This term the Anglo-Norman Reading Group has been working on extracts from Beneit of St Albans’ Vie de Thomas Becket. This text, written c. 1184, was the topic of one of the chapters of my doctoral thesis, and I am now preparing a translation of it for publication.
The Vie de Thomas Becket is one of only three insular French Becket lives, and it has received very little scholarly attention despite being a biography of one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages. The most surprising thing about the text, however, is its unique narrative stance: it is both pro-Thomas and pro-Henry II, despite widespread belief that Henry was indirectly responsible for Becket’s death and his own admission of guilt.
This required a certain amount of narrative gymnastics on Beneit’s part, resulting in him placing the blame largely on other figures in the story, such as bishops and members of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy who opposed Thomas as archbishop, whilst highlighting the close friendship and affection between Thomas and Henry. The narrator works the audience into his strategy of promotion, insisting on their own love and respect for their king and encouraging them to pray to St Thomas on his behalf. The text reveals how narratives of St Thomas were co-opted both by Henry II himself and by authors in response to this, and Beneit takes the opportunity to remind his audience of his own monastery, insisting on the importance of St Albans and its abbot in Becket’s story.
The group has been extremely well attended this term, and is made up of postgraduate students, university staff members, and independent scholars living in Oxford. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to share the text with all members of our group this term, and I have gained invaluable assistance and insight from fortnightly discussions.
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.
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).
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.
Charlotte Hartmann (MPhil Student, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford) examines the representation of Luther in Hans Sachs’ poem. Please visit her blog for more articles on Hans Sachs.
“Hier steh ich nun. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen!“ (Here I stand. I have no other choice. God help me. Amen!). Luther’s famous words at the Diet of Worms in 1521 ultimately sealed his breach with the Catholic Church. In Nuremberg his ideas were quickly absorbed and the Sodalitas Martiniana, an association of influential citizens (including, amongst others, the famous painter Albrecht Dürer) successfully spread Luther’s body of thought. Furthermore, the City Council appointed pro-Lutheran preachers to vacant clerical positions – one of whom was Andreas Osiander.
But following the decrees of the Diet of Worms in May 1521, Nuremberg was forced to perform a dangerous balancing act between demands for reforms and its own political status as a free imperial city, depending on the protection and benevolence of emperor and pope. In 1525 the Reformation was officially established and Nuremberg ‘Protestantized’. Although both government and town population equally acclaimed this shift, the years before 1525 were extremely unpredictable and the production and distribution of reformatory writings and ideas went hand in hand with risks and danger.
In this time especially one citizen of Nuremberg raised his voice: After a literary silence of three years the shoemaker Hans Sachs became the poetic voice of Luther’s reformatory case. His poem ‘The Wittenberg Nightingale’ (1523) immediately became an enormous success and earned Luther an everlasting sobriquet.
Hans Sachs‘ silent years and the enormous success of the “Wittenberg Nightingale”
Scholarship often reacts with perplexity to the fact that Hans Sachs (an exceptionally productive writer) evidently composed nothing between the summers of 1520 and 1523. But we do know that Sachs bound together forty tractates and sermons by Luther in 1522. Therefore, he must undoubtedly have been familiar with Luther’s basic works. Moreover, it can be assumed that he followed public discussions, listened to Osiander’s sermons and read reformatory pamphlets, which flooded the market, especially in the early years of the Reformation. Apparently, Sachs had need of this period of intense involvement with the ideas of the Reformation, before he finally decided upon supporting Luther’s case.
He made this decision known by publishing the “Wittenberg Nightingale” (WN) on the 8th of July in 1523. In this poem he proceeded against the Catholic Church by strongly polemicizing against it. In 1523 alone, the WN was published in seven editions and Sachs achieved nationwide fame as the poet and writer of the Reformation.
Wacht auf, es nahet gen den Tag! (Wake up, the day is nigh!)
Richard Wagner adopted Sachs’ famous opening lines to the WN in his opera ”The Mastersingers of Nuremberg” (article on Hans Sachs in Wagner’s opera) (1868) (Act 3 Scene 5):
Wacht auf, es nahet gen den Tag, ich hör’ singen im grünen Hag ein’ wonnigliche Nachtigal, ihr’ Stimm’ durchdringet Berg und Tal; die Nacht neigt sich zum Okzident, der Tag geht auf von Orient, die rotbrünstige Morgenröt’ her durch die trüben Wolken geht.
These verses evocatively introduce the antithesis of day and night, to which Sachs repeatedly returns during the course of the poem in order to illustrate the contrast between Lutheran and Catholic doctrine.
1. Elaboration of the allegory Blinded by treacherous moonlight, the sheep left their shepherd and pasture to follow the lion into wilderness. But he sets traps for them, killing the ones he caught. Furthermore, they are tormented by wolves and snakes. As the nightingale starts to sing the sheep awake from their blindness and enrage the lion. However, even with the help of his many allies (waltesel (donkey), schwein (pig), pöck (goat), katz (cat), schnecken (snail), frösch (frog) and wiltgens (wild geese)) he does not succeed in silencing the songbird. The nightingale continues to pronounce the daybreak and finally the remaining sheep return auß dyser wilde / Zuo irer weyd und hirten milde (from this wilderness / to the mildness of their pasture and shepherd).
2. Resolution of the allegory In the second part of the WN Sachs deciphers the allegory, starting with the following verses:
Nun das ir klerer mugt verstan So that you may understand clearly Wer die lieplich nachtigall sey Who the sweet nightingale is Die uns den hellen tag auß schrey Pronouncing us the new bright day Ist doctor Martinus Lutther It is Doctor Martin Luther Zuo Wittenberg Augustiner Augustinian from Wittenberg Der uns auffweckt von der nacht Who awakens us from the night Darein der monschein uns hat bracht In which moonlight has led us
Sachs then continues to solve every element of the allegory further. The monschein (moonlight) is the menschen lere der Sophisten (doctrine of the sophists [no link to the philosophers of ancient Greece, but a term of abuse meaning ‘equivocator’]), the lion is Pope Leo X, the mortstrick (traps) are des Babstes netz (the Pope’s webs), the wolves are the Pope’s supporters (bishops, provosts, priests, prelates and all chaplains). Sachs’ anger quickly inflames when reflecting on existing abuses in the Church. He lists them in the form of short catchphrases, pointing at the falsehood of Catholic practices.
The nightingale is Luther and the lion is the Pope – and the lion’s allies also resemble existing actors of religious dispute.
Das wilde schwein (pig): Johannes Eck Der bock (goat): Hieronymus Emser Die katz (cat): Thomas Murner Der waltesel (donkey): Augustin von Alveldt Der schneck (snail): Johann Cochlaeus
Masking ones enemies as animals not only dehumanises them, but also assigns them their animal’s associated negative character traits. This was hardly new, but Sachs was the first to connect Luther with the nightingale, using popular conceptions of the bird as a superior singer and a mediator of wisdom.
3. Luther’s doctrine, including the appeal to the reformatted Christian to remain steadfast and faithful at the face of hazard In opposition to his negative remarks on Catholic doctrine, Sachs gives ein kurtzer anzeig der leere doctor Martini Luthers (a short description of Doctor Martin Luther’s teaching).
Luther states that es sey keyn sundt / Dann was uns hab verboten got (nothing is sin / except what God alone has forbidden). By referring to this quotation, Sachs puts special emphasis on stilling the fear of eternal agony in hell. He seeks to reveal the Church’s deceptions in the sale of indulgence letters. Following Luther’s accusations, Pope Leo X ordered his persecution, fearing loss of power and revenues. But Luther blyb bestendig in sein sachen / Unnd gar keyn wort nit wyderryfft (remained steadfast in his convictions / And did not revoke a single word). The poem closes with Sachs’ plea to the reader to remain steadfast at the threat of expulsion, hatred, captivity and violence.
The Bodleian’s Wittenberg Nightingale. Images left to right: Preface 1 Tr.Luth. 31 (195) Pre-1701 Weston Photo: Charlotte Hartmann; Preface 2 Tr.Luth. 31 (195) Pre-1701 Weston Photo: Charlotte Hartmann; Preface 3 Tr.Luth. 31 (195) Pre-1701 Weston Photo: Charlotte Hartmann
The Bodleian Library has one edition of the WN – a well-preserved print from about 1525. It does not feature the distinct woodcut on the title page, which can be found in various other editions. The print is transmitted in a miscellany, which is part of the rare book collection Tractatus Lutherani. Hence, its signature is Tr. Luth. 31 (195). Other works in this volume include pamphlets by Heinrich von Kettenbach, Martin Luther and Andreas Osiander.
The WN’s preface claims that for a long time the true faith in God had been overshadowed by laws, regulations and commandments, which were solely imposed by the Church. Sachs states that Martin Luther alone freed the Gospel from these bonds to proclaim it in its true meaning once again and he, Hans Sachs, would seek to relay it in this spirit. In the WN, Sachs demonstrates his distinct style, which unfolds in the combination of Christian doctrine and anti-Roman critique of the pope and enables the gemeinen man (ordinary man) to engage in the theological discourse of the time. This style also becomes apparent in later works of his early Reformation literature.
Based on the strong polemic of the text, it can be assumed that proselyting Christians from Catholic to Lutheran faith was not the primary function of the text, but that its main intention was to encourage already reformed Protestants in their belief and to make it possible for them to get involved in controversial contemporary debates over the Reformation.
