http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/Where history, religion and motherhood meet and have a long intellectual conversationen-UKMokoFeed10http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/http://data5.blog.de/design/preview/f8/6023933d2520691c9fca49ca532aa7_160x200.jpghttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/11/02/interfaith-dialogue-for-six-year-olds-7292465/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-11-02:/2009/11/02/interfaith-dialogue-for-six-year-olds-7292465/Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:54:25 +0100 <p>There was a mention of Jews on the radio a day or two ago, so L asked me who they were. Fortunately, we’ve now discussed basic ideas of different religions several times, so I had a reasonably slick answer to hand. The Jews are the followers of a religion, they believe in God and in the stories in the Old Testament, but they don’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God. She then asked why the Jews didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but handily answered herself by saying that they probably thought he was the son of Joseph. (If necessary, I would have told her that people don’t all believe the same things). Her final question was what the difference was between Jews and Muslims. I said that Muslims thought that God had spoken to a man called Muhammed, who had written down what he was told in a book called the Qur’an.</p> <p>I’ve had variants on this discussion several times in the last year or so, as L starts to get to grips with religious pluralism. She’s doing that at a far earlier age than I did, which comes from being in a very ethnically and religiously diverse school. She’s already had a class visit to a mosque, as well as visits from Christian clergy and a Sikh story-teller, and celebrations of Eid and Diwali and Chinese New Year, alongside Harvest, Easter, Christmas and <a href="http://www.rednoseday.com/about_rnd">Red Nose Day</a>. I don’t know how much they’ve done on Judaism or Buddhism yet, but otherwise she’s getting a broad spread of religious culture.</p> <p>All this means that I need to come up with a coherent but not too controversial account of the world’s religions suitable for an inquiring but somewhat unformed mind. I want to try and be informative and factually accurate, because I don’t want L to feel I’m not taking her questions seriously or can’t be relied on to answer them truthfully. On the other hand, I need to keep things simple and I also don’t want to start conflicts at her school, so I’m careful not to denigrate other religions. I’m conscious that anything that I say may get repeated in a somewhat garbled form, and if a six year old’s version of Christianity meets a six year old’s version of Islam or Sikhism the result may be unexpected. So what I’m trying to do is focus on belief in God (or gods), belief in Jesus and the books taken as scriptures. I’m conscious of some large gaps in my knowledge trying to do this (I know very little Sikh theology) and I’m not sure that Buddhism can easily be fitted into this framework (I’m really hoping that L doesn’t start asking about Buddhism till she’s a few years older). But as a basic framework, I hope my explanations at least aren’t actively confuse ng.</p> <p>I am also consciously making all my comments as statements of belief: we (Christians) believe that, Muslims believe that etc. And although L hasn’t asked this yet, I will tell her if/when she asks, that different people believe different things, just as different people like different things to do or different TV programmes. In other words, I’m not trying to make an explicit claim about Christianity as a true religion as opposed to other religions. I am treating religion as being a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact, at this stage. In contrast, when L last academic year got into an argument with her friends because she said the earth went round the sun and they said it didn’t, I was happy to tell her that she was right and they were wrong.</p> <p>Treating my Christian religion as my opinion doesn’t mean I am ashamed of my faith, and when L is older, I’m happy to explain why I believe what I believe and think it’s intellectually justified. But as well as not wanting to stir up things with her friends, I’m also conscious of a longer-term issue. Though L is being raised as a Christian, when she is older she may leave the faith, or choose another one (At the least, she will need to find her own independent relationship to Christianity). If my relationship with her is tightly bound up with my factual claim that Christianity is true, then if she rejects that claim, it is difficult for her to do so without rejecting me as well. Bringing her up to respect other people’s religious beliefs, even if she does not share them, is in that way also a hope for the future in having my own views respected, and a message about how people with different religious beliefs (or none) can nevertheless remain friends.</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/11/02/interfaith-dialogue-for-six-year-olds-7292465/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>schoolsreligionchild-psychologyhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/11/02/interfaith-dialogue-for-six-year-olds-7292465/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/10/18/bloglite-7196099/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-10-18:/2009/10/18/bloglite-7196099/Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:03:21 +0200 <p>I feel I should warn any readers who come along to this site that there are not going to be many updates in the next few months. This is because I am trying to finish the manuscript of a book and my available intellectual energy needs to be directed towards this currently, rather than to getting irritated with <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/17/hilary-mantel-author-booker">Hilary Mantel's view</a> of historians. My (possibly unrealistic) aim is to finish the book by early 2010, at which point normal blogging can be resumed...</p> <p>Meanwhile, I will try and do some posting of links to other sites of interest. My first is to the IHR's <a href="http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/">Making History</a> site, which along with some useful statistics and biographies, includes <a href="http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/">interviews</a> with a number of prominent British historians. These include audio as well as transcripts, so anyone who has not heard what Susan Reynolds, Eric Hobsbawm etc sounds like can now discover. I have not yet read/listened to all the interviews myself, so if anyone does discover "any obscene or libellous material that these interviews may contain" (which the IHR firmly states it is not responsible for), I would be interested to know. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/10/18/bloglite-7196099/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>historiographyhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/10/18/bloglite-7196099/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/10/05/louis-the-pious-parenting-problems-7100785/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-10-05:/2009/10/05/louis-the-pious-parenting-problems-7100785/Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:29:36 +0200 <p>Mayke de Jong’s <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521881524">The Penitential State: Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814-840</a>, which I am gradually working my way through, is Mayke’s sustained discussion of theories about Louis’ reign, theology and political discourse which she says she’s been developing for over 20 years. But chapter 1 also provides a useful summary of the events of Louis the Pious’ reign, which brings out the soap opera aspects of his ongoing struggles with his sons from 829 onwards.</p> <p>After a century or more in which Louis the Pious has been seen as an archetypal ‘weak king’, in the last decades there has been a lot of debate over him (in which Mayke has played a determined role). One of the key arguments for those attempting to refute the idea of weakness is pointing out how frequently rulers struggled with rebellious adult sons. On this view, a ruler with three adult sons (as Louis had in the 830s) was bound to have trouble. But as I looked at the events again, I found myself wondering if the real crunch point didn’t come much earlier, and Louis’ problems in the 830s weren’t just the same pattern repeating itself.</p> <p>I think there is a decent case for seeing Louis’ real problems as starting in 817/818. The <i>Ordinatio imperii</i> of 817 has traditionally been seen as problematic because it produced a succession plan for the empire at such an early stage of Louis the Pious’ reign (before one of his four sons had been born). But more significant, I would argue, is that it made no mention of Bernard of Italy (Louis’s nephew), instead leaving Italy to Louis’ eldest son Lothar I. As a result, Bernard, fearing his sons would be disinherited, revolted.</p> <p>The recurrent theme of Louis’ later years was that planned divisions of the empire he made led to revolts by those of his sons he had disappointed. This, I would argue, is behaviour that could be expected. It is unrealistic for a parent to deprive a son of part of an inheritance in favour of another and not expect a bad reaction. In the same way, excluding Bernard was asking for trouble.</p> <p>The subsequent events are also revealing. Louis the Pious put down the revolt and captured Bernard. He then blinded him, a mutilation from which Bernard died. It is clear that Louis over-reacted here. Five years later, at Attigny in 822 he did public penance for the death of Bernard. However much Mayke sees Louis as in control of his own penance and the situation, he had put himself firmly in the wrong. The bishops who judged him in 833 raised Bernard’s death as one of the many offences that made him unfit to rule.</p> <p>But the reason why Bernard’s punishment had such long-term repercussions is best seen in a comparison with the one family revolt that his father Charlemagne experienced. In 792, Charlemagne’s eldest son Pippin (aka Pippin the Hunchback) revolted. Jinty Nelson has argued that this was because Pippin was being edged out of a future division of the kingdom by his stepmother Fastrada. The parallels seem plain here, but the consequences weren’t. Pippin was not killed, but tonsured and put in a monastery: he died there nearly twenty years later.</p> <p>Charlemagne had form for this kind of behaviour: he’d similarly put his cousin Tassilo permanently into a monastery in 788, when taking over Bavaria. I don’t think it’s coincidence that none of Charlemagne’s other sons revolted after Pippin. They had too much to lose by doing so. In contrast, I would argue that Louis was unable to deal effectively with his sons after their revolts because of Bernard. Having over-reacted once, he could not again be seen as too harsh. Instead, he combined a determination to divide and re-divide the kingdom, which led to revolt, with recurrent forgiveness for his rebellious sons, thus providing no incentive for loyalty. </p> <p>In terms of Carolingian standards of parenting, Charlemagne looks in control: stern action which carefully avoided the appearance of brutality to contemporaries. Louis, in contrast, seems all over the place, unable to deal effectively with the predictable consequences of his behaviour. Louis cannot simply be seen as too merciful (as in the traditional narrative), but it would not surprise any modern parenting guru that his uneasy moves between harshness and leniency were unsuccessful in producing family harmony.</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/10/05/louis-the-pious-parenting-problems-7100785/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>medievalfatherhoodhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/10/05/louis-the-pious-parenting-problems-7100785/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/09/22/can-we-believe-gregory-of-tours-about-obama-7020539/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-09-22:/2009/09/22/can-we-believe-gregory-of-tours-about-obama-7020539/Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:20:49 +0200 <p>Historians once largely believed what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_of_Tours">Gregory of Tours</a> wrote in his ‘Ten Books of History’ (which is how the <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Franks-Classics-Gregory-Tours/dp/0140442952/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252996810&sr=8-1">History of the Franks</a> is now more accurately referred to). Gregory might be naive (all that reporting of miracles), but his artlessly gory portrayals of Merovingian life told us all we needed to know about the horrors of Merovingian society.</p> <p>A more recent view of Gregory, along with many other medieval historians, is that his history reflects his own prejudices or that he is writing propaganda. Nevertheless, even though his text is not transparent, we can read through it to get useful material. We can see the outlines of particular actions by his enemies through his distorted stories about them. Alternatively, for social/cultural historians, even if his stories are not true at all, but purely propaganda, they reflect what a king or a queen or a bishop could feasibly do. Propaganda, after all, needs to be plausible.</p> <p>I would have adhered to such views once, but recent events have made me less certain. If you look at many of the claims circulating in the US about Barack Obama, (such as the claim that he is not a citizen) they’re not remotely plausible, and yet they’re widely accepted. One answer is that this is simply because such stories have been pushed so hard by particular powerful interest groups. But there are implausible stories which have achieved wide circulation and belief without such long term propaganda efforts: <a href="http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/09/false-witnesses.html">Slacktivist</a> has an interesting example of one.</p> <p>And some claims go beyond the merely deeply implausible to a different level. Take the claim that Obama’s plan for health care involves ‘death panels’, for example. You could see this as an extreme distortion of some possible plans for living wills or not paying for heroic treatment of the terminally ill, but it’s probably better to see these statements as symbolic. Obama is an evil ruler and therefore of course he is planning death panels, because that’s what evil rulers do. And, in glorious circularity, he is planning death panels and so that is ‘proof’ that he must be an evil ruler.</p> <p>I’ve just been reading Martin Heinzelmann,<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gregory-Tours-History-Society-Century/dp/0521636388/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253599675&sr=8-1">Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century</a> (CUP, 2001) who argues convincingly and in great detail that Gregory is using symbolic figures in the Ten Books of History: the Good King, the Bad King, the Good Bishop etc. What he doesn’t really get into is looking at how that might affect historians who actually want to know something about the sixth century (as opposed to those wanting to understand how Gregory’s mind works). If Gregory’s stories are largely symbolic, can we take anything factual from them beyond a few names and events? Or are we faced not just with a distorted mirror on the Merovingian past, but a fantasy view of it?</p> <p>What if we can’t trust Gregory? What does it mean for Merovingian history? He provides a very detailed narrative for the second half of the sixth century, but I suspect it’s possible to reconstruct a skeleton political history for the period from other sources. The biggest problem may be for social history, and especially women’s history. Most studies of Merovingian women rely crucially on Gregory for the social details of laywomen’s lives. Hagiography and letters just don’t give us that texture. But what if his stories of good and evil queens aren’t just distorted and sometimes misogynistic reactions to real women? What if they are just symbolic stories of eternal good and evil women, loosed from any anchoring in Merovingian reality? If you can’t hope to reconstruct a historical Obama from his opponents’ fantasies, will you be able to learn anything true about Hillary Clinton?</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/09/22/can-we-believe-gregory-of-tours-about-obama-7020539/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>historiographymedievalgregory-of-tourshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/09/22/can-we-believe-gregory-of-tours-about-obama-7020539/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/09/08/carolingian-lordly-women-6925978/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-09-08:/2009/09/08/carolingian-lordly-women-6925978/Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:32:03 +0200 <p>I came across the research of <a href="http://www.nuigalway.ie/history/loprete/index.html">Kim LoPrete</a> in the spring, when she spoke at the <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/02/pauline-fest-1-is-gender-a-useful-tool-6221308/">Pauline Stafford conference</a>, and she also subsequently sent me some of her articles. She works on aristocratic laywomen in eleventh to thirteenth century France and their political role. In particular a number of her recent articles are arguing for the existence of ‘lordly women’ (her translation of the term <em>dominae</em>) in France in the high Middle Ages.</p> <p>By lordly women what Kim means is aristocratic but non-royal women who are carrying out a variety of activities traditionally seen as lordly: alienating land, adjudicating disputes, collecting dues, ordering knights to fight, swearing oaths to keep the peace, granting privileges, acting as advocates, etc. They are carrying out these actions with authority equivalent to the counts and lords who are their male counterparts.</p> <p>In the articles I’ve read, Kim is looking at two main questions. Firstly, how do these activities (and women carrying them out) relate to historians’ ideas about the ‘public’? (She argues that such activities are just as ‘public’ as when male lords do them, so you can’t sensibly contrast male public power and female private power). Secondly, how are such women seen by their contemporaries in gendered terms? (The evidence suggests that they’re not seen as honorary men or unnatural, but are still regarded as women).</p> <p>I want to add a third question to Kim’s, looking from a research background 300 years earlier. Are such lordly women a new phenomenon? Apart from alienating land, I can’t think of any Carolingian examples (750-900) of non-royal laywoman carrying out any of the other activities I’ve listed above. And the linguistic evidence also supports this: <i>domna/domina</i> (except for royal women and abbesses) is not a common Carolingian term as far as I know, and <i>comitissa</i> only starts appearing at the end of the ninth century (the earliest known example is the widow of Raymond I of Toulouse in 865).</p> <p>The problem, of course, is proving such a negative and deciding whether there’s a difference in behaviour or just in the quantity of sources. (It’d also be useful to know what the evidence for lordly women is in C11-C13 Germany, as a contrast – paging Theo!). For a lot of the kind of activities mentioned, the sources are pretty scanty for the Carolingian period. The one that isn’t, however, is dispute settlement: we do have a decent number of placita. There are a few with royal women involved in making decisions (I think there are some Italian ones involving the empress Engelberga, and Jinty Nelson’s argued for Fastrada deciding one case), but I’m not aware of any with non-royal women prominently involved in judging. Kim is arguing that for 1050-1250 you’re probably looking at around 10-20% of ‘lords’ being women, so you’d expect a few to show up in the Carolingian sources if there’s a similar percentage.</p> <p>The other negative evidence is Dhuoda, who as a magnate’s wife ought to be a lordly woman if anyone is. But I don’t get any sense that Dhuoda has ever acted as a judge from what she writes, whereas her discussion of the royal court is marked by a personal sense of what it is to be a courtier. Dhuoda does talk (LM 10-4) about the ‘servitium’ she’s giving Bernard in the Marches and many other places, which has led her into debt, but it seems equally possible that it’s household management that’s involved – after all, much of the lordly activities mentioned is revenue-gaining.</p> <p>If the lordly woman is a post-Carolingian phenomenon, why is that? At least at the level of countess, I think that Carolingian ideology wouldn’t have allowed such female activity: it would rip the mask off countship as an appointed office if a woman was exercising its functions. In contrast, lordship by Kim’s time was seen as exercised by the grace of God, so if the Almighty had ordained that a woman inherited the title, who had the right to complain that it was unsuitable for her to exercise the authority?</p> <p>About Carolingian lordship below the level of count, I’m less sure. If that kind of lordship was innate, familial, and exercised in a domestic setting (as Kim argues C11-C13 lordship was), then presumably there was no particular ideological reason why women shouldn’t have exercised it. But I think the honest answer is we don’t really know enough about Carolingian lordship to know exactly what was going on. I do think that there’s just enough Carolingian evidence to suggest that overall something did change in non-royal noblewomen’s activities, but as usual, I’m open to countervailing arguments. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/09/08/carolingian-lordly-women-6925978/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>lordshipmedievalfeudalismwomenhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/09/08/carolingian-lordly-women-6925978/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/26/medieval-attitudes-and-mental-exercises-6825281/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-08-26:/2009/08/26/medieval-attitudes-and-mental-exercises-6825281/Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:08:49 +0200 <p>My post on <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/10/why-i-no-longer-read-historical-fiction-i-read-a-6693060/">historical novels</a> (and the responses to it) have got me thinking a bit more about the difference between modern and medieval mentalities, or rather, the differences that historical novelists need to contemplate and possibly find ways to express. This is my first attempt to say what I think the most important differences to note are (please join in with your own suggestions in the comments). I also want to suggest some possible mental exercises/thought experiments to help both historians and novelists contemplate these differences</p> <p>1) <strong>An acceptance of hierarchy, injustice and inequality</strong>.<br> This is often a difficult ‘modern’ concept to unthink: how could people accept the subordination and oppression of peasants, slaves, women, etc? I find memories of childhood (the more traditional the better) useful here (and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that children’s historical novels often stand up better than adult ones). You have to do what you are told, however unfair it might seem, because you are a child and ‘they’ are adults and that’s just how it is. And most children don’t spend most of their time raging against this, both because they don’t know that things could be different, and because there is no conceivable way to change the system. Instead, they spend any spare mental energy working out how to get along in this unfair system, or how to cheat it without getting caught, or dreaming about a better world, or waiting for something to change, or just enjoying whatever good bits there are. Transfer that to the medieval subordinated adult, and that seems to me a basic template for how you might react to a society that is biased against you. Most of the time, most of the oppressed don’t rebel: that’s a basic historical fact.</p> <p>2) <strong>Love and marriage</strong><br> Modern thought also tends to have a problem with the concept of love in the Middle Ages, because we’re so used to thinking of love as essentially between equals, whereas Augustine describes marriage as ‘a certain friendly and true union of the one ruling, and the other obeying’ (On the Good of Marriage c 1). The best descriptions of relationships in historical novels manage to combine both timeless feelings and historical social realities about relationships. I always remember, for example, <a href="http://www.gbradshaw.net/">Gillian Bradshaw’s</a> ‘The Colour of Power’, where a husband realises he has fallen in love with his wife of many years only after she has disappeared and is in danger.</p> <p>3) <strong>Lack of control</strong><br> A few weeks ago I was briefly on the Brough of Deerness, a rocky peninsula in Orkney on which some enthusiast built a chapel. The <a href="http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/broughofdeerness/">current archaeological view</a> seems to be of the buildings around it as being a secular complex rather than a monastic one, but it has a lot of similarities to many other early monastic sites. As I stood there, it occurred to me that the prevailing feel was not one of solitary tranquillity (though there were only the four of us on the rock). Even though it was a lovely sunny day, the wind was still whipping up the waves enough to make it pretty loud: I didn’t feel so much serene as conscious that if we weren’t all careful there could be a horrible accident. And I started wondering whether the spiritual effect of such places wasn’t more about the power of Nature/God and one’s own insignificance than the peace of Nature/God.</p> <p>Much of modern life is about our attempts to control our lives: we believe we can determine what will happen to us. Part of the stress of bereavement, disease, being a victim of crime, unhappy relationships and even failure to get the job we want is the realisation that there are some things we can do nothing about. Life in the pre-modern world made such events far more common. It’s not just natural disasters and disease (although Robin Fleming’s "Bones for Historians: Putting the Body back in Biography," in <em>Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow</em>, ed. David Bates (Woodbridge, 2006), 29-48, is an eye-opening read on the topic), it’s also collapsing buildings (Carolingian balconies are terrible for this) and wars and many other unknowns. Whether this all made medieval people more fatalistic, or more realistic or more superstitious, you’ll just have to decide for yourself, but the attitudes of modern people in such situations outside their control are worth looking at. (There’s an interesting recent study on <a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122458242/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0">Hurricane Katrina</a> for example).</p> <p>4) <strong>Qualities of violence</strong><br> I’ve recently been reading William Ian Miller, <em>Humiliation: and other essays on honor, social discomfort, and violence </em>(Cornell University Press, 1993), which includes some interesting attempt to make parallels between medieval and modern emotions. He comments (p 55): ‘Many of our judgments about quantities of violence...might turn out really to be judgments about qualities of violence’. The medieval world was almost certainly more violent than the modern western world (though it’s hard to produce definite metrics) but the quality of the violence was certainly very different. Violence was more visible, for example, whether public beatings or animals being killed in the farmyard. A novelist has to reflect this difference, without making his or her characters seem impossibly callous in modern terms. One useful trick, it seems to me, is to recalibrate the expected set-point for violence. If a novelist includes some throwaway lines about beatings or deaths (and writing allows one to downplay such events more easily than visual media), they can nevertheless still have set pieces of particularly gratuitous or brutal violence. After all, medieval people could still be shocked by violence, if it was excessive in their terms.</p> <p>5) <strong>Types of racism</strong><br> The big difference between medieval and modern racism is that the former is not predominantly about skin colour. Instead, it’s the more basic idea that all foreigners are strange and have bizarre habits, with ‘foreigner’ expandable as necessary to encompass anyone coming from more than X miles away. Although medieval racism could lead to war atrocities (e.g. English versus Welsh) or opportunistic killings (attacks on Flemings in London), not much of it gets to the level of later European racism, with lesser breeds treated as subhuman. We also need to take care not to read back the current hierarchies of undesirables into the Middle Ages: I’d argue, for example, that the Carolingians were probably more prejudiced about Greeks than Muslims.</p> <p>6) <strong>Religion</strong><br> In the comments on my previous post on historical novels, Morgan said: ‘I have yet to find a believable religious character in a historical fiction novel’. I think it may be here that the historian’s and the novelist’s tasks differ most. While historians may be trying to ascertain what medieval people actually believed, I think what novelists mainly need to do is to produce plausible Christian personalities. Most of the time people do not express their religion through talking about their beliefs, but through their religious practices and also through their personal behaviour.</p> <p>The biggest mistake a novelist (or indeed a historian) can make is to think there is only one kind of Christian (or one kind of true Christian). Everyone’s faith is marked subtly or less subtly by their own personality. My husband and I have been attending church and Christian events together for more than twenty-five years, and we would probably be very close doctrinally. And yet his faith is not quite my faith and his God is not identical with my God. It’s a simplification to see a believer’s idea of God as simply a reflection of his or her own personality, but it is true that their concepts cannot help but be marked by their own sense of themself and of the world around them. The complacent, the fearful, the kind, the cruel, the lover of rituals and those who find rituals meaningless all have their own vision of God.</p> <p>One of the hardest aspects of studying religion (whether for a historian or a novelist) is also trying to get to grips with the viewpoint of the religious zealot or ascetic or fanatic. It’s tempting, even for the religious among us, just to imagine such people as being fundamentally alien and personally warped, but that’s come to seem too simplistic to me. The most useful book on religious history I’ve ever read is Peter Brown’s <em>The body and society: men, women and spiritual renunciation in early Christianity</em> (Columbia University Press, 1988). In this, Brown looks at a religious practice that seems totally alien to almost all modern people (celibacy) and explores the differing reasons that various late antique and early medieval Christian groups had for practising it. Brown’s great skill is that he can make such viewpoints intelligible, fitting them into a system of thought. It was reading him that first made me think about asceticism as a positive rather than a purely negative phenomenon.</p> <p>I think in the same way that one of the most useful exercise a historian or novelist can do is try and get in touch temporarily with their own inner fanatic. (And I would argue that anyone dedicated enough to do a PhD or write a novel does have a touch of the fanatic in them). Firstly, there is the sense that a particular project you are doing is of true importance: it is a goal that you are deeply committed to. And from that springs the discipline to persevere at that project even when it is difficult and to give up things in order to achieve that goal. It is a mini modern version of asceticism: if you persistently find that you would rather go to the pub or read a book or talk to friends than get on with your study or your writing, you are not going to achieve much.</p> <p>Aligned to that commitment to a project, there is also normally also a desire to write the best history or novel that you can. If you are serious about your research or your fiction writing, you are likely to come to be contemptuous or even angry with those who are content to be second rate historians or novelists (especially if they are more successful than you). Why can’t they be bothered to check their sources properly or write without clichés? Why are they damaging the reputation of the craft or the genre? It’s in the moments when you fantasize that X’s book should be publicly denounced as rubbish and a copy symbolically torn into shreds (or used as toilet paper) that you start coming near the concept of fanaticism. It’s misleading to see all fanatics as simply negative, as being against things. It’s the searing, clarifying vision of the one true path that is what can justify the rejection of everything and everyone else.</p> <p>I think most historians and novelists have at some time have had a vision of that true history, that great novel . If we imagine such feelings intensified to extend to something that affects one’s whole life and one’s eternal future, it’s a useful way of considering what motivates at least some religious zealots.</p> <p>Those are the different mental aspects of the medieval past that I currently think are most important for novelists to try and get right. In contrast, there are some mental differences that are less important for novelists, even if they are real changes from the past. Though I’m aware of studies that show cognitive differences between preliterate/prescientific people and modern thought, these tend to occur when considering abstract problems in a way that isn’t really relevant to most situations in novels, (except historic detective novels). For an example, looking at Russian peasants, see <a href="http://psychometrics.sps.cam.ac.uk/page/123/flynn-6-similarities.htm">here</a>. (Although maybe novelists should start looking through their novels and see whether instead of some common class nouns, such as ‘animals’, ‘colo(u)rs’, ‘people’, they would be better off with a more specific term).</p> <p>Another tricky problem for novelists is sensory perception. The medieval world was undoubtedly smellier than ours, the night darker (no light pollution), the cold feeling more bitter, etc. And yet people adapt to such things: after a while in a noisy neighbourhood, you no longer hear the traffic. The novelist must perform a double trick here, working out what are noteworthy sensations from a different sensory baseline. Paradoxically, too much historical knowledge may be a disadvantage here, because a novelist may become tempted to show off the knowledge they have.</p> <p>The historian, presenting medieval mentalities for a modern audience, has one great advantage. They can always painstakingly build up explanations and analogies for how and why a historical character might feel or behave. (For one good example of this, see Michael Clanchey, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Abelard-Medieval-Michael-T-Clanchy/dp/0631214445">Abelard: a Medieval Life</a>). The historical novelist doesn’t have the luxury of explanation: they must somehow make such mentalities comprehensible by implicit means. It’s not surprising that they usually fail: what is impressive is that they occasionally succeed. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/26/medieval-attitudes-and-mental-exercises-6825281/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>historyemotionshistorical-novelshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/26/medieval-attitudes-and-mental-exercises-6825281/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/10/phd-studentship-in-british-genetics-and-early-migration-6695104/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-08-10:/2009/08/10/phd-studentship-in-british-genetics-and-early-migration-6695104/Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:47:02 +0200 <p>I don't normally post job vacancies on the blog, but this is an unusual one. For anyone who has not been scared off interdisciplinary study by <a href="http://imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcapp/SessionDetails.jsp?SessionId=2751&year=2009">Guy Halsall</a>, the University of Leicester have the <a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/projects/roots-of-the-british/phd">ultimate (funded) PhD opportunity</a> on a project called Roots of the British, which brings together historians (such as Jo Storey), geneticists, archaeologists and linguists to look at migration 1000 BC-1000 AD. You will get training in history or archaeology or genetics as appropriate and they even give you desk space (which is more than KCL ever gave me). You might even be able to make a living subsequently, as <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2784361/Curiosity-drives-the-gene-genie-to-a-1m-turnover.html">Bryan Sykes</a> has.</p> <p>The deadline is 25th August, which unfortunately does not give you time to change your surname to a <a href="http://www.le.ac.uk/ge/maj4/">rarer one</a>. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/10/phd-studentship-in-british-genetics-and-early-migration-6695104/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>medievalacademic-lifehttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/10/phd-studentship-in-british-genetics-and-early-migration-6695104/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/10/why-i-no-longer-read-historical-fiction-i-read-a-6693060/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-08-10:/2009/08/10/why-i-no-longer-read-historical-fiction-i-read-a-6693060/Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:50:35 +0200 <p>I read a lot of historical novels both as a child and as a young adult. I still have my copies of books by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Sutcliff">Rosemary Sutcliff</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Trease">Geoffrey Trease</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Welch">Ronald Welch</a> and others. I also devoured<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Hibbert"> Jean Plaidy’s</a> historical romances (and once heard a fellow medievalist admit in a paper on Edward IV and masculinity that she’d been heavily influenced by reading her at an impressionable age). Yet now in my limited fiction reading I deliberately shy away from historical novels and find many that I do glance at unreadable.</p> <p>Before I talk more about my changing relationship to historical fiction I should make two things clear. One is that I am a failed historical novelist. I originally took up researching the early Middle Ages so I could write Charlemagne the Novel. (Actually it was to be called ‘Our Emperor Charlemagne’, after a line in Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation of the Song of Roland). After a while I realised that I enjoyed the researching more than the novel writing, and I was rather better at it, and so managed to sneak my way onto a MPhil course. (The rest is research history). So if I criticise historical novels, it is not with any sense of superiority or illusion that they’re easy to write. Secondly, I’m talking largely about novels set in a realistic pre-nineteenth century past. There have been some wonderful books which have been deliberately anachronistic about historical periods (two personal favourites are <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Bed-Bacon-Caryl-Brahms/dp/0552998559">No Bed for Bacon</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pyrates-George-MacDonald-Fraser/dp/0006470173/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249883180&sr=1-1">Pyrates</a>. And novels set in a relatively recent past (roughly the last 200 years) not only have the benefit of far more sources to draw on, but also have a subtly different relationship to these sources, because there are contemporary novels from their period. Many historical novels set in the Victorian era, for example, are consciously writing stories that Victorian novelists did not or could not write. I can still read such ‘modern’ historical novels with enjoyment.</p> <p>Most serious historical fiction set in an earlier period, however, now makes me uncomfortable, and has done so increasingly as my historical sense has increased. The problem for me is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronism">anachronism</a>, but it’s not predominantly the simple errors of ancient Romans having clocks. The two things I find suspension of disbelief killers are anachronisms in dialogue and social attitudes. (I therefore do not even try to watch historical movies, since I know it’ll be painful).</p> <p>I think I gained my sensitivity to dialogue from writing it myself and learning in that way what sounded authentic while still being readable. I also learned that while it’s hard enough to write contemporary dialogue, it’s substantially harder to write historical speech and gets more difficult the further back in time you go. That’s a combination of individual words and phrases becoming anachronistic (I had to think hard about whether I could use a term such as ‘automatic’ in a largely pre-mechanised age), and a lack of sources for historical registers of speech. Before Shakespeare (and to a lesser extent Chaucer) we have very little sense of how a peasant might speak as opposed to a noble, or how a child would address their parents. (I once abandoned a novel on Arthurian Britain at an early stage, because the young Guinevere referred to her ‘mama’, and I couldn’t get past the twee eighteenth century image this produced). Such informal speech (how medieval people talked to their servants, how they swore, what jokes they told) is vital to a sense of characters as real people, but not easily gained via texts such as Beowulf. One of the few things more painful than reading medieval characters say: ‘You mustn’t let this get you down’, is having them say: ‘Zounds, my lord, tis twelve of the clock, I must away betimes’. </p> <p>Even if a novelist can find a ‘neutral’ tone for writing dialogue, however, it’s still hard for them to avoid their characters having anachronistic social attitudes. While I once read and enjoyed the historical works of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Tranter">Nigel Tranter</a>, for example, I now find his moderate, reasonable, enlightened young men stick out like a sore thumb in medieval Scotland. Oddly, I think that portraying attitudes accurately is something that’s become harder for authors recently, since the 1960s. It may have been easier for female authors raised before feminism to portray naturally a world in which female subordination was taken for granted, just as one of the most authentic portraits of Victorian imperialism was written by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Macdonald_Fraser">George MacDonald Fraser</a>, who clearly shared many of the period’s reactionary views. In contrast, political correctness, which I approve of as a modern phenomenon, is one of the great curses of the historical novel. Most people in the past had views about women, the poor and other races that we’d find offensive today: a good novelist must find a way round this, rather than turning his or her heroes and heroines into liberals before their time.</p> <p>Anachronism in mental attitudes is also why I’m particularly wary of the historical detective novel as a genre, even though I enjoy detective stories. Detection (or at least its explanation) seems to me to require a style of practical, logical thought that sources rarely show for most periods. I can imagine a medieval man, for example, being able to know that someone was not killed with the weapon suspected, but not explaining in the logical way that a detective plot requires how he knows that. And the detective story as a concept does not really make sense in the 95%+ of historical societies in which it does not actually matter whether the wrong person is found guilty as long as it's someone unimportant. </p> <p>Professionally as well, I now find even the best of historical novels problematic, the ones that can manage the immense task of feeling right. At one level, it’s the basic issue that they’re not true (or at least not true in some key moments), and as historians we are trained to be wary about the danger of making things up. But perhaps a more subtle difficulty is that historical novels tend to make the past more coherent than it really is. (This is a particular issue for people like myself who know historical novels can be an effective <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2008/06/22/the-important-and-the-interesting-4347437/">gateway drug</a> to hardcore historical study). Historical novels (and even more novels set in prehistoric times) tell us things we can never learn from the sources: they awake in us a desire for knowledge that we cannot ever obtain: did Elizabeth I have a sex life? What did the <a href="https://www.orcadian.co.uk/acatalog/Orcadian_Bookshop_The_Boy_with_the_Bronze_Axe_36.html">people of Skara Brae</a> think about? Most historical novels also have consistent characters and plots: they make sense in some deep way. In contrast, our fragmented sources and the real-life inconsistencies of historical figures often don’t form a good narrative. The very skill of successful historical novelists can make the history on which they depend seem thin and unsatisfying in contrast. Historians do not mostly aim to <a href="http://asknicola.blogspot.com/2008/08/youve-been-warned.html">own their readers</a> in the way a novelist might: nor, I think, should they aspire to. But is evidence and a strictly controlled imagination (I now have a whole professional vocabulary of qualifying how secure I think my conclusions are) enough to please those who have experienced the visceral thrill of being sucked into a historical novel?</p> <p>There are a few historical novelists, who I discovered before I became a historian, who I can still read happily today: Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Dunnett, for example. Maybe there are some others who I ought to discover, but I suspect that my eye and ear has now become too critical to enjoy the vast majority of historical novels. It is a loss to me of one former pleasure, but still I would, on the whole, rather have the Charlemagne of the sources than any Charlemagne of my own fictional construction. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/10/why-i-no-longer-read-historical-fiction-i-read-a-6693060/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>narrativeliteraturehistorical-novelshistoryhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/10/why-i-no-longer-read-historical-fiction-i-read-a-6693060/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/09/imc-4-my-partial-conversion-to-social-physics-6684213/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-08-09:/2009/08/09/imc-4-my-partial-conversion-to-social-physics-6684213/Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:47:38 +0200 <p>I’m just back from a week in Orkney, where the Middle Ages seems like a recent blip in a 5000 year history, so my next account of the International Medieval Congress in Leeds may be particularly disconnected. But I wanted to report (<a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/leeds-report-2-tuesday-14th-july/">as requested</a>) on the single most thought-provoking session I went to at Leeds: the round table on <a href="http://imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcapp/SessionDetails.jsp?SessionId=2775&year=2009">complexity science and the humanities</a>.</p> <p>It wasn’t strictly a round table, but instead a couple of presentations. The first was by <a href="http://www.crea.polytechnique.fr/personnels/fiches/Galam.htm">Serge Galam</a> who calls himself the first ‘social physicist’, but who was doing what I’d call mathematical modelling of opinion dynamics. The examples he was using were from modern elections (and he’s apparently been quite successful in predicting possible outcomes), but he was arguing that such models could also be used for the spread of religious belief.</p> <p>I’ve always been suspicious of attempts to model human behaviour in this way, because they seem too simplistic, but what dawned on me in this talk was that even with a very basic model, you start getting non-intuitive results. Serge started with a simple yes-no or two party decision, and a framework of two separate mechanisms for opinion forming. One was external, acting directly on an individual (like marketing in elections), the other was internal, arising from the dynamics of interactions between people (referred to as agents here). He was just interested in the internal influences and used external factors to provide an initial parameter: the influence of the advertising produced initial conditions of say 24% of agents for the motion and 76% against. Serge then worked with a model in which there were three kinds of agents: inflexible (who never shift their opinion), floater (who has an opinion but is ready to shift if given more arguments by the other side) and contrarian (who wants to be different to the local or global consensus, regardless of what this is). He used a simplified model of opinion forming in which groups of these agents met at random and used a local majority rule – those agents whose views could change were changed based on the majority within the group. (This may actually be closer to election psychology than more high-minded views that people are independently convinced by the quality of the arguments). The groups were then reshuffled at random and the process repeated until a stable outcome was achieved.</p> <p>If you had only floating agents, the outcome was fairly predictable: the initial majority always win over everyone. But the moment you added either contrarians or the inflexible, you got more interesting patterns. With a few contrarians (up to about 10%) you got a stable situation with a majority and a minority view. If you have more contrarians (more than about 17%), you end up with views splitting 50-50, even if one side started with a strong majority. Serge was arguing that contrarians were more common in the modern world (which seems intuitively plausible, though very hard to demonstrate), and that this posed a real problem for democracies, where you’ll increasingly get very close elections.</p> <p>If instead of contrarians, you have inflexible agents, the dynamics are even more alarming, in some ways. If you only have inflexible people on one side, if there are more than 17% of them, their side will always win, whatever the initial conditions. (I thought of the <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/07/24/27-percent-bush-hits-new-approval-low-in-fox-news-poll/">27%</a> thinking George W Bush was doing a good job as president and winced). Of course, in practice there are inflexible people on both sides of most arguments, but the side with more inflexible people is definitely at an advantage, and can gain a large majority from a relatively unfavourable position.</p> <p>A lot of the questions about Serge’s paper afterwards were pointing out the simplifications made in the model and asking about possible effects: if you don’t have random networks, if you have degrees of conviction, if you have opinion formers who have more influence on groups than others? It sounds like all these kind of details could be added onto the model (at the price of greater complexity of equations). The interesting question (which presumably only experiment would discover) is whether such changes actually affect the dynamics and change the final outcomes.</p> <p>The bigger question for medievalists is whether such models are relevant at all. One objection was that Serge’s suggested application (of religious conversion) was irrelevant, because conversion in the period wasn’t a matter of free will, but coerced/forced. It seemed to me, however, that you could potentially still use this model for resistance to conversion. In most medieval conversion situations, only one side has coercive power: the Jews, the pagans, the heretics don’t normally have it. If you take religious coercion as an external factor, you can start thinking about how people decide whether or not to resist, how many religious zealots you need to maintain a faith, short of extermination. (I’d take the contrarians here to be sceptics, suspicious of whatever orthodoxy tells them).</p> <p>For the early Middle Ages, of course, you still wouldn’t have the parameters you need for the model (though by the time you get to the Reformation, you might be able to get some meaningful figures). But even if there’s no direct application, the outcomes of these simplified models can possibly provide useful rules of thumb in showing how movements gain or lose support and that the dynamics aren’t entirely straightforward.</p> <p>In the second paper, we got onto games: more specifically <a href="http://www.complex-systems.meduniwien.ac.at/people/sthurner/">Stefan Thurner</a> was talking about <a href="http://www.pardus.at/">Pardus</a>, the largest online game in Europe. This is a role-playing game in space, which cunningly doubles as a self-funding social science laboratory, by recording every click made. (Apparently, the student who originally designed it doesn’t need research funding, because he earns substantially more than a research stipend from selling premium accounts).</p> <p>Stefan saw such a game as allowing social science to become an experimental science. The game allows economic, social, scientific and military activities, collaboration etc: it has no rules and no aims, allowing whatever people want to do within it (apparently banks, political parties and clubs have all spontaneously developed). The main interest of the researchers have been in how social networks have developed over time, and looking at whether social science theories of networks actually hold up. </p> <p>What makes it even more interesting is that they’re not looking just at networks of friends or messaging networks (though both are included in the game and are being studied). It is also possible in the game to mark someone as your enemy. Enemy networks can thus be analysed, which prove to be intriguingly different to friendship networks (and which sound potentially very useful for anyone studying feuds) . For example, enemy networks seem to be formed by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment">preferential attachment</a>, whereas friendship networks aren’t.</p> <p>There are also intriguing gender differences here. Players are self-identified by gender in the game. Friendship networks for those identified as women are more reciprocal than for men: if a ‘woman’ marks another ‘woman’ as a friend, the second is more likely to respond by marking the first as her friend, than in the same interaction between two ‘men’. On the other hand, if one ‘man’ marks another ‘man’ as his enemy, the second is more likely to respond by marking the first as his enemy than is the case between two ‘women’. (What this says about the characteristics of ‘men’ and ‘women’ is left to the reader...)</p> <p>This isn’t the only attempt to use MMORPGs (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) to analyse social behaviour: I recently saw a mention of a project using World of Warcraft to study <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jul/29/world-of-warcraft-crime">gang dynamics</a>. The latest plan of the Pardus researchers is to take their experiment one stage further and have a version of a similar game set in a historical world and with banks run by central bankers, to see what the effects of different central bank policies might be on economic behaviour. </p> <p>The bigger question about Pardus, of course, is how generalisible the results are, given that the demographics are untypical. Maybe all it tells you is how a particular group of obsessives behave. The evidence so far, however, is encouraging: for example, messaging networks in Pardus look mathematically very like those in the real world (such as phone networks) even though they’re not from a representative social sample. If we can find other networks that are similar (and the possibility exists of finding these even for the early Middle Ages, via charter witness lists, for example), it seems reasonable to start applying some of the other Pardus results, or at least using them as working hypotheses.</p> <p>I didn’t get to hear the questions put to Stefan (since I had to go and develop some real-life networks at the bloggers meet-up), but the possibilities offered by both researchers did seem intriguing to me. Not something I have the time to explore at the moment, but definitely worth checking back on in a few years time. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/09/imc-4-my-partial-conversion-to-social-physics-6684213/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>gendernetwork-theoryphysicsimcmedievalhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/08/09/imc-4-my-partial-conversion-to-social-physics-6684213/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/28/imc-3-things-to-do-with-charters-before-you-re-dead-6607238/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-07-28:/2009/07/28/imc-3-things-to-do-with-charters-before-you-re-dead-6607238/Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:42:26 +0200 <p>Blogging the International Medieval Congress is itself increasingly historical in one sense: nowadays, you can get a range of reports on several of the <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/07/leeds-live-blog-ii-between-christian.html">key sessions</a>, all written by historians with their own biases and agendas, and the attentive reader can try and reconstruct the event from multiple perspectives. In this spirit, I will rashly give you my thoughts on a <a href="http://imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcapp/SessionDetails.jsp?SessionId=2670&year=2009">couple</a> of <a href="http://imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcapp/SessionDetails.jsp?SessionId=2719&year=2009">sessions</a> that a <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/">fellow blogger</a> organised on 'Problems and possibilities of early medieval diplomatic'. Jon will doubtless give us a more informed take in time, but he is coming from the viewpoint that charters are intrinsically interesting, while I...am not.</p> <p>I think I got turned off charters doing my MPhil at Cambridge, when I realised that there were volumes and volumes of Carolingian royal charters, none of which had been translated. Given that every project involving charters suggested to me seemed to involve reading dozens of them, I decided instead to focus my shaky translating ability on things that gave more immediate results. (OK, I realise now that charters can be read fairly quickly once you've got used to them, but I didn't know that then).</p> <p>Ever since, I have been gradually forced to admit that, actually, charters are very useful for studying all kinds of phenomena, and Jon's IMC sessions this year gave a very good spread of both the kind of things you can study with charters, and even more interestingly, the scale you can work on.</p> <p>At the most local scale, there was Jon's own paper on <a href="http://www.santperedecasserres.com/angles/menu.htm">St Pere de Casserres</a>, a monastery in Catalonia. He was focusing on the oldest original charter, which was showing fictive sales to the monastery. How do we know they were fictive sales? Because some of the properties had already been transferred earlier to the founder of the monastery, Viscountess Ermentrude (Ermetruit) of Osona/Ausona. What case studies like this can give us is some feel for the texture of local power: for example, how new 'histories' are created (all the numerous people whose names appeared in this first charter were complicit in its fiction) and how power relationships worked (the early importance of viscountesses in Catalonia is very interesting).</p> <p>Also on a local scale and focusing on Spain, but looking at a very different aspect of charters was Wendy Davies' paper on 'Local priests in Northern Spain in the tenth century', which was using charters to look at priests' education. In fact she was focusing on one formula within a charter (nullius cogentis imperio/nullius quoque gentis imperio) and its multiple variants. It says much about Wendy's near hypnotic scholarly force that not only was twenty minutes on one formula fascinating, but her wish write a whole book on such language analysis seemed entirely reasonable (though I seem to remember she admitted it probably wouldn't be publishable). Looking at these formula variations, Wendy saw different preferences between micro-regions, areas around particular cities that preferred one version of the formula, as well as individual preferences of some priests. Her analysis of charter-writing also showed different kinds of priest-scribes – some who were following aristocrats around, some who worked only in one location, writing for people who were probably peasants, because of the small-scale of these exchanges. From this incredibly detailed study of charters, she can thus build up a picture of the background of these members of a purely local elite, far below the social level that other early medieval sources normally deal with.</p> <p>At a larger scale, Julie Hofmann from Shenandoah University was looking at women's participation in patronage at Fulda (and hoping to expand this to other Carolingian monasteries east of the Rhine). A fair chunk of the paper was showing how hard it is to spot distinctive trends in women's activities, when charters mentioning women are a relatively small proportion of a charter corpus that itself is changing over time. For example, how significant is a drop off in women's charters, when there's also a general decline in charters after the reign of Charlemagne? And could the overall figures be distorted by a few untypical families, such as one prominent Mainz magnate family which had no surviving sons?</p> <p>One difference Julie thought she could detect was that women were less likely than men to witness their own donations. (I think I remember this correctly, but my notes are a bit sketchy at this point). The problem is determining the significance of this, which means trying to look at when men do or don't witnesses their own donations, and there aren't any clear answers yet. Work on women in early medieval charters has been very much neglected since the early attempts at statistical analysis by David Herlihy, Suzanne Wemple and the like, so this kind of charter analysis potentially offers an important new avenue to looking at Carolingian women's history. Whether we are going to see consistent gendered patterns in the diplomatic, I'm still not sure, but after all, gender analysis is about similarities as well as differences.</p> <p>On a national scale, we had Erik Niblaeus on how the Cistercians brought charters to Sweden, which had somehow managed to survive without them until the 1160s. Charters offer a useful approach to looking at the 'Europeanization' of northern and central Europe, and certainly provide evidence for it at a textual level. As Michael Clanchy commented, looking at one of Eric's images, you wouldn't be able to tell it in style from a charter from almost anywhere else in Western Europe. Despite Erik's title referring to the 'Import of a Political Culture', however, he wasn't sure that charters could be connected to political institutions, because there was so little other evidence for them from the period. Instead, charters add 'reassuring mystery and complication' to our knowledge. (Erik thus shows himself firmly in the John Gillingham tradition of applauding the increase of uncertainty in historical scholarship).</p> <p>Lastly (though actually the first paper of all) we had the global vision of Georg Vogeler, one of the people working on the <a href="http://www.monasterium.net/ieekq/en/home.php">Monasterium project</a>, talking about this and other projects to get charter corpora on the web. The possibilities are substantial. Rather than the handful of images that traditional charter editions have included, you can in theory have images of all the charters. You can have access from anywhere in the world and there are new possibilities for rapid textual analysis. Georg gave an example about looking at vernacular dating clauses in German charters and being able to explore regional differences over time. Diplomatic differences that previously might only be spotted by an expert after half a lifetime can be explored within a week or two.</p> <p>Of course, the full effect is going to take a long time coming, and the other papers showed how different researchers want different things. Jon's work, and to a certain extent Eric's involved careful analysis of the specific physical form of charters, which needs high-resolution images. Wendy's work requires full text (with non-normalized spellings). For the kind of larger-scale statistical analysis which Julie was interested in, in contrast, she didn't really want the text of charters, so much as standardized data from them (she'd constructed her own database to store such data). In theory, people could code full-text to mark such key sections (as the <a href="http://www.cei.uni-muenchen.de/index.html">Charters Encoding Initiative</a> is thinking about), but it would still be an enormous amount of work. Georg said there are projects working on issues like automatic tagging of names, which might reduce some of these problems.</p> <p>If we could get something like this working on a large scale, I think there are all kinds of new research areas that are opened up. For example, it strikes me as having great potential for socio-economic history. If you can relatively easily pull out charters referring to slaves or vineyards or mills etc, you can build up a selection of sources that you'd never have time to explore otherwise. Similarly, I once found a mention in a Freising charter about a woman serving at the royal court – it might be possible to find more evidence about that. All in all, after the two sessions, I'm starting to feel that I probably ought to be more enthusiastic about charters than I've previously been. Maybe, as a friend once commented, 'charters are the new black'. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/28/imc-3-things-to-do-with-charters-before-you-re-dead-6607238/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>imcchartersmedievalhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/28/imc-3-things-to-do-with-charters-before-you-re-dead-6607238/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/21/imc-2-gender-and-the-purposes-of-history-6563121/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-07-21:/2009/07/21/imc-2-gender-and-the-purposes-of-history-6563121/Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:22:29 +0200 <p>The paper I heard at the International Medieval Congress that got the most varied reactions was probably <a href="http://www.wesleyan.edu/templates/dept/rlan/general_faculty.htt?function=f1&department=RLAN&faculty=jrider">Jeff Rider</a> from Wesleyan University on <a href="http://imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcapp/SessionDetails.jsp?SessionId=2751&year=2009">'The uses of the Middle Ages'</a>. Rider's main argument was that we have of the Middle Ages was a body of surviving artefacts, and the ideas we weave around them. These ideas tell us about no longer existing worlds, and Rider saw the possibility of such imaginative projection as enabling us to live better in the everyday world. The exercise of reconstructing a medieval world opens us to new possibilities of being in this world.</p> <p>Anyone, of course, can reconstruct the past in any way they like. The role of historians as a collective community that Rider sees in this reconstruction is on placing views on the limits of acceptable reconstruction (we can imagine the Franks as Roman wannabees or hairy savages, but not as samurai) and by discussing such reconstructions, making them more comprehensible.</p> <p>All this fitted well with some of what I (and others) have talked about in the past about why <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2008/05/12/early-medieval-historical-argument-from--4162787/">early medieval history</a> matters, even if I don't start citing Paul Ricoeur, as Rider did. And yet after the session a friend of mine was dismissive of the paper, ridiculing the idea of history enriching us personally in this way. This friend comes originally from a region noted for its biased and nationalistic historical traditions, so may have some more reason for scepticism there than many.</p> <p>But I also wanted to tie up Rider's paper with issues that I'd been discussing with other bloggers at Leeds. The attempts at meet-ups were all rather patchy, but I did talk to several other bloggers, and get a sense that there were two different kinds of medievalist blogs. One was intended predominantly as a professional show-case, trying both to grow a new audience interested in the Middle Ages and to demonstrate the ability to communicate to multiple audiences. Such bloggers normally blog under their real names, for obvious reasons of publicity. In contrast, other bloggers include more personal material on their blogs (one even called it confessional), and are often particularly interested in exploring their interactions with their role as researchers and teachers. I'd put my own blog in this category. Such blogs are often written pseudonymously, even if, as in my case, my identity is fairly easily discoverable.</p> <p>On one side, we thus have the medieval as personal and potentially life-expanding, and on the other side we have it as fascinating, but personally irrelevant. One interesting factor in which side of the divide you fall on is, it seems to me, gender. My friend who couldn't see anything life-enhancing in medieval history is male. There is also a definite split in the bloggers, with female bloggers more likely to write more 'personal' blogs. The divide isn't absolute, as both Jeff Rider himself, and a blogger like <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/">Eileen Joy</a> show. But I think that many women (and other historically marginalized groups) who come to the study of history do so partly out of a sense that it will say something relevant to their own position, in a way that middle-class white straight men may feel less need for. This isn't so much about naive searches for a golden age for women/Jews/gays etc (though that may often be an initial factor) as for an understanding of how past events have created current society. And I think that the experience of being a historian (or a would-be historian) is also different for men and women. If my blog became a purely professional one, it would lose some of its attraction to me as a tool for thinking with. And the same would be true if my field of research ceased to have resonances with my own personal life.</p> <p>I asked at the end of Rider's talk whether his ideas of exploring new possibilities didn't mean that the real rival of medieval history wasn't science fiction. Though I didn't have time to explain, I was thinking of Judith Bennett's <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/03/21/history-matters-2-change-and-continuity-in-feminist-history-5803520/">concerns</a> that feminists no longer turn to history to inform their world (and of the increasing queer/feminist interest in areas such as cybernetics and genetic engineering). If considering the future offers more enriching possibilities for women, why study the past? Do the more personal blogs of medievalists, connecting together historical experience and our own in a most 'unprofessional' way, offer one route for us to indicate to non-medievalists why history still matters? </p> <p>22/07/09: updated to remove irrelevant details. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/21/imc-2-gender-and-the-purposes-of-history-6563121/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>imchistorybloggingmedievalhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/21/imc-2-gender-and-the-purposes-of-history-6563121/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/19/imc-1-what-are-the-unorthodox-saying-6549747/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-07-19:/2009/07/19/imc-1-what-are-the-unorthodox-saying-6549747/Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:32:03 +0200 <p>Although the special theme for this year's International Medieval Congress was 'Heresy and Orthodoxy', I didn't actually go to many sessions on the topic. I tend to find late medieval sessions on the topic too depressing, and early medieval sessions either too theologically obscure or too politically reductive. I did go to the <a href="http://imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcapp/SessionDetails.jsp?SessionId=3000&year=2009">keynote speeches</a> on the theme, however, and got a couple of satisfying takes on orthodoxy and discourses. (For alternative reports see <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/07/leeds-live-blog-ii-between-christian.html">In the Medieval Middle</a> and <a href="http://izgad.blogspot.com/2009/07/international-medieval-congress-key.html">Izgad</a>.</p> <p>First up was John Arnold on 'Heresies and Rhetorics', which focused on a rather unpromising text: the 'Tractatus Fidei contra Diversos Errores' of Benedict of Alignan, Bishop of Marseille in the late thirteenth century. This is a vast book (2578 chapters) which has normally been seen as a last gasp of simplistic theology before the scholastics got going on the case. John was interested in what looking at it might tell us about anti-heretical discourses in the twelfth and thirteenth century. He thinks this is necessary because people studying heresy in the central Middle Ages (unlike in late antiquity and the early modern period) have been too prone to take the nature of the discourse for granted. Following the model developed by Robert Moore in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Formation-Persecuting-Society-Authority-Deviance/dp/1405129646">'The Formation of a Persecuting Society'</a> it's been presumed that there was a coherent and hegemonic discourse produced by the authorities and that it worked to create and marginalize heresy. As a result, there's been an emphasis on seeing the similarities between heresiological texts and less emphasis on seeing differences between them.</p> <p>John didn't want to deny ecclesiastical power, but he did want us to be more cautious about its limits, and look hard at specific texts. The Tractatus isn't a response to a particular heresy, even though Benedict had had direct experience of Jews, Muslims and Cathar heretics. Instead, it's structured around the creed, and it's a compendium of all possible errors: past, present and future, probably including some errors that Benedict had made up himself. It wasn't intended as a polemic, but claimed to be intended to make 'the unfaithful clearly convinced and the faithful strengthened', and to ensure precise orthodoxy on the basis of the Fourth Lateran Council creed. Its imagined audience, therefore, includes heretics arguing back, so that unlike in some sermons, it doesn't take for granted that heretics only have obviously stupid arguments. Benedict also did his best to try and make this huge book more usable. He has detailed chapter headings and a thematic index, and what John called an 'executive summary'. </p> <p>Whether or not due to these features, someone must have found the work useful. There are a number of manuscripts of the Tractatus, especially from the fifteenth century, in fact rather more than of some texts nowadays thought of as more important, like Bernard Gui's handbook of inquisition and Peter the Venerable's treatise on heresy. Old-fashioned writings on heresy still flourished, and John pointed out how similarly, a large number of copies of Augustine's De Haeresibus were still floating around in the thirteenth century. Indeed Augustine's work tended to come most readily to hand when bishops sought for information on heresy.</p> <p>So the resources that were used for talking about heresy in the later Middle Ages weren't monologic. There were 800-year old texts being used which presumed that you had to debate heretics, not just coerce them (Augustine had just come up with the exciting idea of coercing heretics). The church might be trying to achieve hegemonic discourse, but they didn't necessarily succeed. And nor was there a simple binary of self and Other. There were Others who you might be able to convert, abjected Others who you didn't want to mention, others who might not really be Others at all (laypeople with weird, but not necessarily heretical beliefs) and large muddy area of scepticism, which doesn't really fit into any kind of binary. However big the anti-heretics book, reality is always bigger and stranger.</p> <p>After heretics, we then went on Jeffrey Cohen on Jews in 'Between Christian and Jew: Orthodoxy, Violence, and Living Together in Medieval England'. Jeffrey was focusing on the physical closeness of Azkenazi Jews and Christians in England and some of the weird mental interactions between them, as glimpsed via anti-Jewish polemic. Gerald of Wales has a story about a young Jew who mocks St Frideswide as she is translated (by parodying a healing miracle), and then hangs himself, still blaspheming. This event is publicized by the Jewish family's Christian servants. The same spatial co-existence is seen in the story of Little St Hugh of Lincoln, where Hugh is alleged murdered while playing in a Jewish friend's house.</p> <p>But what Jeffrey argued was that while Jews and Christians might be sharing the same space, they weren't necessarily sharing the same time. Jews were both modern neighbours to the Christians, but they were also the eternal, unchanging Biblical Jews, who Matthew Paris saw as re-enacting the Passion via murdering Christian boys. Yet another temporal perspective, that of John Mandeville, was about future Jews. Mandeville described a Jewish group enclosed in the Caspian Mountains who would explode and take apocalyptic action against revenge. Jews everywhere still learned Hebrew, so he claimed, so that when this group emerged they would be able to follow their orders and know how to kill the Christians.</p> <p>Thinking over this later, I wondered if this 'polychronic' Jew was itself an invention of a particular time. I'm not well up on all the Carolingian texts about Jews, but I don't think there was quite the same feeling about them. I think instead the emphasis was more on the decline of the Jews. Like the Romans, they had failed to recognize and honour Jesus and his followers, and so had been superseded: their power was gone, even if the gens lingered on. The eternal, unchanging Jew seems to me more a product of a later age that could not understand why such remnants still hung on in an otherwise Christianized world.</p> <p>I was also struck by another comment Jeffrey made: that the Christian fantasies of Jewish revenge we see in Mandeville, may in fact be some deeply distorted reflection of Jewish wishes and prayers for their Messiah to avenge Christian attacks on them in the future, ideas which in turn drew on Christian millennialism and Crusader polemic (bloodthirsty othering turtles all the way down...). Put together with John's comments, it was a useful reminder that the powerful may not always be as successful, nor the oppressed so benevolent, as a simple model of hegemonic discourse can make us imagine.. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/19/imc-1-what-are-the-unorthodox-saying-6549747/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>imcheresymedievalhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/19/imc-1-what-are-the-unorthodox-saying-6549747/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/05/bloggers-meet-up-at-imc-6455071/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-07-05:/2009/07/05/bloggers-meet-up-at-imc-6455071/Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:23:52 +0200 <p>Several of us who are going to be at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in a week's time thought it would be good to have a bloggers' meet-up there. Following extensive scrutiny of the timetable, the best time seems to be 8.45 pm onwards on either Monday 13th or Wed 15th (since on the Tuesday there is the Early Medieval Europe reception at that time). Location to be Boddington Hall bar. If anyone is interested, please put your preferred date in the comments (or e-mail magistra/hotmail/co/uk).</p> <p><strong>UPDATE</strong>: Let's make it 8.45 pm on Monday 13th in Boddington Hall bar. That leaves Tuesday night for <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/your-guide-to-jarrett-spotting-at-leeds-and-blogger-meet-up/">Dr Jarrett</a> to buy us all drinks, Wednesday for dancing and Thursday for trying to remember enough the conference to blog on it. Looking forward to seeing you. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/05/bloggers-meet-up-at-imc-6455071/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>imchttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/05/bloggers-meet-up-at-imc-6455071/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/04/princesses-and-agency-6445871/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-07-04:/2009/07/04/princesses-and-agency-6445871/Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:18:46 +0200 <p>You can't observe the culture of small girls (under eights) much without realising that there are an awful lot of princesses involved. They are encouraged to wear princess clothes and princess jewellery, and watch princess videos and read princess books, etc, etc. At this point any good feminist's alarm-bells will be going off. Aren't such stereotypes promoting a desire for a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, unproductive idleness, an ambition limited to marrying a handsome prince and a willingness to grind the face of the poor? (Well, OK, that last aspect of royal life is not specifically mentioned, but it's surely inherent in a class-based society).</p> <p>There are undoubtedly problems with such marketing onslaughts: I would be upset if L said, as I once heard a classmate of hers do, that she dreamt of being Sleeping Beauty. But I'm inclined to think that L's mild princess desires aren't too harmful. That's partly because I'm increasingly interested in what princess narratives are trying to do.</p> <p>I want to focus on the <a href="http://www.tiaraclub.co.uk/about.aspx">Tiara Club</a>, one of the popular mega-series of princess books. There are currently almost 40 books in the series, and they're intended for girls of about 5-7, who have either just learnt to read or are being read to: they're short (about 70 pages), with pictures on most pages and a fairly standardized plot. (They're also implicitly multiracial: a few of the princesses are shown as non-white in the pictures, although that's not mentioned in the text).</p> <p>The books are set in 'The Royal Palace Academy for the Preparation of Perfect Princesses', essentially a boarding school for princesses. I want to summarize the plot of one which we own: 'Princess Ellie and the Enchanted Fawn'. Witch Windlespin ('not one of those horrid witches who ride on broomsticks, or make scary spells. She weaves the most beautiful material, and makes fabulous clothes, and magic herbal medicines as well'), has found a fawn which has lost its mother, and the princesses in the class, along with their fairy godmother teacher, are helping to find the doe. This involves the princesses searching in groups within a large wood. The heroine's group find the doe by spying her from a large tree they have climbed ('very unprincessy'), but then get lost when the pebbles they have been given to mark their path are moved by nasty classmates. However they manage to navigate back part of the way and then meet the doe (with another fawn), who guides them back to the witch's cottage. They are rewarded with points for their group and a special picnic lunch.</p> <p>Beneath the sugary trappings, what you have is a school story of a very traditional kind. The heroine has an adventure (if one involving only 'mild peril'), but by courage, ingenuity and teamwork saves the day. The girls being princesses, and the magical elements in the story, are really secondary to the plot. Instead the girls live up to the school motto: 'A Perfect Princess always thinks of others before herself, and is kind, caring and truthful.' The resolutely pro-social nature of the books may grow tedious after a while (virtue is always rewarded and vice always punished), but it's fairly common in books and TV shows for children.</p> <p>So why princesses and why magic? One obvious reason is that children like fantasies (and a lot of adult fiction is also marked by a lack of gritty realism). Yet in fact, the glamorous life of the princesses in such books is less removed from the reality of the readers than it once was. In contrast to my childhood, in the twenty-first century to have beautiful clothes and jewellery, dance at glamorous parties and go to exciting new places is hardly unusual for most small girls, even if pony riding is still an expensive hobby. The lifestyle of a princess is now aspirational, rather than impossibly exotic. (Perhaps it has to be, in order to be marketed successfully to small consumers).</p> <p>But I think the glamorous side is not the only reason for the settings of the story. Consider what the story I've mentioned above involves, if it's not about magical princesses. Groups of young schoolgirls (the age of the princesses isn't given, but they're implicitly still primary school age) are sent into a largish wood without adult supervision, and expected to look after themselves, and find a potentially hazardous wild animal. In a realistic world, at the end the fairy godmother teacher would be facing a disciplinary charge and the Princess Academy would be being sued by alarmed parents. If you read children's literature from 50 years ago or more, you realise that most of the parents involved would be getting prosecuted by the NSPCC for neglect or negligence. (The Walkers and the Blacketts from Swallows and Amazons would probably be first, but there are many more). </p> <p>It seems to me that the use of princesses and magic in stories are a way of getting round this problem. Young girls reading the books won't think the unusual freedom of the heroine strange; they will also be less likely to imitate in real life the more dangerous behaviour of the princesses. The most notorious models of the passive princess tend to come from traditional fairytales crossed with a 1950s Disney ethic (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella). In contrast, the 'modern' princess enjoys a freedom that many girls in the target audience lack. It may not just be the tiaras that young readers aspire to, even if that is what gets marketed most heavily. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/04/princesses-and-agency-6445871/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>child-psychologyfeminismprincessesliteraturehttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/07/04/princesses-and-agency-6445871/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/29/mary-douglas-natural-symbols-and-gay-marriage-6418124/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-06-29:/2009/06/29/mary-douglas-natural-symbols-and-gay-marriage-6418124/Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:38:08 +0200 <p>One of the most interesting ideas in Mary Douglas' <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Institutions-Think-Frank-Abrams-Lectures/dp/0815602065/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246260914&sr=8-1">'How institutions think'</a>, about which I have been blogging intermittently, is her argument that institutions are stabilized by being naturalized (p 48):</p> <blockquote><p>There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it not seen as a socially contrived arrangement.</p></blockquote> <p>Her argument is that it is only this sense of 'naturalness' that gives an institution strength, making it seeming reasonable and putting it beyond discussion. But this 'naturalization' has itself to be a hidden process, because otherwise it defeats its own object: you can't have naturalness created, it can only be discovered.</p> <p>Douglas provides examples of how such models are used: for example, right and left hands to model complimentary roles of men/women, king/people etc, and appeals to the ancestors to prevent violence within a group. It's easy to start thinking, therefore, that such use of 'natural symbols' is only applicable to the 'premodern' world (whether tribal societies or historical periods). But I'm increasingly coming to see this as an idea that's still surprisingly relevant. For example, the idea of the social construction of all kind of concepts, norms and behaviours (whether it's childhood, or gender roles, or homosexuality or ideas of human rights) is still not widely accepted, even though it's a commonplace for many academics in the humanities. The tendency to think that our culture's institutions and practices are the only natural/normal ones is very widespread.</p> <p>In particular, the question of gay marriage (especially as reflected in the debate in the US) seems to me to raise interesting ideas about natural symbols. Why are so many Christians in the US so opposed to the idea of legalised gay marriages? It can't be simply because such marriages are, in their eyes, sinful, because they're not trying to prevent the legal remarriage of divorced people (which is an equal sin in the New Testament). Instead, gay marriage is often seen as undermining <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22791">marriage as an institution</a> in some way. Usually it is claimed that this is because it breaks the link between marriage and procreation, but this does not explain why marriages between heterosexuals who are unwilling or unable to procreate (e.g. because they are too old) are not condemned.</p> <p>Some feminists claim that Christian conservatives condemn gay marriages because they raise the threat of equal marriages, in which one of the partners in the marriage is not automatically superior (as male) and one automatically inferior (as female). But not all those who are anti-gay are anti-female equality. At least in the UK, there is a strong contingent of female evangelicals, who are nevertheless anti-gay. (Evangelical Anglicans have overwhelmingly accepted female priests, for example).</p> <p>So I am now wondering whether one (though not the only reason) for hostility to gay marriage is that it undermines one current 'naturalistic' view of marriage, by showing its constructed nature. If you look at the Christian-influenced 'traditional' ideology of marriage, the key ideas seem to me to be:</p> <p>1) Marriage is a pairing of opposites (man/woman)<br> 2) Marriage is fruitful, like nature<br> 3) Marriage is eternal and unchanging – like God and the world</p> <p>If gay marriages are accepted as true marriage, that does attack all these 'natural' concepts of marriage, but it's important to note that our changing views of Nature in the modern Western world have already severely weakened those concepts.</p> <p>Firstly, the idea of man and woman as eternal opposites has been greatly weakened in both scientific and cultural terms: no more claims that women's bodies are fundamentally different, no separate spheres for men and women. Secondly, the idea of the simple, peaceful, fruitfulness of nature, in which, for example, birds happily pair off in marriage, is no longer current. Evolutionary ideas show nature's fruitfulness as ruthless and amoral competition for survival, with procreation bound by no institutions or rules. Finally, evolutionary thought also shows that nature is not unchanging, but constantly developing to seek individual advantage. In other words, you can't ground monogamous, lifelong, faithful marriage in Darwinian nature.</p> <p>So the opposition to gay marriage is really a side-issue: you can't preserve 'natural marriage' just by keeping it heterosexual. Should the idea of natural symbolism for marriage therefore be discarded altogether, and the institution be seen just as a social arrangement chosen for a particular society? But then the problem arises of why one particular set of social relations should be privileged over another: in that sense, the conservatives are right to say that it raises the question of why polygamous marriages shouldn't be allowed.</p> <p>I think we therefore need a natural symbolism of marriage that incorporates gay marriage, but also preserves its monogamous and eternal character. And we actually do already have such a symbolism, in the idea of twin souls. The use of this image of partnerships is very old: it goes back to Plato's Symposium and Aristophanes' joking comments about how <a href="http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/sym.htm">primordial humans were split up by the gods</a> and now seek their 'other half', whether same-sex or opposite sex. Such a myth also relies on the key natural symbol of twins, whose potency again has survived for millennia.</p> <p>A non-heterosexual naturalized view of marriage could rest on this idea of soulmates/twin-souls, and fit comfortably with a slightly sentimentalized idea of nature as full of animals seeking/striving for what they truly need, with stability and meaning emerging from this individual seeking. If the proponents of gay marriage want to capture the naturalistic high ground, they may need to stress the romantic nature of marriage, the finding of and clinging to the one true love, even if that now seems old-fashioned for many heterosexuals. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/29/mary-douglas-natural-symbols-and-gay-marriage-6418124/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>marriagehomosexualitymary-douglashttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/29/mary-douglas-natural-symbols-and-gay-marriage-6418124/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/24/the-late-anglo-saxon-state-a-maximum-propaganda-view-6383041/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-06-24:/2009/06/24/the-late-anglo-saxon-state-a-maximum-propaganda-view-6383041/Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:22:18 +0200 <p>Jon Jarrett has already <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/seminary-liii-brain-stretching-new-take-on-late-anglo-saxon-england/">blogged</a> about Chris Lewis's IHR paper on 'The ideology and culture of government in Anglo-Saxon England', but I think it's a rich enough paper to get blogged on twice. While Jon gives a good overview of the paper, I want in this post to try and put Chris' paper into two different historiographical contexts: among the Anglo-Saxonists and among the Carolingianists.</p> <p>Some of Chris' comments only really begin to gain their full import when I went back and re-read my seminar notes alongside James Campbell's 'The late Anglo-Saxon state: a maximum view' (in The Anglo-Saxon state, London, Hambledon, 2000, 1-30. In particular, there is a resonant passage in Campbell's article:</p> <blockquote><p>Late Anglo-Saxon England was a nation state. It was an entity with an effective central authority, uniformly organised institutions, a national language, a national church, defined frontiers (admittedly with considerable fluidity in the north), and above all, a strong sense of national identity.</p></blockquote> <p>Chris seems to me to be reacting to that view in two important ways. In one sense, he was challenging it. The institutions weren't entirely uniform: not all of England was shired, for example. Regional identities were still significant: although Campbell talks about the existence of national saints, most cults were very local. At the level of the thane, most men were only local landholders, not trans-regional. The Benedictine reforms did not cover the whole of the England, but were concentrated in a particular zone. The unity stressed by rulers was of the English people, not that of a state.</p> <p>But Chris wasn't being purely negative about this vision of late Anglo-Saxon England. He was also indirectly raising the question: to the extent that Campbell's ideas are true of the Anglo-Saxon state, how did they get to be true? How did this state get to be this way? Campbell's picture is implicitly about Engelond at the people's command arising from out the azure main (or at least the mists of the seventh century), and Chris was arguing that nowadays Englsih unity was taken for granted. Instead, he was trying to show how late Anglo-Saxon political culture got actively built. Because building political cultures is an important part of politics: persuasive images are vital, even if they don't match reality. There might not have been uniformity in institutions, for example, but it was thought that there should be (and indeed imagined that there was).</p> <p>So much of Chris' paper was looking at the many ways that rulers and those associated with them created this political culture, because it does look to have been created in many ways. Some of these are relatively well-known, such as the cultural role of coinage, and the use of titles such as 'king of the English'. Chris also argued that there were probably mechanisms developed for allowing the temporary partition of the kingdom (as in 957-959 between Eadwig and Edgar) to avoid conflicts between the elite.</p> <p>He was also bringing in intellectual developments which connected to this development of political culture. For example, <a href="http://www.englmedstud.uni-goettingen.de/personal.php?mit_id=14&bereich=personal">Mechthild Gretsch</a> has argued for the deliberate attempt by men such as Aethelwold of Winchester and Dunstan to create and spread an academic vernacular culture, a 'Winchester vocabulary' that enables discussion of politics and theology in Old English. Chris added that such promotion of the vernacular was most stressed in times of external threat, such as under Alfred and Aethelred the Unready. The reform ideology was deeply influenced by clerics and monks, but one of its key ideas, uniformity, was also implicitly a political idea: uniformity went inextricably together with one king leading one people. Chris was also stressing how reform ideology was closely linked to practical government throughout the period. For example, he saw the penitential kingship of Aethelred the Unready, as expressed in some of his later charters, as reflecting a partisan coup at court. Despite what Athelred may have expressed about wishing to undo wrongs to the church, only some Benedictine houses got favoured.</p> <p>Chris was also looking hard at the timing of the reform project and how it was reproduced socially. He was arguing that the tendency to uniformity was greatest in the 970s and that after 1000 the impetus of the project wasn't continuing (although some of the individual ideas continued on even after the conquest, such as standard Old English). He saw social reproduction as important in embedding some of the practices (for example the training of moneyers), but thought that the continuity of Benedictine teaching was broken. He saw the key moment here as the stresses of Aethelred the Unready's reign, when intellectuals either had to enter politics fully or retreat to the schoolroom. After the death of Wulfstan, there was a further break as Cnut then took political culture in a different direction, drawing more on Ottonian models. The full-blown project, as Chris saw it, lasted only around fifty years, from the 970s to the 1020s (he saw Cnut and Edward the Confessor's kingdoms as having different cultures). Even at the time, other ideologies co-existed: Chris thought that distinctive local minster cultures outside the Benedictine Zone existed, for example, although it's very difficult to recreate their details.</p> <p>As the blog posts show, Chris' ideas were wide-ranging and innovative, and yet a lot of them were also strangely familiar to me as a Carolingianist. After all, historians have been discussing Carolingian political culture for getting on for eighty years (really ever since the time of the German 'new constitutional historians' of the 1930s), and there are a lot of parallels: when Chris was talking about the handful of men with national landholdings, for example, I was thinking Anglo-Saxon <em>Reichsadel</em>. </p> <p>But my point here isn't to do a typical Carolingianist manoeuvre and dismiss the late Anglo-Saxon state as just a very late Carolingian one. It's to suggest that we can start doing comparisons on how political cultures are created (and possibly even three-way ones, adding in David Pratt's ideas of Alfredian political culture). How long are such cultures sustainable? The central impetus for the Carolingian reforms looks a bit longer than fifty years, but not much: it's really only three generations (Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald). Did the Anglo-Saxon concept of renovation, which Chris mention differ from the Carolingian concept? What other different aspects can we see? I mentioned that the Anglo-Saxon ideology of lordship was noticeably different from the Frankish one. Chris was wondering whether the continuity of Benedictine influence was due to a lot of young kings coming to the throne; the Carolingian experience suggests that adult kings could deliberately choose such an ideology for political reasons. How important was the use of the vernacular to political cultures? (Some of the new studies on Louis the German might be useful here). Chris' paper is obviously the start of something very interesting in Anglo-Saxon studies; but I think it's potentially also very useful for those of us working on other early medieval societies. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/24/the-late-anglo-saxon-state-a-maximum-propaganda-view-6383041/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>politicsanglo-saxonsmedievalihr-seminarshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/24/the-late-anglo-saxon-state-a-maximum-propaganda-view-6383041/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/20/pauline-fest-3-constraints-violence-and-gender-6347510/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-06-20:/2009/06/20/pauline-fest-3-constraints-violence-and-gender-6347510/Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:17:13 +0200 <p>One of the stereotypes of gender history that the Pauline Stafford symposium in May knocked fairly firmly on the head was a supposed contrast between male freedom and female lack of freedom. This view of men as essentially free seems to be based on some assumed continuity between Roman republican ideas of the true vir, mastered only by himself, and the ideas of the rights of man (but not woman) developed from the eighteenth century onwards. This conveniently ignores over 1700 years when elite men took it for granted that they were constrained by a variety of social pressures. Even rulers themselves rarely had free rein: they had to respond both to the demands of God and those of their secular elite or risk falling from power. The constraints on male behaviour were not as stringent as on female, but to pretend they didn't exist is misleading.</p> <p>This theme of male constraint and restraint kept on recurring as an undertone in papers at the symposium. I've already mentioned <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/02/pauline-fest-1-is-gender-a-useful-tool-6221308/">Julie Mumby's paper</a> on transmission of property in Anglo-Saxon wills. David Bates in his paper on 'Norms, rules and a biography of William the Conqueror' addressed the theme more directly. He argued for William as a man who pushed the boundaries of acceptable royal behaviour to the limit, for example by his use of intimidatory violence, but who could be brought back 'into line', for example by Lanfranc. It's also important that we need to think more carefully about where the boundaries were at that period. David argued that anger was part of what kings did, and that William of Poitiers always implies in his vocabulary that William's anger was rational. On the other hand, when you get stories like William pinning a knife between the fingers of the abbot of La Trinité Rouen when the latter asked how firmly the charter he'd just been given would stick, you realise just how much norms of acceptable behaviour can change.</p> <p>It's when we get to violence, however, that the question of a possible contrast between male and female constraints becomes most acute. The question isn't just whether medieval women were substantially more vulnerable to violence than men. It's also whether women were significantly less able than men to inflict violence.</p> <p>A number of papers at the symposium indirectly addressed these two questions. I've already mentioned <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/02/pauline-fest-1-is-gender-a-useful-tool-6221308/">John Gillingham's paper</a>, which certainly implied women's vulnerability to violence (although someone queried afterwards whether it was really worse in such situations being a woman and enslaved than being a man and slaughtered outright). And we also got a reminder of male vulnerability to violence in Simon Keynes' paper on 'The cult of Edward the Martyr during the reign of Aethelred the Unready'. (This was similar to his paper at the IHR, which <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/seminary-xlvi-agatha-christie-and-edward-the-martyr/">Jon Jarrett</a> has already blogged on).</p> <p>As an example of greater female vulnerability to violence, however, Régine Le Jan's paper on 'Gender and mediation in 11th century Lombardy' was revealing. It discussed how Countess of Liutgard of Valenciennes acted as a mediatrix (female mediator) between Bishop Baldric II of Liège and Count Lambert of Louvain. At one level this was showing the important political role for women in the period (there are other examples of such female mediation outside the family). But there is a twist: Liutgard acted as a mediator because Lambert had first ambushed and captured her. Women might act as peace-weavers, but that didn't mean they necessarily enjoyed peace themselves. Since this paper came just before <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/09/pauline-fest-2-gender-ideology-and-practice-6269196/">Anneke Mulder-Bakker's one on Gertrude of Ortenberg</a>, I was left wondering whether all Anneke's metaphors of warp and weft of the social fabric only work till some men decide to rip the whole thing up with a sword.</p> <p>As for the extent to which women can inflict violence, this is a question which I've debated on this blog <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/03/28/history-matters-5-analysing-carolingian-patriarchy-5845948/">before</a> and there's no simple answer. Some women quite clearly did act as lords and control military forces (as was pointed out, Liutgard probably had an entourage to protect her, even if they failed in this case). Was it harder for them to do so than men? It's very difficult to be certain on that, because some women clearly did manage it successfully. But one pointer is the emphasis in so many sources and over many centuries of the personal prowess of lords and rulers: their strength, skill in battle, courage etc was both announced and demonstrated in hazardous ways (tournaments, hunting etc). All this implies that such an image did matter to their troops, whether or not the ruler always personally led them on campaign. Even powerful women could not project this warrior image and rarely tried to.</p> <p>And this gets us back finally to another of the messages from the symposium on gender similarities and differences. You can often see powerful medieval men and women behaving in quite similar ways. However, even if their practice could be similar, the medieval image is normally of difference between men and women (unless men succumb to effeminate long hair), and this concept of difference itself affected expectations and hence behaviour. The medieval reality of women could not easily dislodge the medieval ideology of women, and nor can it easily dislodge our own ideologies of medieval women. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/20/pauline-fest-3-constraints-violence-and-gender-6347510/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>violencegenderpauline-staffordwomenmedievalhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/20/pauline-fest-3-constraints-violence-and-gender-6347510/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/13/sybarite-sarabaites-monastic-pairs-in-byzantium-6293991/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-06-13:/2009/06/13/sybarite-sarabaites-monastic-pairs-in-byzantium-6293991/Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:22:28 +0200 <p>Jon Jarrett had been doing most of this term's blogging on <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/seminars/">IHR earlier medieval seminars</a>, but we felt that Claudia Rapp on 'Ritual Brotherhood in Byzantium: Origins and Context' was really more in my field of interest. Claudia was talking about the ritual of adelphopoiesis ('brother-making'). This ritual was brought to general attention by John Boswell's book <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Same-Sex-Unions-Premodern-Europe/dp/0679751645/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244876635&sr=8-2"><em>Same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe</em></a>, which made the deliberately sensationalist claim that these were akin to gay marriages. Byzantium is the only medieval society with both evidence of the ritual and narrative sources discussing ritual brotherhood, so it's revealing to look at the evidence rather more carefully.</p> <p>The ritual itself is very well-attested, with over 60 Greek manuscripts from the late eight century onwards, plus an Old Church Slavonic version. Claudia was thinking about it in the context of other rituals which create 'fictive' kinship (non-biological ties): marriage and godparenthood. Marriage affected inheritance rights and marriage prohibitions (you may not marry your desceased wife's sister etc); godparenthood affected marriage prohibitions, but not inheritance rights, ritual brotherhood had no effect on either. (In questions Claudia also said that the adelphopoiesis ritual doesn't look much like the marriage ritual, and isn't normally found in liturgical manuscripts together with it). She saw ritual brotherhood as a very flexible relationship that was an additional strategy for building alliances.</p> <p>Claudia's main focus in the paper was on looking for the origins of the ritual: she thinks it came from early monasticism (C3-C6). Those who work on the west in the Middle Ages tend to think of monasticism in Benedictine patterns, but early eastern monasticism had three main patterns (with monachos and monasterium terminology used for all three). One was eremitic (hermits), cenobitic (communal) and the third was semi-anchoritic (living in small groups of two or three). In the Benedictine Rule, these are the monks that Benedict condemns as Sarabaites.</p> <p>There are a lot of texts which discuss such monastic pairs or triples: Pachomius had his brother with him, Anthony and Macarius each had two disciples, John Cassian and John Moschos both travelled with a single friend. Some of the bonds were hierarchical (with master seen as father, and disciple as son) and some non-hierarchical, seen as brothers. They shared 'spiritual capital', as Claudia put it: for example one motif was that when a pair went into a village to sell their handicrafts, one sinned sexually with a woman and they both did penance, or the 'brother' did penance for the other. There was also often a desire to die together and be buried together: one story has a monk telling his sick 'brother' that he's not going to outlive him, and then lying down and dying first. We also have monastic documents which show brotherhood, such as letters to 'X and his brother' and even one <a href="http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info/reference/articles/McGing-1990-Unusual-MME5.pdf">sixth-century papyrus</a> which shows some kind of formal legal settlement of a dispute between two brothers.</p> <p>But what really got most people's attention was the archaeological evidence of twin-occupant hermitages (for a hermit and his disciple): Claudia had plans for several of them, such as at Kellia in the western Nile Delta. A look at some of these (the plans <a href="http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/kellia.htm">here</a> look very similar) had some members of the audience afterwards making favorable comparisons to the average London flat. Together with a reference to monks inheriting rock-cut hermitages (which assiduous readers of this blog may already <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2008/07/02/inherit-the-tomb-4393066/">know about</a>), it reminds us that the realities of monasticism may not necessarily correspond to the ascetic virtuosity described by hagiographers. I asked Claudia later on why the monks were still admired, when there life didn't seem so much more austere than the rest of the population: she thought that the hours spent in prayer was probably one important factor.</p> <p>But if the Sarabaites led less ascetic lives than we might imagine, how far did that go? Pairs of monks might lead some modern thought into yet more <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/16/gay-monk-fantasies-6125043/">gay monk fantasies</a>. But when I asked about why sarabaites were criticized by St Benedict (and others before him, like Jerome and John Cassian), Claudia though their real concern seemed to be about economic practices. The semi-anchorites seem to have been nearer to the lay world in economic terms than hermits or cenobites (and their letter collections show quite a lot of presents being exchanged).</p> <p>There's inevitably the problem of negative evidence, but I can't believe that if such institutions were hotbeds of vice Jerome, for example, wouldn't have mentioned it. Syneisaktism (where a man and woman lived together chastely) came in for an awful lot of late antique criticism, after all. (This isn't to deny the existence of some gay monks in Byzantium, any more than some gay laymen or some gay clergy, just their concentration in particular institutions). If the evidence from Egypt and Syria challenges our images of monasticism, we have to let it do so, whatever those images of ours might be.</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/13/sybarite-sarabaites-monastic-pairs-in-byzantium-6293991/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>byzantiumihr-seminarsmonasticismasceticismjohn-boswellhomosexualityhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/13/sybarite-sarabaites-monastic-pairs-in-byzantium-6293991/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/11/mary-douglas-on-why-discourses-succeed-6283678/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-06-11:/2009/06/11/mary-douglas-on-why-discourses-succeed-6283678/Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:51:00 +0200 <p>As I said in a <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/24/religious-functionalism-and-homophobia-6170402/">previous post</a>, I've been trying to get to grips with Mary Douglas' 'How institutions think' and finding my usual problem with her stuff. There are some very good individual insights, but it's hard to work out the overall shape of her argument. (It also doesn't help that she's not very good at defining her terms). But I'm increasingly coming to think that the book might most usefully be understood as a way of thinking about discourses without using Foucault's ideas. (She does refer to Foucault, but only in passing).</p> <p>If Douglas' 'classification' corresponds to the idea of a discourse (and it's a bit hard to be certain on this, because she doesn't define the term), then two of her key questions become: why are there discourses, and why are discourses of some types and not others? After all, why should individuals decide to share a particular way of thinking/speaking, and how do particular ideas win in a marketplace of them? If you're Foucault (or Edward Said or the like) at this point you bring in power. Power produces a discourse and forces it on others, classifying people into criminals, madmen, homosexuals, wily Orientals, etc.</p> <p>Mary Douglas, however, is implicitly interested in groups (which she tends, rather confusingly, to call institutions) which don't have this kind of coercive power. A lot of her examples are from tribal societies, scientific communities and egalitarian religious sects, none of which can get too coercive without a subgroup breaking away and going off to found a new tribe, science or religion. So why do some, but not all discourses succeed here?</p> <p>On the 'why discourses' question, her answer is basically for cognitive ease: institutions and classifications/discourses are useful shortcuts to avoid extra thinking for oneself. At this point it's easy to start thinking that it's only the intellectually lazy who do this, but in fact it's frequently convenient for all of us. As one minor example, I probably save 5-10 minutes every morning by limiting my consideration of what I should eat for breakfast to 'suitable' breakfasts, rather than the totality of foodstuffs in my house. At a more abstract level, I remember getting told early in my mathematics degree that original mathematical thought was like a cavalry charge – very expensive in resources and to be reserved for emergencies. It's almost always better to adapt an existing technique than invent one from scratch. And as Douglas herself points out, such institutions/classifications aren't just used for trivial decisions: in times of famine, in most societies available food gets preferentially distributed to those classified as 'most important', without frantic efforts by the marginalised to preserve themselves. </p> <p>As to why particular discourses, Douglas' view is that the classifications that seem 'natural' are the most effective, and most likely to be accepted. I put natural in quotes, because her point is that such 'natural' analogies are actually the projected reflection of existing institutions. So kingship is justified by the relation between the head and the rest of the body. But seeing the relation of the parts of the body in this way is not inevitable: it is the dominant image because it 'makes sense' in a hierarchical society. In this way, institutions and practices are justified by hidden circular reasoning. This use of natural analogies is particularly prevalent in gendered ideas, for example. Culture is to nature, as mind is to body, as man is to woman, as human is to animal, etc, etc. </p> <p>She also points out how institutions are responsible for remembering and forgetting for individuals, which is a less novel idea for historians. Though she does have a nice point about institutional memory generally being shorter in competitive groups/societies, because memory gets rewritten each time another faction gets to the top. This is one of several points where she looks at whether particular social structures are particularly prone to some kinds of thinking. And her preferred groups for discussion (tribal societies, scientific communities and religious sects) would obviously fit into her schema of grid-group, though she doesn't mention that concept in the book at all. (There is a short piece by her on grid-group theory that I have found useful on the <a href="http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/douglas1.pdf">web</a>).</p> <p>Apart from the lack of grid-group stuff, the book does seem to be a summary of many of her earlier interests: the classification theory and its social purposes underlies a lot of 'Purity and Danger', and the stuff on natural analogies is also in 'Natural Symbols'. And the whole principle that traditional and/or small-scale and/or religious social groups are actually much like 'moderns' in their thought processes is basic to all her work. Whether there is any change in her understanding of these ideas, I'm less sure – because she's sometimes vague about ideas and terminology, it 's hard to be certain about shifts.</p> <p>How useful is Mary Douglas for the Middle Ages? Her work seems to have led Eamon Duffy to become an <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/seminary-xlv-interdisciplinary-conversation-ii-douglas-in-the-jungle/">ethnographer of medieval Catholics</a>, which is a benefit in term of providing thick descriptions, and a loss in terms of any <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2007/02/04/was_the_reformation_inevitable~1677240/">attempts at historical objectivity</a>. </p> <p>The two big problems with her style of functionalism remain: it ignores the issue of power and it requires 'knowing better' than your subjects: 'you may think that you're doing this because of X, but actually you're doing it because of Y'. (For this reason, her ideas about pollution pissed off some environmentalists a lot). A related problem with ideas of 'natural symbols' is that because of structuralism, it's easy to think it's all just about binaries. But though the pairs of man/woman, mind/body, sacred/profane often seem to line up in the expected way in medieval thought, medieval society isn't as simple as that in practice and other institutions presumable get naturalised in other ways. If we're using Douglas, we're going to have to be careful and not just assume that any reference to the body politic, for example, means exactly the same.</p> <p>But I also think that Douglas' ideas have some interesting current applications. If I get round to it (among other posts and the stuff I'm actually meant to be writing), I want to look at Mary Douglas' ideas and the current US debate on gay marriage. (Now there's a teaser for you...) </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/11/mary-douglas-on-why-discourses-succeed-6283678/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>anthropologymedievalmary-douglasfunctionalismhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/11/mary-douglas-on-why-discourses-succeed-6283678/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/09/pauline-fest-2-gender-ideology-and-practice-6269196/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-06-09:/2009/06/09/pauline-fest-2-gender-ideology-and-practice-6269196/Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:14:02 +0200 <p>One of the issues that kept coming up implicitly at the recent Pauline Stafford symposium in the papers on gender and women's history was the relationship between gendered ideology and practice. It's easy to point out how texts consistently point out the inferiority of women. It's harder to be sure what effect that had on actual practice: societies seem to have varied greatly.</p> <p>As one example where misogynistic theory and practice seem to have meshed together fairly comprehensively, we had Ross Balzaretti's fairly depressing paper on 'Fatherhood in Late Lombard Italy'. Ross said he'd tried to write something about Lombard women, but just couldn't find much. He quoted some of the standard early medieval works on the subordination of women and sons known in the period: Isidore's Etymologies, Pseudo-Cyprian's Twelve Abuses etc, and then turned to look at narrative sources. These too, especially Paul the Deacon, persistently write out women from histories. Instead there is an emphasis on extreme paternal authority (even when, as in some 'genealogies', there isn't actually a father-son transmission of power – for example in the 'Carmen de Synodo Ticinensi). Ross also gave us a gruesome story from the Vita Walfredi (written 780x810, but still culturally Lombard), in which Walfred decides to enter the monastic life and forces his five sons to do likewise. His favourite son then runs off with horses and charters, is caught and has his finger chopped off as punishment. (Walfred's wife, who entered a convent herself, is mentioned in passing in the Vita, but not in the founding charter of San Pietro di Monteverdi – again, showing how women get written out).</p> <p>In stark contrast to this Lombard horror story, Anneke Mulder-Bakker gave us a very different female experience in her paper on 'Agency and authority in medieval society: the case of Gertrude of Ortenberg'. Gertrude's vita, recently discovered, describes how, after marrying a rich knight, she was widowed in around 1301, when in her early twenties. She settled down to a religious life, first in Ortenburg and then in Strasbourg, until her death in 1335. What was distinctive is that she appears to have practiced a new form of religious life (or rather a very old one): she was a widow, heading an ascetic household, without being part of any order or even a Beguine. She gave pastoral advice to the rich and powerful and also to individual sinners in the countryside around, she mediated in feuds, and (at least according to her biographer) was seen as a living saint, protecting the city from wars.</p> <p>Anneke's argument was that this was not solely a matter of Gertrude's extraordinary charisma. Instead she should be seen as having authority, i.e. socially-sanctioned power. (Anneke used the metaphor of society as a woollen fabric, in which the warp was institutional order and church hierarchy and the weft was social conventions). Gertrude's position as a wealthy widow, her personal prestige and her old age (a vision of death at around 40 appears to have marked her transition to a wise old woman), gave her a status that allowed her to be a spiritual leader.</p> <p>In her two most controversial points, Anneke also wanted to link up Gertrude to earlier traditions. One was Gary Macy's suggestion of women being ordained in the earlier Middle Ages. Even after 1215, Anneke suggested, to ordinary townspeople, vocation more than ordination may have been what counted in a spiritual leader. Finally, Anneke wondered whether Gertrude was actually part of a continuing tradition of domestic ascetic households, reaching back to late antiquity, which provided spiritual authority for some women.</p> <p>These two contrasting papers have got me thinking more about the impact of misogyny, and how we should be analysing it. Perhaps we're too often working with a simplistic model which imagines misogynistic thought as universally accepted, except by a few brave women who stand up and resist the oppression. (It may not be pure coincidence that that sounds like a convenient summary of the situation in the West in the 1960s and 1970s). Such a model is easy to confirm for the Middle Ages from the routine misogyny of writers (often clerics) and the hostility aroused by non-conforming women. But I think we need to look a little harder both at how such atypical women were received, and also at the possible failures of misogynistic propaganda. (Anneke, for example, was saying that her view of the position of religious women in the late Middle Ages was more positive than that of Dyan Elliot, partly because she was concentrating on narrative rather than normative sources).</p> <p>A couple of interesting related points on reactions to women came out of Sue Johns' paper on 'Nest of Deheubarth: reading female power in the historiography of Wales', which looked at how the story of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nest_ferch_Rhys">Nest</a> had been interpreted in later historiography. One was the existence of variants in the medieval versions of Nest's abduction by Owain ap Cadwgan, her cousin, during her marriage to Gerald, Constable of Pembroke. In one version, this abduction is rape; in the other consensual. One of the audience wondered whether the 'consensual' version of the story reflected a different audience, softening the story, perhaps for an audience including women. It was also interesting to hear how some male Welsh antiquarians of the early modern period saw Nest positively in nationalistic terms, as a woman choosing her Welsh cousin over her English husband. Her 'correct' ethnic preferences were obviously seen here as more important than her adultery.</p> <p>On propaganda (and masculinity), meanwhile, as well as Ross, we had Kirsten Fenton on 'William of Malmesbury and the Anglo-Norman court', looking at his gendered depictions of courts. This turned out largely to be discussing male behaviour (William says little about queens and women at court before the reign of Henry I). In contrast, William had a considerable amount to say about effeminate male courtiers, their long hair, their reluctance to remain as they were born etc. As a descriptive piece, this fitted well with some of other Kirsten's work on masculinity and hair-symbolism, but I was left wondering how it fitted into wider pattern. As I pointed out, Carolingian writers criticise male courtiers dressing too fancily, but without accusing them of effeminacy. Why and when are charges of effeminacy used against other men? To what extent did complaints about male costume represent actual practice (there were comments about modern uses of hairstyles by young people to annoy their elders) and to what extent was it a created image to denigrate a particular social group? And if so, how successful was it? (William of Malmesbury had an anecdote in which a long-haired knight had a worrying dream in which his hair was strangling him. Once awake, he therefore cut his hair, and many others followed his example. But the fashion for long hair soon returned).</p> <p>All this suggests that recognising gendered representations is an important part of scholarship, but we may also have to try and go further (however difficult that is) and see how they relate to reality, even as they help to create it. The final paradox came talking to Ross Balzaretti later. His eighth century Lombard Italy does look like a place where ideology and reality fit snugly together, marginalizing women in thought and deed. Discussing this, he saw it as characteristic of a wider and long-enduring 'Mediterranean' pattern (although conscious of the problems of how you define Mediterranean). This pattern is marked by particularly strong formal restrictions on women's actions and yet, he thought, also considerable actual power for women behind the scenes (I suppose one could call it 'private' matriarchy). In other words, perhaps even with the Lombards, we still haven't got to the bottom of how we can really know the truth about female power or its lack. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/09/pauline-fest-2-gender-ideology-and-practice-6269196/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>misogynymedievalwomengendermasculinitypauline-staffordhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/09/pauline-fest-2-gender-ideology-and-practice-6269196/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/02/pauline-fest-1-is-gender-a-useful-tool-6221308/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-06-02:/2009/06/02/pauline-fest-1-is-gender-a-useful-tool-6221308/Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:25:29 +0200 <p>I am just back from a two day symposium to celebrate the work of <a href="http://tulip.liv.ac.uk/portal/pls/portal/tulwwwmerge.mergepage?p_template=hist&p_tulipproc=staff&p_params=%3Fp_func%3Dteldir%26p_hash%3DA685664%26p_url%3DHI%26p_template%3Dhist">Pauline Stafford</a> (on the theme of 'Power, family and legitimation in Europe, 10th to 12th century', although a few papers stretched the time limits) and am mentally trying to digest the sixteen papers I have heard. I'll be doing several posts on some of the over-arching themes: if any of my readers want more details on specific papers (or disagree with my recollections of them), feel free to comment.</p> <p>I take the subtitle for this post from a comment by Lois Huneycutt during her paper on 'Inventing queenship: twenty-five years of scholarship (1983-2008)'. If you wanted a demonstration of why gender is a useful tool for historians, several of the papers provided ample evidence that considering it gives a whole new angle on topics. For example, in what I felt (and others agreed) was the stand-out paper from the first day, John Gillingham discussed 'Women and the profits of war in medieval Europe'. John provided some scattered, but cumulatively significant evidence that it was standard practice in much of earlier medieval warfare to capture women and children as slaves; indeed, that was arguably one of the main reasons for warfare, with the killing of these women's menfolk as secondary. (He had particularly detailed evidence from Henry of Liviona's Chronicle from the thirteenth century, but also some from twelfth century Scotland, fifth century Ireland and hints from eighth century Francia).</p> <p>John pointed out the tendency to neglect this evidence by both historians of slavery and military historians. Studies of slavery have tended to be gender-blind until recently, with a few exceptions, while military historians focus on strategy and other military matters and don't like looking at the bloody social realities of war. He then used the idea that there was a change in attitudes (in which enslaving women was no longer acceptable, at least outside the Mediterranean) as an extra part of a previous argument of his about how 'chivalry' came into existence in the Middle Ages (in the sense of better treatment of certain social groups in conflicts). This was all accompanied by John's usual tough-mindedness about just how nasty the Middle Ages could be: he said in the question session that he had considered calling the paper: 'From enslavement to rape: progress'.</p> <p>John's paper showed us how much we can miss if we don't consider gender: so why was Lois being cautious about its use? Her comment came when she was talking about Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and queens' roles in conversion in Anglo-Saxon England. Her concern was that several recent studies of the topic which adopted a gendered approach were arguing that Bede downplayed the role of queens in conversion, in favour of bishops. Lois argued that Bede actually thought of conversion as an ongoing process and saw the roles of both queens and bishops as important, just as St Paul had talked about him planting the seed and Apollinarius watering it. If you looked at the audience for the Historia and Bede's intentions (to show good and bad models of behaviour), then it would make no sense for him to denigrate queens' roles.</p> <p>Lois's concern wasn't about using gender as a tool, so much as not using it carefully enough. The problem is that it's all too easy to start importing our contemporary ideas of gendered relations and imposing them onto the past. For example, Kim LoPrete, in a high speed paper on 'The domain of lordly women in France c 1050-1250' was arguing that scholars persistently see women's lordship as different from male lordship, even when there is no actual evidence to support this. The claim that female lordship was 'private' in a way that male lordship wasn't, doesn't hold up, for example. (I am still trying to digest her ideas of what 'public' actually means, which will probably have to wait till I've read some Habermas).</p> <p>Julie Mumby had a very satisfying paper ('Temporary property rights in Anglo-Saxon bequests: a synoptic view'), that similarly challenged our ideas about gender. She has been working on the transmission of estates in Anglo-Saxon wills; in her paper she showed some bequests by men as well as women that look like they are constrained by the decisions of earlier generations (such as grants of usufruct), even when these aren't explicitly stated. While women's property ownership has often been seen as consisting of them being little more than 'conduits' of property to others, the same may also be true of men's land ownership in some cases. Even if they claim complete testamentary freedom in wills, that is not necessarily to be taken as accurate.</p> <p>But perhaps the final word for this post ought to be left to Pauline Stafford, who responded to one session with a comment that deserves to become classic: 'Good gender history looks for similarity as well as difference.' It's neglect of that basic truth that all too often weakens gender history. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/02/pauline-fest-1-is-gender-a-useful-tool-6221308/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>medievalgenderpauline-staffordhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/02/pauline-fest-1-is-gender-a-useful-tool-6221308/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/24/religious-functionalism-and-homophobia-6170402/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-05-24:/2009/05/24/religious-functionalism-and-homophobia-6170402/Sun, 24 May 2009 21:18:52 +0200 <p>A while ago, in a <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/seminary-xlv-interdisciplinary-conversation-ii-douglas-in-the-jungle/">discussion</a> over on A Corner of Tenth Century Europe on the anthropologist Mary Douglas, I mentioned that some of the ideas in her more recent books looked useful for discussing religion. I am now trying to get to grips with her 1986 book 'How institutions think', which she claims is the book she should have written after writing on African fieldwork (instead of Purity and Danger etc). As usual with her books, it contains both sections of great directness and clarity along with really obscure bits, and I'm not yet really sure how all her ideas fit together. But her basic approach seems to be to try and rehabilitate functionalist explanations for the practices of religious groups (a key idea of Durkheim's). One of the things she stresses the need for is a better class of functional explanation, and she supplies a template for this (p 33):</p> <p>A behavioural pattern X, is explained by its function Y for a group Z if and only if:</p> <p>1) Y is an effect of X<br> 2) Y is beneficial for Z<br> 3) Y is unintended by actions producing X<br> 4) Y or the causal relation between X and Y is unrecognized by actors in Z<br> 5) Y maintains X by a causal feedback loop passing through Z.</p> <p>This seems to me to be a useful tool to analyse something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently: religious homophobia. The normal explanations for this (repressed sexual desires, scapegoating, a wish to maintain patriarchal family relations) don't really seem adequate to me as explanations. They explain some homophobia, but not enough of it. What I'm coming to wonder is whether homophobic campaigning in religious sects is functional for its promotion of group solidarity within the sect.</p> <p>How would this functional argument work?</p> <p>1) Group solidarity is promoted by working on any campaign together: it gives a group a purpose<br> 2) Such solidarity benefits a religious sect<br> 3) and 4) Group solidarity isn't (normally) intended or recognized by religious campaigners against gay people. (This is more true of the UK than the US, where the use by politicians of the religious right is more conscious).<br> 5) Group solidarity then maintains homophobia by stressing the boundary between us as 'normal' and them as 'abnormal'.</p> <p>This is a very similar argument structurally to ones which explain complex pollution taboos (such as in Old Testament Judaism) as functional, which is perhaps not surprising. But what I want to add here is the significance of the type of group I've mentioned: a religious sect.</p> <p>I'm thinking here about the distinction made (in various forms) since Max Weber between <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociological_classifications_of_religious_movements">church and sect</a> as ideal types, which contrasts universalizing, world-accepting churches which one enters by birth with world-rejecting and 'exclusive' sects which one enters by an act of commitment. Controversial moral campaigning doesn't tend to benefit a church: it alienates members of its own congregation and such views may lead to it becoming out of step with the rest of society to which it is trying to minister. (A lot of campaigns by churches therefore tend to be on issues where they can find support from non-religious groups, such as anti-poverty and anti-racism campaigns).</p> <p>In contrast, the ideal moral campaign (or boundary marker) for a sect is precisely one which divides believers from non-believers as clearly as possible. People have to choose what side they are on, and they have to commit to that choice. Anti-gay action is one of the few remaining issues in the UK that can produce that kind of clear-cut split. Former boundary lines like temperance, Sunday observance, anti-gambling or opposition to divorce and remarriage have all crumbled: start a campaign on those and you'll watch half your congregation squirm. How long homophobia can be maintained isn't clear, but there isn't an obvious alternative dividing shhep from goats issue for Christian sects to take up (unless they're brave enough to revive prohibitions on usury).</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/24/religious-functionalism-and-homophobia-6170402/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>mary-douglaschristianityhomosexualityfunctionalismhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/24/religious-functionalism-and-homophobia-6170402/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/16/gay-monk-fantasies-6125043/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-05-16:/2009/05/16/gay-monk-fantasies-6125043/Sat, 16 May 2009 14:31:01 +0200 <p>There has been a lot of interesting work recently on medieval male sexuality that takes into account the existence of gay men in the past, and has started discussing medieval texts from a rather broader viewpoint. I've recently come across the work of <a href="http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/hist/adiem.htm">Albrecht Diem</a>, for example, who is looking at how understandings of male chastity changed in the sixth century West, building on Mayke de Jong's studies of oblates (Mayke was Diem's PhD supervisor). Diem's ideas about how chastity was institutionalised (e.g. via common dormitories) and made into a collective more than an individual enterprise has an impact on wider issues of early medieval masculinity.</p> <p>However, I've also read several recent studies which, despite all their new framework of gender and power, still seem to show some strangely old-fashioned attitudes about men. Take for example, Mark Masterson, 'Impossible translation: Antony and Paul the Simple in the Historia Monachorum'. In <em>The Boswell thesis: essays on Christianity, social tolerance and homosexuality</em>, edited by M. Kuefler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2006), 215-235, who starts his discussion about the male-only deserts of the desert fathers with the comment (p. 215): 'Of interest, then, is the sensible assertion that homosocial environments increase the incidence of homosexual desire.' He adds (p. 215-216): 'Much of what we have in the literature from the desert is depiction of self-denial not at all invested in telling what I imagine to be a truth about the reality of sexual desire in the desert and the probable effects of homosociality.'</p> <p>The same views are even more prominent in Christopher A. Jones, 'Monastic identity and sodomitic danger in the Occupatio by Odo of Cluny'. <em>Speculum</em> 82 (2007):1-53. He approvingly quotes (p. 1) another author claiming that monasticism 'almost against its will created the most fertile field imaginable in which same-sex desire might grow, while proscribing and punishing its physical expression.' Why do we not hear more from the sources? Jones claims (p. 50): 'it is equally likely that the greater part of such tradition [discussions about sodomitical sin] was maintained "off the books" in more senses than one.' He goes even further a little later (p. 53):</p> <blockquote><p>Whatever similarities appear between Odo's precise expressions of antisodomy and Peter Damian's, the historically more significant connection was probably an institutional undercurrent of discourses broadly manifested. Two volcanoes rising far apart from what appear dissimilar landscapes may both owe their volatility to the same magma churning below. The analogy, if crude, captures some essential features of a monastic tradition of antisodomy being postulated here. Seething more or less constantly beneath Carolingian monasticism – at times so far beneath as to seem absent to us, and possibly to the monks themselves – its eruptions now visible occurred along these grating subduction zones where "reformed" and "unreformed" identities collided, one gradually overthrusting the other.</p></blockquote> <p>When you strip away the over-ripe prose here, you get to the same argument as Masterson: there was a lot of gay eroticism in male monasticism, it's just that the sources rarely mention it. But we know it went on, because, well, because it must have done, it's obvious. Underlying this is the old myth of male sexual insatiability. Protestant scholars fifty years ago thought that men couldn't be celibate, and therefore medieval monks and clerics spent their time misbehaving with women. These modern scholars think men can't be celibate and therefore medieval monks spent their time misbehaving with men, or at least fantasising about doing so.</p> <p>This view ignores the actual medieval evidence. There are some very harsh criticisms of sodomitical monks in the Middle Ages, but not many; there are far more allegations about heterosexually active monks. The many critics of monasticism (from the twelfth century down to the Dissolution of the Monasteries and beyond) rarely used allegations of widespread homosexual behaviour, despite its usefulness (as Philip IV proved against the Templars). The type of hysterical concern about monastic sodomy seen in Peter Damian and Odo of Cluny was rare and didn't get a favourable reaction.</p> <p>Can we simply assume, meanwhile, that 'homosocial environments increase the incidence of homosexual desire'? It's noticeable that the literature Masterson cites is from modern historical studies, and most of the obvious analogies are also modern: boys' schools, the navy, prisons. The difference between them and monasteries is that none of the other institutions train their members in the reduction and control of their bodily appetites, whereas monasteries did.</p> <p>Here is where we get to another modern view about sex: that sexual desire cannot be successfully repressed. The more that monasteries tried to control desire, the more it broke out. Yet if you apply this rule to other desires and passions, the inevitability of overwhelming sexual desire seems less plausible. Someone who trains their body to fast, or to get up several times in the middle of the night to attend services, or to perform hard manual labour can effectively reduce the impact of normal human urges, such as hunger or fatigue on themselves. Why is it implausible that men can trace themselves to reduce their erotic urges?</p> <p>This isn't to say that there were no gay thoughts or actions in medieval monasteries: the penitentials, for example, cover homosexual misdemeanours in some detail. But the irrepressible gayness that some modern scholars see in the medieval monastery seems to me possibly to reflect our experience of the modern world more than those of religious men of the time. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/16/gay-monk-fantasies-6125043/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>medievalmonasticismhomosexualityhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/16/gay-monk-fantasies-6125043/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/12/hard-bodies-soft-bodies-and-power-6100639/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-05-12:/2009/05/12/hard-bodies-soft-bodies-and-power-6100639/Tue, 12 May 2009 07:11:19 +0200 <p>I have been reading more of <a href="http://history.uark.edu/index.php/faculty_bio/4">Lynda Coon’s</a> articles (particularly <a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121460495/abstract">Somatic styles of the early Middle Ages</a>. <em>Gender and history </em>20:463-486 and coming to the conclusion that she has a completely different view of Carolingian masculinity from mine. Which, as we are probably the two people in the world with the greatest interest in Carolingian masculinity, is a little tricky. Coon’s view focuses on a classically-inspired vision of male bodies, in which masculinity is about self-mastery and hardness, as contrasted to feminine softness. The classic example of such a view is in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies XI.ii.17-18: </p> <blockquote><p>17. A man (vir) is so called, because in him resides greater power (vis) than in a woman - hence also 'strength' (virtus) received its name - or else because he deals with a woman by force (vis). 18. But the word woman (mulier) comes from softness (mollities), as if mollier (cf. mollior, "softer"), after a letter has been cut and a letter changed, is now called mulier.</p></blockquote> <p>Coon sees this antithesis of hard man and soft woman as being basic to early medieval gender, but also the source of anxiety, since men who behave in ‘soft’ ways risk becoming feminised. On the other hand, I’ve argued for the Carolingian period as being a time of low male anxiety, where there’s little emphasis on the inferiority of women. How to resolve the contradictions?</p> <p>One way of looking at this is to say that we’re just looking at different discourses which exist simultaneously in the Carolingian world. Coon’s sources are mainly medical texts, exegesis and monastic rules/commentaries. The audience for these texts is therefore overwhelmingly a male monastic one. The sources I use are those written for a lay male audience (among others) and there’s not much overlap in our sources.</p> <p>The problem comes when you start looking at what impact these discourses have, because discourses which don’t have an impact on the world around them are frankly not very significant (just like private languages). Coon’s view is that her monastic viewpoint is significant, because (Somatic styles p 466) ‘male ascetics did create the symbolic systems into which the proclivities of female/male or feminine/masculine bodies were situated.’ She also argues (p 465) that ‘Early medieval churchmen forged gender systems that routinely sought to feminise lay male bodies through a variety of textual, ritual and spatial means, reflecting the intense competition between these two elite and often kindred groups.’ She sees this feminisation as done via the claim that proximity to women weakened married men and reduced them to female softness (p 469).</p> <p>The big problem with this view is that it completely ignores a key difference between the late antique world from which such an ideology of the body was drawn, and the early Middle Ages: the change in the lay aristocracy from a civilian to a military elite. The argument about hardness versus softness was very successful for fourth century ascetics like Jerome, faced with the traditional senatorial class. The obvious retort for a barbarian nobleman, however, told by a monk that he was soft, was to retort: ‘If you’re so hard, let’s see you fight. And why don’t you defend your own XXX monastery, rather than expect me to?’ If ‘hardness’ is the main criteria for manliness, then monks can’t easily compete with soldiers. The Roman world had got round this by treating soldiers as low-grade menials, whose bodily control by others deprived them of true manliness, but that obviously wouldn’t work for monks who could be <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2008/06/26/flogging-naked-monks-4366449/">whipped for misdemeanours</a>.</p> <p>Even putting aside the question of how widespread such classical concepts of the body were (there’s some use of the terminology of ‘mollitia’ in Carolingian sources, but not an enormous amount, and it can also be used as positive concept), this suggests that bodily ‘hardness’ had lost most of its impact as a political weapon. After all, most modern misogynists don’t base their claims of female inferiority on the fact that men are physically stronger, even though it’s true: physical strength is no longer normally seen as a justification for power. The language of female softness must have retained its usefulness within monastic circles as a way of galvanising back-sliding ascetics to renewed efforts. But any monk or abbot who seriously proposed to use this argument to get at laymen (and Coon doesn’t provide specific texts showing this), cannot have been thinking carefully. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/12/hard-bodies-soft-bodies-and-power-6100639/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>masculinitymedievalhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/12/hard-bodies-soft-bodies-and-power-6100639/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/26/what-can-we-do-with-carolingian-honour-6008515/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-04-26:/2009/04/26/what-can-we-do-with-carolingian-honour-6008515/Sun, 26 Apr 2009 08:41:32 +0200 <p>Once again, I have been contemplating the problem of honour in Carolingian society and whether I (or somebody else) ought to be writing about it. Although it’s an issue that’s been touched on by a number of scholars (such as Mayke de Jong), no-one’s made a sustained examination of the topic. And once again, I’ve concluded (as some of my friends, I think, also have), that it would be very difficult getting anywhere with such research, and that I don’t currently want to try.</p> <p>The problem with looking at Carolingian honour isn’t the methodology. There is already a lot of anthropological, legal and historical work on honour available (possibly too much, although that’s a different issue), which can provide a theoretical framework. This includes work that tries to provide cross-cultural definitions of what ‘honour’ is, such as Frank Henderson Stewart's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Honor-Frank-Henderson-Stewart/dp/0226774082">Honor</a> (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Stewart also contrasts the two main approaches to describing honour: the lexical and conceptual. The lexical approach (focusing on the analysis of a few key words used in the society) would be fairly straightforward to apply to Carolingian texts, especially given the existence of databases such as the MGH and Patrologia Latina. Admittedly, you would get a lot of false positives from ‘honor’ as meaning benefice or office (although that in itself is revealing of attitudes), but it’s an eminently do-able project technically.</p> <p>The problem, I suspect, is that the evidence you might find just won’t fit nicely with any model. Even without having done the detailed analysis, my sense is that you can find some clear examples of situations and texts involving a code of honour, but not many. One of the obvious places to look for honour, for example, is as a motive for ‘meaningless’ violence, in the sense of violence that nineteenth (and often twentieth) century historians didn’t think of as justified, but just saw as wanton brutality. The new historical thought, made anthropologically conscious, sees feuds, devastating of territory, violent disputes over seating rights at banquets etc, as closely linked to questions of social status and its regulation, honour etc.</p> <p>In contrast to similar societies, however (Merovingian, early Scandinavian, post-Carolingian France), there isn’t much ‘meaningless’ violence of this kind shown in Carolingian texts: there’s a lot of violence, but it’s more clearly politically motivated. And nor do we have texts which show us intense, even if non-violent, competition for status between nobles, the sort of texts which lie behind Carlin Barton’s studies of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Roman-Honor-Bones-Carlin-Barton/dp/0520225252/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240731586&sr=1-1">Roman honour</a> or Gerd Althoff’s discussions of Ottonian courts. It’s not that Carolingianists can’t think of parallels to many of the kind of behaviours seen in such discussions. It’s more that we can only ever think of one or two isolated examples.</p> <p>All this leaves us with the problem of how to characterise Carolingian society. You can conclude either that Carolingian society is the kind of intensely honour/status conscious society that most other early medieval societies seem to be, but then you have to explain why the texts don’t generally reflect this. Or you can say that Carolingian society seems less honour obsessed than parallel societies, as reflected in the texts, and then explain why this is. (My suspicion is that Carolingian rulers were able to divert concerns about nobles’ honour and status so they focused mainly on performance in public warfare, but that’s only an initial guess). I’m not sure that either view is going to fit terribly well within the current paradigms of honour societies; whoever does try and tackle Carolingian honour may end up with some rather unsatisfactory conclusions. But then, if the problem was easy, someone would have done it already. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/26/what-can-we-do-with-carolingian-honour-6008515/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>medievalhonourhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/26/what-can-we-do-with-carolingian-honour-6008515/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/23/who-ya-gonna-call-when-the-libertarians-come-5996757/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-04-23:/2009/04/23/who-ya-gonna-call-when-the-libertarians-come-5996757/Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:25:05 +0200 <p>A recent post on <a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/are-republicans-going-galt.html">FiveThirtyEight</a> arguing that US Republicans are moving towards libertarianism and away from cultural conservatism got me wondering. If the New Atheists do get their way and religious influence is greatly reduced in western politics, are they really going to like the outcome? If Religion as the Source of All Evil is removed, is political life really going to become the kind of paradise that Richard Dawkins/Polly Toynbee believes it will be?</p> <p>It’s possible, at this point to get into arguments about whether or not true libertarianism would be a good thing or not, but I don’t have the energy. The US (and thus indirectly the world) is not going to get some Platonic ideal of libertarianism, if it does go in that direction. It will get the bastardized version, along the lines of ‘government’s role is solely to protect property rights’ and ‘I owe no-one else anything’. Or in other words, the overall result will be Georgian London with assault rifles. There are certainly groups who are currently oppressed who may benefit from libertarianism, as opposed to religious right-wing conservatism (particularly users of illegal drugs and those with non-standard sexual preferences), but against this, people who are poor or in any way dependent (ill, a child, old etc) would almost certainly lose out big time. (I’m also not sure what libertarianism might mean for US foreign policy).</p> <p>The problem for the anti-religious is that the main ideological opposition to libertarianism has traditionally been religious. The idea of Christian brotherhood was basic both to trade unionism and also to the Evangelical paternalism that from the Victorian period started to improve the lot of the poor and regulate business. The same bonds of solidarity and concern for the poor are also basic to many other religious traditions. In contrast, other than the busted flush of Jacobin/Marxist fraternity, secular ideologies don’t offer as secure a basis for arguing for helping others. In particular, evolutionary thought has often been perverted into Social Darwinism and used to justify neglect of the weak. This doesn’t mean that left-wing atheists can’t successfully oppose libertarianism, but I think it is going to be harder for them to do so, if as they want to, they eliminate all religious ideology from public discourse. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/23/who-ya-gonna-call-when-the-libertarians-come-5996757/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>christianitylibertarianismus-politicshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/23/who-ya-gonna-call-when-the-libertarians-come-5996757/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/16/women-office-and-role-the-last-of-the-ihr-earlier-5957434/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-04-16:/2009/04/16/women-office-and-role-the-last-of-the-ihr-earlier-5957434/Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:39:32 +0200 <p>The last of the IHR Earlier Medieval Seminars for this term has already been <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/seminary-xlvi-agatha-christie-and-edward-the-martyr/">blogged on</a>, so here belatedly is the penultimate one, Charlotte Cartwright from Liverpool on 'Before she was Queen: Matilda of Flanders as Countess of Normandy'. This was a very charter-heavy look at the activity of William the Conqueror's wife before she became Queen of England, aiming to use her activities and titles to look for indications of female office-holding. Matilda is most frequently called 'countess' (comitissa) in the charters that mention her. What is the meaning of this and of the titles 'count' (comes) and 'duke' (dux) used of her husband? Charlotte was trying to use the 200+ surviving Norman ducal charters from before 1066 to explore this (almost all eleventh century).</p> <p>She started off looking at charters mentioning earlier dukes' wives, from before 1020. There are four women mentioned, all of whom sometimes get called countess, but not consistently. Charlotte has been trying to find patterns for the use (particular roles of the woman as donor or signer, monastic foundations they have particularly close ties to etc), but the evidence is limited and there doesn't seem much consistency. She was arguing that comitissa was a title showing status, but not the only way of showing status: describing a woman as someone's wife or daughter could also be used. In contrast, Richard II, at the same time, was almost always called count in the charter, and quite often 'count of the Normans' or 'count by the grace of God'. However some close male relatives of Richard also get called count some, but not all of the time, but without any territorial designation. Charlotte argued that in this situation, 'count' looks more like a sign of individual status than an office, in a way rather parallel to how 'comitissa' is used.</p> <p>We then went forward 20+ years to Matilda's appearance in the charters after 1049/50 (there are no duke's wives mentioned in charters in between). Matilda appears in around one-third of William's charters, which is comparable to the most prominent men (and more than her sons). When she signs charters the title of comitissa is consistently used, but not always when she has other roles in charters. For example, she's called comitissa when she's a sole donor, but not when she's a co-donor. This is starting to look more like an idea of countess as an office.</p> <p>There are also shifts in male title usage in the period. Some of William's relatives who are called count are consistently associated with an area of land and have their title used more consistently. For William himself, there's a wide range of titles, some rather extravagant (he sometimes gets called princeps, for example). He gets quasi regal titles, while Matilda doesn't, but that doesn't necessarily mean that comitissa doesn't have a quasi-regal meaning.</p> <p>Charlotte ended by suggesting possible parallels to how Capetian queens appear in charters (unfortunately, we haven't got the carters edited for other regions) , and suggested that queenship was less an office than a range of possibilities. She saw In Matilda the similar beginnings of a perception and definition of the role of count's wife.</p> <p>I feel that this contrast of role and office may be the most useful way to approach looking at the problem of queenship, 'countess-ship' etc. It also suggests ways that you can combine Charlotte's approach, focusing on titles and charters, with other approaches. While Charlotte's paper was very stimulating on its own, it runs into several possible objections. One is about who is deciding on such titles, if charters are being written by recipients (and we got into some discussion of that). The other, broader objection, is just to say that isn't this all just semantics, anyhow? This goes along with the broader problem of how you distinguish office for men, and when/whether there is such a concept among the medieval nobility.</p> <p>I would see office as being primarily a matter of tasks/functions to be carried out. This is what allows the separation out of someone?s personal qualities from their effectiveness: an individual is not the same as their duties. Sellers? and Yeatman?s classic statement that someone could be a 'good man but a bad king' would make perfect sense to medieval people. After all, it's near to some of the judgements made about Louis the Pious and Charles the Fat. On the other hand, consider an alternative statement: 'she was a good woman, but a bad queen'. Can you imagine any medieval author saying the equivalent of that?</p> <p>I would say that queenship was a role: the behaviour is inseparable from the personality of the queen, and the 'part' of queen can be played in numerous different ways. It's clear that by the Carolingian period, if not before, there is a generally shared view of what a good king and a good count ought to be like. It's there in narrative sources, mirrors for princes, capitularies, etc. And I suspect that most of what is expected then would still have been expected in the fifteenth century. You might get minor shifts in how pious a ruler is expected to be, or how financially prudent, but the overall thrust is remarkably consistent.</p> <p>On the other hand, whenever researchers start doing collective biographies of queens, countesses, etc, what stands out is how different they all are in their behaviour. One queen will have an active political role, the next will be a pious near-recluse, etc. There is no one right way to do it, and therefore no reason to write mirrors for queens, who need only the general advice given to all wives. I'm not sure that queenship in the Middle Ages ever really becomes an office. (In contrast, if you want a clear sense of female office, look at Chaucer's treatment of the Prioress, which skewers how, although not wicked, she is behaving inappropriately for her office).</p> <p>I think, though, that there's an even wider point here, that may feed into further discussions of the history of patriarchy. I don?t think that it's just coincidence that a lot of powerful medieval women are nevertheless in these ill-defined roles, and that these roles don?t become offices. It's much easier in that case to avoid setting precedents. If Matilda of Flanders is repeatedly associated with William the Conqueror's charters, that is one thing: if the queen is repeatedly associated with the king's charters, that has different implications. Avoiding queen or countess becoming an office meant that the reset button could constantly be set: a woman did not automatically acquire the power her predecessor had held. Instead she had to renegotiate that power individually (in a way that kings/counts etc increasingly did not need to) and this limited the overall advance of women. In fact it's arguable that such patterns are still visible in the modern world; the phenomenon of the woman who is responsible for sustaining an organisation, but has no official role, or only a relatively lowly one, is still visible (see, for example, the vicar's wife). Status is all too often transitory for women; it may be best when an offer of power is made to get it in writing (whether or not in a charter). </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/16/women-office-and-role-the-last-of-the-ihr-earlier-5957434/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>patriarchygendermedievalihr-seminarshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/16/women-office-and-role-the-last-of-the-ihr-earlier-5957434/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/14/middlemarch-and-male-reputation-5944647/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-04-14:/2009/04/14/middlemarch-and-male-reputation-5944647/Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:58:42 +0200 <p>I’ve been re-reading George Eliot’s <em>Middlemarch</em> and realising how much of the plot I’d forgotten in the several years since I last read it. But reading it again I was also struck by an interesting theme that I don’t think I noticed last time, but which plays into a lot of my current interests: how many of the male characters are pre-occupied with questions of their reputation, and how endangered that reputation often is. Farebrother risks his clerical reputation by his need to win money at cards. Lydgate’s repeated difficulties stem from the intertwining of suspicion at his radical medical views and his debt problems. Fred Vincy is desperate to restore Mary Garth’s good opinion of him even at the expense of his social standing. Mr Bulstrode is destroyed socially by rumours about him. Will Ladislaw’s reputation is repeatedly called into question: indeed his very surname is a threat to his reputation. Even those whose social position seems more secure have problems. Mr Brooke’s reputation is a key part of his difficulty as a reform candidate; Mr Casaubon’s concerns about his scholarly reputation becoming paralysing. Even Caleb Garth, seemingly secure in his humble position, is rapid to distance himself from anything that might damage his honour to himself. Only three significant male characters avoid such fears: Sir James Chettham (by being well-born and entirely conventional), Peter Featherstone, too rich and eccentric to care and Raffles.</p> <p>Why I find this intriguing is that many Victorian novels are preoccupied with female reputation, particularly in the contrast of angelic innocent and fallen woman. I can’t off-hand think of one where so many male characters are so imperilled (though given my haphazard reading, there may be some which better-informed readers can tell me about: Trollope, possibly?). I don’t think this is purely about female versus male writers: Ellen Wood’s East Lynne is largely about female reputation, with only a few marginal men (murderers and suspected murderers) having damaged reputations. And though a novel set in provincial England is intrinsically likely to have more on reputation than one in London (where anonymity and re-invention is far easier), that doesn’t explain all the traumas these men suffer. I’m left wondering whether George Eliot was more sensitive to such male concerns or whether she’s over-emphasised them. But it is useful to be reminded that when looking at masculine anxiety (and there’s a lot on display in the novel), that such anxiety can be distinctively male, without in any way being concerned about either physical strength or sexual behaviour.</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/14/middlemarch-and-male-reputation-5944647/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>honourliteraturemasculinityhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/14/middlemarch-and-male-reputation-5944647/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/13/nicky-gumbel-evangelicals-and-homosexuality-5939787/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-04-13:/2009/04/13/nicky-gumbel-evangelicals-and-homosexuality-5939787/Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:06:07 +0200 <p>I’ve just been looking at Nicky Gumbel, <em>Searching Issues </em>(revised edition, 2004), a short book written by one of the most currently influential Evangelical Anglicans. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicky_Gumbel">Gumbel</a> is the founder of the Alpha course, widely used as an introduction to Christianity, and also prominent at Holy Trinity Brompton, one of the biggest Evangelical churches in the Church of England. The book is intended to answer the seven most common questions raised on the Alpha course and includes a chapter on homosexuality. Although the book’s brief and doesn’t go into theological depth on any of the issues covered, it strikes me as a good guide to the kind of Evangelical apologetics that goes on in sermons, discussion groups etc. (It has a lot of similarities to stuff that I was hearing/reading as an Evangelical Anglican student in the 1980s). So I wanted to use this as a way into looking how the current Evangelical wing of the Church of England treats homosexuality.</p> <p>Gumbel starts from the principles that the only permissible sexual activity is within marriage and that the Bible condemns homosexual activity. He therefore argues that all homosexual activity is sinful, though he’s keen to stress that a homosexual orientation in itself isn’t sinful. In a discussion of the causes of homosexual orientation, he accepts that: ‘Whether the basis is biological or social, in most cases homosexually orientated people are the product of forces over which they have little or no control, certainly in the early stages.’ However ‘Even if there is a scientific basis, it does not mean that it is God’s will. Genetic conditioning produces good things, such as the wonderful diversity o human beings, but also bad things like congenital disease.’ He sees changes in orientation as unusual, but possible: otherwise, gay people are called to a life of celibacy.</p> <p>Gumbel doesn’t come across as homophobic (although some of his comments can undoubtedly be seen as offensive). What I find more interesting, in many ways, is what isn’t in this chapter, particularly in comparison to an earlier chapter on ‘Sex before marriage’. Gumbel discusses harmful effects of promiscuity (psychological problems, AIDS etc) there; there’s no suggestion that a ‘gay lifestyle’ is itself harmful, formerly a common allegation. He also makes no use of ‘arguments by design’, the supposed un-naturalness of sexual acts that do not involves a penis and vagina. I suspect this comes from a realisation that ‘straight sex’ is no longer just about this. And in the sex before marriage chapter, Gumbel carefully avoids condemning non-procreative sex.</p> <p>What has gone, therefore, in Gumbel’s approach is the non-Scriptural, ‘rational’ reasons for condemning homosexual acts. You can’t have gay sex because God disapproves, and there is no other reason. Even his one half-hearted attempt at a rational explanation (a passing comparison to congenital disease) falls down. For just one example, take coeliac disease, as a genetically influenced disorder that people would agree in seeing as a ‘bad thing’. If people with coeliac disease cannot tolerate gluten and therefore cannot eat bread, is it morally wrong for them to find a form of bread that they can eat? (Most people would think it just as hard to get through life without loving relationships as without bread).<br> Gumbel’s solution to the problem is also unrealistic: even though you can’t help what your feelings are, you mustn’t act on them, ever. Because he’s honest enough to admit that changes in orientation are rare, he can’t offer real hope for gays, just a lifetime of struggle. (It’s also a struggle that heterosexuals are no longer prepared to share: lifelong celibate heterosexuals are now extremely hard to find). There’s a noticeable contrast also to the end of his chapter on premarital sex, which ends with the story of how a Chinese woman who had been a heroin addict and a prostitute for sixty years is finally healed. ‘The former prostitute was able to walk down the aisle in white, cleansed and forgiven by Jesus Christ.’</p> <p>All this raises serious problems for Gumbel’s aims as an evangelist. If he wants to persuade people to become Christian, how does he persuade people to accept a doctrine that a) has no rational basis and b) seems unjust to a particular group of people? Twenty years ago, it was probably easier to persuade people that this aspect of Christianity was relatively unimportant. In a modern world in which most people will know some gays or a gay couple, it is increasingly hard to see such irrational discrimination against them as tolerable.</p> <p>If Evangelical Anglicans hold to this view of homosexuality, they risk becoming unable to convert an increasingly large number of British people. That makes me suspect that they will find one of two possible ways around the problem in the next generation or so. One is what might be called the evangelical jump-cut, skipping over the key texts. This is already effectively done on issues about the subordination of wives, and even more noticeably on remarriage. The New Testament condemns divorce and Jesus specifically calls remarriage as adultery. Evangelical preachers today speak out strongly against adultery, and condemn divorce, but implicitly most remarriage is filed under marriage and not adultery and quietly accepted. The alternative, that of telling remarried people that they can only be forgiven if they abandon their current marriage and either remain celibate or return to their original spouse, is rightly seen as unrealistic. In the same way, evangelicals might decide that they will condemn homosexual pre-marital/extra-marital acts, but once someone is in a civil partnership, they will implicitly be treated as if they were married and such relationships will not be condemned.</p> <p>I suspect, however, that it will be hard to carry out such deliberate ignoring tactics, and that therefore Evangelical Anglicans are going to have to change their Biblical interpretation. This isn’t intrinsically impossible: after all, they have already done the same on the subject of slavery, and (for the most part) on the issue of women priests. The outlines of this re-interpretation are already visible. You start with the overall message of Jesus as being the equality of humanity: in Christ there is neither slave nor free, male or female etc. You accept that Leviticus doesn’t have to be followed on homosexuality anymore than on the rape of engaged women. You interpret the story of Sodom as punishing homosexual rape. You end by arguing that Paul’s letters were condemning homosexual prostitution and heterosexuals indulging in homosexual experimentation. Based on this and further scientific evidence of sexual orientation as innate, you conclude that permanent monogamous gay relationships are acceptable.</p> <p>Such a re-interpretation isn’t going to be universally accepted, but it’s not intrinsically ridiculous. It’s the kind of argument that groups like <a href="http://www.acceptingevangelicals.org/Index.htm">Accepting Evangelicals</a> are already coming up with. I don’t know whether Nicky Gumbel (or his successors in twenty years time) are going to be making that kind of answer to Alpha groups in twenty years’ time. But I think if they don’t, they’re going to find their evangelism becoming substantially harder.</p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/13/nicky-gumbel-evangelicals-and-homosexuality-5939787/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>christianityhomosexualityhttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/13/nicky-gumbel-evangelicals-and-homosexuality-5939787/#commentshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/07/1000-years-of-economic-irrationality-a-belated-attempt-at-catching-5907347/tag:magistraetmater.blog.co.uk,2009-04-07:/2009/04/07/1000-years-of-economic-irrationality-a-belated-attempt-at-catching-5907347/Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:49:08 +0200 <p>A belated attempt at catching up on the IHR seminars, which in March saw Laurent Feller from Paris talking about ‘Accumulation, redistribution and exchange in the early Middle Ages’. Here’s my take on it, though with the proviso that Professor Feller was cutting the paper as he went along, so if there are bits where it doesn’t entirely hang together, that may be my misunderstanding, or it may be one of the bits he skipped. He was looking at the processes of enrichment of the social elite from the Carolingian period onwards. His starting point was the question about whether this elite had a rational attitude to economics, and looking at the interface of historical and anthropological attitudes towards such processes.</p> <p>He started from some obvious basics for the period. Firstly, there was no autonomous economic sphere, but instead economic practice was embedded in societies. Secondly, that wealth was not the only form of capital: social capital also mattered. On the other hand, wealth was one criterion for belonging to the social elite and hence people adopted methods to maintain this. </p> <p>Professor Feller pointed out that the polyptychs show systematic attempts to collect details of estates and income and that even dead saints knew the value of presents given (and did nasty things to donors who tried to substitute a present cheaper than promised). He then went back to late Merovingian/early Carolingian times to look at the will of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbo_of_Provence">Abbo of Provence</a>. He argued that it showed that Abbo was carefully accumulating land around four central points that supported his power, aiming for contiguous estates and also reconstructing a family patrimony (he acquired land mostly from his kin). In other words, behaving entirely rationally in an economic/political sense.</p> <p>Professor Feller’s next case study was Peredeo, bishop of Lucca in 779-788, whose will made two churches his main heirs. In turn, one of these churches was given to the cathedral and the other to the monastery of San Columbano. These gifts consecrated Peredo’s wealth into inalienable form, while strengthening his family’s link to the land even though they no longer held it. (I presume that it’s the two stage process here that he saw as distinctive).</p> <p>Professor Feller then went onto <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meinwerk">Bishop Meinwerk of Paderborn</a>, whose vita includes details of a large number of his transactions with local notables (also discussed by Timothy Reuter, Property transactions and social relations between rulers, bishops and nobles in early-eleventh century Saxony: the evidence of the Vita Meinwerci. In <em>Property and power in the early Middle Ages</em>, edited by W. Davies and P. Fouracre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1995).) People give gifts to Meinwerk and get counter-gifts. These counter-gifts are often substantial, but Tim had argued these weren’t economic exchanges, but a way of creating relationships with the bishop. Professor Feller agreed it was a non-commercial system (for example, the lands that Meinwerk get given are never described, suggesting that wasn’t necessary information), but wondered whether in some cases we were looking at ‘life annuities’ in the counter-gifts, providing some long-term economic provision. Thus donors could maintain their living standards, while also getting prestige from the donation. He also drew parallels to cases where donors gave all their estates to a monastery, but kept a life interest.</p> <p>Professor Feller’s final comments were about redistribution, pointing out that accumulation wasn’t seen as an end per se, but only a prelude to some form of redistribution. He talked specifically about episcopal and monastic charity, which required considerable funding. He saw a complex attitude by the church to wealth, with accumulation and good administration by them being justified, and their wealth a proof of their godliness. (This bit all seemed fairly obvious to me, but I think he was trying to contrast it to the rather different views seen in St Francis).</p> <p>What I was left wondering about was how we could get beyond binaries of economic rationality v irrationality and gift v market. Recent events have made the idea of the current era as one of economic rationality rather tricky to maintain. And most of the ‘irrational’ or non-market exchanges visible in the early Middle Ages still exist today. Gifts have not disappeared; nor has spending to acquire social capital, or donations to churches and other charities. The Carolingian period wasn’t one of Stone Age economics or a completely non-market economy, but demonstrating economic rationality in particular areas still doesn’t make it much like our world.</p> <p>The most productive approach seems to me to come from one comment of Tim Reuter’s on the Vita Meinwerci that Professor Feller didn’t pick up on (p 181):</p> <blockquote><p>In the kind of society we are dealing with here, the anonymity and absence of ongoing relations between the partners implicit in the modern contrast between a sale and a gift is meaningless: you do not sell to your enemies or people whom you do not know any more than you give to them.</p></blockquote> <p>If you look at transactions not in terms of economic rationality, but in terms of the strength of the relationship between the parties involved, then you do get useful distinctions. At one end is the gift, in which, ideally, the exactly correct thing for a specific person is offered (whether to suit their taste or their status); at the other end, is the kind of anonymous transaction summed up in a tender for a contract, where you buy from whoever can provide goods of a particular specification at the cheapest rate. What is useful is that this formulation reminds us of how often modern day transactions are not entirely impersonal. If you buy your groceries at the local shop, if you have a preferred supplier because you find them reliable, if you always buy brand X because it makes you feel good, then relationship elements are entering into your economic calculations. This is not necessarily economically irrational: after all, much of the current economic crisis originated in the wish of banks to offer mortgages to people, without establishing a long-term relationship with that customer. It seemed more profitable to sell someone a subprime mortgage and then hastily pass the debt on to another anonymous financial organisation.</p> <p>In these terms, the early Middle Ages looks pretty heavily weighted towards the strongly personal end of the transaction scale. But there is one complication to this. Mostly, what we judge early medieval transactions on are land transactions; these are the only ones which are frequently recorded. But it’s possible that these may have stayed personal for longer than other transactions. After all, if you’re selling/exchanging/donating land, it’s most often going to be with someone who’s your neighbour or at least lives in your local area and so who you need and want to get on with. (Even if they’re not your neighbour to start with, they may well be once they’ve bought your field). Impersonal or one-off transactions might be more likely to develop with regional markets for produce. Do you buy your wine/salt etc from the same person/institution each time or are there rivals you might choose between on cost? If we’re looking for traces of ‘modern’ economics, the butcher, brewer or baker whose regard for their self-interest is more important than their benevolence, land transactions may not be the ideal place to start. </p> <p> <small> <a href="http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/07/1000-years-of-economic-irrationality-a-belated-attempt-at-catching-5907347/#comments">Comments</a> </small> </p>ihr-seminarsmedievaleconomicshttp://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/04/07/1000-years-of-economic-irrationality-a-belated-attempt-at-catching-5907347/#comments