End of winter troubadour poetry

Very happily, I begin to love a joy from which I will have more pleasure; and, since I want to be back to joy I well ought to, if I can, aim for the best; since I love the best, without doubt, that one could see or hear. I (you know as much) should not brag nor dare I praise myself much; but if ever could one joy blossom, this one should above all take roots and shine above all others just as the day turns brighter. And never could anyone portray it for in want nor wish nor in though nor in imagination such a joy can't find an equivalent; and if one wanted to praise it properly, he couldn't do it in a year. Every joy must lower itself and all royalty obey my lady, because of her kindness and of her sweet pleasant visage; and he will live a hundred times longer who can partake of her love. Because of her joy can the sick turn healthy and because of her displeasure can a healthy man die and a wise man turn mad and a handsome man lose his beauty and the most courteous turn into a lout and the most churlish turn into a courtier. Since nobody can find a worthier woman nor eyes see one, nor mouth describe one, I want to keep her all for me, to bring freshness to my heart and to renew my flesh, so that it cannot grow old. If my lady wants to grant me her love, I am ready to receive it and to reciprocate I am ready to discretion and cajoling and to say and do what she pleases, and to keep her worth into account and to further her reputation I don't dare communicate by proxy, so much I am afraid to anger her; nor I myself, so much I am afraid to fail, dare declare my love precisely; But she ought to choose what is best for me because she knows that I shall be saved through her.

Guilhen de Peiteus

A thought on modern heraldry

This week there was an article in the National Post about how Canada's heraldic authority was producing some of the best and most imaginative modern heraldry around. The focus was on the supporters, the animals (usually) who support the shield with the arms proper on them.

It was all positive in the article but I could not help but think that different message might be appropriate, too. The article might say that Canada's top heraldic artists are so good that they can take any bizarre thought you have for a supporter and make it look not only decent but really excellent.

And if the heraldic artists said that about themselves I would be the first to agree with them. This is amazing work.

My taste in heraldry is focused on the shields, however. I'm interested in early heraldry and things like supporters have always seemed to me to be later clutter. But even there, Canada's heralds shine. Just look at the coat of arms above, the one for the Québec City ballet company. I gasped when I saw it first. Brilliant and pure.

The Square (2013) – an intense look at the Egyptian revolution

The Square (meaning, Tahrir Square) is an Egyptian movie that follows several people from Cairo through their political journey through the  recent upheavals in their country. The filmmakers caught several eloquent and serious people to be their subjects, to show through their debates and ruminations what kind of different ideals have been present in this remarkable historical moment.

I have been thinking recently that nobody knows what's going on in Egypt, and I feel that more strongly now, if a bit more hopefully. All the possibilities are there, good and bad. And if you ever thought that people outside of "the West" could not possibly understand democracy and human rights, here's your refutation.

Of course there are no guarantees that they will achieve a worthwhile democracy, but many of them know that they want it and it's not so different from what many people in Canada and elsewhere want.

As of today The Square is available on Netflix and I highly recommend it.

Wrapping up a seminar on chivalry

This year I once again taught a fourth-year undergraduate seminar on chivalry.  Since it is quite possible that I may never teach it again, I am glad to say that it was a particularly satisfying iteration of the course.  Below you will find one student's concluding thoughts.  It may give you an idea of how happy I am, and why.
 

Chivalry Culmination
by Elisia Evans

              Throughout this course my understanding of chivalry has developed and changed regarding the new information that was introduced to our class.  As new material was introduced I asked myself new questions about the topic and eventually landed on a conclusion that encompasses a variety of sources that were studied in class. I have come to see chivalry as a combination of the ideas I developed on the subject throughout the course.

              At the beginning of the course I presented my ideas of chivalry as relating to the daring hero of Hyrule, Link, and the steadfast honour and sense of duty of Brienne of Tarth. To my understanding of the time chivalry was a term used to describe the traits of these two characters: dutiful, honourable, reliable, and brave.  To pledge fealty and keep it, or to embark on quests at great personal risk, were examples of chivalrous behaviour. As far as I was concerned at this stage of my understanding of chivalry, this was the extent of the meaning of the word.

              After reading Charny and Lull at the beginning of the course I was introduced to the true complexity of the idea of ‘chivalry’. Charny’s A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry was one of the most valuable sources we explored in this course because it provided a decent foundation for an accurate understanding of this elusive concept. Charny introduces a much more serious and professional definition of chivalry. He outlines the different types of knights and the different methods they might use to gain prestige in their knightly tasks. He often declares that “he who does best is most worthy (Charny 52)” and constantly asks these men to do more. This is extremely demanding considering how difficult being a mediocre knight would be, let alone one that meets Charny’s crazy standards. There is also an entire section devoted to the discouragement of physical pleasure entitled “A Good Man-at-Arms Should not Pamper his Body (68)”. This passage denies knightly men even soft sheets on their beds. The message I took away from Charny was that being a good knight sucked but was apparently worth it for the reputation and honour with which it is associated. Lull’s book The Book of the Order of Chivalry explained to me that these self-torturing men at arms were part of an ‘order’. This was important to my understanding of chivalry because it introduced the idea of chivalry being a type of legitimate profession or club. At this stage in my understanding of chivalry I was not sure who would ever in a million years want to attempt to meet Charny’s standards and enter into the world of ‘chivalry’.

              The identity of these men was soon illuminated by Duby’s article, “Youth in Aristocratic Society”. This was one of the most valuable sources for my academic understanding of knights, as well as a personal favourite. This article explained that knights were often the second sons of wealthier families and could not inherit land and thus had to make their own way in the world. For entertainment and a chance at a future they wandered around getting into trouble and fighting one another. These men developed into professional warriors, embarked on crusades and fought in tournaments. This article explains the origins of the men who are expected to dedicate themselves to the ideas proposed by Charny. My ponderings concerning the employment of these men was answered by our studies of jousts, challenges, and warfare. The literature concerning knights, such as the stories of Lancelot and Erec, gave me an impression of how the public viewed these men at arms because this was the media representation of chivalry to the literate populace. From these sources I was able to gather the origins of knights and that they were typically romanticized and respected because of their valiant deeds of arms and reputed honour.

              After learning about the relationship between knights and civilians I was completely surprised. During the 100 years war, on which I found Knights and Peasants to have been a valuable read, men at arms were reported to have taken part in some bad behaviour. Fields were burned, cities were sacked, and non-combatants were forced to participate as a means of survival. This blurred the idea of chivalry in my eyes.  In his book Wright points out that only a small number of the men at arms participating were actually members of the order of chivalry. This does not ease my mind because in Gillingham’s article on William the Marshal he describes the role of chivalry in warfare as being selected and somewhat diluted. There does not seem to be much room for an honour code when one is fighting for his life. However, I have deduced that Chivalry’s role in warfare was to ensure safe ransoms. Knight’s would only willingly surrender to other gentlemen and would then be ransomed back to their king.  It seems to be that at this moment men at arms remembered the rules with which they so strongly abide during peace. My overall conclusion, although incomplete at this time, was that Chivalry was a pipedream; people saw its value much more in theory than in practice.

              The final development of my idea of chivalry brought all of this together. I settled on the idea that knights had unrealistic expectations put on them by men like Charny and their adoring public. I now see chivalry as the equivalent of a gentlemen’s club; select members, large egos, a great deal of games played, and not much accomplished. I also believe that chivalry is swept under the rug during war, especially a war as frustrating and confusing as the 100 years war. However I would like to point out that in the document on jousts during a peace period there was a great deal of tournaments hosting chivalrous behaviour which shows the drive to remember chivalry as soon as the fighting subsides. In modern day warfare there is not much difference, soldiers forget their restraint and sometimes their morality while they are at war. In conclusion knights were real men who sometimes did not match up to the idea presented by Charny and the authors of the Epics read in class. I think this is why the idea of chivalry is so hard to place. 

Phil Paine reissues his "Meditations on Democracy."

My friend Phil Paine deserves some kind of designation as a great Canadian eccentric

The only thing preventing this is that the country is full of them.

But really, this is inaccurate. Phil is a truly original thinker, the most original I have ever met. He and I have sometimes worked together, with him coming up with the unexpected insights and me reorganizing them into a form acceptable to normal intellectuals and scholars. What I have done with Phil may be some of my most important work.

A few days ago I went over to his blog at PhilPaine.com and found that Phil
had reorganized it to feature its most important content, his Meditations on Democracy.

Go have a look. 

The meaning of chivalry

If you are a serious student of history, paid or unpaid, it sometimes comes as a shock to realize how little other people know about the problems and eras that you find fascinating, or the amazing misconceptions they sometimes have.

This school year I have been teaching a fourth year seminar on chivalry, and I started out the course by asking the students to characterize or define chivalry, not so much in a formal definition sense, but by relating the concept to stories, symbols, or analogies. At the end of last month I asked them as the seminar started winding down, to tell me what they had learned about chivalry, and what sources in particular had shaped their current view.

I wasn't really surprised to see three of the students talk about chivalry as courtesy as the view that they started out with. But still, look at this:

Prior to taking this class, it would suffice to say, I knew next to nothing about the concept of chivalry, except for within the context is used today.… My understanding of chivalry was limited to the concept of acting in a polite fashion, holding doors, surrendering the shotgun seat of a vehicle etc. I wondered how an entire class could be devoted to the study of "being polite."

 There you are.

Lawrence Martin on the history of Canadian democracy

Canada’s forgotten independence day

March 11, 1848, was the day when Canada’s united colonies got responsible government. You might go so far as to call it our independence day – the day real democracy arrived.

It followed decades of struggle against British rule, the rebellions of 1837 and 1838 being foremost examples. Power passed from colonial elites to citizens when a Reform government headed by Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin was sworn in that day by governor-general Lord Elgin. The Reformers had won an election over conservative forces aligned to the monarchy.

Baldwin and LaFontaine, leaders of the territories now known as Ontario and Quebec, convinced their colonial masters that allowing power to reside with an elected assembly instead of a governor’s appointed executive council was the only way to stave off anarchy.

In the context of times, of so many countries seeking and failing to establish democratic systems, it was a remarkable achievement. We were “almost first out of the modern democracy gate,” writes John Ralston Saul in his book on LaFontaine and Baldwin. While you probably wouldn’t want to high-five our democracy today, given what it has become, we were trailblazers back then.

Europe-wide democratic revolutions marked 1848. Counterrevolutions followed shortly thereafter, and one was ignited in Canada. In 1849, reactionary mobs burned down the parliament buildings, then located in Montreal. But LaFontaine and Baldwin handled the crisis in a spirit of conciliation and compromise, as they had in bringing their culturally divergent provinces into union years earlier.

No such spirit prevailed in the United States, which was on the road to civil war, or in European jurisdictions where upheaval would mark the road to democratic legitimacy and world wars would be triggered.

The model put in place in our colonies was sound enough to endure through time with minimal politically inspired violence and bloodshed. The Baldwin and LaFontaine ministry decentralized power, establishing municipal governments. It brought in a modern legal and jury system and established secular public universities.

John A. Macdonald became our nation maker, as biographer Richard Gwyn calls him, but these men put in place the foundation. Lawyers by profession, they were not your typical win-at-all-costs politicians. Baldwin was a soft-spoken man who went about his work with a sunken heart. The pain at the loss of his adored wife at a young age never escaped him. But inescapable too was his devotion to the principles of democracy, social equity and justice. LaFontaine had that same commitment. He overcame strident opposition from francophone leaders in realizing his vision of a democratic union of the two cultures.

Not to be overlooked is Nova Scotia’s Joseph Howe, who secured responsible government for Nova Scotia two months earlier than Ontario and Quebec. His philosophy of governance paralleled that of Baldwin and LaFontaine. “The only questions I ask myself are, What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?” he said.

That’s a credo today’s political leaders would do well to heed. The responsible government fashioned in 1848 was primitive in many ways, but the form of democracy, in which the executive was controlled by the elected assembly, was a purer one than now. Now, the system is more akin to what existed prior to March 11, 1848, when the governor had all the power.

It’s all the more reason to remember that date, but we don’t. Academic David E. Smith notes in his book, Across the Aisle, that Canada’s contribution to responsible government used to be “a venerable theme in Canadian high school classes.” Sadly, he notes, that’s no longer the case.

Somebody will be interested in this book post...

From The Medieval Review:

Rouse, Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse. Foreword by Robert Somerville.
Bound Fast with Letters: Medieval Writers, Readers, and Texts.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xvi, 570.
$89.00 ISBN: 9780268040338.

   Reviewed by Alexander Andrée
        University of Toronto
        alexander.andree@utoronto.ca


Eighteen articles published over a span of forty years find a bele
conjointure
in this delightful volume, which takes its reader on a
journey through one thousand years of book production. Divided into
three sections and an epilogue, this collection offers its reader
seasoned research on such seemingly disparate topics as wax tablets,
Donatist Aids to Biblical Study, Carolingian liturgical texts,
twelfth-century monastic sermons, the Waldensians and the schools, the
manuscripts of Richard de Fournival, crusading collections in
fourteenth-century France, a mysterious golden peacock, the habits of
wandering scribes and traveling artists, and much more.

Though article collections often seem to lack cohesion, this is not
the case with the present book. Its editors wisely saw fit to
privilege concept over context as their guiding organizational
principle. A brand new introduction, ditto vignettes for each section,
uniform formatting and new page numbering further contribute to the
unified aspect of the volume. And this book is, after all, about
books. It covers scribal practices across a thousand years,
parchmenting and decoration, patronage and book production. Though a
book devoted exclusively to matters of codicology may perhaps run the
risk of being a rather dry read except for the ardent specialist, this
is, once again, not the case here. On the contrary, the authors
consistently contextualize the material dimension of their manuscripts
as they call attention to the implications this material has on
medieval culture at large. This makes for a riveting read, which has
something to offer every kind of medievalist. In short, this is
"integral palaeography" at its best. Leonard Boyle would surely have
been proud.

A most impressive aspect of this volume, and one that shines through
most of its pages, is the special care with which the authors describe
and contextualize the single manuscripts--or even manuscript leaves--
held in North America. If the proper scrutiny of two Carolingian
bifolia, for example, can yield unexpected insights into "previously
unknown monastic liturgical practices in late-ninth or early-tenth-
century Burgundy" (60), one can only imagine the fruits that might be
reaped through equally detailed research into the much richer and more
plentiful European manuscript holdings. This message can certainly be
extrapolated from the opening section, "Writing It Down:
Practicalities and Imagery, 500-1200" (13-112), where we also learn
how a manuscript kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library provides
the hitherto missing link between the Spanish Waldensians, on the
brink of heresy, and the schools of Paris. It shows how the former,
through tolerance and understanding, could be brought into the
orthodox fold of the Church ("The Schools and the Waldensians: A New
Work by Durand of Huesca," 89-112).

The central portion, "Patrons and the Use of Books, 1250-1400," is the
book's longest (115-419) section and it perhaps reflects the authors'
keenest interests. The main theme here is how, and it what context, a
number of French vernacular texts were produced and circulated in the
high Middle Ages. First comes a study of the surviving manuscripts of
the Old French vernacular poet and patron of Latin manuscript
production Richard de Fournival (d. 1260). Judging by his list of
personal book-holdings, the Biblionomia, which mentions no less
than 132 volumes, it has long been held that Richard was instrumental
in preserving and transmitting rare works of classical Antiquity. Back
in 1973, when the Rouses originally published on this subject, they
were able to identify thirty-eight surviving manuscripts from this
list, most of which were held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France
in Paris, with a few exceptions uncovered in such distant locations as
Bern, Edinburgh and Florence. The authors have since successfully
identified six additional codices (in Paris, Leiden, Valenciennes and
at the Vatican) as originally belonging to de Fournivals's library.
The longest article in the volume, "Context and Reception: A Crusading
Collection for Charles IV of France" (215-279), considers how a Roman
tractate on warfare, Vegetius' De re militari, copied in the
company of the "right" texts and diffused under favourable
circumstances, could be turned into a piece of papal propaganda. In a
feat of codicological sleuthing worthy of a Lord Peter Wimsey, the
Rouses manage to show not only that Vegetius' tractate was copied
alongside crusading literature at Paris in the early part of the
fourteenth century, but also that it was assembled for King Charles IV
of France at the behest of none other than Pope John XXII, whose
crusading plans were shared by the French monarch.

Particularly fascinating in the third section, "Commercial Book-
Makers, French and Italian, 1290-1410" (422-522), is chapter 13,
"Wandering Scribes and Traveling Artists: Raulinus of Fremington and
His Bolognese Bible" (423-458), which reconstructs the career of a
West Country Englishman using information gleaned from the Bible he
copied toward the end of the thirteenth century. Not only were the
authors able to gather that he learned his trade in Paris and worked
in Bologna, they obtained insight into the scribe's personal life.
Contrary to the habits of most copyists, Raulinus left personal notes
scattered throughout the volume, not in the margins or otherwise
separate from the text, but as part of the text proper. From these
notes (the Rouses count sixteen of varying length, some of which are
in verse), Raulinus emerges, even by modern standards, as "lustful,
coarse, and self-absorbed" (425). His notes normally concern his
encounters with two women, Meldina and Vilana. The former is described
sometimes as a harlot, whore or leech and other times as a blossoming
rose and a jewel of womankind, whose love for Raulinus is commensurate
to the amount of change in his pockets. Vilana, according to Raulinus,
stole his cloak, for which she obtained the epithet, "dung-heap."
Indeed, it is the way in which the Rouses illuminate the human
dimension of scribal activity (which is sadly so rare among surviving
witnesses) that makes the book a cohesive delight to read. I only wish
Raulinus' comments could have been printed as an appendix--like many
of the other texts encountered in manuscripts in this volume--rather
than being relegated to the footnotes. For, as stated above, Raulinus
was not one to relegate his thoughts to the margins of his materials.

This book is undeniably a florilegium, but one hardly notices
that the flores have been plucked from different pastures.
Together, they give off the enticing scent of codicology come alive.







The Medieval Review
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3631