in a donor image watching St George without identifying himself as feminized, being like the princess? James discussed how some of the iconography seems to have attempted to differentiate the viewing devotee from the viewing princess, as well as pointing out the problems of knowing exactly what prayers were being used and by whom. (Some rich men had multiple Books of Hours, for example). As usual, we can look at artefacts/texts, but it's very hard to know the male subjectivity in reactions to them.

We then had Iain MacInnes talking about how some traditional patterns of personal piety for warriors were less suitable during the Scottish wars, because the type of warfare had changed, and there was much more skirmishing. So for example, prayers before battle aren't much good if you're no longer fighting pitched battles. Instead there was an increased move to patronage of religious establishments, both before battles and afterwards, in memory of dead lords and followers.

Finally, David Harry was looking at the pastoral role that literate laymen were being expected to play in teaching others. This suggested immediate parallels to the Carolingian "lay mirrors" which I have discussed before now in considerable detail, but there are important changes in language and social levels from the ninth century. David was looking at vernacular pastoral literature, and contrasted it to twelfth century texts that were in Anglo-Norman and associated with the English court. In the ninth century, meanwhile, we have Latin texts, produced for laymen of the highest social status (although some of these were also later translated into vernacular languages). Once again, when we're debating issues of continuity versus change, scale is the key, though as usual, there's no obvious way in which we can measure that effectively for expectations of lay pastoral activity in 800-1500.

Next up in the day was James Clark providing statistics to show that there was no late medieval decline in recruitment for "traditional" religious orders (as opposed to the Mendicants), and that it's just Protestant propaganda that makes us believe the last monasteries before the Dissolution contained nothing more than two old men and a dog. In fact, in difficult times you can see particular vigour, such as between the two waves of the Black Death in 1348 and 1351 and between 1534 (the royal settlement) and 1536 (the final dissolution). As well as recruitment holding up, you can also see a continued interest in what are now sometimes called "alongsiders" – people sharing in the community for a while, whether children, youths or independent clerks.

James was arguing that a heroic, saintly ideal of monasticism still survived in the period, and that such a way of life also came to be associated with Englishness, with memories of King Offa as founding monasteries, and devotion to saints associated with monasteries, such as St Alban. Family identity was also important to some monks, where there was a tradition of sons entering a particular foundation.

But regular monasticism was also a career choice, providing social capital for gentry, yeoman and burgess families when their teenage sons entered. (There were relatively few sons of the nobility or lower classes professing). Some social mobility was possible, and there are examples of endowments and patronage allowing particular boys to enter the monastery as a richer monk's groom or being educated in a monastic school. There were professional opportunities in monasteries as well – as Joel Rosenthal pointed out on the first day, a fair number of late medieval bishops were regular clergy. There were also increasing opportunities for scholarship for monks, especially since some Benedictine abbeys had their own Oxbridge studia and links to specific secular colleges.

Parallel session 4 had a lot of manly crying men. Hannah Hunt was talking about two different models of the Eastern monk as mourner (the Syrian word for hermit, "abila", literally means "mourner"). John Climacus, from Mount Sinai in the seventh chapter of his Ladder of Divine Ascent had an inclusive view of mourning as a charismon that could be gained by anyone, emperors, women, children, convicts. Isaac of Nineveh, meanwhile, who talked about gouging tracks in your face by weeping, saw mourning as an activity done by male priests, while women lamented by singing, as in Jewish practice. Hannah was followed by Kimberley-Joy Knight arguing that contrary to what Piroska Nagy argued, the grace of tears didn't lose its significance after the twelfth century. Nagy argued that tears from the thirteenth century were no longer the unique gift of a male elite, but Kimberley-Joy was giving examples showing that tears weren't necessarily feminized after that.

After those two papers, which usefully implied that whatever happened in the Year 1000 and the Gregorian Reforms, there wasn't a "lachrymal mutation", we then had Elisa Puledo talking about something that did happen in the early eleventh century: Rabbi Gershom banning polygamy and a man divorcing a woman without her consent. The ban on polygamy was completely accepted in Europe, but not by Jews in Muslim-controlled areas. Elisa argued that a possible motive was as a way of distancing Jews from Muslims, at a time of increased tension after Caliph Al-Hakim had destroyed the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. Muslims were seen as lascivious by Christians, and Ashkenazi Jews, by changing their practices, moved radically away from other Jews as well as Islamic practices. Elisa wondered whether this then made it easier for bishops to protect Jews during the anti-Semitism preceding and during the Crusaders, but concluded that Christians may well have been unaware of the ban. Partial assimilation of this sort may not have made much difference.

The final session of the day was probably the most enjoyable one, even though I got roped into chairing it. We started off with an excellent paper from Kirsten Fenton in which my vast ignorance of twelfth-century English historians was revealed. I had not realised that Henry of Huntingdon was a married cleric with children, at a time when such behaviour was being attacked and prohibited. Kirsten showed how Henry's discussions of synods on clerical celibacy were affected by this – such as his gleeful claim that in 1125, after the papal legate, John of Crema, had dealt severely with clerical concubines, he was discovered "after vespers with a whore". Henry also didn't mention some councils that prohibited clerical wives, and reported protests that attempts at purity beyond clerics' capacity might lead to further sin. It was a nice reminder that the views of reformers about clerical celibacy weren't universally accepted, and especially significant because Henry was an archdeacon, a group who were now being expected to act as enforcers of such decisions at a parish level.

Next up after Kirsten was Joanna Huntington, giving us a rousing account of Hereward the Wake, complete with PowerPoint slides of Lego figures and weird Victorian images of Hereward. Such unusual images seem rather appropriate when combined with a discussion of the Gesta Herewardi, a work which Joanna described as being at the intersection of history and fiction. The text includes a lot of anecdotes about Hereward as an exiled youth, including him slaying a bear in Northumberland (this animal was allegedly the offspring of one from Norway and possessed human intelligence, thus allowing Joanna to point out that we therefore now knew what a Norwegian bear does in the woods).

Joanna's main point was that even though Hereward is shown as a hero in some ways right from the start, he's only shown as truly manly, a "praeclarus vir", rather than an "iuvenis", when he's older and behaves more responsibly, for example by returning booty he looted from Peterborough Abbey. Joanna sees this as a part of a wider concern in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to have clerics recognised as rightful leaders of the Christian community. Laymen have to know their place; military virtus isn't enough on its own.

The combination of the two papers raises interesting questions about the extent to which discussions of masculinity/correct behaviour by men in the eleventh and twelfth centuries are mainly focused on conflicts between clerics and laymen or within the clergy themselves. Who are religious men defining themselves against? The most influential view has tended to see masculinity in the Gregorian Reform as about clerics asserting their male superiority over laymen, based on their supposedly greater purity. But that doesn't explain why reformers were making that claim in the eleventh century, but not in the ninth. Joanna's paper suggests that clerical claims to control of laymen could be as much about greater wisdom and respect for Christ's servants as opposed to simple claims of moral superiority based on celibacy. Kirsten's paper suggests how much conflict there was within clerical circles, that reform is as much about making claims of having superior virtue over other clerics (to which someone like Henry of Huntington responds by claiming that the reformers are just hypocrites). I hope to talk a bit more in my final post on the conference about how that ties in with some of the wider points that came out in the conference about clerical careers.

But first of all, a brief mention of the final paper of the day, by John Jenkins who managed the previously-unheard of feat of being more outrageous than Joanna. Though his paper started off with some comparisons between the Buddha and St Francis as mendicants, the main focus was on Buddha as the embodiment of the perfect man in Indian Buddhism. There he is portrayed not as a jolly fat figure (that's Budai, but as having extraordinary beauty and great skill in martial arts. John referred to the 32 major characteristics of the Buddha's body, which included him having webbed hands and feet and a retractable penis. John was arguing that this hyper-masculine image was developed to be set against the Vedic religion, which contrasted Brahma (the priestly god) with Indra (the warrior god) and linked beauty and strength together. The Buddha is the perfectly controlled warrior as well as the perfect spiritual leader, the perfect man in this world who can therefore renounce it. In contrast, St Francis, in a more established religious environment, doesn't need to display such hyper-masculinity. Instead, the very weakness of his body simply confirms his strength of mind. Unlike the Buddha, he fights his own body, not those around him.

As a conversation-starter, a paper discussing a retractable penis is always going to be hard to beat. But at a slightly more analytical level, it's a useful illustration of the fact that even hyper-masculine warriors aren't culturally identical. The next time I hear evolutionary psychologists going on about universal views of male or female beauty, I am going to ask whether they include having a "long and broad tongue" (no. 28).

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Popular culture and populist puritans

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:58:15 +0200

My final post on this summer's IHR Earlier Medieval seminars (though it wasn't actually the final paper of the term) is about Lucy Grig's paper on "In search of late antique popular culture (via Caesarius of Arles)". Lucy was looking at Arles in the early sixth century, a city possibly at the cusp of the ancient and medieval worlds. (Its greatest moment had been in the fourth century, when it had won imperial favour under Constantine). She was particularly interested in looking at how popular culture might be embedded in and interacting with "high culture" and quoted Stuart Hall (the modern cultural theorist) on the tensions between popular culture and the dominant culture which tries to reshape it.

Those attempts to reshape popular culture are very clear in Caesarius' sermons (or at least the sermons attributed to Caesarius – Lucy said for her purposes it wasn't essential if they were all his personal work). His sermons do seem to be aimed at a wider cultural group than before, even if there's argument about who exactly the audience are, and they're certainly trying to reform popular culture. Some of the things he complains about, like attending theatrical spectacles, may be purely a trope. It's unlikely the amphitheatre and theatre in Arles were still going by his time; their sites seem to have been used for spolia from the fifth century.

But in sermon 6, which is written in the form of a dialogue with various "rustici", we do seem to have something reflecting actual practices. Caesarius insists that being illiterate is no excuse for not following God's commandments – you can still listen to someone reading to you. If you can remember "shameful love songs", why can't you learn and remember the Creed? If you're bothered enough about your vineyard to get good advice on taking care of it, why aren't you bothered enough about your soul to ask experts about that? Caesarius' rustic man may not be the lowest of the peasants, if he's got his own vineyard, but he certainly sounds to have his own culture, and it's one that Caesarius wants to change. Other sermons of Caesarius show him co-opting the local land-owning elite into policing their subordinates and controlling their own household, as well as encouraging his audience to inform on their misbehaving neighbours.

This looks like the active attempt to attack current forms of popular culture; Lucy briefly also mentioned hints at what might be intended to replace this. Caesarius wanted lay people to learn psalms and hymns by heart, partly because if they were singing in church, they wouldn't have time to gossip there. Augustine composed popular hymns, such as a peculiar abecedarian hymn against the Donatists. (This has apparently been described as the first pop song, even though it would have taken 35 minutes to perform – I think references to prog rock popped up either in the talk itself or the discussion afterwards, though we also had Charlotte Roueché saying that Acts 19 has a crowd crying out acclamations to Diana of the Ephesians for two hours, so 35 minutes against the Donatists isn't long).

So is this another case of cultural hegemony attempting to stifle popular culture, which in turn resists it, in the way Stuart Hall talks about? Yes, but there's also something interesting and different here. Peter Heather, in the discussion afterwards, was pointing out that pre-Christian/non-Christian authors (he mentioned Themistius as an example), simply didn't give a damn about popular culture. Themistius was part of a very elitist culture in which the only rational people worth bothering about were the educated and leisured. This only changed in the fourth and fifth century because Christianity said everyone had souls. Caesarius fulminated against the lives and culture of the plebs because they mattered to him as people in a way that they hadn't to previous cultural elites.

In this, Caesarius is part of a whole group of populist puritans visible in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages: I'd link him with other religious reformers such as Augustine, John Chrysostom, Jonas of Orléans, and to a certain extent Hincmar of Rheims as well. They're all men who want to interfere in the lives of others: puritanical about sex and dirty songs, but also attacking the ill-deeds of rich and powerful men. Caesarius condemns male drunkenness and promiscuity; Chrysostom denounces wife-beating and those who don't help the poor. Jonas and Hincmar too both condemn oppression of the less powerful. They were moralists who didn't take the moral status quo of the ancient/early medieval world as acceptable: the other side to their puritanical nature was a genuine concern for the poor and vulnerable. Many religious moralists now only seem to worry about sex; it's interesting to have a reminder of a time when moralists were concerned with all aspects of their audience's lives.

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Today's suggestion for a PhD thesis

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 12:30:18 +0200

I have just been reading Amanda Vickery, "Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history", The Historical Journal 36 (1993), pp. 383-414 (DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X9300001X), which despite its title, is only about 1600 onwards. But despite this, it does include the following useful hint for where future research is needed

Thirdly, it would be mistaken to see evangelical enthusiasm thriving in every middle-class home, just because the history of the tepid, the backsliding and the utterly indifferent nineteenth-century household remains to be written. (p. 398)

To the archives, eager young researchers! (But do the tepid bother to write voluminous diaries/letters etc. or are they just too busy out backsliding?)

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Medieval social networks 1: concepts, intellectual networks and tools

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:17:09 +0200

Data visualization of Facebook relationships by Kencf0618

Network analysis is one of those areas which keeps on cropping up as a possibility for medieval researchers. (There have been some interesting discussions and examples previously at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe and Cathalaunia, which I'll discuss more in a later post).

Since one of the hopes of the Making of Charlemagne's Europe project I'm working for is that the data collected can be used for exploring social networks, I thought it would be useful to find out a bit more about what has been done already. So is this my first attempt to get a feeling for what's been done with medieval data and what it might be possible to do.

I should note at this point that I'm drawing very heavily on the work of Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, especially his paper: "Visualising Communities: Möglichkeiten der Netzwerkanalyse und der relationalen Soziologie für die Erfassung und Analyse mittelalterlicher Gemeinschaften". I found out about many of the projects I discuss from this paper, so I am grateful for to him for providing such a primer. My focus is slightly different to his, however, as what I'm particularly interested is the type of research questions that social network analysis might be used to answer, more than the details of particular projects.

Defining networks
One immediate problem in knowing where to look comes because the key mathematical tools and visualization techniques can be applied to very different kinds of data. The underlying concepts come mainly from graph theory. Wikipedia defines that as: "the study of graphs, which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context is a collection of "vertices" or "nodes" and a collection of edges that connect pairs of vertices. A graph may be undirected, meaning that there is no distinction between the two vertices associated with each edge, or its edges may be directed from one vertex to another."

What that means is that you can use the same basic techniques to study anything from a road network via the structure of novels, to how infections spread through a population. But it also means that the type of network and how you can analyse it depends crucially on several factors. These include how you define a node and edge, whether all edges are the same (or whether you're counting the connections between some pairs as somehow different/more important than others) and whether it's a directed or undirected graph.
The size of the network is also crucial, and that differs vastly between disciplines: it's when you see a physicist commenting that "At best power law forms for small networks (and small to me means under a million nodes in this context) give a reasonable description or summary of fat tailed distributions" that you know that not all networks are the same kind of thing. One of the things that interests me when looking at projects is the extent to which data visualization is important in itself or whether the emphasis is on mathematical analysis of the underlying data.

Data quality

There are, inevitably, particular issues with data quality for medieval networks. The obvious one is whether the information you have is typical or whether the reasons for its survival bias our evidence excessively from the start. (The answer is almost certainly yes, but medievalists wouldn't know how to cope if they had properly representative sources, so let's move on rapidly).

Another big issue is identifying individual nodes. You can in theory have anything as nodes: an individual, a "family", a manuscript, a place, a type of archaeological artefact, a gene, a unit of language. (I'm not going to look at either linguistic or genetic network analysis in what follows, but there are projects doing both of those). The problem with medieval data is that there's almost always some uncertainty about identification: are two people the same or not? What do you do about unidentifiable places? How do you decide whether two people belong to the same family?

Then there's question of how you define a connection between two nodes. What makes two people connected to one another? The data you extract from the sources obviously depends on decisions made about this, but for a lot of medieval networks there's the added complication that not all connections are made at the same time. If you have a modern social network where A connects with B and (simultaneously) B connects with C you can make certain deductions about the network from data about whether or not A and C are connected. If you have limited medieval data where A connects with B and 20 years later B connects with C, can you model that as one network, or do you have to take time-slices across the network (which may often reduce your available data set from small to pathetic)?

Varieties of projects
Of the medieval history projects I've come across so far (I suspect there's a whole slew of others in fields such as archaeology), most seem to fall into three categories. There are studies on networks of traders, such as by Mike Burkhardt on the Hanse. There are probably other similar examples: I've not yet had a chance to investigate whether the important work by Avner Greif on traders in the Maghreb also uses network analysis or not. But these kinds of studies are unlikely to be relevant to any early medieval project, because they will almost certainly rely on relatively large-scale sets of data from a short chronological range (account-books, registers of traders etc). Such data sets simply don't exist for the periods I'm interested in.

The other two types of medieval network studies I've noticed are ones which are looking at intellectual networks or the spread of ideas (with some possible overlap with spread of objects more generally) and ones using network analysis to study how a society operates (social network analysis in its most specific sense). For both of these, I'm aware of some early medieval studies and others that are potentially applicable to early medieval style-data. I'll cover intellectual networks in this post (including a discussion of a recent IHR seminar) and then move onto social history uses of network analysis in the next post.

Intellectual networks/spread of ideas: example projects

1) Ego-networks
There are several forms that network analysis of intellectual networks can take. One obvious one is as a more quantitative version of what's been done for many years (if not centuries): the study of "ego-networks", the intellectual contacts that a particular individual has.

This is the basis for the study by Isabelle Rosé of Odo of Cluny (Rosé, Isabelle. "Reconstitution, représentation graphique et analyse des réseaux de pouvoir au haut Moyen Âge: Approche des pratiques sociales de l’aristocratie à partir de l’exemple d’Odon de Cluny († 942)", Redes. Revista hispana para el análisis de redes sociales 21, no. 1 (2011)

Rosé's study isn't strictly of just an ego-network, since she also tries to analyse the connections that Odo's contacts had with each other in which Odo wasn't involved, but the centre is clearly Odo. Rosé uses a mix of different sources (narrative and charters) to construct snapshots of Odo's connections over time: she ends up with a PowerPoint slideshow showing the network for every year (available from here). She wanted to include a spatial dimension to the networks (showing where connections were formed), but couldn't find a way of doing that.

Rosé's account includes some useful detail about her methodology. The data she collected in Excel consisted of 2 people's names, a type of connection and a direction for it, a source and start dates and end dates for the connection. She also codes individual nodes based on the person's social function (monk, layman, king etc) and the aristocratic group they belong to (Bosonids etc); this is reflected in their colour and shape on her network diagrams.

There are a lot of questions raised immediately about how such decisions are made (period of time allocated to a particular connection, how she decides on who counts as on one of the groups); all the kind of nitty-gritty that has to be sorted out for any particular project.

What does Rosé's use of network analysis allow that a conventional analysis of how Odo's social networks helped him couldn't do? One is that the data collection method encourages a systematic searching for all connections that an unstructured reading of the sources might miss. Secondly, the visualization of networks (especially as they change over time) gives an easy way of spotting patterns, allowing periodization of Odo's career, for example. Thirdly, it's possible to compare different sorts of tie, e.g. she shows that the kinship networks (whether actual or the fictive kinship of godparenthood) consists of a number of unconnected segments. But when you include ties of kinship and ties of fidelity, you do get a single network. Finally, Rosé uses a few formal network metrics to rank people by their centrality to the network (their importance to it) and their role as cut-points (people whose removal from the network would mean that there were disconnected segments of it).

Apart from this restricted use of metrics, Rosé is mostly doing visualization and I suspect that many of her conclusions are confirmations of things that a conventional analysis of Odo's social network without such complex data collection would have come up with anyhow: who Odo's key connections were, the importance of the fact that right from the start Odo had connections to the Robertines and also the Guilhemides. But one of her most interesting comments was that analysis showed a move away from kings as central to social networks, which she connected to a move to "feudalism". If we could find comparable data sets (and there are obvious problems in doing so), it'd be interesting to see whether kings outside France become non-central to reforming abbots in the same way.

2) Scale-free networks
There are a couple of articles I want to highlight which talk about scale-free medieval networks and which I want to discuss more for some of the difficulties they raise than the answers they're coming up with. One is work that hasn't yet been published, but has been publicised: analysis of the spread of heresy by Andrew Roach of Glasgow and Paul Ormerod. The other is Sindbæk, S.M. 2007. 'The Small World of the Vikings. Networks in Early Medieval Communication and Exchange', Norwegian Archaeological Review 40, 59-74, online.

But first, a very rough explanation of scale-free networks, which means introducing one or two basic mathematical/statistical ideas. The first is the degree of a node, the number of connections it has. The second is the distribution of these degrees, i.e. what percentage of nodes have 1 degree, 2 degrees, etc. Scale-free networks are ones where the degree distribution follows a power law: roughly speaking, you have a few very well-connected nodes and then a long tail of a lot of poorly-connected nodes.

The crunch here is "roughly-speaking": there are all kinds of issues about whether any particular example really does represent the power law distributions that supposedly lie behind it. It's a reminder that if we as historians we do start doing more of this kind of work, we're probably going to need some good mathematicians/statisticians behind us pointing out possible issues.

Without seeing the data, it's impossible to tell whether Roach and Ormerod are accurate about medieval heresy spreading through such types of networks. But Søren Sindbæk's paper on Viking trade suggests that the interest here isn't strictly whether we're talking about scale-free distributions or not. It's a more general question about how the very localized societies within which the vast majority of medieval people lived could nevertheless allow the relatively rapid long-range spread of everything from unusual theological ideas to silver dirhams.

Søren's main point is that there are two possible ways that such small-world networks can evolve: either you can have a few random links between two otherwise largely separate networks (weak-ties model) or you can have a few very well-connected nodes amid the otherwise very localised societies ("scale-free"). Which of these two ideal type of networks you have affects considerably the robustness of the network: i.e. if you have one or two crucial hubs that get destroyed by attackers, the whole network falls apart, but random attacks aren't likely to have much effect, while the weak-ties model is more vulnerable to a random attack (if a random link that ties two networks together happens to get severed). Søren tries to see which type of network best fits two very limited sets of data (one based on the Vita Anskari) and one on archaeological data. The answer, not surprisingly, is "scale-free" networks.

I say the answer isn't surprising because the medieval world is full of hierarchies of people and places, and some of the defining characteristics of those at the top of such hierarchies are that they move around more or they have connections to a lot more places. I found Søren's paper mainly revealing in giving a feel of the numerical bounds for where simple visualization is a useful tool: a plot of 116 edges (see Fig 3) is already getting complex to visualise; one with 491 edges (see fig 4) almost impossible to take in by eye.

As for Roach and Ormerod, the fact that heresy was mainly spread through a small number of widespread travellers isn't exactly news. We'll have to wait and see whether they can provide something that gives a new dimension of analysis.

3) Six degrees of not-Alcuin
Finally for this post, I want to discuss an IHR seminar I heard back in May: Clare Woods from Duke University talking about "Ninth century networks: books, gifts, scholarly exchange". Clare's coming to intellectual history from a slightly different angle from Isabelle Rosé: she has been editing a collection of sermons by Hrabanus Maurus for Archbishop Haistulf of Mainz, and thinking about how to represent the relationship between manuscript witnesses visually (rather than just rely on verbal descriptions or stemma diagrams.

The point here is that manuscript stemma can be thought of as directional networks between manuscripts, whose place of production can be located (more or less accurately). (There are also projects endeavouring to generate manuscript stemma automatically, but I'm not discussing those at the moment). Clare is also using data from book dedications, known manuscript movements, and the evidence of medieval library catalogues.

Also in contrast to Rosé, Clare was interested in the possibility of getting beyond the spider's web idea of intellectual history. i.e. that Hrabanus (or Odo) sits at the centre and everyone else revolves around him. This is a particular issue for Carolingian intellectual history because of Alcuin. We have by far more letters of Alcuin preserved than of any other Carolingian author (Hincmar probably comes second, but his letters still haven't been edited properly), so if you use Rosé's techniques you're liable to end up overrating Alcuin's significance vastly.

Clare's main focus was on simple tools for visualizing this information, ideally in both its spatial and temporal dimensions. As I said above, Rosé was using Excel, Powerpoint and NetDrawand was finding problems in showing locations. Clare was using Google Maps for the spatial element, but thought she'd need Javascript (which she doesn't know) to show changes over time. I have seen projects which use GoogleMaps and a timeline, such as the MGH Constitutiones timemap (click on Karte to follow how Charles IV, the fourteenth century Holy Roman Emperor moved around his kingdom). I don't know how that is made to work.

I'd be interested to know from more informed readers of the blog if there are such tools available that non-experts can use to produce geo-coded networks of this kind. Gephi seems to be popular free software for network analysis, and I've seen a reference to a plug-in for this which allows entering geo-coded data. The Guardian datablog recommends Google Fusion Tables.

But whatever software you have, there are the normal issues of data quality. There's a particular problem with data coming from a very long timescale: in questions David Ganz wondered whether the evidence was getting contaminated by C12 copies (I wasn't quite sure whether that's just because there are so many manuscripts of all sorts from later). How do we know whether manuscript movements do reflect actual intellectual contacts, rather than just random accidents of them getting moved/displaced etc? Clare also discussed the problems of how you mapped a manuscript which came from "northern Italy". Her response was to choose an arbitrary point in the region and use that – at the level of approximation and small number of data points she's using, it's not a major distortion.

The data sets for early medieval texts are always going to be tiny: having more than 100 manuscripts of one text from the whole of the Middle Ages is exceptional. (The largest transmission I know of is for Alcuin's De virtutibus et vitiis of which we have around 140 copies). But Clare's project does potentially offer the possibility of combining her data with other geo-referenced social networks to get an alternative and wider picture of intellectual connections in the Carolingian world. Combining data-sets is likely to lead to even more quality issues, but it does offer the possibility of building up new concepts of the Carolingian world module by module.

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Love my sword more than you

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:31:31 +0200

Early C7 sword from Sutton Hoo ship burial. Image © Trustees of the British Museum

Inspired by Jon Jarrett, who is now enthusiastically blogging large numbers of long-past seminars, I thought I should weigh in and give readers a brief account of some seminars from the IHR Earlier Medieval Seminar summer term programme. The first one of these I went to was by Sue Brunning of UCL and the British Museum on "'Precious iron', 'friend in war': swords with character in Anglo-Saxon England", which took the vague clichés I had been aware of about the emotional importance of swords to early medieval warriors and placed them on a far better evidential basis. She was talking about the concept of artefact biography and stressing how important the life history of an object was: thinking not just its manufacture, but about its ownership, circulation, repair, modification and end.

Sue's work draws on images, texts and material objects, though there's something of a mismatch between the sources: most of the archaeological evidence comes from the earlier Anglo-Saxon period (fifth to seventh century), when furnished burials are common, and most of the textual evidence comes from the later period. In this paper, Sue was specifically talking about swords as having "character", both in the sense of individual features that made them distinctive, and in the sense of having a reputation (as implied by someone behaving "out of character"). There's good evidence of individual swords having distinctive visual appearances: Anglo-Saxon wills, such as that of Athelstan, the son of Ethelred the Unready refer to several different swords by their appearances (e.g. "notched swords", damaged and unrepaired). Descriptions of hilt ornaments appear in poems such as Beowulf as well as in wills. Swords could be individually recognisable, especially since all components could be replaced or augmented individually (Customisable swords with "go sharper" stripes?) Meanwhile archaeological studies of wear on sword hilts shows asymmetrical patterns, suggesting that the (two-edged) sword was always put back in the scabbard the same way round. Many pommels have different faces, with a plain face that is more worn, implying that the patterned face is shown off more, on display to the viewer.

Although named swords are common in poetry, they don't appear in prose or official documents and the archaeological evidence is ambiguous: it's not clear whether the runes found on some swords are names of the sword or its owner. Possibly names were more informally given, and might be changed: Sue suggested the parallel of owners naming cars today. What we can see, however, is swords with histories. They appear in poems such as Waldere, but also in official documents: Duke Hugo gives King Athelstan Constantine's sword, which would be 600 years old, and Athelstan's will refers to a sword of Offa that would be 200 years old. Old swords were not considered redundant. Some swords show severe signs of wear, and have been repaired and modified, with fittings changed or ornaments and inscriptions added to a previously undecorated sword. At this point, I must admit that I did start thinking about the old joke from a Stanley Holloway monologue.

‘Ere’s the axe – that’s the genuine axe, Sir,
That’s given Royal necks some ‘ard whacks.
Tho’ it’s ‘ad a new ‘andle and perhaps a new head
But it’s a real old original axe.

Sue also mentioned ring swords, with a ring attached to the hilt – these could be added and subtracted: metallurgical analysis can sometimes show where a fitting hole for a ring has been put and later removed. Sue suggested that sword rings possibly represented oaths sworn to a lord and might be a visual representation of a warrior's career, something that reflected on the character or reputation of the wielder. We perhaps need to think of swords and men as being in partnership, sharing a reputation. And these were long-term relationships. There are burials in Kent where the sword is enfolded in the body or arms. No other weapon is touched like this in these graves, suggesting a relationship that extended even beyond death. Swords did not just have an economic value, but a symbolic character.

As you will gather, Sue's talk was an excellent one, and implicitly made a good argument for interdisciplinary study, something that has recently been called into question. There is a strand of military history that tends to downplay literary sources on warfare, see them as fanciful, far removed from the practical logic of combat. But Sue's paper, moving between different types of sources, shows common elements to Anglo-Saxon warrior culture, where weapons are more than simply means of attack and defence. If a modern day solider can still write a book called Love My Rifle More than You, and say of a modern-day mass-produced weapon: "I love my M4...Gun in your hands and you're in a special place", how much more potent a character must a handmade "battle-beam" have had?

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Who cares about history (unique identifiers edition)?

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:41:31 +0200

Over at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, a discussion that started off being about the trajectory of women's history has mutated into one about why someone isn't creating a system of unique identifiers for medieval texts. And while I've spent the last decade or so thinking about gender history, I've spent half my life thinking about databases and identifying references uniquely, because that is one of the things librarians do all day. So I wanted to start from Joan Vilaseca's plea for "A public and standarized corpus of classical/ancient texts with external references to editions, versions, comments, articles, etc,etc.etc", sketch out what I'm aware of as existing and explore why history seemingly can't get its act together in the way that chemistry or taxonomy has.

There are actually some databases that do a fair amount of what Joan would want. As examples, there are:

1) Perseus Digital Library. This is a big and sophisticated free collection of classical texts, including some very neat tools, such as Greek and Latin word study tools (which I freely admit to using when I'm stumped on working out the root verb from a conjugated form). This doesn't have identifying references, however.

2) Library of Latin texts. This commercial database includes the full text of the whole corpus of Latin literature up to the second century AD (essentially taken from the Teubner editions), plus a lot of patristic and medieval Latin (largely, but not entirely taken from the Corpus Christianorum series). Associated with this is the Clavis Patrum Latinorum which provides a numbered list of all Christian Latin texts from Tertullian to Bede. (There are similar indexes which cover Greek patristic texts, apocrypha, and early medieval French authors.

3) Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. This database includes most literary texts in Greek from Homer to the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It's a subscription service, but it includes a free online canon database that provides unique identifying numbers for works and parts of works.

4) Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (BHL). This is a catalogue of ancient and medieval Latin hagiographical materials, produced by the Bollandists, which provides unique identifying numbers for different texts. There's also a free online version.

5) Leuven Database of Ancient Books. This free database includes basic information on all literary texts preserved in manuscript from the fourth century BC to AD 800; the texts are assigned a unique number. (It's a subset of the Trimegistos project which focus on documents from Graeco-Roman Egypt, both literary and non-literary and also provides identifying numbers).

What this very brief overview reflects is one basic fact: to produce a database and/or identifying ring systems of any size takes time and money. As a result, there have to be enough people wanting the result to make it worthwhile making that investment. There are several different models for financing such projects: you can sell the resultant database (either for profit or at a break-even price), or you can persuade funding bodies to support you, or rely on charitable donations but you need someone willing to pay.

It's worth looking here to see why identifier projects in other fields have succeeded. A lot of large-scale identifier projects, for example, have come out of library science and publishing, both because these are huge and connected networks and because there's the commercial driver of being able to identify something in your inventory quickly and accurately). So the Standard Book Number, developed for WH Smith in the 1960s became the ISBN of today, followed in the 1970s by the ISSN for serials, etc. It's noticeable that it took more than twenty years after unique identifiers for serials to develop for unique identifiers for individual articles within those serials to develop (the CrossRef project using DOIs). This wasn't because no user ever wanted an individual article to read before then; it was because it was only with electronic journals that it became feasible to try and sell individual articles to people.

Most of the other really large-scale nomenclature/identifier projects have been in the sciences, for the simple reason that the same phenomena are being studied all over the world. We're (mostly) looking at the same sky, hence the International Astronomical Union was formed in 1919. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, responsible for chemical nomenclature also dates from a similar period. (One of the other main systems of chemical nomenclature, the CAS Registry number is an offshoot of the subscription index/database Chemical Abstracts). Again, people are trying to do the same chemical reactions from Bombay to Los Angeles, so there's a big demand for such systems. Biological classification has a very long history, dating back to Linnaeus (although unique identifiers are only just being developed), reacting to thousands of years of attempts to show how all species are related.

The classical/medieval database projects that I've mentioned above have essentially been possible because they have a sufficiently tightly-defined group of potential users who are all interested in the same sort of thing: classical literature or papyrology or hagiography. It's therefore worth creating something for them to use. The problem with extending such a system to broader historical areas is that no-one cares about history.

That sounds ridiculous, but it's a problem I've mentioned before: it's not really clear that we're doing the same thing as historians when we study vastly different periods and use completely different sorts of sources. Or to put it a different way, the Old Bailey database is a remarkable resource, but not of any professional use to me. I don't care about all history, everywhere; I care specifically about early medieval European history. Historical sources, even just medieval sources, aren't one thing, but a patchwork of different islands and most researchers spend most of their time perched securely on a few of these, rarely venturing off them. I've had years of being an early medievalist and never needed to cite Sawyer numbers, for example, because I don't research or teach Anglo-Saxon history; I'd be almost equally baffled if I came across Corpus Iuris Canonici footnotes without the help of Edward Peters. The patchwork systems of identifying medieval documents remain because of the lack of overlap between the groups of researchers using them, and I can't see any driving force that is going to change that. Crowd-sourcing has produced some remarkable things, but creating unique identifiers is a peculiarly ill-suited task for crowd-sourcing. Unless more people start caring about the history of everywhere at all times, Joan isn't going to get the wide-ranging system he'd like.

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Reading "Kim" in Echternach

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:41:51 +0200

I spent most of last week on holiday in Echternach, a small town in the far east of Luxemburg. It's a place that probably most British people have never heard of, even though it owes its existence to an Englishman: the monastery round which the town grew up was founded in 698 by St Willibrord, an Anglo-Saxon missionary.

If Willibrord hasn't already been made official saint of the EU, he probably should be. He was born somewhere near Ripon, and came to the Continent after time spent in a monastery in Ireland. He was apostle to the Frisians, the Frankish mayor of the palace Pippin II was one of his patrons, and he made several trips to Rome and into Germany, as well as establishing a base in modern-day Luxemburg. Echternach has always had a "European" aspect to it. There's a huge Roman villa a few miles from the spot where the monastery was built. The medieval manuscripts from the monastery's important scriptorium are now scattered from Madrid to Uppsala. There are three official languages of Luxemburg (Luxembourgish, French and German) and people and texts in Echternach switch between even more: we grew used to trying to work out what to eat from menus with dishes with Italian names and German descriptions. We'd speak to people in French and they'd presume we were German (or occasionally Dutch, which was really confusing). Echternach is right on the German border: over the Sauer river is Echternacherbrück ("Echternach Bridge"), a little German town. Thanks to the Schengen Agreement, we wandered over one of the bridges in Echternach and into Germany several times in a day with no officialdom involved; it's only the sudden lack of French signs and a notice about different speed limits that marks that you're in a different country.

The "European" nature of Echternach, and Luxemburg more generally, hasn't all been sweetness and light, of course. The Grand-Duchy was ruled by outside powers for more than 500 years; there are signs up in Echternach remembering people executed for anti-Nazi resistance, and the town was badly damaged during the Battle of the Bulge. But it does speak of a world where the co-existence of multiple cultures and languages and influences is normal, not exceptional.

It may be possible to say that they do things differently on the Continent, that this is not the British (English) way. But that was rather contradicted by one of the books I was reading on holiday: Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Kim is a white boy (not English, but Irish) in India, who has "gone native" after being orphaned. The book is an unexpected celebration of the diversity of the Indian empire and the East more generally. (Kim's closest companion is a Tibetan lama). Kim is recognised and educated as a Sahib, but he does not simply remain one. Instead he becomes a spy, moving between cultures to gain information useful for the British rulers of India. Here, there is a pragmatic reason for a fascination with other races and religions: it is necessary to maintain order. But Kim is not simply a spy; he is also the lama's chela, disciple/servant, genuinely seeking for spiritual understanding and open to learn from others. The book isn't a simple glorification of white superiority (let alone white Christian superiority), but something far more complex.

Put Echternach together with "Kim" and you see a whole world in which multiple cultures exist, rubbing alongside one another. It's historically unusual to have a state or country with only one language and religion and ethnic background. People who decry "multiculturalism" need to answer the question: what is the alternative way to deal with the fact of people from multiple cultures in the same place?

It's revealing to look at some of the most successful empires – Roman, Carolingian, British – which have had to deal with this problem in a particular acute form. You don't, generally, see an attempt to insist that there can only be one religion, one language, one way of doing things. That doesn't mean that all traditions get equal weighting or encouragement, but it does mean that some diversity is tolerated, that "non-conformity" isn't automatically a threat, that cultures are assumed to be strong enough to learn from others and adapt, rather than be "swamped". To suggest otherwise, to see "Indian dance" as the wrong sort of thing for British children to do, strikes me as ignoring the lessons of both European and British history.

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Digital diplomatics 1: projects and possibilities

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:45:48 +0200

I am currently trying to get up to speed on some of the many projects involving charters online, drawing heavily on accounts from the Digital Diplomatics conferences (and also Jon Jarrett's useful reports on the 2011 conference). I don't claim to be an expert on charters, but I have been using (and sometimes developing) databases for 25 years, so some of the issues seem quite familiar from my experience as a librarian. What I want to do in this first post is give a sample of the types of project out there and also note what I consider to be some particularly interesting features.

It's useful to start with a sketch of the origins of diplomatics (the study of charters) because that explains a lot about how digital developments have been shaped. The starting point was the attempts by early modernists to work out which charters of a particular religious institution were false and which were genuine. For this, the key ability was being able to compare charters with good evidence for being authentic (e.g. held as originals) to other more dubious versions. As a result, charter studies have often been organised either around particular collections/archives (e.g. editions of cartularies, charters of St Gall) or around rulers (e.g. the diplomas of Charles the Bald), because it's easier to spot the dodgy stuff in a reasonably homogenous corpus.

Charters have also long been a key source for regional history, so eighteenth and nineteenth century scholars produced a lot of editions of regional collections of documents including charters, such as the Histoire générale de Languedoc. Where the corpus is small enough, these have then been extended to national collections or overviews, some of which I mention below.

From the purely print age, we have now, however, begun moving into digital diplomatics and there have been a variety of approaches.

1) Simple retro-digitisation
Because there's been scholarly interest in diplomatics for several centuries, a lot of early editions are now out of copyright. Simple retro-digitisation of old editions doesn't often get mentioned in discussions of digital diplomatics (though Georg Vogeler, "Digitale Urkundenbücher. Eine Bestandsaufnahme", Archiv für Diplomatik, 56 (2010), p. 363?392 has a useful discussion of them), but there are a lot of old charter editions being put online by projects such as Google, Internet Archive, Gallica etc. This data, however, is pretty hard for charter scholars to make use of unless they're looking for a specific charter (or at most a specific edition). Is there any way in which this material could be deal with more effectively?

Doing something with such data doesn't strike me as a project that's likely to possible to fund (it's not new and exciting enough). The most plausible way of organising it seems to me to be crowd-sourcing of OCR work on charter scans (or checking already OCR'd documents) along with adding some basic XML markup and then sticking them in a repository. Monasterium seems the obvious one to use. Whether there would be enough researchers interested in charters from more than one foundation to make the effort of doing this worthwhile, however, I'm not sure.

2) Databases based on the printed edition model
Printed editions of charters are normally either arranged chronologically or include a chronological index. (There are a few cartulary editions which don't have this, and I have winced at having to look through hundreds of pages to spot if there are any Carolingian charters). The vast majority of printed editions also have indexes to personal names and place names. In contrast, content analysis of the charter is often fairly limited, in the form of headnotes plus a narrative introduction.

The indexes to printed charters, if they're done properly, work pretty well for the needs of many people working with these sources. Or, to see it from a different angle, historians studying charters arrange their research into these kind of categories. As a result, where such indexes don't exist in the original edition, you'll often find that someone creates them later (like Julius Schmincke doing an index to Dronke's edition of the charters from Fulda).

A lot of charter databases are still essentially arranged around these traditional print access methods, with digitisation essentially adding (often fairly basic) full text search and remote access. Many of the online charter projects that have got furthest have been digitisations of relatively small and coherent existing charter collections, which have already been published in a single print series. There are several based on national collections, such as Sean Miller's database of Anglo-Saxon charters, Diplomaticum Norvegicum and Diplomatarium Fennicum. There are also some regional charter databases of the same type (such as the Württembergische Urkundenbuch, and the early twentieth-century edition of the Cluny charters have also been put in a database. And then, of course, there's the charters section of the digital Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

3) Aggregator databases
There are also a few charter database projects which are based on aggregating multiple printed editions: the two most important are Monasterium and Chartae Burgundiae Medii Aevi.

4) Born digital/hybrid editions
In contrast to the substantial projects of digitising existing editions, most of the born digital (or moved to digital) charter databases seem to be fairly small scale. The one exception I've found so far is Codice diplomatico della Lombardia Medievale which has now put over 5,000 Lombard charters from the eighth to twelfth century online.

5) Databases of originals
There is also a slightly separate strand of digital diplomatics research, which has focused on charters which are preserved in the originals (rather than as cartulary copies, etc). Some of these databases just include the text, others focus on images of charters. Projects include ARTEM and the (basic) database now attached to the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores publishing project. I'm also aware of several more image-focused projects, such as the Marburg Lichtbildarchiv, and Pergamo Online, which contains images of parchments preserved in Pergamo.

I'm not going to discuss the image databases in any detail, because they're a very different kettle of fish to the textual databases I'm used to working with, but it is worth noting how decisions made on how much detail is recorded for original documents can be fairly arbitrary. As George Vogeler points out, there's an odd division for the St Gall charters between the early stuff that gets put in horrendously expensive printed ChLA editions and the material from the eleventh century onwards that is available free via Monasterium.

6) Linguistic projects
I also won't say much about charter database projects that focus on linguistic analysis of texts, such as Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden bis zum Jahr 1300, Langscape and the work being done by people like Rosanna Sornicola and Timo Korkiangas. While this is interesting work, it seems to me of less immediate relevance to most historians.

7) Factoid model
As Patrick Sahle put it in a recent paper ("Vorüberlegungen zur Portalbildung in der Urkundenforschung", Digitale Diplomatik: Neue Technologien in der historischen Arbeit mit Urkunden. Archiv fur Diplomatik Schriftgeschichte, Siegel-und Wappenkunde, Beiheft 12, edited by Georg Vogeler (Cologne, Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 325-341 at p. 338), the object of diplomatic research is the individual charter. Most database projects are structured in a way that reflects this focus on the charter as a unit.

A contrast is given by the factoid model adopted by a number of KCL projects, such as the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England and what will shortly become the People of Medieval Scotland project. Here, the key unit is the factoid, a statement of the form: "Source S claims Agents X1, X2, X3 etc carried out Action A1 connected with Possessions/Places P1, P2 at date D1." A charter (or another source) can thus be broken down into a number of factoids, allowing finer grained-access to the content of charters. Although this may not seem an obvious approach to considering charters (and there are a number of practical problems), it does match surprisingly well to the "Who, What, Where, When, How do we know" model that I've mentioned before as one approach to working with charters.

What works
As my overview suggests, there are already too many charter databases out there to make it easy to discuss them all in any more depth than "here's another one that does X, Y and Z". But there are some projects that seem to me to illuminate particularly important aspects of digital diplomatics:

1) DEEDS: full text done right
I've discussed before the problems of searching full-text databases of charters, but most projects don't seem to respond to such problems. Instead they have very basic full-text facilities, and certainly nothing like the ability to use regular expressions that Jon Jarrett longs for.

The problem with regular expressions, of course, is that they still require an expert user. And as several generations of designers of library catalogues and other kinds of databases know, most users aren't experts, and they don't want to have to become so to be able to use your database. Even if you learn the right syntax, how do you know what spelling variations to try searching for before you've seen what might be lurking in the database? For example, if know that the MGH edition of one of Charlemagne's charters (DK 169) refers to a particular county as Drungaoe or Trungaoe, how on earth would it occur to you that the same charter in Monasterium would name the place as "Traungaev"?

DEEDS is the only project I've seen so far that has really sophisticated analytical tools for full-text. Its methods of shingles for example, is currently being applied to dating documents, but it strikes me as something that might also very usefully be applied to identifying particular formularies used by someone drawing up a charter. By breaking a document down in this way, you can analyse multiple factors suggesting that a document is "nearer" to one model than another in a way that's simply not practical with manual methods.

Even more useful, potentially is DEEDS' use of normalisation. Their alternative spelling option makes their search engine cope with a lot of the more common issues in searching Latin. But the really interesting part to me was their discussion of using normalisation to produce phonetic proxies. This takes a phrase such as "Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego Iohannes de Halliwelle" and reduces it to "scnt prsnt cj futr cj eg iohns pr hall", the bare sounds of the key terms. A full-text search facility with phonetic proxy as option strikes me as one of the few ways that you might be able to produce something that could find you the multiple possible Latin spellings of the Traungau, without you needing to sit down for a week to work them out...

2) ARTEM: bringing in the users
ARTEM, the database of French original charters before 1121 is far from being the biggest or the more sophisticated charter database around. Where the project has succeeded, however, is in getting researchers actually to use the database. There have been several conference publications based on its work, e.g. Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean and Benoît-Michel Tock, eds. Les actes comme expression du pouvoir au haut Moyen âge: actes de la table ronde de Nancy, 26-27 novembre 1999. Atelier de recherches sur les textes médiévaux, 5. (Turnhout, Brepols, 2003).

What I'm not yet sure of is why ARTEM have been more successful than comparable projects in getting other scholars involved. Is it because they've been going longer, that they're more pro-active in arranging roundtables, or is it because France has a weird early medieval charter distribution, with a large number of relatively small collections of charters, and thus researchers desperately need a multi-archive database?

3) Monasterium: Charters 2.0
Monasterium.net describes itself as a "collaborative archive" and it's the only project I'm so far aware of that takes the idea of user participation seriously. As well as providing tools for working with and annotating individual charters (which I haven't yet had the chance to try out), it's also intended to provide a distributed infrastructure into which individual archives from across Europe can add their material. As a means for getting later medieval charters available online, especially for smaller archives, it looks ideal. In terms of data quantity and quality, however, it's liable to the patchiness inherent to large-scale collaborative projects: some areas get very well-covered, some don't get referred to at all.

4) CBMA: blending old and new
Chartae Burgundiae Medii Aevi isn't unusual in its scope ? it's aiming to put online the 15,000 charters from the region of Burgundy. What's more unusual is its methods ? it's putting online both old editions and previously unedited cartularies. There are obvious issues here about whether they can get data consistency, but potentially it seems more practical to start with existing editions (however imperfect) and "grow" a database using them, than to wait for funding to re-edit everything from scratch.

5) Cathalaunia.org: DIY databases
All the databases I've discussed so far have been major research projects. However Cathalaunia.org, created by Joan Vilaseca shows the possibility for a dedicated individual to produce their own web-based charter database, using easily available tools.
Joan uses a wiki format, which for the relatively small number of documents he has provides a neat way of showing links between people and places. The unstructured nature of the data may make it harder to search, but it also means that different genres of documents (not just charters, but hagiography etc) can be incorporated easily. It's a useful reminder that charter information doesn't have to be stored in relational databases. (For another example of this minimalist approach, see Project FAST, which is putting a Florentine archive online).

Cathalonia.org also raises an interesting point about audiences and the accessibility of charter databases. The site is in Catalan, which makes it far more suitable for what I presume is Joan's main audience, people interested in the history of their own region. But for those of us who aren't Catalans (and don't specialise in its history) the use of a relatively uncommon language is a disadvantage.

Preliminary conclusions
The databases I've so far read about or seen prove that there are lots of interesting projects going on, but I do slightly wonder if there's too much variety. Different audiences and different aims can explain some of the variants, but I think maybe we start needing to adapt more systematically from previous projects. I can see the components of really effective databases in some projects, but so far they're not being pulled together into something that properly builds on the pioneering work. So, I finish with a question for the more experienced users: what do you like from particular charter database sites? What should the Charlemagne project be stealing from other projects?

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Religious men 1: rabbis, bishops and saints

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 09:26:11 +0200

I went to two conferences in July: the first one was organised by Katherine Lewis and Pat Cullem at Huddersfield, discussing Religious Men in the Middle Ages. In one way this was revisiting a lot of my previous work on masculinity (since a lot of papers dealt with gender), but also moving onto new territory, since I've worked mainly on lay masculinity. This conference, though, cleverly swung between "religious men" as those who had some kind of clerical/monastic profession and those who were simply holy or aspired to be, whatever their official role in life. It also got me at least a little further forward in pursuit of two questions that I keep on turning over: how historians can get to grips with masculinity and what actually changed during the Gregorian reforms.

The opening paper was by Michael Satlow on "From salve to weapon: Torah study, masculinity and the Babylonian Talmud", a very revealing look at gender in late antique Judaism. (Michael's introduction to his paper is here). I was vaguely aware (via the work of Daniel Boyarin) of Judaism historically having different models of masculinity, but not of some of the details.

Michael was arguing for rabbis as redefining masculinity in the later first century and producing a model distinct from, but not opposed to, the hegemonic classical masculinity (which defined manliness as a matter of domination). Instead, the study of Torah was gendered as a masculine activity, one that allowed Jewish men (but not women, children or non-Jews) to resist the evil desire inherent in all humans. Michael also mentioned how the rabbis were ambivalent about the merits of asceticism, which is an interesting contrast to the attempts by some Christians in the same period to redefine true masculinity as the battle against one's own desires. The metaphor of being a warrior is rarely used in the early texts discussing Torah studies, again a contrast to Christian traditions.

Michael saw a change coming, however, in the Babylonian Talmud, written around 500 CE, in the context of an institutionalisation of Torah study in the yeshiva. This resulted in a highly structured academy, where teaching was based on oral arguments and the study of Torah came to incorporate images of aggression and dominance. Stories such as the quarrel between Resh Lakish and Rabbi Yohanan, which led to Resh Lakish's death, show a competition for power reminiscent of the hegemonic masculinity from which earlier rabbis had moved away.

The paper was revealing on one particular form of Jewish masculinity, although Michael doubted how much influence the rabbis had on the rest of Judaism. But it also raised a wider question about recurrent patterns in masculinity, the repeated return to similar ideals of what a true man is like. I've discussed before how the existence of the male archive, easy access to earlier works about prominent men is one explanation for this. But this isn't an adequate explanation for why, in this case, a hegemonic form of masculinity is first moved away from and then reappropriated.

I don't think this is an argument for arguing (as some commentators on this blog have sometimes done) that there is one only true (timeless) form of manliness. Firstly, at a theoretical level, if there was, why would any group choose to move away from this? And secondly, because the empirical evidence is against it. For example, Michael said that the metaphor of the athlete is entirely missing from Jewish literature (although it appears in early Christian tradition, thanks to St Paul). What seems more plausible is that particular social structures generate (or at least encourage) particular forms of male behaviour. Social structures which encourage competition will produce more competitive men, which in turn is likely to generate the belief that victory in competition is manly, whether you're beating the other male over the head with a club or a really good citation.

After this view of Jewish masculinity, we then moved back to the Christian west with a session on bishops. The papers covered 500 years: I talked about Hincmar of Rheims as a religious man, while Michael Davis from Suzhou discussed the career of Henry of Blois and Joel Rosenthal gave a prosopographical study of the late medieval bishops of Wells, Lichfield and Hereford. I found Joel's paper particularly interesting, because he was deliberately concentrating on what he called "minor dioceses", ones that were some way down in terms of prestige from sees such as Ely and Lincoln (though still above some, such as St David's). To some of the bishops, such a diocese was a staging post to greater success, but many men who achieved bishoprics in these sees were "lifers", who reached no higher than this. (As noted before, medieval clerical careers have some odd parallels to modern academic ones, and I did find myself thinking of those whose ambitions have been thwarted by achieving only a professorship at a minor university).

But a question after our papers about ambition did provide one answer for what changed during the Middle Ages. The existence of ambitious clerics was certainly constant - though I was arguing that professed humility was also important for bishops, as a way of dealing with the gap between their pretensions and the realities of their life. Notker the Stammer, for example, has some funny tales about Carolingian royal chaplains desperate for bishoprics. But there were also limits to ambition in an era before episcopal translation was allowed: here again, institutional structures affect the forms of competition. So a change is visible here, which fits at least partly with Conrad Leyser's argument about professionalisation of clerics being a key factor in the reform movement.

After bishops, I moved onto saints, with a session on religious and lay saints in the later Middle Ages. Mary Lester from Princeton was talking on C13 Italian lay saints, arguing that they held a liminal position between lay and religious masculinity. She contrasted some who achieved holiness within existing models of urban non-elite lay masculinity (such as Raimondo Palmario of Piacenza, who was a married craftsman) with St Andrea Galarandi (?) of Siena who subverted such models. Andrea lived all his life in his brother's house and was often mistreated by him, and when threatened by street violence offered himself up humbly to the gang about to attack him. Then came Michalis Olympios from the University of Cyprus talking about the veneration of Latin saints in Cyprus under the Lusignan rulers. There is evidence for some veneration of western saints (such as John, count of Montfort) by Greek Orthodox Cypriots in Nicosia, as well as by Jacobite Christians. In contrast to Nicosia, which seems to have developed a blanket Cypriot identity and been receptive to Latin cults, such Latin saints don't seem to have developed a following within rural Cyprus.

Finally in the session, we had Catherine Sanok from Michigan talking about John of Bridlington, the last English person to be canonised before the Reformation. Catherine was focusing on two artefacts: a stained-glass window in Ludlow and a Middle English poem on him. She contrasted the stained glass window which shows John in pontificals (mitre etc) distancing him from the laity, with the poem, written in tail-rhyme (more usual for romances) and concentrating on broad moral virtues applicable to both lay and religious. John became a model of the mixed life, combing active and contemplative roles and he was also a model for Marjory Kempe in her gift of tears. John's virtues are thus non-gendered and cut across religious and lay lines and also across class lines as well. The poem thus produces an ethics largely divorced from social status, something that has previously been thought to be characteristic only of the modern period. (It's certainly different from Carolingian moral texts).

Collectively, I think this session did a good job of reminding me of two things. One is the subversive potential of Christianity on the dominant social order (even if this potential was rarely realised). In fact, if you include Michael Satlow's paper alongside Lester's and Sanok's, you can get the subversive potential of Judaeo-Christianity, creating models of manliness that do not simply conform to society's preconceptions. The papers on saints also showed the potential for spiritual/personal identification to cross social boundaries: an orthodox Christian could identify with a Latin saint, a merchant woman attempt to imitate a male prior. The sessions on the next day (which I will try and write up soon) had more about identifications and the sometimes blurred divide between lay and religious men, but this first day already gave me a lot of food for thought.

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An Academic Life at the International Medieval Congress

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:56:25 +0200

The International Medieval Congress at Leeds will be relocating next year to the city-centre, so prompting intermittent waves of nostalgia this year, apart from when we remembered the sometimes inadequate facilities at the current campus. Various people were saying how many times they'd come to Leeds and I realised that I couldn't remember how often I had. So once I got home, I dug out the programmes lurking on my shelves and started to explore. (Most of these programmes are also on the website, for anyone else who wants to indulge in such an exercise).

1) IMC 1999 – during MPhil – not presenting

I knew almost nobody and I was still extremely lowly, so though this was a fascinating time, it was also very scary.

2) IMC 2001 – "Power Corrupts? Carolingian Moralists on Noble Power and Wealth", in Texts and Identities session with Albrecht Diem and Christina Pössl

The only time I've ever presented in a T&I strand, and one where I promptly discovered what it was like giving the paper in a session that almost no-one was interested in. However, the one person who was interested was Joanna Huntington, which led to...

3) IMC 2002 – "Clerici on laici, laici on laici: are Carolingian Clerical and Lay Authors Different?" in a session with Joanna and Kirsten Fenton on churchmen and laymen

The one time at Leeds when I couldn't drink, because I was several months pregnant. This, of course, did not stop some of the more enthusiastic of my friends encouraging me to drink.

4) IMC 2003 – not presenting

First time I'd been away from my daughter, since she'd been born in November 2002. I had a great time as a result. She had a mostly great time off with her other relatives, apart from falling off a changing table right at the end of the holiday.

5) IMC 2004 – "Manly Men, Womanly Men: Carolingian Laymen and the Gender Continuum", presenting in one of three sessions I organised on medieval masculinity.

First time I'd tried organising sessions. I don't think I managed the social side of this as well as I should have, but it did help develop a network of contacts among high and late medievalists that has come in handy ever since.

6) IMC 2005 – "Duritia and Sapientia: Were Carolingian Old Men Still Manly?" in a session with Nic Percival and Agnes Davies on life cycle and masculinity

I ended up as a late paper in this session and there was a certain overlap with some other sessions/papers on Carolingian old men, but fairly pleased with this.

7) IMC 2007 – "Waltharius and Carolingian Morality: Irony and Lay Values" in a session with James McCune and Michael Gelting on early medieval Latin writing

With childcare responsibilities (and not earning much money) I couldn't really justify coming to Leeds every year. When I did, it was to find Texts and Identities still on the march (up to 10 sessions that year) and everything else rather marginalised. But still good to meet up with everybody. Apart from the person who told me that the teaching I'd been promised for September wasn't going to happen after all.

8) IMC 2009 – "The Canon Law of Marriage: a Useful Concept for the Ninth Century?" in a session on marriage and canon law. It ended up with only one other paper in the session, by a late medievalist Frederick Pedersen, with the amazing title "Murder, Mayhem, and a Very Small Penis"

This was the IMC at which Texts and Identities reached its apogee at 13 sessions. If you weren't in the charmed circle (and I wasn't) it meant you were bound to be scheduled against it. But I continued my role of bringing early medieval history to those who thought nothing happened before the eleventh century and got some positive responses to my paper from proper canonists.

9) IMC 2011 – "The Emperor's New Clothes: Moral Aspects of Carolingian Royal Costume" in a session with Christopher Braun on medieval Islamic alchemy

I had originally hoped to organise some sessions on Hincmar for this IMC, only to find out that a) Texts & Identities, under whose auspices I was hoping to place my sessions, were now cutting down considerably and b) that some of the key participants wouldn't be able to come. So instead, I joined another major strand. Björn Weiler had been hard at work organising six comparative sessions on the material culture of Western, Byzantine and Islamic rulers (for the theme rich and poor). Unfortunately, this sterling work wasn't, to my mind, rewarded by brilliant audiences. On the other hand, it was good being back at Leeds again and my fellow enthusiast for Hincmar, Charles West and I had plans...

10) IMC 2012 – the year of Hincmar. Charles and I organised five sessions on Hincmar, which was great fun, but meant that a lot of other sessions had to be skipped. I wandered around an eclectic mix of sessions on gender, charters and early medieval history, met old friends and new people, saw that my book was on display at the CUP stand and felt generally positive. I will, almost certainly, be back next year, probably doing something on charter databases...

Now all I have to do is write some accounts of the sessions I went to...

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Hincmar at IMC 2012 (and me too!)

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 08:31:06 +0200

My latest excuse for not having put anything up on this blog is that I’ve been writing two conference papers. I have now given the first of these, at the Religious Men in the Middle Ages conference at Huddersfield University: this focused on Hincmar of Rheims and gender order and included the story of the second dodgiest early medieval bishop of Laon, St Genebaudus.

This afternoon, I am off to Leeds for the International Medieval Congress 2012, where I am organising a whole string of sessions on Hincmar of Rheims. There will be dubious historical methods and the misuse of sources (by Hincmar). There will be intrigue and attempts to get a favourable hearing from a sceptical audience (by Hincmar, obviously). There will be discussions of topless nuns (guess whose paper that crops up in?) There will be the dodgiest early medieval bishop of Laon. You are all warmly invited to come and hear.

For those who do not wish to devote their time at Leeds to hearing about Hincmar, there will also be a bloggers' meetup, on Monday 9th from 8 pm onwards at the Stables pub at Weetwood. Jon Jarrett will be there as will I, along with whatever other bloggers dare to emerge blinking into real life. We look forward to meeting others of you there.

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Why cultural history? 1: History and political agendas

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 09:03:56 +0200

In a recent post on gender history Jon Jarrett was referring to a question that Guy Halsall raised a few years ago: does every form of history nowadays end up becoming cultural history? I think it's certainly true that current research on medieval history is particularly prone to ending up as cultural history (and I'll explore why that is in a separate post). What I want to discuss now is another aspect of this: the fact that for most historians (and certainly medieval historians) writing cultural history is the most effective way of having any political impact.

Jon's remarks came together in my head with something else I've recently been reading: a chapter by John Tosh, 'The history of masculinity: an outdated concept?', in Sean Brady and John H. Arnold (eds.), What is masculinity? Historical dynamics from antiquity to the contemporary world (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 17-34. (This is the proceedings of a conference I went to at Birkbeck College in 2008, and I also have a chapter in the book).

Tosh is very much a modernist, although he just about acknowledges the existence of early modern history. His main argument is that the cultural turn that the studies of masculinity and gender has now taken means that the field has lost the political edge that it had in the 1970s, when it formed part of the "men's movement" with (p. 25) "its quest for a good past and an inspiring role models". In contrast, Tosh claims: "Analysing the masculinities of the past as cultural constructs...conveys the unfortunate impression that historical scholarship has little or nothing to contribute to today's agenda."

This depoliticisation is an issue that Judith Bennett also worries about in her analysis of women's history, History Matters. But I think in both cases, these very distinguished historians seem to be ignoring the extent to which the political situation has changed since the 1970s.

As a medievalist, Judith Bennett has a particularly difficult time making the claim that the socio-economic history she studies still speaks to modern feminist concerns (although her discussion of women's work is relatively effective in doing so). Tosh (p 22) speaks of how women's history retains a non-academic audience, but if you look at Amazon's 100 best-selling books on women's history, there's only one that's specifically on the Middle Ages (Judith Herrin's Women in Purple at number 98).

As for the history of masculinity, Tosh gives two examples of topics where he feels that a greater emphasis on lived social experience would make the subject have more political impact and more appeal to non-historians. One is that imperial history should look more at the experience of British colonial emigrants. The second is that studies of fatherhood (by which Tosh effectively means nineteenth century fatherhood) should focus less on prescriptive texts and more on practice. He quotes approvingly a study by David Roberts on 168 governing class Victorian families.

Both these topics may prove fascinating studies in themselves, but it's hard to see how they are going to affect contemporary male practice. Tosh talks (p 31) about how the "nature of the imperial commitment" affects "how the British evaluate their imperial record today", but the argument about the aftermath of the British Empire is normally conducted at a far more pragmatic level. Did those ruled by Britain actually benefit from this (as Niall Ferguson, among others is prone to claim)?

Again, Tosh's views that what contemporary debates on fatherhood really need is examples of Victorian practice seem odd. In the 1960s and 1970s it may well have been the case that past examples of non-conforming fathers were an important resource for men trying to invent a new way of living. Forty years later, if you want to see non-conforming fathers, whether they're house-husbands or gay three-parent families, they're all around you.

Tosh's reference to "a good past" as well as role models, however suggests that what is still significant is not simply individual examples, but socially widespread ones. Or in other words, what he's looking for is societies with a different culture of masculinity, which is where someone like me comes in. My book on Carolingian masculinity is unashamedly a work of cultural history, but it is also one that has an (admittedly muted) political agenda: to show that the culturally dominant forms of masculinity in a society are not eternal, but historically variable.

I still remember at one of the first seminars on women's history I ever went to someone saying that the real enemy of the history of women and gender was evolutionary psychology: an emphasis on male and female behaviour as eternal and fundamentally unchangeable. In order to combat that you don't just need examples of individual "non-conforming" men, because they can be written off as (evolutionarily unsuccessful) aberrations. You need to show that entire societies officially subscribed to the belief that women were "naturally" more lustful than men were, or that boys should be dressed in pink.

I've been talking about gender and women's history here, but in fact I'd argue for a wider claim. To the extent that medievalists want their work to be politically relevant, they have to focus on cultural history, rather than political history or socio-economic history. The number of counter-examples is surprisingly small. How many political events are there from 500-1500 that still have important effects on today's Europe, for example? I think you could argue for the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the rise of Islam and the Crusades, but after that I'd say that you're rapidly down to events of relatively minor impact, as compared to say the Reformation, the French Revolution or World War I.

Similarly, how much can people in the twenty-first century West usefully learn about alternative social and economic structures from the examples of pre-industrial societies, or ones with widespread illiteracy, or where messages could move at no more than 30 km a day? That isn't to deny that studying such societies is of interest, but that it is hard to show the political relevance of such research.

In contrast, there is far more continuity in some aspects of cultural history. Ideas on women (or gay people) that date from thousands of years ago are still widely influential. Augustine's views on just war are still being debated by non-historians; how ethnic identities develop or are created is a live topic. If (western) medievalists do want to influence current political debates, then, whatever their personal research interests, they may have to become cultural historians in order to do so.

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Framing the clerical cosmos 2: the connected church

Mon, 21 May 2012 17:52:21 +0200

In my first post about the Clerical Cosmos conference that I attended last month I discussed papers looking at clerics on the ground – the local priests of Yorkshire and northern Spain. The remainder of the day's programme focused on the more traditional interests of early medieval church scholarship: the episcopate and the intellectual elite. First up was Henry Parkes on the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum (PRG), a huge liturgical compilation, of which we have forty C11 and C12 copies. The PRG has tended to be seen as an official document, created to serve the political ambitions of the Ottonians, but according to Henry we don't have any solid evidence for where it was produced (or what its medieval title was).

Henry argued that, in fact, there's little evidence for the PRG playing any practical role. Most of the manuscripts look too big to be used easily on a lectern and there are very variable contents to the manuscripts, with only 15 of 258 chapters common to all the sources. The individual texts themselves are provided with excessive numbers of variants. For example, there are 14 different prayers for the blessing of palms on Palm Sunday, which seriously breaks up the flow of the text. There are also duplicate rituals included and overall the texts are "massively overwrought".

Rather than being a liturgical book then, Henry sees the PRG as being an encyclopedia of liturgy or a handbook of possibilities. In one copy of the text which Henry discussed (Vienne 701), some of the additional canons added into the text contradicted the parts to which they were added. He drew parallels with the development of canon law materials: just as canon law collections gradually developed from simple accumulations of material to produce a concordant and coherent whole, so texts of the PRG became progressively more "clean", with some particularly contentious material, such as a priest's vow of obedience to his bishop, disappearing.

The PRG then, at least in its earlier forms, might best be seen as a surrogate canon law collection: a way of resolving liturgical disputes. These did occur: Henry started his talk with a reference to problems around the date of celebrating Advent in 999 AD between the monks of Orleans and visiting clerics from Fleury. (A council of bishops next day found in favour of Fleury).

Henry was followed by Helen Carr talking about how the bishopric of Chur got its importance back in the tenth century. Chur had been very significant up till around 806, under the Victorine family, a number of members of whom held the bishopric, but lost influence in the C9, after the county of Rhaetia based at Rankweil was created; it was alleged that Count Hunfried stole some of the churches of Chur from the bishopric. The city was then badly damaged in the first half of the tenth century by Saracen and Magyar raids, but in the second half of the century, the bishopric's fortunes improved.

The priest Hartbert was made first an abbot and then bishop of Chur in c 949 and was able to attract considerable patronage from both the Ottonians and Hermann, duke of Swabia, whose chaplain Hartbert had been. With increasing Ottonian involvement in Italy, the region, with its links to the Brenner Pass, regained strategic significance, and Hartbert also seems to have become politically useful as an envoy and negotiator. By the 960s he was one of three major royal representatives in Swabia. Hartbert probably developed some kind of fortified centre at the Abbey of Müstair and may be buried there, although no cult of him developed after his death, which happened between 968-972.

The bishopric's position of strength continued after Hartbert's death and by C12 there were prince-bishops of Chur. In contrast, the Upper Rhaetian countship disappeared at the beginning of the eleventh century. It's possible that there was a vacuum of secular power after the raids of the earlier tenth century, though since we only have royal and episcopal sources, it's hard to be sure. But Helen also suggested that bishops may have been more effective as administrators, given the network of priests they had on the ground, providing information, etc.

After lunch, we were back to bishops again, firstly with Bernard Gowers on metropolitan authorities in the tenth century. I've already mentioned in the previous post how Bernard was talking about possible ways to do comparative studies of the tenth century. A substantial part of his paper was devoted to this, and then he explained one possible parameter you could do comparative studies of in this way: the relationships between metropolitans and their suffragans. This is particularly interesting, Bernard thought, because there isn't an obvious "trajectory" to such a relationship; it's not an issue much discussed by either reformers or the fourth Lateran Council. And we can see very different amounts of control over suffragans. There are some very prestigious metropolitans, for example, such as Ravenna, Cologne, Rome and Milan, whose holders are deciding on appointments, making visitations and arranging synods. In contrast, the Archbishop of Tours couldn't even consecrate Breton bishops.

Perhaps inevitably, given the broad reaches of such a comparative study, Bernard didn't really have any answers to give yet, other than the differences in authority don't seem to map onto the Carolingian or non-Carolingian origins of the provinces. It's also likely to be quite complex to separate out the differing effects of support from secular powers and personalities: how much of Hincmar of Rheims' problems with his suffragans, for example, was due to him simply being so annoying? But Bernard's ideas do seem to offer a very intriguing new way of thinking about the early medieval church.

Finally we had Conrad Leyser and John Nightingale, who were allegedly going to give a joint paper, but in fact gave two separate papers on views from Merseburg. Conrad concentrated on a manuscript, Merseburg 104, which he described as a B list compilation of canon law. This is written about 900, possibly at Bobbio or somewhere else in northern Italy and then brought to Merseburg in the tenth century, judging by its marginal notes. In the 980s and 990s there were attempts to suppress the see of Merseburg in favour of Magdeburg, and Conrad thought the manuscript may have been relocated as support for one side in this quarrel.

The manuscript has been studied, if at all, because it contains the only copy of the accusations about Pope Formosus, the notorious victim of the Cadaver Synod, as well as texts supporting him. Conrad pointed out that the second and third parts of the manuscript also contained what amounted to a textbook of canons on reorganising sees and episcopal translation. The latter was one of the key points at issue in Formosus' case. I've heard Conrad talk before on his view that the "professionalization" of the clergy via an acceptance of episcopal translation was the driving force behind the reform movement.

Here he was more interested in how we see the period intellectually. Is it best seen as a period of rationalization, funnelling down into the eleventh century? Or is instead, better seen as a period of improvisation? Conrad mentioned the example of the very varied formulae of excommunication, which Sarah Hamilton is currently working on: "jazz curses", as he described them. Then with typical Conrad flair for a paradox, he argued that both rationalization and improvisation might be true: bishops and canonists are learning how to argue with one another via such dossiers, and from this you get reform. (Or, in the mixed metaphor I suggested later, clerics were now arguing from the same hymn-sheet).

John Nightingale, meanwhile, was looking at Thietmar of Merseburg's Chronicon and its view of episcopal elections. Thietmar discusses these frequently, especially those to the see of Magdeburg, and shows a complex process of negotiation. The king called the shots in practice, but there were repeated attempts by the canons of Magdeburg to assert their right to elect. The result was a need for negotiations, ways of saving face, where, for example, the chapter's candidate might instead get some other preferment, e.g. as happened to Thietmar's cousin Dietrich in 1012 (Chronicon 6-74, 81). There are also indignant stories about how some bishops were wrongly chosen, with warning visions seen by their predec essors or the king about to appoint them.

What do you get if you put all the papers together? To go back to a point made by Theo Riches, is there something new in the tenth century, and does it matter if there isn't? The theme I felt coming up again and again throughout the day was that of self-sustaining clerical networks; that is ones that don't primarily rely on the active intervention of superiors, whether rulers or clerical superiors.

At the lowest level, such networks are visible in the independent Spanish priests, getting educated and consecrated somewhere. They're also possibly there in Yorkshire, though the lack of evidence makes it's harder to be sure. The situation in these two regions could perhaps be seen just as another version of Peter Brown's MicroChristendoms, but at the level slightly further up, there's more obviously a change from the situation in the sixth to eighth centuries.

In intellectual terms, you can see self-sustaining networks in Conrad's "B list" canon law collection and the Pontificale Romano-Germanicum. These are not the products of a top-down Carolingian/Ottonian reformation, but suggest a cultural harmonization that is more "bottom-up" than "top-down", or at least is independently developed by mid-level clerics, rather than court elites. Meanwhile, despite all their subservience to Henry II's decisions, the chapter of Magdeburg clearly had a well-developed sense of itself as a community; it's hard to point out many Carolingian parallels for that. And Helena Carr shows a bishop with what looks like a viable network for ensuring the surveillance and possibly even the effective control of strategically valuable areas.

All this suggests that one of the key comparisons we should be making across regions is the strength of the vertical bonds, both between metropolitans and suffragans (as Bernard suggested) and also between bishops and the clergy of their diocese. It is in these hierarchical relationships that the wider significance of such networks come in: that they could potentially be used by more powerful figures to project their power downwards more effectively, reaching into more localities and communities more deeply. There are interesting parallels to the current model of Carolingian secular power. This sees royal power as based on the supporting of local elites who then are connected into the central network by patronage. These local elites survive into the tenth and eleventh centuries: what changes is that the "top node" is repeatedly sliced off this model as networks fragment, with first kings and then sometimes counts becoming irrelevant and powerless.

I'd argue that what the Carolingian reforms create is several new kinds of clerical elites who gradually become more self-conscious and independent of royal control. At the lowest level, while there may not be a parish system everywhere, there are more local churches and clerics. (The size of the clerical prosopography we get from the Making of Charlemagne's Europe project should be an interest contrast with Robert Godding's listings of priests in sixth and seventh century Gaul.) Intellectually, the end of the ninth century is marked by the emergence of figures who are not court-centred, from Notker the Stammerer to the school of Auxerre. Stephen Patzold has argued for the development of a self-conscious episcopal ideology in the 820s; by the end of the century you have a figure like Regino of Prüm providing model handbooks for episcopal visitations.

What is distinctive about the tenth century then would be the scaling up of these Carolingian innovations. It's no longer just an exceptional bishop like Hincmar of Rheims who compiles canon law dossiers, but a more widely acquired technique. Reforms no longer have to be initiated top-down by rulers (though some examples still are, such as the Benedictine reforms of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon England). Bernard was arguing about the concept of "reform" as being meaningless, because so many bishops were involved in some such activities, but maybe that's part of the point. If a "papal monarchy" develops from around 1050, it may be partly because there are already existing networks that it can "capture" and build on. From the ninth century, there is certainly an ideological and professional underpinning to church hierarchies that most secular powers simply don't have. Lacking strong royal support in many areas, bishops, chapters, groups of local priests etc built on their own traditions, but also had interchanges with other similar groups, not necessarily within the same polity. In the process, a thousand ecclesiastical flowers bloomed. Mostly, of course, to be cut down and tidied up during the Gregorian Reformation itself, but that's another story.

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The Mercian octopus is a paper tiger

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:32:58 +0200

The penultimate presentation at last term's IHR Earlier Middle Ages seminars was given by Morn Capper, currently working on the Staffordshire Hoard at Birmingham Museum, although unfortunately she wasn't allowed to talk much about this at the time. Her paper was entitled "Rethinking thought and action under the Mercian hegemony: responses to Mercia c. 650-850", and was to a considerable extent (as I only realised via some reading up afterwards) a response to a view of Mercia, and Offa in particular, promulgated by Simon Keynes, especially in Changing faces: Offa, king of Mercia, History Today 14 (11) (November 1990), 14-19.

It was Simon who came up with one of the key images that Morn was, I think, trying to challenge, when he claims (p. 17):

He [Offa] might be seen as a species of Mercian octopus: his tentacles reaching out over different peoples, smothering some and poised more or less threateningly over others, but united only in the head that remained firmly in the West Midlands.

There were several other points Simon made in this article that Morn was implicitly replying to. Simon pointed out that charters that refer to Offa as rex Anglorum are C10 forgeries, but Morn mentioned the Ismere charter of 736 which calls Athelbald of Mercia rex Britanniae and was arguing that there are other contemporary hints of the power of the Mercian king, such as Felix's Life of St Guthlac which sees his rule as providential.

Morn was also trying to look at the possibility of agency by regional rulers, arguing that they can be seen as negotiating their submission to Mercia, instead of simply being "smothered" by it. She cited the example of Sebbi of Essex, abdicating to become a monk in 694 and using grants of lands to monasteries to secure his children's prospects. Choosing Mercian lordship allowed East Saxon kingship to survive.

It's also possible to see differing choices by regional nobility in their response to Mercian kings. The Hwiccans engaged with Mercian rule and their royal line benefited from this. In contrast, there's very little evidence of East Anglian secular leaders engaging with the Mercians. Some royal lines may also have effectively gone "underground" for generations, e.g. the East Anglian royal line re-emerges after the death of Offa.

Finally, Morn was arguing that Mercian kings weren't as autocratic as has sometimes been made out. We can see the importance of church councils from 781 onwards, and the Mercian army should also be seen as a political institution. Indeed she thought that it was the army that raised Coenwulf to kingship, but also added that military defeat could lead to a spiral downwards of loss of power, e.g. as happened in the 820s.

Simon's image of the Mercian octopus implies top-down, oppressive control. If I understand Morn correctly, she's arguing for more negotiation between the centre and regions/localities, a model that's now very familiar in Carolingian historiography.

However, there were a couple of points Morn mentioned in passing that do challenge some of our understanding of early medieval polities more generally. One is that you have some moneyers minting across rulers and during rebellions: even though Offa is one of the first kings to have portrait coins (before the Carolingians did), there were limits to kings' powers. Secondly, there is almost no pottery evidence in western Mercia till around 1000 AD. More generally, there seems to be a contrast between a monetized periphery of Mercia towards the east and south coasts and a heartland, where, for example, the archbishop of Lichfield was not minting coins.

These facts call into question two of the main types of evidence that have been used for measuring the power and complexity of a state: ceramics and coin evidence. We know about the wealth and power of Mercia from other textual and archaeological evidence: if we didn't have that, would we conclude that the Mercians must still have been largely at a stage of small-scale kingship and what Chris Wickham calls the "peasant mode of production"? Are our more general measures of economic and political development as robust as we would like to hope? It's one of the many interesting questions that Morn's paper raised.

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Liking sexist fiction

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:38:43 +0200

My knowledge of popular culture is notoriously bad, but hanging around with fanficcers, as I have been doing recently, does mean that I get to read/hear a lot of discussions about films and TV that I will probably never have the time or inclination to see, such as the new Avengers Assemble movie. It's also increasingly making me feel that discussing whether or not particular works are sexist (as I have myself been known to do) is surprisingly unhelpful. I was aware in the responses I got to my discussion that I'd made friends of mine feel uncomfortable with their positive response to the film, which I didn't intend to do.

I think there are two big problems here. One is that it's surprisingly difficult, beyond the most basic facts (e.g. number of female characters and if a work passes the Bechdel Test) to agree on what exactly constitutes sexism. One reason is that everybody brings their own experiences to a piece of fiction and - particularly for films and TV, where we are rarely privy to the characters' own thoughts - we tend to project onto and identify with particular characters. A recent review of Avengers Assemble talks about the writer identifying with superheroes, even as she admits their problematic nature. Similarly, I've seen complaints about a lack of strong female characters in the Harry Potter books, although I immediately identified with Hermione (as a fellow swot/good girl). JK Rowling clearly also intends Mrs Weasley to be a heroine. One of the highlights of the final battle in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for some readers is Mrs Weasley killing Bellatrix Lestrange; a woman who's been mocked for her love of family finally conquers. But other readers have seen this as merely the sexist cliché of a woman whose highest role is motherhood defeating a "bad woman" who fails to adhere to properly feminine roles.

As these examples show, it's very difficult to write any characters - male, female or other - who don't fall into some stereotypes/tropes, and most of them have been used in sexist ways at some point. So it's easy to see the same figure as either being part of a long positive tradition of brave mothers or a long negative tradition of "only mothers are good women". A related and difficult point is that there is no longer any agreement within our own society as to what constitute desirable goals/a happy ending for a woman. Should a woman want to end up married to a man she loves and/or having children? Should she want to end up rich and/or successful, but on her own? To some women among the audience independence from any emotional ties is a victory; to others it's cutting ourselves off the key things that make us human. (This is one of the reasons why having several prominent female characters in a work is useful: it potentially allows the creator to show a range of options for them. I still remember the ending of Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes in which the heroines variously become a film star, a ballet dancer and an engineer).

People of good will, therefore, can't necessarily always agree on whether a particular character or situation is sexist or not. But that is compounded by a second major problem. The amount of sexism and the quality of a work are not necessarily inversely correlated. In other words, there are sexist works of fiction that are more enjoyable and/or more inventive in other ways than works that show greater gender equality. For example, the recent ITV detective drama Scott and Bailey was notable for having both the two leads and their immediate boss as female. However, in terms of interesting and plausible characters and memorable writing, it struck me as less successful than a male-dominated show like Sherlock.

Yet sexism often tends to be taken as an absolute marker of value. To say a book or film is sexist is sometimes taken as a claim that one should therefore not enjoy it, and that one is a morally inferior person for doing so. I've seen too many discussions between feminists degenerate into defensiveness and rancour because someone likes a piece of work that another person dismisses as sexist, resulting in attempts to "prove" that a work is or is not sexist.

It would surely be far more constructive if it was legitimate to take sexism (or other isms) as one criterion among many for judging the quality of a work, and people were allowed to balance such criteria. We ought to be able to say explicitly "I liked this work for other reasons even though it was sexist" (with the understanding that it'd be a still better work of art if it was less sexist). We also ought to be able to say: "this work pushes a particular button of mine about sexism that means I really, really don't want to read it/watch it" without it being taken as meaning "you are an insensitive pig if you don't agree with me and like the work".

I'm not trying to argue that sexism is purely a subjective matter, but I think we need to acknowledge the subjective side of it, and that our own responses to works of fiction in particular are inevitably personal. In that way, we might make feminist discussions of such works more constructive and less prone to making people feel guilty or irritated.

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