Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Fellow at St Edmund Hall, and Co-Director of Oxford Medieval Studies.
This blog post was originally posted on the 3 April on this website.
A little while ago now (15 March), I went to a one day workshop titled Medieval Intersectionality, pulled together by Amanda Power and Robin Whelan. It was a day to bring scholars across Oxford together to consider:
…ways that we might examine the multiple and complex interactions of…identities, experiences and labels, and how they shed light on the societies in which medieval people lived. … How can it [intersectionality] enrich our research? What has the prospect of deeper histories of intersectional oppression, resistance and power relations to offer those working in more contemporary fields? Given the concept’s roots in fighting discrimination and inequality, what are its broader implications for Medieval Studies as a discipline?
The day was framed around two sessions, each with a handful of short (10 minute) papers, and plenty of time for discussion. This worked very well as a model, and there was lots of fruitful conversation. The papers ranged in theme/period from late Roman Africa to my own paper on late medieval England. The two papers I enjoyed most were Philippa Byrne’s “Lucaera Saracenorum: building urban identity in the persecuting society” and Azfar bin Anwar’s “Intersectionality of identities in medieval Islamic biographical dictionaries”, both of which did the magic triangle thing of (1) introducing me to new sources while (2) asking the kind of questions I like to ask of my sources, and (3) talking about places or people often neglected by Western medieval studies. Philippa’s discussion of the forced settlement of 20,000 Muslims in the Sicilian city of Lucera made me think a lot about boundaries and identities, particularly in the current climate of refugee-phobia, and Azfar’s paper on the homoerotic and homosocial potential of Islamic biographies gave a fascinating insight into the creative opportunities offered by a genre of literature I know nothing about.
Days like this are so important – though as I said during one of the question sessions, it’s all very well bringing academics together and making them think outside their neat little specialised boxes, but that only has a chance of greater impact if we think more broadly about decolonising medieval studies.The room full of people who assembled in Oxford that day were largely – though not entirely! – white Westerners. Engaging with a global middle ages also means engaging with global medievalists, both in our scholarship and in our teaching. This is not just an intellectual issue, where we earnestly discuss what we can do to make medieval studies more inclusive. White nationalism is on the rise and is co-opting our field. As Dorothy Kim forcefully argues, white medievalists have a responsibility to clean up our field and to make it clear that racism, misogyny and ableism have no place here. This is not work that should just be left to minorities.
Your colleagues and students are now specific targets of virulent attack, not just bodies that have to deal with implicit bias and a host of daily microaggressions. … What are you going to do about it medievalists? Will you hide and just hope that being silent will allow you to be overlooked? … Let’s call it what it is, will you collaborate? If this is your thought or answer, this is also your incredible privilege. Guess what, it completely changes the bodies in this field who do not have your cisgendered, white, male, Christian privilege. Your silent, tacit, or enthusiastic compliance will mean these bodies will be violently driven out of the field.
So, a day like Medieval Intersectionality was important in getting conversations started. But if we just leave it at talk, it will have been an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful event.
On Friday 31st March and Saturday 1st April 2017, graduate students, early career researchers, and established scholars met for the Thirteenth Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference held at Merton College, Oxford. As usual, the conference revolved around one word, one theme, chosen by the delegates of the OMGC held the year before. This year, it was about Time.
What is the OMGC? An annual conference that welcomes graduate students and early career researchers to Oxford for two full days of academic discussions around one theme. It provides a friendly and convivial forum for young academics to both gain experience presenting in a formal setting, and to meet their peers and colleagues who will make up their cohort for the length of their careers. This year, speakers came from the UK (Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Oxford, and York) and from Germany, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA. As such it assures Oxford’s place as a centre for medieval graduate student interaction, and as a conference hosting up to twenty-one papers, two invited speakers, and about sixty delegates, it is one of the biggest of its kind.
This year, the conference considered various aspects of medieval Time and temporality (all panels, keynotes, and more were live-tweeted under the hashtag #OMGC17). How is Sacred Time expressed through astrology, architecture, and cosmology? How can Time be measured? How was it perceived in texts, in everyday life? Does Time stop? Can Time stop? Many discussions arose about Purgatory, its emergence and its function(s). Time was also considered in a spatial form: relics, for example, can lead the viewer to a specific point in Time/History. Visions, mystical writings, and their use of Time were another topic and focus of the days’ conversations; as were manuscripts and archives. Each day ended by a thought-provoking keynote address: one by Professor David d’Avray on ‘Questions about Time’ which considered medieval Time in relation to modern scholarships and past and present approaches on Time; another by Professor Eric Stanley on ‘Indefinable Time Experienced in Medieval Living, Sinning, Doubting, Dying.’ Professor Stanley productively talked about unproductive Time and the off-putting of Time, such as procrastination!
The quality of the papers this year was extremely high and I would like to take the opportunity to thank and congratulate all speakers, but especially those who were giving their very first paper! Discussions were equally enlightening. They were lively and respectful; a testimony to the lovely atmosphere I experienced throughout the conference. More relaxed gaps between the panels were far from unproductive: from the coffee breaks with home-made cakes baked by the Committee to the wine reception with a Time playlist and the lovely dinner in Merton College Hall. Each lunch break allowed delegates to unwind and chat and/or to visit the Merton Astrolabes (many thanks to Dr Julia Walworth, Librarian at Merton College, and to Sarah Griffin for making these visits possible).
The Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference would not have been possible this year without its committee and its sponsors. The organisers who have all done an amazing job are all postgraduate or early career Oxford medievalists from different Faculties (History, English, Music, and Medieval and Modern Languages): Caroline Batten, Anna Boeles Rowland, Hannah Bower, Henry Drummond, Sarah Griffin, Pauline Souleau, and Sian Witherden. The team was amazing and strong friendship bonds were woven which I am sure will produce more interdisciplinary collaboration in the future. All Committee members either presented at or organised the OMGC in 2016 and I am confident that some of this year’s speakers will take part in the OMGC 2018 organisation (which will be on Animals). The conference sponsors (Merton College; the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Faculties of Music, English, and Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford; the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities; and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature) provided the necessary support to ensure minimum registration cost for our delegates and travel bursaries for our speakers.
I will end this rapid overview with the very last panel which focused on Cycles in life, death, and narratives. One question that was asked was: does Time just repeat itself or is there change? In the case of the OMGC, both aspects are present: Time does repeat itself as in 2018 there will be an Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference as there has been for the past thirteen years; there is also room for change from one theme to another and from one generation of postgraduate/early career academics to the next.
The conference Mourning in Italian Poetry from the Medieval to the Modern was organised and led by Adele Bardazzi, Jennifer Rushworth, and Emanuela Tandello with the support of Christ Church and St John’s College, the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford, the Society of Italian Studies, and in association with Oxford Medieval Studies sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
The conference happened to coincide with the recent publication of Rushworth’s Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch and Proust which truly rests on the Medieval and the Modern. In practice, the conference pivoted on the two centuries from Giacomo Leopardi to the living poets Antonella Anedda and Jamie McKendrick, who crowned the event with a bilingual reading of each other’s work and its translation. The Middle Ages were nonetheless an intertextual presence, brought out in the Q&A sessions when not in the papers.
The event was designed to encourage this: speakers and participants sat together around the table in the Kidd Room at Christ Church; a selection of secondary literature was circulated in advance, and a small booklet of poems referenced was handed out on the day to ensure that everyone could be on the same page. These careful details were successful in making the conference also a conversation.
Seven convenors and one respondent took turns over three sessions and one roundtable. The Oxford-based majority was made up of Adele Bardazzi, Marzia D’Amico, Vilma De Gasperin, Eleanor Parker, Francesca Southerden, and Emanuela Tandello; Fabio Camilletti joined them from Warwick, Francesco Giusti from ICI Berlin and Manuele Gragnolati from Paris Sorbonne.
The picture of the experience and theme of mourning that these papers painted was complex and paradoxical. Loss, grief and mourning exceed expression. When they are expressed they face the struggle to ring true. When they manage to ring true, they struggle to be conclusive. And indeed definitive conclusions were not sought on a subject where conclusion is rather the question.
Fittingly, then, the papers moved between two poles: presence and absence, sound and silence, public and private. Papers navigated these tensions by showing how literature bears witness to the universal experience of loss and the fact that such experience is only given to us in a personal form (De Gasperin). For poets, ‘time’ is truly, as Ezra Pound wrote, ‘the evil, beloved’, and memory is alternatingly the enemy and the solution (Gragnolati). In their writing, poets look to the literary past for help, seeking it in the topos of the prematurely dead (Camilletti), in the tradition of elegy (Bardazzi), in the figures of myth (Parker); or they try to find respite from those very myths and conventions (D’Amico). The mourner, like the writer, is caught between the compulsion to look back and the necessity (narrative, existential, aesthetic?) to move forward; it is small wonder that mourning tests linear development with intermittences, closure with open-endedness, and time-specificity with timelessness (Giusti).
Francesca Southerden did justice to these paradoxes with the difficult task of responding to the papers and leading the roundtable. There is indeed, as she claims, a metapoetic thread which makes writing of mourning also writing of writing, involving as it does, the building-blocks of literature: time, words, memory, ends. The papers and discussions surely reflected this.
The day closed with a reading by Antonella Anedda and Jamie McKendrick from their haunting poetry collection ‘Archipelago’. Like a scattering of islands, each poem stood alone and together reflected on, enacted, the poetics of mourning analysed by the day’s papers.
‘noi non siamo salvi | noi non salviamo’
[we are not saved, | we do not save]
Anedda’s verses and McKendrick’s translations sketched a tension observed throughout the day, eloquently summarised by Francesca Southerden as the making and remaking of poetic subjectivity through encounter with the other. An absent-present other who the verse recalls but whose death is irrevocable:
‘se non con un coraggio obliquo | con un gesto | di minima luce.’
[unless with oblique courage, | with a gesture | of minimal light]
A day of gestures then, towards illuminating the processes through which poetry communicates – expiates – loss through language, always under threat from the silence waiting at the end of the final line.
The full programme of the day can be found through here.
As he stepped down from his role as Head of the Humanities Division and retired from the University, OMS sat down with Chris Wickham (Chichele Professor of Medieval History, 2005–2016) to take stock of the past decade or so of developments in medieval studies, and particularly in the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity.
Jessica Berenbeim (Fellow by Examination, Magdalen College, 2012–2016) channelled our questions, and added some of her own…
Is ‘interdisciplinarity’ a real thing intellectually? Is it a creative combination of analytic approaches or a kind of coping mechanism in response to artificial divisions among modern academic disciplines?
In some ways, both. It’s all the same field on one level: it’s all about the past. But on another level, it’s not, because historians are genuinely interested in different things from literary scholars, and philosophers, and archaeologists, and theologians. So if you’re interested in the interface between these different disciplines, you’ve actually got to be interested in the things that interest the other discipline. That is where the coping mechanism comes in – but it’s of course better if you are doing it because you actually want to.
But it’s not just that people are interested in different things—it’s also truth criteria. There are different epistemologies in different fields; for example, a historian will be content to regard a couple of documents as enough to establish an argument, as long as they say the same thing, if there is really no alternative. If this concerns the foundation of a castle, however, the archaeologists digging it are not going to think that’s a lot. It’s going to take an awfully long time to convince them that those two documents are as good as even really quite a small excavation, if it implies something different. And often they’re right; but a historian might not be convinced by a small excavation… So I think that truth criteria are a hidden barrier, one of the things that we need to be able to work around.
We all talk a lot about interdisciplinarity these days, but to what extent do you feel that we know what we’re doing with it?
Not everybody does; a lot of it is rhetoric. But it’s not so much ‘we know what we’re doing with it’ as, different people are doing different things with it, and some people don’t know what they’re doing anyway. In that respect, it’s much like the rest of academic research. But I think that, if you’re doing it, you have to be doing it for a reason. There’s no point in doing it just to be correct. If you’re studying late fourteenth-century England as a historian, and you want to use Chaucer, you have to know why you want to use Chaucer, and how and what for. And similarly, if you’re a literary scholar of Chaucer, and you want to use court records, you have to know why and how and what for. And if you don’t, you’re going to write something that’s really incoherent.
How do you see the discourse and practice of interdisciplinarity to have changed over the past 10–15 years in medieval studies?
The climate is much more favourable towards it. People are now recognizing that it’s something that they cannot entirely do without. When I say ‘people’, I don’t mean everybody; it never is entirely everybody. But if you think of the S-curve—early adopters, the slope, late adopters—we’re further up the slope. People are now beginning to feel guilty when they’re not being interdisciplinary. I don’t think that it’s always required to engage in interdisciplinary activity, in fact I think that’s not the case at all. However, more people understand what they could do with it at the times at which they might. And I think that’s important in itself, and excellent.
As both a medievalist and an historian, what do you feel History can learn from other disciplines? What can medieval History offer to other disciplines?
History really does need to learn from other disciplines. Many historians have a bottom-line assumption that ‘I can sort-of believe this text’; it’s not the right starting-point. If you start off with the assumption that all sources are lies, you’ll actually get a bit further. I’ve always thought that the image of reading a bunch of daily newspapers is a good one, because you don’t believe most of them. Even if it’s the same story, it’s portrayed very, very differently indeed—and yet they’re using the same sources. They’re going to be telling you different things, and sometimes they’re making stuff up. But we do manage to construct our own knowledge from them, because we’re engaging in source criticism when we read newspapers, and we create what you might call quasi-knowledge on that basis. That’s as much as you’re ever going to get from anything—but you have to do the critical analysis first. Historians very often forget that bit.
What can other disciplines learn from History? I think a sense of groundedness, of what people are actually doing in their lives. Literary disciplines are really dealing with quite a small population of writers and audience, because most other people are operating in a framework that doesn’t involve writing anything down, except possibly contracts. It’s easier for someone in a literary discipline to forget that most people are not engaging in the kind of sophisticated intertextuality that Chaucer is, to say nothing of Dante. Most people are living their lives in an environment that is not simple, but has less to do with the written word.
Are universities well set up as fora for interdisciplinary research?
Probably mostly not. I think Medieval Studies tends to be better set up than later periods, because there’s a sense of common defensiveness. I don’t think we need to be defensive, but we do tend to stick together. There have been versions of Medieval Studies programmes in many universities for many years. Often they haven’t worked very well, but the sense that they ought to have worked is there. People are now taking it more seriously in other fields too, but universities are not really set up for it because they don’t really think about it enough. But even government bodies—HEFCE, REF procedures—now go on about interdisciplinarity, and then they constantly lament that universities don’t really get it. There’s a Zeitgeist in favour of it, but universities institutionally are not perfectly set up for it.
If you were determining the University’s organisation, what would you do about disciplines and faculties?
I would probably keep it much as it is, but allow for much more crossover. In graduate courses, I’d maybe require supervisors from two different disciplines, as the Masters in Medieval Studies does. As long as it’s possible to have the crossover, I think you can keep the disciplines that you’ve got, rather than reinvent uncertainly.
What specific current projects or collaborations in medieval studies would you highlight as models of how interdisciplinary research should work?
I’m excited by the Global Middle Ages project, which Catherine Holmes here runs with Naomi Standen in Birmingham. That’s a history project that gets over one of the problems with Global History, namely languages: they’re publishing a book at the moment, and each chapter is written by two people who work on different areas. Someone on England, someone on China, and see what comes together. That works well. It doesn’t work fast, because actually those kinds of collaborative articles take longer to write, but I think that it’s a very good a model for getting over certain sorts of problems.
How can medievalists best counter the utilitarian arguments for ‘relevant’ scholarship?
It’s interesting how often medieval history comes up in politicians’ language as a ‘we really don’t want to do that’. And every time, there’s such a blowback that politicians then apologise, which I think is a good sign. It is, however, the case that it does seem a bit marginal. I think there’s one basic response, if you need a utilitarian response: the cliché ’if you don’t know the past, you’re condemned to repeat it’ doesn’t stop at 1800. You’ve got to know quite a lot of the past to get that knowledge straight.
It doesn’t stop at 1500, either—there’s so much nationalism that begins in the Middle Ages. You cannot understand Serbian nationalism unless you understand Kosovo Field in 1389. Serbian oral poetry is associated very closely with the Battle of Kosovo Polje, the oral poets are singing about Kosovo Polje, and there’s famous work on oral literature and Homer from the ‘20s based exclusively on this—and then you discover that Serbian singers are singing much the same songs to the Serbian armies in the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s. They see it as a single process, and so should we.
What forms of outreach and public engagement do you recommend as the most effective for medievalists to undertake?
People want to know where they come from, where their families come from, and where the world they know comes from—whether you’re talking about 1800 or 1300 or 300. If you dig with archaeologists, it’s easier: the stuff’s sitting in the ground, so people can touch it. There is a great interest in the past; look at Richard III. A lot of that interest in the past is associated with things that didn’t actually ever happen—King Arthur—but it’s an interest in the past that we can satisfy and deepen. As long as we don’t end up telling stories that are too simplistic to be true.
In your interview for the British Academy Review a couple of years ago, you mentioned Game of Thrones in the context of popular representations of the Middle Ages. One thing that’s noticeable about the series is its strikingly unsympathetic view of religious belief…
Well, in Game of Thrones it’s barely there at all!
Does that say something about our own times? What does think the twenty-first-century idea of the Middle Ages says about the twenty-first century?
It’s actually quite interesting, isn’t it? If you look at nineteenth-century medievalism, there’s a lot more religion, because they were a lot more religious. And in the twenty-first, part of it is, this is English stuff, and England—and I say ‘England’ advisedly, because it’s not so in Scotland or Wales—is probably the least religious country in the western world.
But one of the things that seems to me profoundly the case, is that in our period the sex and the violence and the duplicity go hand and hand with religion, rather than being covered by religion in a hypocritical way. People are religious, while they engage in sex, and violence, and duplicity. Because since they’re religious all the time, they can’t not. It’s quite difficult for TV to capture that. It’s always going to look like hypocrisy to us, because we are us. It’s actually quite striking: you won’t find very much religion in Lord of the Rings either — well, I suppose going off to the West, and it being a kind of quasi-Paradise; but certainly there’s little organized religion. It’s an odd absence, for something conceived in the ‘30s, by someone as devout as Tolkien. So it may well be that even in the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first, it was hard to do.
This year’s Medieval Studies lecture took on a slightly different form, as not just the annual celebration of the interdisciplinary study of medieval culture but also of Professor Nigel Palmer’s 70th birthday. It was therefore highly appropriate that Dr Stephen Mossman, who wrote his doctorate in the Oxford German sub-faculty but now lectures in the Manchester History department and who himself was a former pupil of Nigel, was able to deliver this year’s highly memorable and engaging lecture.
The focus of Stephen’s lecture was devotional culture in late medieval Strasbourg. The city presents a particular challenge for those attempting to reconstruct its literary, religious and cultural history because of the destruction of the town’s municipal library in its bombardment in the Franco-Prussian war. Stephen offered a number of possibilities of how this could nonetheless be possible, drawing on surviving archival sources, art and architecture from the city, even taking us inside a Strasbourg clothes shop where the back room houses a number of important wall paintings. He showed through an analysis of widely dispersed manuscripts how connections to Strasbourg could still be traced. He underlined the importance of the Alsatian city through the example of the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec, the transmission of whose works centred on Brabant but also Strasbourg, as religious and intellectual trends flowed up the Rhine, often directly.
A highlight of the lecture was undoubtedly the ‘great reveal’ of Nigel’s birthday present, a fifteenth century Carthusian manuscript in its original limp binding bought by the Bodleian library. This collection of devotional texts, focussed on the Passion (such as Bonaventure) and Carthusian spirituality (such as Adam of Dryburgh), contains a reference to a Strasbourg Carthusian famulus, a significant discovery given the particular transmission situation from the city. Thanks to references to the diocese of Trier in the binding material, Stephen suggested that the manuscript was produced in the Koblenz Charterhouse and made its way to Strasbourg. Nevertheless Monika Studer, in a colloquium the following day on German Manuscripts in Oxford, suggested through a comparison with a Basel manuscript from the Strasbourg Charterhouse, that the Oxford manuscript could in fact have been produced there. Nigel had no idea about the existence of the manuscript or that it had been purchased by the Bodleian: further research is now an exciting possibility.
The Strasbourg Charterhouse manuscript was one strand in Stephen’s lecture on the central importance of a new kind of domestic devotion within Strasbourg in the later Middle Ages. He showed how the division between cloister and world was less pronounced and more permeable than has previously been recognised. Institutions such as the Strasbourg Charterhouse and the Hospitaller commandery at the Grüner Wörth (founded 1367) were at the forefront of a new lay, devotional culture. These institutions, less connected to the town’s guilds but more with its citizenship, offered a particular blend of monastic and worldly devotion and offered a distinctive development from earlier forms of monastic, urban spirituality. Contemporary writers suggested that the decline of monasteries lay less in their separation from the world, but rather in the lack of lay oversight.
The developments in these institutions paralleled a rise of a new understanding of domesticity, emerging in the fourteenth century, in which qualities such as orderliness and privacy came more to the fore. An increased focus on interiority was not just evident in Flemish or Italian art, but was in evidence in Strasbourg as the domestic sphere became sacralised. Altar pieces such as the Meister des Paradiesgärtlein’s altar piece ‘Joseph’s Doubt’ (1430), were one such media in which this became clear and were part of a widespread phenomena in stained glass, tapestries and wall paintings. The domestic and the sacred had become merged.
Following the talk, a drinks reception was held in the Taylor and the newly-acquired manuscript was on display (behind glass!). Strasbourg was then the focus of attention at the morning session the following day at a colloquium in the Weston Library on German manuscripts in Oxford. Former students, colleagues and friends of Nigel gave a number of short presentations on various manuscripts held in Oxford, including from the Taylorian and Merton College Library, and suggested various palaeographical, codicological and textual approaches to a diverse set of material ranging from a set of eighth century psalms to an early seventeenth century Yiddish songbook.
This interdisciplinary conference, kindly supported by the TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme, hoped to unite classicists, archaeologists, celticists, historians, and literary scholars in investigating the profound influence of Celtic and Classical heritage on the development of British identity. Three chronologically arranged panels attempted to trace the respective importance of Ancient Britons and Romans in British culture over the centuries, starting in the pre-Roman period and ending in the present day. Covering such a vast expanse of time presented a particular challenge to our medievalists, whose papers were separated from each other by centuries. However, they made sure that medieval legacies loomed large throughout the conference, with ideas about Roman influence in post-Roman Britain and the long shadows cast by medieval origin myths recurring again and again.
The first panel, chaired by Prof. Thomas Charles-Edwards (Oxford), featured Sir Barry Cunliffe (Oxford) on the theory that Celts first emerged in western Europe, Dr. Alex Woolf (St. Andrews) on how a British people might have developed in late antiquity, and Prof. Helen Fulton (Bristol) on the use of Troy by medieval English writers.
The second panel, chaired by Rhys Kaminski-Jones (University of Wales), featured Prof. Ceri Davies (Swansea) on the reception of Trojan origin myths by Welsh renaissance humanists, Prof. Philip Schwyzer (Exeter) on the politics of British antiquity under James I, and Mary-Ann Constantine (University of Wales) on how eighteenth-century travellers to Wales and Scotland imagined the Celtic and Roman past.
The third panel, chaired by Dr. Nick Lowe (RHUL), featured Prof. Rosemary Sweet (Leicester) on how nineteenth-century antiquarians reconsidered Roman Britain as a domestic and commercial society, Dr. Philip Burton (Birmingham) on the complex Celtic themes and echoes in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and Prof. Richard Hingley (Durham) on how Hadrian’s Wall is used today as a symbol of national division and international co-operation.
The discussion sessions following each panel provided a wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary analysis of this aspect of British identity, touching on the problematic nature of “indigenous” Britishness from the Middle Ages to the present day, the exclusion of women from a male-dominated Celts v. Romans historical narrative, and the role of contemporary heritage bodies in emphasising Celtic or Classical aspects of the British past. The conference was enthusiastically received, with all 60 available places filled, and with the possibility of published conference proceedings being actively considered. The organisers would like to thank everyone involved in making it a success, and especially the Oxford Medieval Studies Programme who helped make it possible in the first place.
‘Global’ and ‘middle ages’ are not an obvious fit. How can we refer to ‘global history’ in an era when the Americas remained largely unknown to the rest of the world, and in which contact between Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa was relatively fitful? Since 2012, however, the AHRC-funded project ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’, involving thirty academics from institutions across the UK, has sought to outline what a global history of the period between 500 and 1600 might look like, and, in doing so, to question definitions of a ‘global’ approach to history designed with the early modern and modern periods in mind. This May, two talks have provided medievalists at Oxford with the opportunity to learn about the fruits of this collaborative research network and to contemplate the consequences that a ‘global approach’ might have for the discipline of medieval history as a whole.
Professor Naomi Standen of the University of Birmingham, one of the members of the ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’ project, was in Oxford on 3 May to give the History Faculty’s Annual Special Lecture, taking as her topic ‘Options and Experiments: Defining the “Global Middle Ages”’. Ranging from China to the Swahili coast to the Mayan empire, Professor Standen argued that the Middle Ages was a period of global networks and intense cross-cultural interaction, but that historians often fail to recognise this because in the medieval era, unlike in those which preceded and succeeded it, centralised states were not the primary agents of connectivity. The period between the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the early modern nation-state, Standen said, was characterised by political fragmentation and religious diversity, meaning that people across the globe were exposed to a wide variety of different cultural traditions and, mostly unconstrained by coercive institutionalised governments, were able to pick-and-choose from amongst these paradigms to best suit their own particular needs. The result was a ‘globalisation’ defined by multiculturalism and experimentation, rather than the imposition of a standardised dominant culture. In Standen’s view, a global history of the middle ages proves that globalisation need not be the product of conquest, expansion, and integration, but can also stem from choices made by individuals at all levels of society.
Professor Standen’s talk was followed on 17 May by ‘The Global Middle Ages: A Discussion’ at St John’s College, in which Dr Caroline Goodson (Birkbeck, University of London), Dr Catherine Holmes (Univ, Oxford), and Professor Chris Wickham (All Souls, Oxford)—the latter two being members of the ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’ project—each gave short papers. While Professor Standen focused on placing the Middle Ages within long-term narratives of global history, the speakers at the St John’s event were more concerned with outlining the opportunities and pitfalls that global history presents to medieval historians working on shorter time spans or on a particular region. Dr Goodson, examining archaeological and textual evidence from the central Mediterranean region in the early Middle Ages, found that while there was some inter-cultural contact in this region, economic activity was steadfastly local and cultural assimilation between Romans, Byzantines, and (Islamic) North Africans, minimal. While Goodson argued that a global history approach based on connectivity, such as that proposed by Standen, was of limited relevance to the society she studied, she did think that a global study of the Mediterranean could be useful in demonstrating how the different cultures active in this region responded in similar ways to common pressures and stimuli, producing ‘inter-related chronologies’ for all societies in the area. Dr Holmes, like Goodson, addressed the relevance of global history to a regional case study, this time examining the Byzantine Empire from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Holmes argued that a global approach could encourage historians to think of the Byzantine Empire not as a centralised polity, but as a as polycentric entity that needed to negotiate with local agents from a wide variety of cultural traditions in order to maintain power. This set-up contributed to a hybrid political culture in the region, with rulers of all kinds of polities borrowing liberally from the repertoires of Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic communities to justify their power. Holmes’s presentation emphasised that a global history of the middle ages should be concerned as much with a ‘micro-history’, redefining the relationship of local space to larger polities, as with a ‘macro’ narrative, comparing the development of cultures and empires. Professor Wickham took a broader view of what global history could mean to medievalists. He stated that there are three main types of global history—one tracing the ‘common development’ of all world cultures towards modernity, one identifying (and usually celebrating) the networks formed between different cultures, and one comparing the histories of unconnected polities or regions from different parts of the globe. Each type of global history, Wickham argued, contains dangerous tendencies for the unwary practitioner: a ‘common development’ approach often becomes a narrative of the triumph of Western civilization and also fails to account for why certain areas do not follow wider global trends, a connective approach ignores the fact that most people do not move from their localities or have direct contact with other cultures, and a comparative approach is overly reliant on secondary literature. Wickham ended by stressing that not all medieval historians need become global historians, but that a global approach can provide new points of comparison or new potential explanations for phenomena in particular historical societies, prompting historians to question perceived orthodoxies in the history of their region of specialization. Professor Nicholas Purcell (Brasenose, Oxford) brought the event to a close with a series of concluding remarks, which stressed that a global history of the middle ages should be one that seeks to explain why globalisation doesn’t happen as much as why it does, and echoed points made by Goodson and Holmes in emphasising the importance of conducting global history at a local level and rooting it in the actions of individuals.
So, what can medieval historians make of all this? The talks by Standen, Goodson, Holmes, and Wickham certainly presented a global history as a tempting prospect—particularly as a means of elucidating the relationship of local political and economic processes to a wider global milieu. All of the talks emphasised local contexts and individual agency as the keys to a medieval global history, challenging ancient and early modern narratives of globalisation as a product of conquest and empire. But have we been too quick to write coercion out of the ‘Global Middle Ages’? The papers discussed above implied that individuals and groups could choose whether or not they wished to engage with the outside world through economic and cultural exchanges, and that power structures were formed in response to local needs and on-the-ground negotiations between ruler and ruled. We must remember, however, that even though the middle ages was not characterised by imperial hegemony or consolidated nation-states, political domination and socio-economic oppression still very much constrained the options available to individuals, either denying them access to networks in which they would have liked to participate or forcing them into contact with other cultures against their will. Robert Bartlett’s book The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (1993) is perhaps an important corrective to the emerging view of the ‘Global Middle Ages’ as a period of diversity and individual agency. The world that Bartlett presents is also one of political fragmentation, but non-state actors (aristocrats, merchants, and the Church, in particular) use force to conquer peripheral lands and enforce cultural standardisation—Ireland’s inclusion into an Anglo-Norman world of trading contacts and cultural practices, for example, was hardly a matter of choice for most residents of the island. While the attention of historians involved in the ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’ project to local contexts and non-state agency is laudable, it is also imperative that today’s historians of the ‘Global Middle Ages’ do not reinstitute the nineteenth-century Romantic’s view of the Middle Ages as a period of personal freedom before the onset of bureaucratised modernity.
Another point of contention, raised at both events by Dr Hannah Skoda (St John’s, Oxford), is the fact that the study of medieval global history has been undertaken almost entirely by scholars from Western academic institutions, particularly Anglo-American ones. Does this result in an essentially European vision of the histories of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the pre-Columbian Americas, and devalue the research performed by scholars from these regions? It’s certainly an area of concern, but scholars from the ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages’ project did indicate that they hope in future to collaborate with academics from outside Europe and North America.
For those wanting to know what, exactly, constitutes ‘global history’, the ‘Global Middle Ages’ events hosted by the History Faculty and St John’s did not provide easy answers. ‘Global history’, after all, doesn’t have its own methodology or a clear range of topics associated with it. This ambiguity, however, may be a benefit rather than a problem. The goal is not to construct a meta-narrative of globalisation, but rather to prompt historians to approach their own work from new angles and to ask new questions of their material in light of developments occurring elsewhere in the medieval world. In short, it’s not creating a definition for ‘global history’ that’s important, but rather the process of inquiry that it generates.
Dr Eliza Hartrich is a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, University of Oxford
By Dr Liv Robinson, Brasenose College/English Faculty
‘The bottom line is that, even when written with probing wit by [Carol Ann] Duffy, medieval morality plays are not the place to go to for sophisticated characters and gripping plot twists.’
TimeOut’s review of the recent National Theatre production of Duffy’s Everyman articulated a sense that the medieval play’s 2015 update was perhaps hampered by its late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century origins. Reviews of the play – whether the reviewers loved it or loathed it – returned frequently to what they perceived as the aesthetic and intellectual paucity of the medieval Everyman upon which Duffy based her twenty-first century adaptation. They contrasted her ‘memorable characters’ with the ‘intrinsic thinness’ of the medieval play (TimeOut again); they described the play as ‘dramatically threadbare’, lacking ‘psychological substance’, but revealing that ‘that’s partly the limitation of the medieval source material’ (The Telegraph); or they congratulated her on making a now-irrelevant piece of medieval literature speak to contemporary concerns: ‘what was originally church propaganda has been turned… into a scathing assault on the myopic materialism of the modern age’ (The Guardian).
As a medievalist with research specialisms in translation and medieval drama, these reviews rather got my goat. It wasn’t that so many reviewers enjoyed Everyman’s 2015 incarnation: I too thought it was outstanding – thought-provoking, terrifying and moving in equal measure. My own academic work centres in part upon the re-creative and critical potential which resides in translation, and I was excited by the ways in which Duffy had creatively responded to the dialogic form, the sounds and rhythms of the medieval play, as well as to its complex ethical and soteriological concerns. My frustration with the critical reception of her work arose principally from the fact that so many reviewers seemed to take as read the tediousness of the medieval Everyman, to cheerfully assert its poor quality as drama and the unsophistication of its intellectual endeavours.
Everyman, to me, is emphatically not a dramatically limited or unsubtle play; nor is it simply ‘church propaganda’ aimed at a credulous, unquestioning medieval Catholic audience. The play speaks to shared and complex apprehensions, imaginings and terrors. It begins as an abstracted, allegorical dramatization of a character called Dethe’s approach to a character called ‘Everyman’ – who represents each and every one of us – and it concludes as an attempt to actively think through and beyond the end of our lives. It asks, how can we prepare ourselves for death? How do we give shape to what happens when we die, in terms of the ‘experience’ of dying? How do we imagine death – not just in the sense of watching a character, on-stage, dying, but rather ‘from the inside’: what it’s like to go through the process of becoming not-alive? Can we even conceive of this state, given that the acts of thinking, imagining and questioning are all, in some senses, predicated on the state of being alive and conscious – and this is the one thing we won’t be when we die?
In its sixteenth-century printed editions, Everyman travels with a subtitle: ‘a tretyse… in maner of a morall pleye’. The term ‘tretyse’ perhaps suggests something other than drama – yet the fact that it is ‘in maner of a pleye’ is also key – what is it that performance brings? One of the key elements here is sophisticated on-stage embodiment of allegorical concepts. Everyman begins with the stage representing its audience’s own world, or something like it – watching, we’re apparently on the outside, as Everyman, an individual, a character external to us, even as we know that allegorically ‘represents’ us all, meets (quite literally) his Dethe, and then seeks out some other characters – his Felawshyp, or friendships; his Kindrede and Cosyn, or family members; his Goodes, or possessions – to attempt to persuade them (fruitlessly) to help him make his reckoning before God. Once his worldly goods have left Everyman, he’s forced to seek out his Good Dedes, and this moment marks a pivot in the play. On one level, that’s because Everyman has turned to the ‘right’ people, things or processes to help him secure salvation – his own good deeds, and Knowledge, who points the way to the sacraments of Confession and extreme unction at the hands of a priest – so it marks a movement from bad choices to good, from despair to hope.
But it also marks a pivot in terms of what we, as the audience, are watching, in that the playing space suddenly ceases to represent a world peopled by other individuals and characters (friends, family, objects Everyman owns), and begins to represent the internal world of Everyman himself. The stage disorientingly shifts to become the space inside his mind and body, which is peopled by his own physical and psychological forces, each played by a different actor: his Strength, his Beaute, his Fyve Wyttes or five senses, his Discrecion, his Knowledge. Everyman, then, is allowed to enter a conversation with parts of himself, to become sensitised to the presence of the faculties within him which allow him to experience, to know, to interact with other individuals and the world – to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, to feel, to move, to learn – in a word, to live. At the play’s climax, Everyman is stripped of these faculties one by one in a really challenging attempt to imagine and perform, not what it looks like when an individual dies but what it is like to experience death within a fractured and multi-voiced human psyche, moment by moment. And because Everyman is who he is – each and every one of us – the space of the stage becomes in some senses the inside of everyone’s head. It forces us all to attempt to imagine a conscious calling into being, then a gradual abandonment of our own, unique and personal bodily and psychological attributes – to confront our own mortality. The play certainly does express an orthodox medieval Christian message about salvation: that it can only be assured through an intricate mixture of our own works during our lifetimes and the operation of divine grace; that the sacraments, particularly penance, mediated through the proper ecclesiastical authorities, are key to that process. Yet the questions that it asks about the terrifying and disorientating experience of dying are no less resonant for the fact that they are approached through this framework.
It was with all this in mind that I embarked, in November 2015, on my own production of Everyman at the generous invitation of the University Church, using mainly my second-year English students as actors. Many saw the production as an opportunity for them to become far more familiar with a medieval text, and to appreciate more fully its dramatic workings, than if they had simply read it for a tutorial. My own aims were two-fold: one was certainly pedagogic, in that I too hoped for these outcomes for my English students, and was curious to see how performing the play would impact on their Middle English comprehension and close reading skills. However, I also wanted to interrogate, through performance, the assessments of Everyman prevalent in press reviews of Duffy’s play. Would my students succeed in conveying to a non-specialist audience the complex questions that the medieval play poses, in rendering them critically engaging and thought-provoking? Could Everyman be provocative of discussion and interest, and could that challenge some ideas about the ‘relevance’ of medieval literature to today’s culture, and how that ‘relevance’ might be conceptualised? I wasn’t trying to suggest that the medieval play holds up a straightforward mirror to our own, twenty-first century preoccupations and desires, or that ‘medieval people were just like us’ (for a compelling critique of ‘relevance’ and an argument for the importance of underlining alterity in relation to medieval literature, see Marion Turner’s post here). What I wanted was to show that experiencing the medieval play on its own terms could provoke questions and conversations; that the play was ‘relevant’ in the sense that it challenged us to think.
We performed to a full house in the University Church’s Old Library, and the audience comprised a wonderful mixture of academic colleagues (largely non-medievalist), students and members of the public. We held an audience Q and A session after the performance, in which all the actors took part, and the questions they were asked – about the process of representing and embodying abstract forces such as Fyve Wyttes, about the shifting ownership of Knowledge throughout the play and how its staging might convey this, about the role and presence of God in the world, the ambiguous potential for corruption amongst His representatives, the Priesthood, and the consolatory, supplicatory presence of embodied, human Good Dedes at the moment of death – left me in no doubt that the medieval play had been as generative of thought and engagement as I had hoped.
The pedagogical impact, too, has been rich: although perhaps not primarily in the areas I’d anticipated. Certainly, performing the play forced the students to understand every single word or line spoken by their character(s), and so forced them to think through sometimes confusing or counterintuitive syntax carefully, to notice the impact of verse form and register on meaning. This is especially important in a play like Everyman where the actors have to give embodied shape to forces and concepts which have no ‘set’ physical form. There was a danger that the play would become very static – two or more allegorical characters standing still in conversation – and we worked hard on translating close reading into dynamic, physical performance. Yet some of the most rewarding pedagogical outcomes that I’ve seen have been in students’ grasp of more conceptual ideas and challenges. In class, we have discussed shifting or co-existent times and spaces in texts; or tensions between the abstract and the ‘real’, the human and the divine, and a student has begun with ‘it’s a bit like in Everyman, when…’ The play seems to have formed a reference point, a shared set of ideas and questions which can help to understand other unfamiliar medieval texts. It also gave the students an opportunity to mix theatrical creativity fully with their academic work: their insights, suggestions and intellectual excitement were crucial in rehearsal (you can read about two actors’ perspectives here. I was very proud of them as they confidently and sensitively fielded questions about our creative work: I realised in those moments just how much they had taken from the process, in both an academic and non-academic sense.
It’s for all these reasons that I’ll be returning to the University Church in 7th week Trinity Term with (hopefully) a new set of student performers and a new medieval play: we warmly invite readers to join us. (For further information, email olivia.robinson@bnc.ox.ac.uk or penny.boxall@universitychurch.ox.ac.uk).
The Oxford Medieval Studies programme at TORCH recently organised an interdisciplinary workshop on the topic of ‘The Medieval List’. I would like to focus more on responding than simply reporting, so I will begin by offering only a very brief outline of the papers in a list of my own:
o Anna Sapir Abulafia discussed the thirteenth-century Nuremburg Memorbuch and the kind of community setting and sensibilities which might have created it o Julia Bray argued that a seemingly haphazard list created by Ibn Ḥabīb was in fact a careful intervention in historical argument o Daron Burrows examined the messy and not entirely helpful list of incipits in an illustrated copy of the French prose Apocalypse o Elizabeth Eva Leach demonstrated for us the journey through many modern lists of medieval material necessary to understand one medieval list of songs o Andy Orchard offered a reading of the Old English poem known as Maxims II as something more than a ‘senseless’ list of maxims o Richard Sharpe reverse-engineered aspects of a Benedictine house’s library from one partial list of books o Stephen Parkinson argued for the paratextual status of the complex table of contents transmitted with the Cantigas de Santa Maria
After a few hours of list scholarship, I was left seeing lists everywhere and in everything. Thinking of the inclusive, heterogeneous and relatively unstructured type of poetic list exemplified by Maxims II, where should the line be drawn between a list and a sequence? Is all verse, as a sequence of words with relatively tight formal organisation, close to a list? If so, we might want to think of the list as a formal choice as well as a utilitarian tool antithetical to poetry.
That idea of utility is closely tied to the idea of the list today but might deserve a closer look. Discussing lists of books’ contents, both Elizabeth Eva Leach and Daron Burrows noted that the ones present in their manuscripts are less useful than they initially appeared—they are not entirely truthful or helpful representations of the contents they claim to identify and render accessible. Without being too cynical about the people behind these particular medieval lists, should we think more about other kinds of ‘utility’ in unhelpful lists of contents? Was the impression of completeness itself valuable, desirable—pleasurable? Could an unhelpful list be useful as a kind of ornamentation?
More broadly still, examples such as the records of persecution discussed by Anna Sapir Abulafia and the pointed, interventionist historical listing which Julia Bray argued for in the work of Ibn Ḥabīb might suggest that the list in all its variety is one of our dominant tools for organising lived experience—one of writing’s most common reactions to time and space.
That is a very broad, unifying set of possibilities, and I would also like to approach the variety of the medieval list by making distinctions: what are the ways in which lists can differ from each other? Lists can be exhaustive, or at least aspire to be exhaustive, or they can be selective. Tables of contents, the lists contained in the Nuremberg Memorbuch and the modern finding aids adduced by Elizabeth Eva Leach, for example, aspire to be exhaustive. I suggested above that some lists of contents in books at least give the impression of completeness. Excluding things can be a useful approach too, of course: Richard Sharpe suggested that the library book list discussed in his paper was an individual’s selective, working set of notes on texts of interest to them within a larger collection. But perhaps some lists are neither exhaustive nor selective, but putatively endless—it seems to me that Maxims II fits into this category, offering the impression that the poet has boundless skill and could advertise his repertoire forever if given the time. Finally, most of the lists discussed at the workshop list entities which are categorically equivalent, such as songs, or martyrs. Ibn Ḥabīb’s list, distinctively, draws connections between otherwise different people unified by displays of power after their death, and perhaps derives some of its effect from asserting that equivalencies exist and waiting for the reader’s mind to fill them in. Maxims II might operate in a similar way, and certainly Andy Orchard offered a reading of it as a chain of riddling ties.
One natural common thread linking the papers was a conviction that lists are powerful, subtle and interesting. The lists discussed on the day might function in different ways, and some of them might not fulfil their ostensible purposes very well at all, but they were all productive objects for discussion. By finding and listing distinctions between these and other lists we might begin to create a framework with which we can more precisely describe the workings (and not-workings) of the lists we study.
Daniel Sawyer recently completed a DPhil thesis using manuscript evidence to understand how Middle English verse was normally read. He is interested in the history of reading, in the survival and non-survival of medieval books, and in combinations of quantitative and qualitative codicology.
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 135th year of the second millennium since the Lord’s incarnation. But this could also be calculated as the 69th year from the arrival of the Normans in England; the 703rd year from the coming of the English (i.e. the Anglo-Saxons) into England; the 2,265th year from the Britons settling in the same island; or the 5,317th 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.
[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).
