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 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).
by Liv Robinson (Brasenose/English and French) Andrew Lloyd (St Peter’s/History) and Will Brockbank (Pembroke/English)
The Anglo-Norman Reading Group, convened by Dr Liv Robinson and Dr Jane Bliss, meets every two weeks, to read and discuss a wide range of medieval Insular French texts, ranging in date from the very start of the post-conquest period through to later medieval material. As many medievalists will know, in recent years there’s been a concerted push to consider anew the sociolinguistic, literary and cultural relationships between the different vernacular languages spoken and written within the geographical space and the individual locales that form ‘England’—particularly the complex impacts which England’s major ‘co-vernaculars’, French and English, may have exerted on one another. Anglo-Norman is coming in from the cold: its uses in a range of literary and non-literary contexts is being re-conceptualised.
In the wake of this, the Anglo-Norman reading group was founded in 2009, simply as a means of bringing together all those who might want to practise their Anglo-Norman by reading original texts. It has since provided an informal forum for the sharing of expertise and experience in reading the French(es) of England. We also host an occasional research seminar in Anglo-Norman, and have welcomed a range of speakers on Anglo-Norman language, history, literature and cultures, including Marianne Ailes (Bristol), Catherine Batt (Leeds), Richard Ingham (Birmingham City), Judy Weiss (Cambridge) and, most recently, Daron Burrows (Oxford).
The group has always been open to any and all members, regardless of levels of proficiency or disciplinary background, and one of the things the convenors have come to appreciate over the years is the way in which it fosters friendly collaboration and exchange of knowledge between individuals from a very large range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds. We welcome MSt students, Professors and everyone in between, and several of our longest-standing members are independent scholars and translators based in Oxford. As a group we are constantly surprised – and excited – by the sheer range of expertise which we assemble. Last term, for example, our attendees included medievalists specialising in Old English philology, Middle English literature, French literature, musicology, Latin, legal history, military history and Byzantine literature and culture. This gave rise to some fascinating interdisciplinary discussions, in which members enriched each other’s understandings of the language, literature and contexts which we were discussing, from the perspectives of their own disciplinary backgrounds and knowledge bases. The round-table format of the group facilitates fluid and stimulating discourse between the members, and being able to draw on the expertise of those coming to Anglo-Norman from such a variety of backgrounds helps enormously with the rendering of the text into English as there exists between us a broad range of knowledge, allowing for little reliance on modern English and French ‘cribs’, which remain our last resort.
Yet this same interdisciplinarity can also give rise to tensions: Anglo-Norman was used for a huge variety of subjects ranging from chronicles, to legal texts, to language manuals, literature and much more. The convenors try hard to vary the genre of texts we read, and encourage members to suggest future readings which they personally might find useful for research or teaching purposes. We have covered an eclectic range of material over the years, from extracts from the Anonimalle Chronicle, via a series of Anglo-Norman model court pleas, to Wace’s Roman de rou, Andrew of Coutance’s truly hilarious Roman des franceis, and (currently) Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de troie; however there are inevitably differences of opinion on whether (for example) we should cover one extract/text per session or spend longer (a term? A year?) on a particular text or topic. There are clearly advantages, in terms of depth of understanding, to spending a sustained number of sessions reading from a single text, but this can prove understandably frustrating to members whose primary research interests lie elsewhere, and/or those who seek rapid breadth of coverage.
The other aspect of the group which can prove a challenge to foster, in practical terms, is also the aspect of which its convenors are most proud: its mixed levels of ability. We realise how daunting it can be to attend a group such as ours as a new graduate, particularly when one is starting out learning to read Anglo-Norman with little previous experience of Old French. We hope that we foster a relaxed and fun atmosphere in which all members feel comfortable in having a go at reading and translating, whatever their level of expertise – and we try really hard to create a supportive environment for newcomers to the field, in which advice from more expert readers can be offered in an informal but constructive way, which is helpful without being too formally ‘pedagogic’. This can sometimes be a hard line to tread, but it is one of the cornerstones of our group practice, and something the convenors strive to promote and keep in everyone’s mind during each session.
Some members would like to see many more undergraduates taking part, arguing rightly that their attendance would expose them to literature and language not normally encountered on their courses, thereby nurturing future academic interest in Anglo-Norman, and that their individual readings of the texts would also prove a valuable contribution to our discussion. But undergraduates’ time in Oxford remains heavily oversubscribed, and the research-based text choices which many of our members value do not always gel well with undergraduate syllabuses and reading lists. In practice, therefore, we have evolved into a graduate-based group (although Liv has been inspired by the success of ANRG to start her own, undergraduate Anglo-Norman reading circle, aimed exclusively at her Course II English students who are studying Marie de France as part of their Medieval English and Related Literatures paper).
Navigating these experiences, tensions and differing expectations are, ultimately, all part and parcel of nurturing and participating in a thriving, critically engaged and rich group culture, in which our various members will, inevitably, have in mind different aims, motivations and benefits from the reading sessions. As convenors, Jane and Liv have learned to try to be responsive to this diversity, and to allow the group to evolve organically as members’ interests and levels of expertise change throughout the year.
We leave the final word to Will, one of our most recent graduate members:
“Sitting in the plush settings of the Old Library at Brasenose College, a glass of red (or white, if you prefer) in hand on a Friday evening, you could easily be fooled into thinking that you might not actually spend the next hour and a half working through excerpts from Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Le Roman de Troie. But you would be wrong. From the beginning of Michaelmas Term, through Hilary (and beyond!), we amateur Anglo-Normanists have been reading aloud (some more convincingly, others less so, though which camp I fall in I wouldn’t like to say…) and translating snippets of Benoît’s 30,000+ line epic with due enthusiasm.
Dating from the second half of the twelfth century, Benoît’s Roman survives in some 60 manuscripts and fragments from the Anglo-Norman world, though few can reasonably be dated to the time of the composition of the Roman. The poem, itself a retelling of the Trojan War, would go on to influence Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and it was even translated into medieval Greek as The War of Troy. Such was its reach during the medieval period that no other literary French text from the twelfth century survives in as many manuscripts as the Roman. So far so significant, but what of it to me?
Though my own background is in modern foreign languages (French included), I myself am a graduate student in medieval English. As such, the convivial atmosphere of the Anglo-Norman reading group allows me to indulge in my predilection for Old French/Anglo-Norman poetry, without fear of chastisement in the classroom for inadvertently uttering some orz moz (‘swear word’) or another, when in fact I just wanted to say ‘he was’ (il fut). Fortunately, those of us with a foul mouth were relieved to be able to—indeed encouraged to!—utter such orz moz when Daron Burrows, Associate Professor in Medieval French at St. Peter’s College, delivered his ‘Anglo Norman Sex Talk’ seminar to wrap up Michaelmas Term in seventh week.
And this perfectly sums up for me what the reading group is about. Here one has the chance to share the enthusiasm that surely launched us all down the sometimes bumpy, pothole-ridden path of academia, but at times gets buried by other concerns and cogitations. As ‘Salemons nos enseigne e dit’ [Solomon teaches us and says] in the prologue of the Roman, it is our solemn duty to pass on knowledge from great books down through the generations, but here one can do so and let one’s hair down, raise a glass, and take pleasure in reading medieval poetry in the original language.”
Illustration: BnF MS fr. 60, fol. 42: a copy of Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (which the group is currently reading).
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.
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.
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 20th 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.
Byzantium is, for most, a rather dirty word, connoting something faintly alien and somehow obscene. To classicists, the Rome that did not fall is an embarrassing pantomime horse, cavorting about in the ill-fitting clothing of the once great Roman Empire. To medievalists, it is an outsider, a distinctly foreign looking entity lingering on the edges of a Europe to which it does not belong. It is Greek, it is lurid, it is decadent. Above all, it is irrelevant.
Historians of Byzantium recognise these viewpoints as erroneous, but I fear they still have much work to do in getting the word out. The prejudices of our own disciplines (note that those who study the medieval world are medievalists, unless they happen to study Byzantium, in which case they become byzantinists) have a tendency to lock us away from recognising the enormous influence that this supposedly alien power had upon many of the social and intellectual stories that we consider to be so distinctly Western. No more so is this true than of the so-called renaissance in Italian art that took place in the period roughly bounded by the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
It may seem that the art of the Byzantine East – static, golden, otherworldly – has little indeed to do with the vitality, the realism, and the sheer ambition of Italy – and Europe’s – renaissance, that explosion of creative energy that seemed to blossom, unbidden, in the Latin speaking West after the thirteenth century. Cursory familiarity with Byzantine art confirms this and indeed confirms the opinion of Giorgio Vasari, the Italian painter turned historian, whose 1550 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times essentially defined the renaissance – the rinascita – as a rejection of ‘that clumsy Greek style’ (quella greca goffa maniera) and the creation of a new naturalism that captured the human form in ways not known before. But it may be that the art historian doth protest too much; Vasari’s very emphasis on the ways in which the artists of his own day had surpassed the Greek models indicates just how deep was Byzantine influence on Italy’s artistic culture.
One of the bright lights of Vasari’s renaissance, the man he saw as truly kick-starting the turn towards naturalism, towards capturing authentic human emotion, and towards tricks of composition like perspective, was Giotto. Giotto, a Florentine artist who lived between 1267 and 1337, was an archetype of true artistic genius, a former shepherd whose prodigious talent was unlocked when the artist Cimabue discovered him sketching his sheep with a pointed rock. The sheer life and expression of Giotto’s paintings instantly strike the observer and – unlike his teacher Cimabue – seem to have nothing at all in common with the frozen, abstract forms of the East.
But uniquely gifted though Giotto surely was, his art and the movement it inspired owed more to Byzantine influence than we might at first believe. At times, these debts can be seen almost directly. In the tiny mountain village of Gorno Nerezi in modern day Macedonia lies the externally unremarkable late Byzantine church of St Panteleimon, patronised by the imperial family and decorated inside with a fresco cycle completed by artists from Constantinople. These frescoes, completed at some time in the twelfth century, burst with energy and an emotional intensity that might surprise viewers accustomed to think of Byzantine art as frozen and lifeless. The frescoes are crowded with varied figures and with a sense of movement and action. Each face tells a story in its expression, no more so than the tortured, wailing face of Mary, the Mother of God, who holds the body of her dead son, taken down from the cross. The artist has made this divine moment painfully human. Though Giotto himself surely never saw this image, the comparison with his own Pietà is so striking as challenge any notion of coincidence and, indeed, to challenge the notion that Giotto and his like had done something unprecedented in seeking to capture the intensity of human experience in the look of a face or the shape of a body. Giotto’s models, like those of St Panteleimon, were firmly Byzantine, and it was by working and experimenting with techniques from the Greek East that Giotto’s own remarkable paintings were produced. Without Byzantine art, Giotto might have remained on his hillside, drawing sheep in the dirt.
That the Italian masters whose work began the renaissance should have been inspired and indeed trained by Byzantine artists and models is hardly surprising. Byzantine art had long exercised enormous influence in the Italian peninsula, not least because it was not until 1071 that the Byzantines finally lost their last territories in Italy. Throughout the period of late antiquity and the middle ages, evidence – both direct and indirect – of Byzantine artists at work within Italy can be found and Byzantines were clearly often seen as masters to be copied.
Direct evidence of their work can take the most striking forms. Within the tiny church of Santa Maria foris portas in Castelseprio in northern Italy, long hidden under plaster, is a cycle of late eighth or early ninth century Byzantine frescoes, which, like those at Panteleimon, defy the stereotypes of Byzantine composition and are among some of the most remarkable early medieval frescoes ever to be discovered in the Latin West. The depicted image shows the Annunciation, in whose frame the movement of the archangel Gabriel, swooping down to announce the Good News to the supine and unsuspecting Mary, is boldly evoked and the folds and contours of the clothing that covers the two figures betray the living bodies beneath the cloth. The composition eschews the linearity and the stasis that we are told to expect from eastern art. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Castelseprio frescoes demonstrate both the vitality of the Byzantine artistic tradition and its deep influence within Italy.
Castelseprio is merely one of dozens if not hundreds of specific examples that may be adduced to show the activities of Byzantine artists at work in Italy. Another spectacular example of such – and at the opposite end of the spectrum from Caselsprio in terms of its sheer monumental grandeur – is the great church of San Marco in Venice. Built at the end of the eleventh century to a Greek cross plan and with Byzantine expertise, the church is surmounted by five enormous domes that float upon pendentives above the Venetian lagoon and was constructed as a conscious model of Constantinople’s now lost Church of the Holy Apostles. Its interior still gleams with a cascade of Byzantine-inspired gold mosaic work. Even the ardently anti-Byzantine Vasari admitted that the first great master of his Lives, Cimabue (c. 1240-1302), learnt to paint by bunking off from his studies to watch at work the Byzantine painters who had been summoned to Florence ‘for no other reason than to restore the art of painting, which had long since been lost in Tuscany.’
A certain sense of superiority in comparing Italian art to that of the (fallen) Byzantine Empire was easy for renaissance Italians to project back into the past, standing upon the self-confident vantage point of centuries of innovation, but to do so today ignores the enormous influence of outsiders upon Italy, Byzantium at their forefront. The adaptations of Byzantine models produced some of Italy’s most spectacular art and architecture. The commissioning of the so-called Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti in 1401, a masterpiece of bronze relief sculpture still to be seen on Florence’s Battistero di San Giovanni, has sometimes been taken to mark the starting point of Italy’s renaissance, but in the centuries that preceded Ghiberti it was the foundries of Constantinople that produced Italy’s finest bronze doors, as at Sant’Andrea in Amalfi, at the abbey church of Monte Cassino, at San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome, at San Sebastiano in Atrani, at the Cathedral of Salerno, and more besides. Like Giotto and his suffering Mary, these influences ran deep and ‘renaissance’ amounted to a reinvention of inherited models, not a rejection of them.
None of this, of course, is an attempt to deny the brilliance of the Italian renaissance, an explosion of creativity that brought into being some of the greatest works of art the world had ever seen. Yet seen from a western perspective, it is important to recognise that these are not merely rungs on the ladder of Western genius but part of the story of an interconnected world, a world in which, for many centuries until its fall, Byzantium (not to mention the Arab world) set the pace of cultural change. Medieval scholars need to train themselves to look for these interconnectivities and to remember that Western authors have always, since the days of Charlemagne, sought so hard to paint the Byzantine Empire as the irrelevant vestige of a once great power precisely because Byzantium’s influence stretched so far and reached so deep.
Picture captions:
Picture 1: Golden and glorious: Christ Pantocrator from Hagia Sophia, Constantinople (late 13th century).
Picture 2: Giotto’s Pietà in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, one of the artist’s great masterpieces (completed 1305).
Picture 3: The Lamentation of Christ as depicted in the St Panteleimon fresco cycle (mid-12th century).
Picture 4: The Annunciation from Castelseprio (late eighth / early ninth century).
Picture 5: The genius of Byzantine relief sculpture: the Harbaville Triptych, an example of the vibrant and flourishing artistic culture under the Macedonian dynasty, 867-1057.
Interdisciplinarity, like breaking up, is hard to do. It’s even harder when you only have 10 minutes. Four professors of diverse medieval disciplines took up the challenge at the Main Hall of the Taylor Institution for the Oxford Medieval Studies launch event.
The brief was to show us how medievalists can ‘cross boundaries’ by tackling a text or artifact from outside their own comfort zone. Their responses were intriguingly varied. Henrike Lähnemann (Medieval German) was particularly transgressive, tracing the story and iconography of Tristan and Iseult—perhaps best known to moderns from the Wagner opera—across all sorts of boundaries, disciplinary and otherwise: political borders; languages; text and object; secular and sacred. David Wallace (English Literature) drew on his experience editing a history of medieval European literature(s) to evoke the interconnectedness of late medieval western Eurasia. His account broke down the (modern) political boundaries of Europe to remodel medieval literary history as a series of ‘itineraries’. Emma Dillon (Music) set out the need for a new conception of the medieval ‘song’ which integrates the performable lyric and notation beloved of musicologists with the depictions of music-making which punctuate romance literature. Using the work of R. Murray Schafer on ‘soundscapes’, she suggested that we should listen more carefully to the joyful noise conjured by medieval authors. Finally, Chris Wickham (History) delivered a characteristically pointed reappraisal of the historical value of Icelandic sagas. Focusing on a single, difficult-to-translate word (virðing: ‘credit/honour’) in the saga of Hrafnkell, he convincingly argued that the (obviously fictional) sagas, when carefully handled by historians and philologists, allow us to capture something of the distinctive nature of medieval Icelandic society.
Questions from the floor ranged from the need for collaborative teaching of medieval Latin (a suggestion strongly applauded in the room) to the big philosophical question at the heart of the evening: is it really possible to be truly interdisciplinary, or will medievalists (and others) always remain poachers sneaking onto the territory of their colleagues? It is a much debated question and there are good arguments eitherway.
What this evening suggested (to me, at least) was that there are two different sorts of ‘interdisciplinarity’ which can be distinguished—and which are worth pursuing in Oxford. One is decidedly pragmatic: collaboration across the boundaries of faculties and disciplines which often no longer make sense as the sole institutional settings for what we do. This is the creative reforming of disciplines to gather together like-minded scholars who share particular approaches to particular forms of evidence: something already begun in the many dedicated ‘centres’ dotting the landscape of Oxford. In my own field, I would mention the Centres for Late Antiquity (OCLA) and Byzantine Studies (LABS), which bring together historians, theologians, archaeologists, classical and medieval linguists and litterateurs—among many others.
In some senses, though, this is not *really* interdisciplinarity—certainly not by the terms of the persuasively iconoclastic argument presented by Guy Halsall in the link above—but simply the creation of a new discipline with its own scholarly culture. For someone to embody interdisciplinarity in their own scholarly person would require them, instead, to excel—and, just as important, be accepted as a practitioner—in multiple fields of inquiry at once. (That is—for example—to write books and papers on material evidence which speak to archaeological problems, while simultaneously winning acclaim as an exegete of medieval Italian poetry). Halsall sets out the very real constraints on what any one individual might achieve (who has the time to learn all of those skills, languages and subtle codes of academic practice?). Setting this unworkable ideal to one side, all four presentations nevertheless showed just how important familiarity with (and indeed proficiency in) a wide range of methods and a variety of evidence is for medievalists.
This is where I think it is best to envisage the crossing of disciplines as a process. The evening provided numerous examples of how the meetings of very different medieval minds might be achieved and the results it might provide, from the chance coincidence (literary scholars stumbling across an archaeological dig and using their knowledge of liturgy to correct the plans of a medieval abbey), to something more sustained and—dare I say it—institutional. Here, pragmatism and aspiration need not be mutually exclusive. As Chris Wickham noted, as a historian, he asks different questions of material evidence to those of archaeologists—anyone interested in medieval stone supply may have felt short-changed here!—but there is a common core of problems where he and they can collaborate. Each of us could delineate our own intellectual interests along similar lines.
As decades of revisionist scholarship have drummed into us, medieval frontiers were not lines on a map, but zones of interaction. The same goes for our disciplinary boundaries. It is perhaps too much to expect scholars to maintain estates in multiple lands—that is, expertise in more than one discipline—although these four speakers come about as close as anyone to doing so. Nevertheless, creative exchanges across these borderlands—and occasional invitations to take up residence in the core territories of other sovereign disciplines—remain not just useful, but vital for the study of the middle ages.
