Month: February 2016

By Philippa Byrne

Writing in 1135, the twelfth-century chronicler Henry of Huntingdon paused from his narrative to explain why he kept returning to the idea of time. ‘I have dwelt at some length on the question of the extent of time’, Henry observes, ‘because we shall lie decaying in our tombs for such a long time that we shall necessarily lose all memory of our bodily activities, and therefore we should think about it in advance’.[1] Henry had indeed thought very carefully about all the ways in which his own time might be measured. He was living, he wrote, in the 135^th year of the second millennium since the Lord’s incarnation. But this could also be calculated as the 69^th year from the arrival of the Normans in England; the 703^rd year from the coming of the English (i.e. the Anglo-Saxons) into England; the 2,265^th year from the Britons settling in the same island; or the 5,317^th year since the beginning of the world.[2]

The twelfth century was intensely interested in time: in its measurement and computation; in the chronology of sacred history and the construction of genealogies; in the production of chronicles and annals; and, most importantly of all, in the ‘time’ of judgement – in when the last days might come, and how rapidly they were approaching. It seems only fitting, then, that modern historians of the twelfth century should be just as engaged with the question of time as those they study, although historians’ struggles take the form of worries about periodisation.

The twelfth century has long been heralded as a turning point in European history, a period during which the seeds of many recognisably ‘modern’ institutions were first planted. The idea was first (and famously) propounded by Charles Homer Haskins in a work of 1927, entitled The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, which remains a key text on most undergraduate and graduate reading lists.[3] Haskins’ ‘renaissance’ was primarily associated with changes in learning, namely the foundation of schools that would grow into universities, but also with developments in government and law, whereby increasingly assertive monarchs developed increasingly sophisticated ideas about rulership. Haskins is on the offensive from the start of the book, deploying the term ‘renaissance’ as a provocative salvo. He wants to make it clear to the historians of the Italian Renaissance that their era was not the first to be interested in the classics, the idea of government, or learning.

Anyone, however, who considers Haskins’ description of a twelfth-century ‘renaissance’ excessively sunny, teleological and value-laden really ought to treat themselves to reading a work of 1907, James Joseph Walsh’s The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries. Walsh was not a medievalist sensu stricto, but a professor of medicine at Fordham University. The book is striking for its strident note of conviction – there is no question mark at the end of its title. Walsh begins from the proposition that ‘a historical epoch…is really great just in proportion to the happiness which it provides for the largest possible number of humanity’, an unashamedly utilitarian principle. He adds ‘that period is greatest that has done the most to make men happy’ (the gross cumulative happiness of thirteenth-century women, it should be noted, is not a major concern for Walsh, although, happily, St Clare’s ‘strongly set lips’ and ‘full firm chin’ do receive their due attention).[4] The thirteenth century gave to men the first systems of theology, medicine and advocacy (admittedly, not everyone today would necessarily agree that a proliferation of lawyers is happiness-inducing). Walsh charts the forward march of democracy across the thirteenth century – from Magna Carta to the legislation of Louis IX.

It is easy to mock such a breezy, uncomplicated and partial outline. Haskins’ take on the twelfth century was considerably more subtle and substantially better researched and argued. In the almost 90 years since its publication, Haskins’ characterisation of the century has stimulated great volumes of historical commentary, including serious debate as to whether there was any twelfth-century renaissance at all. Most historians accept, however, that there is at least one reason for recognising the period as distinctive, because twelfth-century thinkers vocalise a sense that something about their own times was fundamentally different to what had gone before.

Modern historians have also accepted Haskins’ proposition that the twelfth century, as shorthand for an era of change, lasted more than a century. Haskins’ ‘renaissance’ actually begins in 1050 and lasts until 1250. More recent historians have talked about ‘the long twelfth century’.[5] In this context, periodisation is linked to characterisation. Lengthening the century has allowed historians to capture the sense that the world in 1050 looked very different from the world in 1250 – and that something quite important must have happened in between. But opinions vary as to when that change began and ended: for Robert Benson and Giles Constable, focusing on changes in religious life, the twelfth century lasts from the 1060s to 1160s.[6] Haskins’ student, Joseph Strayer, argued that the three centuries 1000 to 1300 mark the genesis of the modern state.[7]

Historians should, and do, think carefully about periodisation, which goes beyond the history by regnal or dynastic dates that characterises many history syllabi in British secondary school education. And periodisation is tricky: I have no envy of the historians in Oxford who are tasked with deciding when period history papers should begin and end, or who must justify 1485 as the start of the early modern period and the end of the Middle Ages in Britain.

But almost all recent assessments of the twelfth century have combined both an effort to define how ‘long’ the century is, and to characterise its ‘achievements’ in some way. R.I. Moore describes the period as the ‘First European Revolution’ – but Moore’s ‘revolution’ is a far less positive term than Haskins’ ‘renaissance’. For Moore, that long twelfth century laid the foundation for the inequalities and social disparities that characterised later medieval and early modern social relations – the gulf between free and unfree, peasants and lords.[8] Moore is less than complimentary about the period in other ways too, famously categorising the era 970-1250 as representing ‘the formation of a persecuting society’, the creation of a European order which excluded and victimised outsiders – be they heretics, Jews or lepers.[9] Again, it is agreed that the twelfth century laid the foundations for structures that would cast a long shadow over European development, but not at all as Haskins envisioned.

The inherent difficulty is that all our arguments about the ‘length’ of the twelfth century are tied, to a greater or lesser extent, to value judgements. It is hard, for example, for a historian writing in her university office to say that the foundation of universities was not A Good Thing, especially if her own university can trace an unbroken line of continuity to the twelfth-century schools of the city. What to call – or how to describe – the twelfth century is a knotty conceptual problem, and not one I am able to resolve, but, as Henry of Huntingdon noted, time is well worth thinking about.

There have been two types of response to Haskins in contemporary historiography. The first is a shift away from an ideologically-charged renaissance. Some recent studies have chosen to describe what happened in the twelfth century (whatever that was) as a ‘transformation’ or series of ‘transformations’.[10] One book explains that ‘transformation’ denotes that conditions at the end of the period were different to those at the start of it.[11] But, in many way, that sort of ‘transformation’ is no more helpful than the concept of a ‘renaissance’, and comes with its own problems – not least that it verges on the platitudinous. The broader we make it, the more meaningless the term ‘transformation’ becomes: I would be surprised if any historian could point to an age in which there were no ‘transformations’, in which everything was static and unchanging. This was a point not lost on Haskins, who noted in his own introduction that attempting to coin a term to describe all the changes in Europe across the twelfth century would be ‘too wide and vague for any purpose save the general history of the period’.

The second development in modern accounts of the twelfth century has been to strike a note of pessimism. Moore, of course, finds ‘persecution’ there. Recently T.N. Bisson has coined the phrase ‘the crisis of the twelfth century’.[12] Bisson tilts at Haskins’ renaissance in his preface, treating it as a ghost that cannot be laid. Bisson claims that most ordinary people experienced the twelfth century as a time of power, stress and violence. In another take, John Cotts portrays it as an age of ‘order, anxiety and adaptation’.[13] ‘Order’ here does not come with any of the comforting associations of systematisation and progress it might have held for early twentieth-century historians. Cotts’ twelfth century – running from 1095 to 1229 – is a world characterised by tension, discontent and conflict between the real and ideal.

As medievalists have become rather more circumspect about the march of medieval progress and the democratic tendencies of medieval society, they have also become rather more sombre about the twelfth century (however long it lasted). Perhaps this turn in historiography simply represents an anxious twenty-first century state of mind, and an unflattering opinion of modern European society, for which the twelfth century may or may not be to blame.

Haskins, though, deserves the last laugh in this conversation about time. He anticipates most of the modern criticisms levelled at his idea of a ‘renaissance’ in the introduction to his book. One still refreshing aspect of his work is that he is resolutely unafraid to pin his colours to the mast. Terminology, Haskins argues, is the least of the historian’s problems. To those who are nervous about using the term ‘renaissance’, he responds bluntly that ‘there was an Italian Renaissance, whatever we choose to call it’. That sentence – rather than Haskins’ coining of the term ‘renaissance’ – is perhaps the insight that is most instructive today for modern historiography and gloomy medieval historians. The twelfth century will remain the problem middle-point between two different types of medieval Europe, whatever we choose to call it.

Philippa Byrne is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Somerville College.

Illustrations: Hugh of St Victor teaching his students from the Bodleian, Ms. Laud Misc. 409, f.3v. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

C.H. Haskins. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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[1] Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum = The History of the English People, trans. D. Greenway (Oxford, 1996) VIII.6, p. 499.

[2] Ibid., VIII.1-2, p. 495.

[3] C.H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1927).

[4] James Joseph Walsh, The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries (New York, 1907), introduction.

[5] For example, Susan Reynolds, ‘The Emergence of Professional Law in the Long Twelfth Century’, Law and History Review 21:2 (2003), 347-66; Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Cultures of Authority in the Long Twelfth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 108 (2009), 421-48.

[6] Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (eds.), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1982).

[7] Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, 1970).

[8] R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c.970-1215 (Oxford, 2000).

[9] R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford, 1987).

[10] Thomas F.X. Noble and John Van Engen (eds.) European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre Dame, Ind., 2012).

[11] Ibid., Noble, ‘Introduction’.

[12] T.N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship and The Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2009).

[13] John D. Cotts, Europe’s Long Twelfth Century: Order, Anxiety and Adaptation, 1095-1229 (Basingstoke, 2012).

By Huw Grange

If you’d asked someone to be your Valentine before the 14th century, they’d probably have looked at you as if you were mad. And checked you weren’t holding an axe.

There were two saints by the name of Valentine who were venerated on February 14 during the Middle Ages. Both Valentines were supposedly Christian priests who fell foul of Roman officials keen on decapitation. But there’s little in the early legends of either saint to suggest a highly successful posthumous career as assistant Cupid. So I wouldn’t go to them for tips.

It was probably Geoffrey Chaucer who got the Valentine’s ball rolling. In his Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer imagined the goddess Nature pairing off all the birds for the year to come on “Seint Valentynes day”.

First up is the queenly eagle. She’s wooed at great length by noble birds-of-prey, much to the annoyance of the ducks and cuckoos and other low-ranking birds (eager to get on with getting it on):

‘Come on!’ they cried, ‘Alas, you us offend!
When will your cursed pleading have an end?’

Amid impatient squawks rivalling our very own Prime Minister’s Questions (“Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek!”), the she-eagle can’t decide which suitor most deserves her love. So she resolves to keep ’em keen till the following year.

But why on earth did Chaucer pick a date in February for his avian assembly? England’s birds aren’t exactly in full voice at this time of year, even with global warming. Perhaps he was thinking of an obscure St Valentine celebrated in Genoa in the month of May. But the Valentines fêted on February 14 were better-known, and that was the date that stuck. Of course, when it comes to matters of the heart, we can hardly expect reason to triumph.

FICTION TO FACT

Murky origins didn’t matter for too long, however. By the turn of the 15th century, fictional lovebirds weren’t the only ones singing their hearts out on Valentine’s day.

According to its founding charter, a society known as the “Court of Love” was set up in France in 1400 as a distraction from a particularly nasty bout of plague. This curious document stipulates that every February 14: “when the little birds resume their sweet song” (sure about that, guys?), members should meet in Paris for a splendid supper. Male guests were to bring a love song of their own composition, to be judged by an all-female panel. More effort than Tinder demands, then. But if you want to make an effort…

There’s no evidence that the Court of Love convened as often as planned (its charter provided for monthly meetings in addition to February 14 festivities). But nor does it seem to have been pure poetic fiction. Eventually totalling 950 or so, participants represented quite a cross-section of society, from the king of France to the petite bourgeoisie. Valentine’s day romance was no longer just for the eagles.

Today’s February 14 love-fest, then, is perhaps the result of a group of medieval men and women making life imitate art. If so, their mimicry wasn’t necessarily naïve. By staging the most poetic of avian courtship rituals, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowlsprompts its audiences to ponder the differences between their “artistic” courtship and the birds’ “natural” one. Texts like this one helped medieval audiences understand their identities as the product of cultural artefacts. And in this regard they can still help us today.

FOUR MEDIEVAL TIPS

On this 14th-century coffret, a man surrenders his heart to Lady Love. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org)

On a more practical note, medieval literature can be of assistance if you’re yet to find a gift for a special someone this Valentine’s day. Forget about flashy jewellery; here are some love tokens suitable for every budget:

• Looking to reignite that spark in your relationship? In his 12th-century Art of Courtly Love Andreas Capellanus suggests buying your partner a washbasin. Who needs expensive perfume when a good wash may do the trick?
• How about personalising some of your beloved’s clothes? Add fasteners only you know how to undo and you’ve got yourself an instant chastity belt. (See the 12th-century tales by Marie de France for examples of suitable garments.)
• Alternatively, upcycle one of your lover’s old shirts by sewing strands of your hair into it. To judge by Alexander’s reaction in the 12th-century romance of Cligés by Chrétien de Troyes, they’ll never want to wear anything else. (Hand-wash only.)
• And if the above just don’t seem heartfelt enough, you could always take a leaf out of Le Chastelain de Couci’s book, who (according to his 13th-century biography) literally gave his heart to his lover. (Beware unwanted side effects.)

Top tip: provide a little literary and historical context with the above gifts and there’s even a chance your Valentine won’t look at you as if you’re holding an axe.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

– Huw Grange (Junior Research Fellow in French, University of Oxford)

By Adele Curness

19th January 2016, Ertegun House

Taking place at Ertegun House with the support of the Oxford University Byzantine Society, the event ‘Being a Woman Byzantinist’ was the brainchild of current DPhil student Anya Rai-Sharma. Rai-Sharma introduced the event with personal reflections on how female role models, real and fictional, had helped her navigate the sexism she encountered growing up and how she aimed to celebrate the female academic role models she had found in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies by inviting celebrated female academics from all areas of the field to discuss their careers and research.

The speakers accepting Rai-Sharma’s invitation were Professor Averil Cameron (Emeritus Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History & former Warden, Keble College, Oxford), Professor Elizabeth Jeffreys (Former Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature, Exeter College, Oxford), Professor Judith Herrin (Former Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, King’s College London & Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London), and Dr Catherine Holmes (Associate Professor of Medieval History & A.D.M. Cox Old Members’ Tutorial Fellow in Medieval History, University College, Oxford). Dr Marlia Mango (Emeritus Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford) had sent a few words to be read out in her absence and the event closed with a presentation by Professor Charlotte Roueché (Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Kings College London) on women Byzantinists of the late 19th and early 20th century, whose contribution outside of the Academy paved the way for many current scholars of the Byzantine Empire.

Averil Cameron noted in her speech that there were two distinct conversations to be had, that of being a woman and that of being a Byzantinist, and no speaker chose to focus exclusively on her gender, preferring to talk about her career and research. Useful advice to graduate students of any gender, from how to break through the thesis-writing wall to how to cope with dubious Black Sea ferries was woven into each talk, alongside each woman’s passion for her research and pride in her achievements.

A prominent piece of advice that ran through all six speeches was the importance of finding friendship and exchange within a mutually supportive academic community; a subject of particular relevance in a field such as Byzantine Studies, composed as it is of numerous, wide-ranging sub-disciplines. Each woman spoke about the positive impact made on her life by teachers, undergraduate and graduate tutors (particularly female tutors); and, particularly, academic peers. In an academic world where young graduate students are acutely aware of the pressure to secure limited jobs and even more limited funding, this exhortation to recognise the talent of your peers and to use them to advise and shape your own research was important and refreshing. As a woman, it was also uplifting to see such an admiration by the speakers for their female peers. Young women are so frequently socialised to begrudge other women’s success that the resoundingly positive attitude towards fellow female academics was something that I hope many who attended the talk will have noted.

However, in spite of the efforts made to keep the focus on careers rather than gender, the sexist attitudes that all the speakers had encountered were a consistent refrain. With the exception of Catherine Holmes, all had begun their academic careers prior to the integration of Oxbridge colleges and Ivy League universities, and numerous references were made to being the only or one of the only women in the faculty at the beginning of their careers. Cameron’s distaste at being told by a senior academic at KCL that women shouldn’t take academic jobs as it kept their husbands out of the sector was obvious, as was Herrin’s disbelief at being told she was forbidden from taking up graduate study at Harvard due to her gender. One was acutely aware how visible and exposed the speakers must have seemed in the overwhelmingly male academia of their early careers, as a photograph of Cameron at the 1970 Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies Symposium starkly illustrates.

This feeling of exposure seemed far more distant to current female graduate students; as did Holmes’ recollection that there was an undercurrent of unease towards female undergraduates at her Cambridge college, which had gone mixed only a few years before her matriculation. However, points the speakers made about sexism in their early careers still, to the shame of British universities, resonated today. Cameron’s statement that when she became head of house at Keble in 1994 there was only one female fellow on Governing Body is hardly an example of a past problem – no Oxford college has gender parity among its tutorial fellows, and many colleges only have one or two women fellows at all. Similarly, Herrin’s point that her career was made enormously easier by the sympathetic and liberal attitude of Princeton University towards her young family and the demands placed upon her by childcare will have struck a chord with anyone familiar with evidence that female academics take significantly less maternity leave than counterparts in other sectors (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/nov/18/academia-for-women-shor…) and that female academics face such pressure to publish in the competition for a permanent job that maternity leave is spent working (https://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/on-being-an-ecr-academia-and-m…).

This aside, I was struck by how casually the effects of other sexist practices were brushed aside by the speakers. Each one mentioned how she had spent much or all of her education in all-female institutions, with four of the six educated at all-female Oxbridge colleges. The positive aspects of single-sex education are not to be rejected outright, and the impact of inspiring female teachers and tutors has been discussed, but I felt it odd to present this aspect of education as a freely made choice when, in fact, women were forced into all-female colleges by the refusal of male colleges to admit them. The impact this would have had on female academics working before the integration of colleges, forbidden from applying for fellowships at the more prestigious men’s colleges, was only briefly touched upon by Cameron.

Perhaps, however, my unease at this represents how far the current generation of graduate Byzantinists has come and how differently my peers and I have encountered sexism in academia. Female students are now admitted to Oxford to mixed-sex colleges at equal rates with men, and achievement gender gaps at undergraduate level are narrowing. Furthermore, state-educated undergraduates are now in the majority and this number is increasing, and impressive access initiatives are prevalent across Oxford University to encourage applications from those from non-traditional backgrounds. When listening to Roueché talk about women Byzantinists of the 19th and 20^th century, I was struck by her comment that these women’s promotion of Byzantine Studies through popular culture, such as novels, will have reached many more people than the male scholars of the age, and I hope such figures will inspire graduate Byzantinists to engage with outreach events like the East Oxford Community Classics Centre.

The final word must be given to Jeffreys’ statement that her mother, who had been denied the chance of a university education by the social diktat that it was not ‘proper’ for women, had insisted that her daughter study to undo the wrongs of the previous generation. The next generation of women Byzantinists could do worse than remember that mantra. 

Image 1: The Theotokos with Christ, Chora Church, Istanbul
Image 2: Solidus of the Empress Irene (797-802), with her bust struck on both the obverse and reverse of the coin.
Image 3: The 1970 Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies Symposium
Image 4: Maria of Alania marries Nikephoros III Botaniates, who she will eventually try to have overthrown.

Adele Curness