Favorite entries 2015

This year's best.

Kim Stanley Robinson – a giant among men (with some others)!

I am reading fiction for the fun of it. I don't have a lot of professional reading and for the first time in my life I am in very easy walking distance of a branch of a decent public library system. I don't have to plan a trip to the library, I just have to remember when the branch is open.

One of the things that I am reading is science fiction that's strong on presenting future (and past) history. I have in the past read Neil Stephenson, whose work sometimes falls into that category; now I am getting into Kim Stanley Robinson. KSM wrote what I think is the best American utopian SF ever created, the Mars trilogy. I read it a ways back and I enjoyed it tremendously. In the last month or so I have read two large KSM books that rethinks the developments of world history in the early modern and modern eras by creating alternative histories.

One of them is Galileo's Dream which follows Galileo Galilei both through his own life in the 17th century and his quantum-theory-implemented trips to the Galilean moons of Jupiter in the year 3000. There is a tremendous amount of philosophical thinking embedded in this book, as we follow Galileo's life and researches in great detail and the efforts of human colonists in the Jupiter system to encourage and protect and even sacrifice him to make sure that Galileo's thought develops and is disseminated in such a way that humanity benefits from the Scientific Revolution and is not destroyed by it. There is a great deal of discussion of physics, ancient and modern, and more about the politics of the 17th century Vatican than you want to know.

Another KSM book that I am finishing up is the Years of Rice and Salt, which almost reads like a first draft of Galileo's Dream. It is an alternate history based on what might have happened if the Black Death had killed off the people of Western, Eastern and Northern Europe while only diminishing the population of the rest of Eurasia. It is a world where Christianity has been eliminated as a cultural influence, and the major cultures are Chinese, Muslim and Iroquois. Plus Buddhism.

Rice and Salt has a lot of explication but it does not lack human interest. We are given to understand that many of the characters we meet in different eras are reincarnations who meet occasionally in the bardo, the Buddhist hell to talk about how tough it is to make a difference in the earthly life. The characters are interesting in their earthly existence and every once in a while KSM throws in a vivid description of a place or a situation. For instance, here is KSM discussing the lack of trees in the Chinese capital after the tremendous sufferings and dislocations of the Long War (sort of like World Wars I and II, but much longer):

Every tree in the city had been cut down during the Twelve Hard Years, and even now the city was bare of almost all vegetation; the new trees had been planted with spiked fences protecting them, and watchmen to guard them at night, which did not always work; the poor old guards would wake in the mornings to find the fence there but the tree gone, cut at the ground for firewood or pulled out by the roots for sale somewhere else, and for these lost saplings they would weep inconsolably, or even commit suicide.

Do you have to be a historian to like these books? No, KSM sells a lot of books and the readers can't possibly be all historians.

I should mention a third author who has a touch of this alternative history but who actually explores even bigger ideas. Robert Charles Wilson is somebody who I met on my first month in Toronto, back in the early 70s. He is one smart guy and it shows in his fiction. RCW has written a variety of books, but some of the best ones combine a lot of contemplation of the history of the whole universe (sort of like Olaf Stapledon) with individual human characters. If you know Stapledon, you know that's an unusual combination.

Justin Trudeau – a giant among men?

I have not made up my mind about Justin Trudeau. I expect that he will disappoint (not so much me as the large number of his current fans). And hey, he is Liberal. And finally, I was never that fond of his father (not that I expected J. Trudeau to be a reincarnation of his father).

But OMG! Have you seen that video of Trudeau greeting the first Syrian refugees to land in Toronto two or three days ago? Telling them that they will leave the buildings as Canadians?

Trudeau greets the refugees

Canada is coming out of ten years of the rule of the man without a heart – a characterization that the man so characterized pretty much owned up to himself. If there was a way of making a policy less generous and more divisive, he found it. If a policy used up some of the reputational capital that previous governments and private individuals had earned, or sucked up to the great powers while ignoring Canada's need and desire to maintain an independent international identity, our just past prime minister enthusiastically adopted it. And the extent of the rot he encouraged and promoted in Canada's institutions – the civil service and Parliament in particular -- will only be revealed over years and years of investigation and the testimony by people no longer afraid to speak up.

This is a man who was perfectly happy to say that he was unmoved by a picture of a dead baby on a beach. It's not that the past PM lacked a certain degree of support. Any country has its fearful and ungenerous elements. But when those elements are made the foundation of the ruling party's efforts to create a permanent ruling coalition, god help the country so afflicted.

But that dead baby reminded Canadians that they are by and large more generous than that. Justin Trudeau was given the opportunity to embody the generous side of Canadians, and he took it. Enthusiastically and without compromise. While people all over the world were freaking out about the supposed dangers of admitting refugees, Trudeau (however sincerely, however calculatedly) made a major commitment to work with private organizations (who were already gearing up) to do something to help the Syrians. And has stuck to that commitment, despite the supposed political dangers.

To look at the situation from the crass political angle, the ungenerous approach taken by the past government may go down as one of the most amazing own goals in Canada's history. A year ago, six months ago, the past government could gain a certain amount of traction by presenting Trudeau as "not ready for prime time." Then they handed him an issue that he could exploit, not just during the election campaign but after. Has there ever been a newly elected PM whose stature was so great so soon after his initial victory? Who has identified himself with what many Canadians like to think is the best aspect on this country? Who in fact has made it clear that if the government wants to do something, and has the backing of a good part of the citizenry, it can DO SOMETHING WORTHWHILE?

This could all blow over and the Liberals may end up looking like a group of sad sacks – hey, they've done it before. But maybe not. This could be an important turning point.

The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert A. Heinlein

I first read this book about half a century ago when I was a teenager. I came back to it because I have a relative working for Space X, and the book is about a private enterprise effort to get to the moon. I was fascinated to see or remind myself that Heinlein was as interested in politics and business and human organizations in general as he was in the scientific aspects and engineering aspects of spaceflight. I gave this three stars on Goodreads but be warned this is a book that will seem really quite old to most readers. Already back in the 60s, when the stories were about 15 years old, it seemed quite old to me. Now it's a relic of an older era for sure.

Image: The edition I have. Not a typical science fiction cover illustration of the time. I'd guess that Signet was going for a more mainstream readership. I wonder if it worked?

Another appealing book -- Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble: Pardon Letters in the Burgundian Low Countries, by Arnade and Prevenier,

From The Medieval Review

Arnade, Peter, and Walter Prevenier, eds. Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble: Pardon Letters in the Burgundian Low Countries. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 244. $26.95. ISBN: 978-080-1453-465.

Reviewed by Justine Firnhaber-Baker

University of St Andrews

jmfb@st-andrews.ac.uk

Medieval pardon tales and their tellers have been informing and amusing students of late medieval history for a long time now. This most recent study from two eminent scholars draws on Burgundian ducal letters of pardon to paint a lively and lovely picture of fifteenth-century life in the Low Countries. Weaving together a series of anecdotes drawn from the letters, the authors explore such historiographically resonant themes as honour and vengeance; feuding and peace-making; gender, kinship, and family; and the historicity of emotions. Each chapter is followed by translations of several of the letters discussed in the text.

To a greater extent than Natalie Zemon Davis, whose Fiction in the Archives galvanized the study of pardon letters, Arnade and Prevenier are focused on the social reality they believe recoverable from these texts rather than their narrative logic. [1] Whenever possible, they have gone beyond the text of the letter to find other archival sources that shed new light on the pardon's tale and its teller, embedding them more fully in the social and political world they occupied. The authors are nevertheless mindful both of the literary constraints that crafting a narrative imposed on supplicants and the likely mendacity of some of their stories, which had to seem pardonable no matter how dubious the facts. As they point out, the tales in the pardons often echo the sorts of stories found in the contemporary story collection the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Arnade and Prevenier also pay careful attention to the judicial procedures and political context in which a pardon was enmeshed. One did not simply procure a pardon and skip merrily away; the story had to be verified before ratification and opposing parties could object and sometimes did so successfully. There were also political considerations, which, as the authors repeatedly demonstrate, could tip the balance of ducal favour even in the face of aggravated culpability. The authors' commitment to the careful source criticism of these complex texts is a model for any historian.

This is both a deeply learned book and a richly entertaining one. Footnotes, though kept to a minimum, point toward the extensive historiographical traditions in which the authors are fully conversant and to which they themselves have contributed a great deal. So, although the authors are mostly telling stories in this book, the reader can rest easy that the evidence is not merely anecdotal. And in fact, Arnade and Prevenier have great stories to tell, ranging from the very funny to the profoundly sad. We are introduced to the full social panoply of late medieval Burgundy, from the rich and connected widow of one of the duchy's top courtiers to a poor serving boy of a travelling Italian merchant. Readers will come away from this book feeling like they have been to fifteenth-century Burgundy, to its dirty taverns and raucous public squares, its draughty castles and its cosy inns.

In the four chapters that follow their excellent introduction to late medieval Burgundy and its sources, Arnade and Prevenier use the pardons' stories to "expose the norms of society and lay bare its sinews, its social layers, and its gender expectations" (4). In chapter one, on "Disputes, Vendettas, and Political Clients," they show how violent conflicts and their resolution were embedded in the family, professional, and political matrices that structured medieval Burgundian life. The authors define only very loosely those notoriously protean terms "vendetta" and "feud." This seems fair enough, given medieval sources' own avoidance of strict definitions when it comes to such violence. [2] The authors argue that pardons functioned to resolve these violent disputes when the normal avenues of arbitration and settlement had failed. The importance of this civil function was thus greater than in the French pardons, which usually only remitted the criminal penalties and any civil penalties owed to the state and in many cases depended on the parties having already arrived at a peace settlement. The state's interest in pardons was great though, for pardons not only reified the duke's sovereign prerogative, they were also useful tools for shoring up political alliances and bestowing patronage on loyal clients.

Chapter two continues the focus on dispute, vengeance, and violence, turning especially to adultery and other sexually-connected crimes, like infanticide. In this chapter, Arnade and Prevenier are particularly interested in male honour and how its injury provoked violence. It is perhaps heretical to say this, given how fundamental the concept of honour is to late medieval historiography of the past thirty years, but I did not find the homicidal protection of masculine honour to be as central to the letters published in the book as did Arnade and Prevenier. They assert that the letters "confirm honour's heaviest footprint in disputes centered on male sexual worth and status, as a term invoked to justify revenge or self-defense after an episode of male humiliation" (89), but the word honour appears in only one of the thirteen letters (as translated) that follow the text of the first two chapters. (There are also another four instances, by my count, in other documents discussed in the text of the second chapter). Now, limiting one's interpretation to the semantic incidences alone is certainly not a defensible strategy, but neither is assuming that honour was the crux of the issue in every case in which violence was preceded by (male) embarrassment or outrage. What does seem clear is that situations causing anger and/or shame could turn easily violent. It is arguable that we might get the same impression of modern life if we primarily read police blotters and divorce court proceedings. Moreover, the emphasis on honour/shame as an exclusively masculine concern seems to me misleading. The distressing story recounted in letter 12 of the noblewoman Antonie van Claerhout, who killed the newborn baby had she had birthed in secret and dumped the body in waste water (watching to be sure it sank) certainly suggests that reputation could be a matter of life or death for women, too.

In fact, one of the most valuable aspects of this book is its attention to women. Women are a major focus of chapter three, on marital conflict, which beautifully illustrates and explains the legal, social, and emotional issues in late medieval marriage, and chapter four, which is entirely devoted to the tale of the first known European actress Maria van der Hoeven and its many tellers. Women received a vanishingly small number of pardons, but in addition to discussing those few remissions with a female recipient, Arnade and Prevenier show how women were simultaneously absent from the letters as protagonists and witnesses but also central to them as the objects of dispute. As is frequently the case in recent historiography, a lot of this discussion is framed around the idea of masculinity and how it was constructed and performed in the workplace, the family, the tavern, etc. The flipside to this, of course, is that the masculine ideal and its social demonstration were predicated on a deep and virulent strain of misogyny, a topic almost absent from the discussion (with only one occurrence in the book's index, compared to 26 for 'masculinity'). This is a widespread feature of scholarship these days, but it is not one that should go unchallenged, especially in a work that gives us such engaging portraits of so many real women and their lives. For if the book confirms some of Dyan Elliott's recently expressed worries about the study of "gender" in medieval history, it also fulfils her hope that we continue to recover knowledge of historical women. [3]

Obviously, Arnade and Prevenier's is a qualitative approach, not a quantitative one. Sometimes, I wished for some of the stark statistics that make Claude Gauvard's study of the French pardons under King Charles VI so useful, and fewer assurances--no matter how true--that a feature of one letter was present in "countless" others. [4] But this book is doing something different and at least as valuable by weaving together the little stories in the pardons to tell a bigger story about how real people in Burgundy experienced the waning of the Middle Ages. Wearing its magisterial learning lightly, Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble is both a thoroughly informative and a delightfully amusing book.

-------- Notes:

1. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

2. Jeppe Büchert Netterstrøm, "Introduction: The Study of Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe," in idem and Bjørn Poulsen, eds., Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), 9-67.

3. Dyan Elliott, "The Three Ages of Joan Scott," American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1390-1403.

4. Claude Gauvard, "De grace especial": Crime, État et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991).. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 244. $26.95. ISBN: 978-080-1453-465.