Attention, all you Poles and Lithuanians!

From the Medieval Review, an excerpt from a long and positive book review. I know some of my friends and readers will be very interested!

To see this review with the correct diacritical marks, please see the web archive: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/22603/28523

Frost, Robert. The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, Vol. 1: The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385-1569. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xxv, 564. £85.00/$135.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-820869-3.

Reviewed by Piotr Górecki

University of California-Riverside

piotr.gorecki@ucr.edu

This could (but will not) be a short review. Robert Frost has written an outstanding book, as good as it is big--a major contribution to the history of the polity linked by the hyphen in its title, and to the history of early modern Europe. The book is a major benchmark in Frost's distinguished output addressing specific aspects of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's history, situated in the broad context of its contemporary Europe. [1] It consolidates Poland-Lithuania's entrance into top-tier scholarship conceived and written in English over the past twenty years or so [2]--a process parallel, and related to, an analogous inclusion of Poland, Lithuania, and East Central Europe in the general historiography of medieval Europe. [3]

Frost introduces his book as an histoire événementielle, prompting my one (slight) disagreement with him. The tag is too modest and self-effacing. The book's story frames, and brilliantly develops, a wide range of subjects, all visible to the reader. This is in fact a profoundly thematic book. That said, it is indeed structured as one continuous, seamless narration, huge in its scope and its particulars. Its subjects are, so to speak, layered throughout the text, and developed in its course. As a result, the book is best read in its entirety, from beginning to end--a most worthwhile exercise, because Frost's prose is outstanding: tightly-packed yet translucent, highly engaging and interesting in basic storytelling terms, and witty. We have here a lovely example of the current return of "narrative" history at its best, into the core of what we do.

Especially conspicuous are three interrelated subjects: people, places, and constructs. The book is a biographical gallery of a huge number of individually etched actors: kings of Poland; dukes and grand dukes of Lithuania; contenders for those two offices; and a myriad other specific protagonists who made up the political worlds presided by these rulers. No less important is a collective generic actor: the political community, [4] above all the royal or grand-ducal "council"; the noble, or knightly, "assembly," or "general assembly"; and higher-level collectivities, such as the "nobility," "boyars," "Poles," "Lithuanians," and, perhaps most recurrently, "community of the realm." The places are: the major realms, or polities--Lithuania, Poland, Masovia, and "Royal" Prussia [5]--of which the first two formed the principal union, the second two joined it through unions with Poland; the localities where the major phases of the story occurred, and left a written record; and the localities relevant to the governance and administration of the four polities comprising the union.

And there is much more...

Voting for a third-party candidate

When Americans talk about "third parties" they do so in the context of a political culture that for a very long time has given so much importance to a competition between two major parties that voting for or founding or working for a "third" party has to be assumed to be futile. Except, of course, for those who hold idealistic or even utopian hopes that can't be realized by working through one of the two major parties.

I have a pretty wide idealistic streak myself, but I find myself extremely frustrated by what I consider the unrealistic appreciation of the possibilities of American politics on the part of so-called protest voters. And not just American politics. We are taught that elections decide policies. I think it in a large polity like United States or Canada that is seldom the case. At least you and I as individuals can't guarantee that our needs and wishes will be addressed in any sort of direct way. Far more often we are in the position of voting against catastrophe and I believe that has to be the top priority. It's not just a matter of this year, though the situation in the United States is a very dramatic illustration. When people whose intellect and goodwill I respect talk about voting for the Greens or the Libertarians because they like some aspects of their programs, I want to scream that "the top priority this year is avoiding catastrophe."

That they don't realize how crucial this is makes me wonder where such protest voters were in the year 2000 when protest voting was a important factor in the election of George W. Bush. Think of the environmental damage and the disastrous state of the Middle East that can be traced back to Bush rather than Gore being the president when important issues had to be decided. The entire human community has suffered great harm that will go on for centuries because of the results of that election. The protest voters --what did they get for their idealistic stand?

Image: You can always vote for the regular guy.

Blogging medievalism: Sypeck and Gygax

Back about a decade ago, when I started this blog, I felt a bit like a Johnny-come-lately. Lots of professional medievalists, a pretty bright and eloquent bunch, were already churning out commentary or autobiographical reflections at a great rate. I had a long list of their blogs. Of course those days are pretty much dead, as bloggers have moved on to faster, simpler platforms like FB or Twitter &c. Blog lists at the side of many a blog link to forums that haven't been added to since 2011. But there are the honorable exceptions, for instance Jeff Sypeck's Quid Plura?. Jeff is a Charlemagne scholar who is both light and serious in his way of handling things, all sorts of things, including his own poetry. Long may Quid Plura? wave.
A good example of Jeff's virtues is the blog entry/review “Silhouettes and shadows watch the revolution…”. It is a discussion of the importance of Gary Gygax, a co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, and the significance of D&D itself. The focus of the post, however, is Sypeck's contention that despite the appearance of an interesting biography of Gygax, Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragonsthere is no full investigation of the life and thought of this key figure of the popular culture of the past half-century.
This passage says much:

Early on, Gygax supported his family as an insurance underwriter, but Witwer suggests that the main influence of this job on his game-writing hobby was the convenience of the office typewriter. I don’t doubt that the typewriter was handy—but isn’t it noteworthy that a guy who spent his days poring over actuarial data would go on to craft a game around pages and pages of probability-based tables? I wish Witwer had drawn this connection; there’s meaning in it. It’s charming that one of the quirkiest countercultural pastimes, now an endless wellspring of self-expression and creativity, has roots in a field that most people find utterly deadening.
The biggest surprise in Empire of Imagination pops up halfway through the book, when Witwer writes about conflicts between the Gygaxes and their children in the late 1970s:
Another point of dissension between Gary and his son was that Ernie had drifted away from his parents’ faith, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In times past, Gary had made attempts to pull away from gaming in favor of devoting more time to his faith, but such efforts were always short-lived. And while not “devout” by Jehovah’s Witness standards, Gary and Mary Jo had maintained the religious affiliation and expected their children to follow suit.
Wait—what? The Prime Mover of geekdom and godfather of role-playing games, dogged by accusations of promoting demonology and witchcraft, was a Jehovah’s Witness? That’s a heck of a revelation not to poke with a stick. Was he born into the religion? Did he adopt it as an adult? Witwer doesn’t say. Twenty pages later, Gygax and his wife break from their church over gaming, drinking, and smoking, and that’s that. But how can it be that the co-creator of a game steeped in magic, mysticism, polytheism, and violence was active in a faith most of us think of as uncompromising and austere? Are there traces of the religion in the design of D&D, and if so, what are they?
It’s clear from Witwer’s lengthy sketch that Gygax demands a thorough intellectual biography. He was a complex autodidact whose inner life wasn’t easy to categorize or explain, the product of an unrepeatable alchemy of place, time, and personality—but unless someone can conjure a compilation of interviews, letters, and reminiscences by family and friends, Empire of Imagination may be the best glimpse of his life we’re going to get. It’s engaging and earnest; it just doesn’t feel done.

Acts of the Apostles and the riots of the Roman Peace

I am currently reading the New Testament more or less in the order that it was written. I began with the Acts of the Apostles, which discusses the missionary efforts of Jesus's followers after his ascension to heaven.
Taking the Acts as a historical document, I am very impressed by how chaotic social religious and political scene was in this era of "Roman peace." Many of you know that during this apostolic era was characterized by strong opposition to the new Christian movement by a variety of better established Jewish and Greek/Roman parties. It is remarkable how nervous the established powers seem to have been – how quickly they ran to the Roman authorities to denounce the new religious movement. There is a lot of actual fighting described or implied, and of course sometimes the opponents of the Christians got them imprisoned, beaten up, and murdered.
We have to wonder-- at least I do – whether the reaction by the established religious authorities was justified or completely out of proportion. Is there a big difference between these two alternatives? Either way it's not exactly happy days in the Eastern Mediterranean in the first century A.D.
You might well come away with a much more sympathetic understanding of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who did his best to stay out of the conflict between the established Jewish authorities in Jerusalem and Jesus's movement. It may have been commonplace to credit the Romans and their representatives with peace and reform, but if you were one of the governors mentioned in Acts, you probably felt that your office was like a wild horse, and you would be lucky to stay on it.

A battle over the meaning of 9/11

My contribution to counteract the current effort of Facebook to censor a dissenting voice.