Objectivity and the teaching historian

Andrew Holt of Florida State College at Jacksonville recently asked some medieval historians (he is one himself) to comment on the possiblity of "objectivity" in the teaching of history. I was one of them. Here are the answers he received.
Objectivity and and the classroom: ten historians respond.
There are no big surprises, but the similarity of views here might be of interest to non-academic readers.

Who reads this stuff?

Back in the mid-1980s, I spun an article off my dissertation, The Fifth-century Chroniclers. The article was entitled "Prosper's Epitoma Chronicon: Was There An Edition of 443?" and was a brief discussion about...whether the 5th-century chronicler Prosper wrote an edition in A.D. 443! (As you may have guessed!) It could be taken as a fine example of scholarly nit-pickery, but it was worth doing because close scrutiny of ancient and medieval sources is and has been one of the methods we reconstruct the distant past. I thought it might help some readers somewhere while assuring potential employers that I was still at work.
But how many such readers could there be?
Well, this week I got a note from the Academia.edu site telling me that a Russian scholar was interested in having a look at the old article. I brushed it off and sent it off to the site. She saw it and thanked me.
Two days later the site has recorded 27!!!views. Good grief!
If any of you readers is really interested in the historiography of the Later Roman Empire and the origins of the medieval Latin chronicle tradition, the book version of The Fifth-century Chroniclers is still in print.
But if you are just vaguely curious about the answer to the question in the article's title: I said, probably not.
Image below: Somebody else's book on Prosper.

Guy Halsall: think with history, act in the present.

Guy Halsall sings, "You better free your mind instead!"

The point is this: HfB [Historians for Britain] and its opponents share exactly the same, entirely conventional approach to the ‘relevance’ of history to current political debate; in other words, to ‘why history matters’. That relevance, as is clear from any close reading of almost all of the contributions to the exchange, consists entirely in the deployment of historical ‘fact’. I find this, to be blunt, more than a tad wearisome. [The involvement of historians in the referendum on Scottish separatism took exactly the same tedious form.] What seems largely to be at stake is who can assemble the biggest pile of facts. This is not going to make much of a difference, let alone decisively carry the day, either way. By way of demonstration, and if you can bear it, just read ‘below the line’ on the on-line version of the ‘Fog in the Channel…’ piece. To quote the (in my estimation) criminally underrated Andrew Roachford, ‘I don’t want to argue over who is wrong and who is right’.

Let me row back from the extreme position that might be inherent in that statement. First, it is very important to deploy historical fact to counter misleading public presentations of what ‘history shows us’. This was another reason I signed up to the ‘Fog in the Channel…’ letter. There were some seriously dubious elements in Abulafia’s piece ... However, as I have said too many times to count, history (as opposed to chronicling or antiquarianism) is the process of thinking, interpretation, explanation and critique, carried out on the basis of those facts, it does not stop at the latter's simple accumulation (most historical 'facts' are, to me, not especially interesting in and of themselves: this happened; that did not happen – factual accuracy is a duty not a virtue).

More seriously, both sides essentially see the course of history (as established by these facts) as providing a set of tramlines governing the proper path we should take in future. This removes any kind of emancipatory potential from the study of history. Put another way, and to restate the counter-factual posited earlier, suppose you agreed with Abulafia (and after all he’s not wrong about everything) that Britain’s history was, fundamentally, profoundly different from that of mainland Europe and had run a quite separate course (there is a case that could be put to support that contention that would have to be taken seriously, even if it is not the one put forward by HfB). But suppose that, unlike him, you thought that this had been a terrible thing and thought that Britain needed to incorporate itself more fully in Europe. Or suppose that you thought that the authors of ‘Fog in the Channel…’ were fundamentally right that Britain’s history was entirely entwined with that of the mainland but that you thought that this was wholly regrettable. In still other words, suppose that – like me – you thought that the course of the past had no force and provided no secure or reliable guide at all to what ought to be done in future.

So, what would one be able to contribute to a debate on these (or other) issues if one held a (superficially) seemingly nihilistic view, like mine, of history as random, chaotic, ironic, and unpredictable, and of the past as having no ability in and of itself to compel anyone to do anything? What, so to speak, would be the point of history? Why would it matter?

In his excellent blog-post – in my view, the best intervention in this discussion by some way (impressive not least for its concision) – Martial Staub draws attention to the discontinuities of history that subvert any attempt at a unified narrative or quest for origins. This seems to me to point us at a much more valuable and sophisticated means by which the study of history (rather than ‘History’ itself, that somehow mystic object, or objective force) can make a political contribution. Every dot that is later joined up to make a historical narrative represents a point of decision, of potential or, if you prefer, of freedom, where something quite different could have happened. To understand any of these decisions, as again I have said many times before, it is necessary to look at what people were trying to do, at what the options open to them were, or those they thought were open to them, what they knew – in short at all the things that didn’t happen, which frequently include the intended outcomes. You cannot simply explain them as steps on a pre-ordained path towards a later result, or as the natural outcomes of the preceding events. Any present moment of political decision represents the same thing: a point of choice, of decision, which requires serious thought. It should not be closed down by the idea that some 'burden of history' or other compels us to go one way rather than another. Those decision points that I just called the dots joined up to make a story were, at their time, points of freedom when any number of things were possible. The unpicking of narrative constructions makes this very clear and that – in my view – is the point that emerges from historical study.

This lesson, for want of a better word (I mistrust ‘lessons from history’), points at a string of possible subversions. Staub points out the subversion of the ‘national’ story but at the same time it subverts any similar ‘European’ master narrative. Britain can be said to have had a history different from that of other European countries – true enough - but to no greater extent than any other region of Europe has a history different from the others. It may be true that at some points British history seemed to run on a course that bucked European trends, but exactly the same can be said of, for example, Italian or Spanish history at various points. What is Europe anyway? Is it any more natural a unit of analysis than any other? In the Roman period, the idea of thinking of the north of Africa as somehow a different area from the northern shore of the Mediterranean would be very odd. Indeed the Mediterranean basin can be seen as a unified area of historical analysis (who, after all, knows that better than David Abulafia?), rather than as different continents divided by a sea – perhaps one with different histories from northern Europe or the North Sea cultural zone (which obviously includes Britain). All of these points also contribute to a historical critique and dismantling of the idea of the nation (any nation) itself, not simply the national story (see also here). All historical narratives are constructs so (unless one is based upon the misuse or fabrication of evidence, or not staying true to the basic 'facts' of what did or did not happen) one cannot be claimed to be more accurate than another. No one can win an argument on that basis. The best that can happen (and it is important) is the demonstration that there is more than one story to be told.

Above all, what I find to be one of the most important contributions that historical study can make, in terms of social/political engagement, is the subversion of all reifications, of all attempts to render contingent categorisations as natural. And of course it similarly subverts claims to represent contingent oppositions as eternal or natural.

All these subversions arise from what I have repeatedly argued on this blog are historical study’s most important benefits: the critique of what one is presented with, as evidence, and the simultaneous requirement to see similarity – shared human experience – in difference and diversity, or to listen to and understand that evidence).

So I would contend that the view of history sketched above is very much not a disabling, nihilistic one but quite the opposite. The careful, sympathetic yet critical investigation of the traces of the past, the deconstruction of narrative, nation and so on, can and should free us from the burdens that people want to impose on us in the name of history. The appreciation of the once possible but now impossible potentials at the decision-points of the past can and should allow us to think twice about what people tell us are now impossibilities and open our minds to the potentials and possibilities of the present.

If you want a catchphrase, try this: think with history, act in the present.

Griping about the word medieval

This past week I was in Kalamazoo Michigan for the International Congress for Medieval Studies. It was the 50th such Congress at Western Michigan University, and a certain number of sessions were devoted to looking back over the past half-century or so.

Sure enough, some of those sessions (which I should point out were very good and interesting) included a lot of griping and grouching about the misuse and ambiguity of the word medieval. You would think that a bunch of scholars who by their very nature of their discipline are experts in the evolution of the meaning of words would by now have gotten over the fact that though it doesn’t make a lot of sense to call “the Middle Ages” by that term, and that coming up with a really good, chronological definition of those ages is impossible, we are stuck with the words medieval and Middle Ages anyway. But no, there is a lingering feeling that it should be possible to nail down these terms – Middle Ages, medieval – once and for all. Or ditch them. If all the experts agreed, everybody else would have to fall into line – right?

You know that’s not going to happen.

Scholars of the Middle Ages, like experts in any other field, feel they should be in control of the terminology that defines their work and gives them legitimacy. But the truth is that any important subject is contested between a whole bunch of different individuals and groups who have an interest in that field. A single word – medieval – is shattered into a variety of definitions, many of which are out of date – at least in the eyes of people working on the cutting edge of, say, “medieval studies.” Old assumptions and terms and generalizations which current practitioners have rejected hang on in popular and nonspecialist discussions.

This can be intensely irritating for people who know that certain phrases and analyses lost their cogency back in 1927 and want to talk about what their friends are doing in the field now. Nevertheless people whose business is words should really accept the fact that words like “medieval” have a number of popular meanings, and when one of them shows up in current discussion (when, for instance, a Game of Thrones shows up and is widely labelled as medieval, even though the world of Game of Thrones is not our earth at all), the fact can be dealt with a good-humored way. It certainly would reflect credit on any field where a good-humored approach was the norm.

David Parry made the most sensible remark of the entire week when he pointed out that an imprecise word like medieval has a lot of cultural value for people who make their living interpreting that era. Indeed there is a financial payoff being associated with it. As he said, “the word makes students registering for courses press the button on the screen that says ‘enroll.’ The phrase ‘early modern’ doesn’t have that effect. ”

Antoine de la Sale, Jean de Saintré. My review of a new translation

From The Medieval Review

De la Sale, Antoine. Jean de Saintré: A Late Medieval Education in Love and Chivalry. Trans. Roberta L. Krueger and Jane H. M. Taylor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 264. $59.95. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4586-8.

Reviewed by Steven Muhlberger

Nipissing University

stevem@nipissingu.ca

Translations are sometimes seen as a lesser form of scholarly endeavor. This is to my mind quite unfair. Medievalists should be among the first to acknowledge that we all bump up against our linguistic limitations and have to turn to translations for help. Translations allow us medievalists to decide, after mastering four or five languages, whether material in a sixth is going to be relevant to our research question. Of course without translations we would have no way of introducing our students to the evidence on which we build our historical reconstructions. The best translations are running commentaries on some historical subject, which provide far more than a literal representation of the original text. The best translators are expert guides to whole past cultures. Finally, translators are literary artists who (in perhaps their most contentious role) create a modern analog of a premodern aesthetic experience.

Jean de Saintré (1456) has long attracted the attention of scholars and ordinary readers. It survives in ten manuscripts and numerous printed editions starting in 1517. Indeed there have been two previous English translations, the most recent being from 1965. Non-specialist readers have been attracted by Jean de Saintré as a portrayal of the chivalric, courtly culture of the fifteenth century--what has been called an early historical novel. Scholars have found and continue to find the book as capturing an important moment in French literary history. Roberta L. Krueger and Jane H. M. Taylor have given this text a new and approachable form.

Jean de Saintré draws much of its value from the fact that it portrays chivalric and courtly culture from the inside. Its author, Antoine de la Sale, is himself a fascinating subject for scholarly investigation. The son of a Gascon mercenary, La Sale spent most of his long life as a courtier in the retinues of the houses of Anjou and Luxemburg, working most of that time as a preceptor or tutor for various young princes. His duties provided him with motivation to write. His three major works, of which Jean de Saintré is one, have a strong pedagogical component, combining moral instruction with discussion of chivalric customs and courtly manners and lighthearted storytelling.

La Sale combined these various elements into Jean de Saintré, which has been called the first historical novel. The eponymous hero was a real warrior of the fourteenth century but little of his actual career found itself into La Sale's book. Jean de Saintré the character is a young nobleman who over the course of the book advances from being a bashful and uncultivated youngster to being a perfect knight, expert in chivalric competition, courtly intercourse, and war. He owes his transformation to the patronage of an older woman, a rich widow whom the author calls the lady of Belles Cousines. This lady spots young Jean in court one day and decides to take him in hand. After teasing him unmercifully about his ignorance of love and his lack of a lover, she begins to train him up to be a knightly figure who attains such courtly grace that by his mid-teens he is wildly popular with all and sundry. Even kings feel privileged to associate with him.

His relationship with the lady of Belles Cousines is more complicated. To judge by her rather cool public interaction with Jean, her fellow courtiers might easily conclude that she of all the ladies is the least impressed with him. While others are full of praise for the wonderboy she has hardly a good word to say to or about him. But she meets him in secret to share pleasure and delight; and perhaps more importantly, she lavishly dresses and equips him and funds his training in chivalric combat. Parts of the book reads like a catalogue of luxuries that most nonfictional noblemen of La Sale's time could hardly hope to obtain. For the modern reader, these passages give an idea of the attractions of the royal court--clothing, weapons, horses as well as good company and good food. Not that this can be taken as reportage. Jean lives a dream-like existence and enjoys the best of everything and the approval of all the best people.

Young Jean, with the encouragement of his lady, matures into an impressive warrior. Much of the book is devoted to describing Jean's tremendous success in the lists and on the battlefield. This is the ultimate test of Jean's worth as a man and of the quality of the secret and intense love affair he enjoys. The lady of Belles Cousines is his silent partner, imperiously telling him when and whom he will fight, praying and weeping for him when he goes out to do her will.

Eventually, however, the partnership breaks down when after many years Jean arranges a deed of arms without consulting the lady. She takes tremendous offense at this and without a word of explanation withdraws to the country where she begins an affair with a rich abbot. The book ends with Jean following her to her rural retreat, where he finds out how the land lies. Unsurprisingly, the two lovers of the lady come to blows and Jean defeats the abbot, though not without difficulty. His revenge on the lady is more subtle; he traps her into betraying herself before the entire court as an unworthy lover.

Roberta L. Krueger and Jane H. M. Taylor have created in Jean de Saintré a work that has many valuable characteristics. First, the translation makes available a rich source for those interested in the culture of chivalry in the later Middle Ages. For me, the depiction of the role of the lady in the education and success of an aspiring knight was particularly interesting, a theme that gave me new material to think about, and one that might well be very useful in a number of different teaching situations.

Second, the translators' apparatus is effectively mustered. The introduction briefly and clearly covers the essential information; it should be understandable and accessible to all potential readers. There is a valuable glossary, and a good discussion of some of the choices the translators made, e.g. their very sensible decision not to translate heraldic terminology.

Third, the style of the translators is neither obviously modern nor obnoxiously archaic. They have not, in other words, produced a new set of barriers that readers must jump over.

Fourth, unlike some earlier translations, the entire text is translated, including two long catalogues, one of the heraldry borne by important families of France, another of families that supposedly accompanied Saintré to Prussia on crusade. These catalogues and other long passages devoted to description of the court, luxurious gifts exchanged between important courtiers, and blow-by-blow coverage of Saintré's deeds of arms, could be and sometimes have been abridged in earlier versions of the book; the result being, however, that what La Sale and his fifteenth-century readers thought was edifying and enjoyable is obscured.

It is too bad that the publishers have decided to charge the same price for the e-book as they do for the hardback. For years I have taught a seminar on the history of chivalry and this book is an obvious candidate for the reading list. At its current price, however, I would probably pass it by the next time I teach it.

Scholarly editions and databases online

In the good old days of the early Internet, the appearance of a new site or resource often attracted a lot of attention. Now there are so many good resources that it’s quite easy for them to slip by without people who might really be interested finding out about them.

Here are three resources related to medieval military history and chivalry, one of my own particular interests. I am not surprised if you’ve missed them.

What looks like a brand-new one just caught my attention. It is a site devoted to the Spanish epic, the Song of the Cid (Cantar de mio Cid).  Its purpose is to make the text more accessible in its original language.  Thus its primary users will be students of medieval Castilian who want to compare the readings of the chief manuscript with a “normalized” text, to a spoken version, to an English translation. There is a lot of useful information packed into the site, and it is really pretty to look at, too. One gripe: it is not so easy to find the English translation. There is a button that takes you straight to it, but that button is not labelled. I rather think that was people who come to the site will be using the English version, even if they are not the core audience for whom the site was built.

A similar site has been around for a while. It is the Online Froissart, which like the Cid site presents textual material in a variety of ways, with once again serious scholars being the core audience. The value of the site is underlined by the fact that the the best print edition Froissart’s over a century old and still unfinished. Looking at book prices for much less specialized and complicated scholarly works, one wonders whether the print edition will be finished and if anyone will be able to afford it on that happy day. The editors of the site have broken down one set of barriers to this key later medieval work.

And how about Armour in Art?  It describes itself thus:  “ArmourInArt.com is a searchable database of medieval art featuring armour. Items in the database range in date from 1100 to 1450 and are located throughout Europe. Content is varied - frescos, altars, stained glass, reliefs, etc - anything that is not an effigy/brass or manuscript is included.”

Why those latter two exclusions? Because, Mr. Bones, there related sites to cover that of the material. See the links just above.

Even yet, the Internet offers us some good serious content along with the kitty cats and the child stars who have aged so badly.

Authenticity

I don't consider the Society for Creative Anachronism to be neo-primitivism, exactly, but what Mr. Potter says about authenticity hits close to home.  I've been thinking of authenticity as a near-religious term for quite a while now:

The moral imperative driving  this is what we can call the quest for authenticity. This is the search for meaning in a world that is alienating, spiritually disenchanted, socially flattened, technologically obsessed, and thoroughly commercialized. To that end, “authenticity” has become the go-to buzzword in our moral slang, underwriting everything from our condo purchases and vacation stops to our friendships and political allegiances.

There are two major problems with this.

The first is that authenticity turns out to be just another form of hyper-competitive status seeking, exacerbating many of the very problems it was designed to solve. Second, and even more worrisome, is that the legitimate fear of the negative effects of technological evolution has given way to a paranoid rejection of science and even reason itself.

Modernity, as a civilization, sits at the confluence of secularism, liberalism, and capitalism, and it is not everyone’s cup of coffee. The promise of the authentic is that it will help us carve out a space where true community can flourish outside of the cash nexus and in a way that treads lightly upon the Earth. More often than not, this manifests itself through nostalgia, for a misremembered time when the air was cleaner, the water purer, and communities more nurturing.

It was never going to work out that way. From its very origins, the quest for the authentic was motivated by that most ancient and base of human urges, the desire for status. The authenticity craze of the past decade is simply the latest version of what the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, called “conspicuous display.” Veblen was mostly concerned with the pretensions of the failing aristocracy and their obsession with obsolete endeavours such as hunting, swordfighting, and learning useless languages. Yet his basic insight – that consumption is first and foremost about social distinction – remains the key to decoding our consumer driven cultural shivers.

As recently as a decade and a half ago, organic food was the almost exclusive bastion of earnest former hippies and young nature lovers — the sort of people who like to make their own granola, don’t like to shave, and use rock crystals as a natural deodorant. But by the turn of the millennium, organic was making inroads into more mainstream precincts, driven by an increasing concern over globalization, the health effects of pesticide use, and the environmental impact of industrial farming. The shift to organic seemed the perfect alignment of private and public benefit.

In the past few juice cleansing has become a 5 billion dollar industry in the U.S., appealing to those who want to lose weight and “detox” their bodies.

It also became an essential element of any “authentic” lifestyle. Yet as it became more popular, the rumblings of discontent within the organic movement became harder to ignore. What was once a niche market had become mainstream, and with massification came the need for large-scale forms of production that, in many ways, are indistinguishable from the industrial farming techniques that organic was supposed to replace. Once Walmart started selling organic food, the terms of what counts as authentic shifted from a choice between organic and conventional food to a dispute between supporters of the organic movement and those who advocate a far more restrictive standard for authenticity, namely, locally grown food.

But when it comes to shopping locally, how local is local enough? If we want to live a low-impact, environmentally conscious lifestyle, how far do we need to go?

The short answer is, you need to go as far as necessary to maintain your position in the status hierarchy.


The problem is you can only be authentic as long as most of the people around you are not, which has its own built-in radicalizing dynamic. You start out getting an organic-vegetable delivery service once a month, then you try growing chickens in your urban backyard. Then the next thing you know, your friends have gone all-in on paleo, eschewing grains, starches, and processed sugar and learning how to bow-hunt wild boar on weekends.


The Whole Food chain plans to start rolling out a system that ranks fruits and vegetables as “good,” ”better” or “best” based on the supplier’s farming practices.

There’s a deeper issue here though, which is that the problem with radicalization is that it breeds extremism. It is one thing to play at being anti-modern by eating only wild game, becoming an expert in axe-throwing, or building a whisky still in your backyard. It is something else entirely to push that ethos into a thoroughgoing rejection of science, technology, and reason itself.

Yet this is where we have ended up. The neoprimitivist logic of authenticity has pushed its way into every corner of how we think, act and consume. 

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991, by Eric J. Hobsbawm

It has been almost a quarter-century since Eric Hobsbawm the daring step of writing history from the outbreak of World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And only now am I getting around to reading it.

This is not a book that I think I would ever read from cover to cover. It is a long one. However, it is so interesting in its many details and its many passages of analysis that I got a lot out of it even just reading a few pages at a time more or less at random.

Here's one fact of 1 million: Hobsbawm points out that of the leaders of the various countries of the world in 1970, a year when baby boomers were  coming of age, almost all were people who had been adults at the end or even at the beginning of the First World War. No wonder there was a lack of sympathy between the establishment and the young rebels! It is typical of Hobsbawm's style that he illustrates the point thus: professors of economic history in France were people who had grown up on or vacationed on farms, and had a pretty good idea of how agriculture worked. They faced students in their classes with no idea what  milkmaids did or the usefulness of manure piles to a working farmer.
Anecdotal history? I love it nonetheless.

The Crusades: defensive wars?

Recently experts on the Crusades have got a reasonable amount of press on whether the Crusades should be condemned or not. One statement made by several of them is that the Crusades were justifiable as defensive wars against Muslim aggression.

Iff you look at maps illustrating the course the Crusades, you usually will see a fairly clear back-and-forth boundary between Christian ruled countries and Muslim ruled countries.

Yet I have a hard time taking this argument all that seriously because I have my strong doubts that warriors in the 11^thcentury, whatever the ethnic or religious background, cared whether or not a war was “offensive” or “defensive”.

If you look at the 11^th century, the century that ended with the First Crusade, and you will find a large number of major wars that resulted in new rulers being imposed on the previous population, which sometimes practiced a different religion from the conquerors. Here is an incomplete list straight out of my head, done without referring to any reference works so there might be some mistakes. It is in roughly chronological order.

• Conquest of England by Knut (Canute)
•  Conquest of Norway by Canute
•  Conquest of England by William
•  Conquest of southern Italy and Sicily by various Normans
• Conquest of Anatolia by the Seljuk Turks
• Conquest of Central Spain by Castile
• First Crusade

Similarities

• It is extremely unlikely that any of the conquering armies saw themselves as ethnically or nationally unified. In some cases it is quite clear that they were ethnically heterogenous.
• People were willing to travel long distances to take part in wars that might result in conquest. 
• Also, it is pretty clear that warriors believed that if they were successful in their war they were entitled to all the wealth that they could confiscate, whether that might be lordship over wide territories for the highest ranking and most successful or whether it might be plunder, which just about everybody expected and hoped for.

Using this perspective, The First Crusade doesn’t seem to be all that different from the other wars listed here.

That doesn’t mean other reasons for wars were not present. William the Conqueror seems have considered himself to have been legitimately named as Edward the Confessor’s heir for the kingdom of England. Some of his followers may have gotten a bit of a thrill from fighting for the right of William to be King. But they did not go home after Hastings to sit around talking about how they had done the right thing. No, they got as much territory and profit out of William’s successful war as they possibly could. Also, the Pope did give William a papal banner to take to England as a sign of ecclesiastical support and a certain amount of religious justification was present in some of these other wars as well. Some people did go home after the first crusade and talk about how they done the right thing. But what plunder could be acquired was always part of the picture. It was a rare warrior – were there any? – who did not think that plunder was a legitimate source of profit in any war.

Visualizing these large groups of armed men roaming the countryside stealing stuff and conquering countries makes me sceptical that the big movements on the historical maps of the Crusades can be explained as “defensive wars.” Looking back over the larger sweep of history I wonder whether “defensive wars” were an important phenomenon in most people’s view of the world before the 20^th century. Certainly professional warriors have tended to look at war as a normal part of life, not some terrible breakdown of society as many people feel today. Perhaps a dislike for war was stronger among non-warrior groups such as the peasantry or the clergy (especially monks) and of course large numbers of women. But among the people who led wars and fought wars, did they really think about offense or defence as an important category affecting their decision-making?

Two great women of the medievalist variety

From the Medieval Review.  Many of my readers either know Waddell or will be glad to learn of her.

FitzGerald, Jennifer.  Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke: Irishwomen, Friends, and Scholars. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Pp. xvi, 293. €44.40/$62.95. ISBN: 978-3034307123.

FitzGerald, Jennifer, ed. Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. Pp. ix, 342. €56.00/$72.95. ISBN: 978-3034309783.

   Reviewed by Joel T. Rosenthal
        SUNY Stony Brook (emeritus)
        Joel.rosenthal@stonybrook.edu


Helen Waddell (1889-1965) has been a name to conjure with ever since the first edition of The Wandering Scholars appeared in 1927. She achieved great popularity and success with this collection as well as with a number of subsequent volumes, especially her labor-of-love and best-selling novel, Peter Abelard in 1933. Her works have remained in print, still being virtually "must" reading for a medievalist, and her life and many of her lesser-known writings have continued to be a subject of interest. We have a 1973 biography by Monica Blackett and another in 1984 by Dame Felicitas Corrigan. Corrigan also edited a 1993 volume, Between Two Eternities: A Helen Waddell Anthology with quotations from Waddell and from the many figures whose works she paraphrased and adopted in her own collections, while in 2005 David Burleigh edited a volume of some of her very early work, Helen Waddell's Writings from Japan. In the volumes under review here FitzGerald adds a further dimension to these earlier works, the biographical volume weaving together the lives of two long-time and very close friends, Waddell and the highly esteemed fourteenth century historian, Maude V. Clarke (1892-1935); the volume of edited papers brings together thirteen essays on various aspects of Waddell's writings, life and family, and literary and intellectual affinities.

While previous biographers have looked at Waddell in the setting of her family--liberal Presbyterian missionary father with roots in Belfast, early life in Japan, close ties with her sister Meg, the difficulties in the path of a woman seeking to establish herself as a scholar/writer--FitzGerald draws the parallel lines between Waddell and Clarke, close friends from their student days at Queen's University, Belfast. The ties and impositions of family slowed them both down; Clarke with a mother who went insane (albeit with a supportive father), Waddell as the youngest of many siblings and therefore tied for years to the care of a sickly and alcoholic stepmother, only free to heed the call of scholarly and literary ambition in 1920 when she was over thirty. Clarke overcame the predictable obstacles to emerge as an important historian, suffering from but winning through the denigration of her Irish degree, academic misogyny at many levels, and the heavy duties demanded of residential faculty at an Oxford woman's college. But mostly she knew where she wanted to go and eventually she got there. Finally and firmly established at Somerville she worked with and drew the admiration of colleagues: F. M. Powicke (who had taught both women at Belfast), V. H. Galbraith (who wrote her British Academy obituary), and E. F. Jacob. Only her sad death prevented her from accepting the invitation to write the fourteenth-century volume of The Oxford History of England, this being about as high a tribute as British academia could offer. When that volume did appear, in 1959, it was by May McKisack, Clarke's friend and contemporary.

Waddell, by contrast, found the bonds of academia too narrow, and was rejected several times for positions for which she had applied (and was well qualified). But she had the good fortune to gather enough fellowship money for research in Paris, work that led to those medieval volumes that, soon after publication, brought her fame (and probably a fair degree of fortune). She had begun her serious studies with an interest in the role of women in literature and FitzGerald gives us her hitherto unpublished "Women in the Drama before Shakespeare" in an appendix (187-230). But in the course of Waddell's intellectual development she came to aspire to a wider sweep, a larger vision of the role of literature. As she read medieval sources she found a charm in the material that few had discovered, let alone championed. As FitzGerald says, it was this "that would make her famous; she is distinguished among her fellow 'discoverers' of twelfth-century humanism for emphasizing the inclination towards love, friendship, nature, the bonds of humankind" (77). This sort of "ode to joy" was to be the spirit or theme behind her work, including the collections of Latin poetry that argued for a common vein of human experience from late classical-pagan times through the Middle Ages. The high-water mark of this approach is found in Waddell's fictionalized tale of Abelard and Heloise. Here she manages to identify with each or both in their quest for love and spiritual fulfillment; a follow-up novel on Heloise was planned but never written. When her learned but eccentric books began to attract popular acclaim (and sales figures to match), an academic critic accused her of "jazzing" up the Middle Ages. No doubt, she was guilty as charged--to the pleasure of readers for about three-quarters of a century.

Helen Waddell Reassessed brings together thirteen papers (eleven authors) from a 2012 conference at which all paid tribute to Waddell's unique blend of "scholarship and imagination" (1). The papers are divided into three groupings, opening with "Medieval Contexts." Under this heading Constant Mews discussed how Waddell came to grips with the multi-faceted history of Abelard and Heloise; lust and sin and, simultaneously, a painful search for salvation and peace. Charles Lock looks at the virtual stranglehold that Germanic philology had on medieval studies (at least in the literary realms) and how Waddell rebelled against this, championing Irish-Celtic, pagan, and late classical elements in medieval culture. Ann Buckley tells of the liturgies for some fairly obscure Irish saints--a background that, again, helps explain Waddell's emphasis on this body of literature and the traditions that lay behind it. FitzGerald covers some of the biographical material of her full volume though now she emphasizes aspects of Waddell's continual growth and tries to recapture some of her views about poetry and the human spirit as they had been enunciated in a now-lost lecture on mime.

"Critical Readings" carries papers by Stephen Kelly, Amanda Tucker, Norman Vance, and FitzGerald, looking at such varied topics as the influence upon Waddell or her convergence with Walter Benjamin and R. G. Collingwood, the legacy of liberal Presbyterianism, her Irish roots and the legacy of national identity, and her development during the "lost decade" that she spent tending her step-mother. "Parallel and Influences" does what it promises, in some cases by illuminating links that seem perfectly obvious after they have been called to our attention: David Burleigh on Waddell and Arthur Waley as they both paraphrased and/or translated Chinese verse, Helen Carr on Waddell and Ezra Pound as they both turned to the charm and inspiration of that same body of writing, Louis Watson on parallels between Waddell and Hope Emily Allen (who brought Margery Kempe to our attention), and Norman Vance on the similarities between Waddell's Protestant commitment and the spiritual quest of some contemporary Roman Catholic, Irish figures. Nini Rogers very lucidly puts much of the biographical material into the context of the large late-Victorian family with its many webs of affection and repression.

In this collection of papers on a variety of Waddell-focused topics we range to what we now think of as theory, as in the references to Benjamin and Collingwood, or to comparative religion--setting Waddell against Catholic theologians--or transnational literature as in her writings that looked to China and Japan. Behind it all, was her view of a universal love of expression, whether in joy or sorrow or quiet contemplation--a belief that the common bonds of humanity overleaped the obvious boundaries of language, nation, and religion. FitzGerald does extra service, beyond that of editor and contributor, by including an admirable and seemingly exhaustive bibliography to the collected volume: Waddell's works, large and small and including her own poems and reviews, reviews of her many books, biographical material, literary criticism, and seven dissertations.

As the third biography and the fifth or sixth book on Waddell in recent decades, we may ask why she is still of such interest, a question that goes beyond the power and charm of her writings. Maude Clarke, we can say, was a very good academic historian and students of medieval England still know her work--or they should. But Waddell brought unique qualities to her work and they continue to give her, as well as those books, considerable currency. Interest in her life goes beyond the obviously biographical, though no doubt we all enjoy a story of how adversity is overcome and diligence and perseverance (and a touch of genius) come to the top. In addition, we note (from the many quotations and notes in both books) that Waddell and Clarke--especially Waddell--are rich subject for biography because they wrote so much: letters, notes to themselves and each other and to friends and siblings and colleagues. They chronicled their lives, both the up sides and the down sides, in great detail and the challenge of reconstructing these lives is an intriguing one. These two books take us to a world of a century ago with exciting frontiers and time-honored rigidities. Waddell saw some of her near and dear die in each World War and her writings reflect touches of sorrow and anxiety, as they do of the soaring spirit. In the best sense Maude Clarke represents exacting scholarship; we still honor her for that. Waddell seems to transcend exacting scholarship--in numerous works on Chinese poetry, as in her more familiar work on the Latin West--and we continue to honor her for that; we look at her life and we read what she wrote. No wonder that her legacy is alive and well

Research and re-creation

Steven Muhlberger

Delivered at Nipissing University

October 30, 2014

as part of the History Department Seminar Series

I am very pleased to be here before my beloved colleagues and other friends of the History Department, and to have the opportunity to discuss my work and my interests. I hope this will not come across as merely an exercise in self-aggrandizement or nostalgia. It’s meant as a reflection on one person’s meandering path through the vast country that is history, and on the variety of ways that history can be approached. My path is probably more eccentric than most but I think that all of you working historians out there have a tale to tell of how your engagement in the past is not restricted within the boundaries of the notional career path of the so-called “average academic historian.” At least, I hope so.

Reflecting back on my career at Nipissing University and before that at University of Toronto, I consider that I have been very lucky having the freedom to pursue my extraordinarily diverse intellectual interests. I began as a graduate student with a very intense project in which I took long-known late ancient chronicles, key sources for the understanding of the fall of the Roman Empire, and reconstructed the mental universe of the men who wrote them. The standard view of these works was that they were defective fragments of lost official records. My task was to turn the chroniclers from being incompetent historians to being valuable witnesses, who were more closed mouth than we might like, but still people who had something to say for themselves, and whose silences said as much about late Roman times as their explicit statements. Thanks to my supervisor Walter Goffart it was an absolutely first class introduction to an extraordinarily difficult historiographical problem, where analyzing the scholarly tradition surrounding the questions was just as important as reconstructing contemporary accounts of the era.

I was and am very proud of my first book The Fifth-Century Chroniclers because I did not avoid the hardest questions of source interpretations. I believe it is one of those books that is good to argue with and will prove useful to researchers for decades to come. Nevertheless, when I finished the Fifth- Century Chroniclers, I had no desire to take on another highly technical puzzle of that sort. About the time I was hired at Nipissing University, I found another historiographical problem worth exploring. It was 1989; the Iron Curtain was falling, and millions were occupying Tien An Men Square and erecting a statue of the Goddess of Democracy. What did it all mean?

As usual, a pessimistic view of human society emerged very quickly. Specifically an old notion was trotted out are not, in an effort explain away the clear demands of people on every continent for democracy to replace autocracy.

My friend Phil Paine and I found such arguments sour and self-serving. Together we wrote the article “Democracy’s Place in World History” for the Journal of World History, in which we demonstrated that proto-democratic institutions, especially at the local level, are documentable in many parts of the world; the potential for democracy can be found in many parts of the world. Particularly interesting was the comparison between the experience of ancient urban democracy in India and in Greece. The Greek democratic experience is often rated as a crucial moment in world history; ancient Indian democracy is not very well known even in India. Phil and I argued that they were of similar significance – both demonstrating potential for democracy without however guaranteeing it.

This was a daring project and depended on faith that big, difficult historiographical questions could be tackled by historians of normal intelligence and training if they used a careful comparative methodology and paid critical attention to the historiographical tradition. Phil Paine and I had ambitions to do more with the history of democracy but circumstances prevented us working together closely. Our output of the last 20 years on the subject is rather restricted as a result. In the 1990s I was once again looking for direction. I found it in the best place, at home.

Some of you know and others do not that I have been a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism as long as I have been a student of the Middle Ages, that is, for over 40 years. The SCA can be seen as one of the many historical reenactment organizations that have grown up in the last half-century. Except it isn’t much like most of the rest. The normal reenactment organization seeks to re-create a specific time and place. Participants appropriately and accurately dressed and equipped re-create a battle or a scene from daily life. The participants are usually in the position of actors putting on a show for paying customers who, as in most theatre, are a passive audience.

The SCA, however, is not a show for an audience. Rather the audience is identical with the participants. It can be seen as a roving theme party that has been going on in various locales since May 1, 1966. On that day a number of Californians put on in a backyard party which they called an “international tournament.” Guests were encouraged to dress in the style of “any age when swords were used.” The party featured mock ceremony, music and combat with a variety of swords. The winner of the tournament crowned a simple peasant girl queen, and a promising young squire was knighted. And when it was all over they all said “let’s do it again!” And they did.

The SCA evolved into a society focused not on reenacting such historic events as the Battle of Bosworth Field, but the world of the 12 century romances where an ideal king and queen preside over a court of knights and ladies and those who aspire to be such. In the evolving SCA as in the early romances, the tournament remained the focus of activity. Thus the SCA can be seen as a recreation of medieval literature rather than of actual history. Yet there was an early commitment by the individual members and the organization they founded to do things “right,” meaning that an SCA event would aspire to get the visual and physical aspects right – armour, food, costuming, tents and pavilions, beer, mead and cider. The desire to get the props right and the respect given to artists and artisans -- all of whom must necessarily be seen as amateur researchers-- are among the chief things that keeps the SCA from being just a fantasy role playing activity, of the sort now called a LARP (live action role-playing game).

The SCA is a role playing game, an embodied reimagining –in Paul Monahan’s elegant phrase –of some aspects of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. But it is not an attempt to re-create a full and accurate and consistent historical environment. It is important to remember that the first SCA event gave invitees free choice of what historical or even fictional era they wished to portray –one person came as Queen Lucy of Narnia, and there were hobbits as well. That principle of the individual choice of “persona” or in-game identity has continued ever since, although purely fantasy identities have been phased out long ago. Indeed, the most serious efforts at accurate reenactment are located in the individual person. There is next to no effort to maintain a consistent time that embraces everybody at a given event or in the society as a whole. I may come to an event as a 10th century Viking, while you come to the same event in a costume modeled on one worn by Anne Boleyn. The success of the re-creation, in the judgment of those present, doesn’t have anything to do with consistent portrayals of either the 10th century or the 16th. While participants may carefully put together a consistent and accurate persona for themselves as individuals, the social environment they create is a fictional kingdom -- say Ealdormere – and a fictional time -- AS 49, the year of the Society 49. To do an excellent job of embodied reimagining, there is no particular reason that the individual participant needs to know a lot about the actual history of the Middle Ages or even the history of a given country, such as 10th-century Norway. Better one should know how to make or acquire authentically styled shoes or boots.

I realized long ago that my scholarly knowledge of the Middle Ages was going to be of only limited application to my SCA participation. The only advantage of knowing medieval history in any detail is that you can occasionally contribute a decorative element, as for instance in showing people how a medieval heraldic display would differ from a modern logo. Or you can use your knowledge to say, as so many fans of historical fiction and movies do, “that’s not right!” A strategy with a very limited lifespan. The social structures and practices of SCA members are formed by the needs of the 21st century society they are creating and re-creating. For instance, monarchs in the SCA are chosen by combat in tournament. This was never done in the actual Middle Ages, and nobody thinks it was. Why the divergence between re-creation and actual history? To have an hereditary monarch for life would be boring; competition for the crown on the other hand binds society members with an ongoing drama.

But scholarship and hobby, research and re-enactment came together for me in the late 1990s anyway.

I owned an old hardback edition of the Chronicles of Jean Froissart, a famous historian who lived during and wrote about the first half of the Hundred Years War (in the late 14th century). I had bought the book for $20 back when $20 was a lot of money. One day, years later, I picked it up and started reading it cover to cover and was fascinated by the fact that the so-called “chronicle” read more like a novel than the chronicles I was used to from late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. (All the smart people already knew this, but I didn’t.) Since Froissart’s main historical interest was in recording what he called “deeds of arms” (we might also say “chivalric combats”) there were many little anecdotes and a fair number of very substantial stories which illustrated the attitudes and actions of “men at arms” during the Hundred Years War. In other words, Froissart’s historical characters were largely the kind of people that SCA warriors were trying to imitate. This too was common knowledge. Yet very few SCA members, with the honorable exception of an amateur scholar named Will McLean had actively been working with late medieval chronicles with the intention of shedding light on the central activity of the SCA, our tournament combat. SCA members do not read primary materials, at least not very carefully. My reaction on reading Froissart again was that if the proper interpreter took this material and spread it around the SCA, there would be widespread interest among the warrior community. Will McLean already done some of this, as had others such as Brian Price and Daryl Pompeo. So I took it upon myself to excerpt Froissart as I read along and put the best pieces on the website here at Nipissing University, which I called “Tales from Froissart.” It was and is a list of very interesting stories, not all of them the best examples of what we would like chivalry to be, but at least examples of contemporary praise and criticism of noble warriors in action.

I also became aware of a text from the 14th century that had been fearfully neglected, both by amateurs and professional scholars, Geoffrey de Charny’s Questions on the Joust Tournaments and War. The Questions are a collection, compiled by a famous French knight in the 1350s, of questions about legal matters that might arise in both sport fighting (jousts and tournaments) and actual warfare. In some ways this should be a high profile source of information on 14th century chivalry, because Charny was a close associate of the reigning King of France and an active warrior. His opinions as to what chivalry and the laws of arms (as he called them) should be very important to modern scholars. But the Questions are not very helpful if one simply reads them through. Charny provided no answers to the 134 questions he raised. That fact and the fact that there are no obvious parallels to the collection of questions during his time, have seemingly discouraged work on that material. Maybe scholars hate to be wrong? Or perhaps they hate to take chances?

Charny’s questions and my close reading of Froissart’s Chronicles had a common focus. In both cases I was mostly interested in what chivalric combat was like from the contemporary’s point of view. What was a “deed of arms?” What exactly did the participants in such deeds do? And finally, why did they do it? I had a dual interest in answering these questions. Having taken part in what might be called “deeds of arms” in the SCA context for many years, I was interested in how close we had come to the spirit and the actuality of the medieval practice. It was quite clear that we had not come very close to medieval practice. People had known this for a long time. But to what degree was there similarity, both in spirit and in practice? Second, I was interested in the analysis of the historical practice. Back in the 19th century there had been some interest among scholars, mostly amateur ones, in the nuts and bolts and sweat and blood aspects of individual combats and duels. Indeed, duels were not entirely extinct in that century. But since about the First World War, there had been little serious scholarly interest. People tended to follow the lead of the eminent Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga when he said that chivalric combats – jousts and tournaments and individual challenges – were a preoccupation of the nobility and not taken seriously by anybody else. I was pretty sure he was wrong about that, but at least his dismissal had left a gap in the literature that I felt could and should be filled by somebody like me.

Here is some of the material I have produced since I made the decision. First was a short book called Jousts and Tournaments, which is a translation and interpretation of those of Charny’s Questions which concerned chivalric sports in the 14th century, in an effort to reconstruct the rules used by contemporaries. It is not so easy to see what those rules really were, because as I said, Charny's Questions are unanswered. However, the Questions do show how extraordinarily important horses were to 14th century knights. There are 41 questions about jousts and tournaments, and all but one of them can be boiled down to "in such and such a situation, who gets the horse?" If nothing else, the book reminds us of how central to the identity of the noble warrior his horse was.

The next project was the book Deeds of Arms, in which I investigated the era in which Froissart wrote; thanks to his literary talent he has tremendously influenced our cultural memory of the Middle Ages. In this book I tried to put contemporary descriptions of chivalric sport and chivalric challenges in the context of the politics of England and France during the Hundred Years War. The book was in part an argument that there is no thing in real life that corresponds to "mere sport." One might like to think that sports or re-creations are something of a timeout from real life. But there is no such thing. 14th century jousts, 21st-century SCA tournaments, and the World Series are all parts of so-called real life. What happens in them counts for something. It may not count quite the same way that events in so-called real life count, but they do count. The book was a monograph-length demonstration of how chivalric sport counted, its psychology and symbolism and even its political importance.

Deeds of Arms the monograph inspired a series called “Deeds of Arms,” of which I am the editor and Freelance Academy Press is the publisher. The idea behind this series was that it would present translations of medieval accounts of chivalric combats in a very attractive illustrated format. There was hope that they would appeal to a wide audience, including people who just like attractive books and were not necessarily tremendously interested in the details of medieval combat. The series Deeds of Arms currently includes three books, two of which are basically my work, Royal Jousts and the Combat of the Thirty. I have another one: Will A Frenchman Fight? ready to go whenever the publisher is.

Two more books have come out in the last year or so. One of them is frankly an experiment, a collection of three conference papers on deeds of arms, repackaged as an e-book entitled Formal Combats in the Fourteenth Century. I wanted to see if there was in fact a market for cheap electronic publication of material that otherwise be too slight for publication. This was a no-risk project for me – I had a publisher anxious to do all the work.

This past summer finally saw the appearance of a book that I had essentially finished in my last sabbatical, Charny’s Men-at-Arms. It can be considered the expanded version of Jousts and Tournaments. Jousts and Tournaments used Charny’s Questions to reconstruct the rules for chivalric sport; the new book reviewed that material and added an investigation of the Questions on War, 93 cases about the laws of arms and issues of honor. The result is a group portrait of Charny’s military class and what they thought was important about “the life in arms.”

But my exploration of more authentic, more medieval styles of sport combat was not restricted to the page. At about the same time it began to write Jousts and Tournaments, I started to promote what I hoped would be more authentic styles of sport combat within the SCA. This was to some degree a joint effort with my wife Ruta, because together we hosted an SCA event on our rural property and Bonfield, Ontario, something we did for twenty Labor Day weekends in a row. Much of what we did on those weekends were standard SCA activities, but because we had so much space and the whole long weekend, we were able to experiment, to hold challenges and tournaments and for a while at least equestrian games both modern and medieval. We had some jousting on one occasion. The spirit of the event and some of the activities we put on resulted in a certain amount of influence in the SCA community. People came from as far away as St. Louis Missouri to take part. (Repeatedly!) Some of them brought their own elaborate, non-martial re-enactments. One group forged iron and set up a glass-bead furnace. Another group erected a medieval-style barn.

As these last activities indicate, it was not just a matter of me and of my wife dispensing wisdom to our friends and visitors. In our encouragement of higher quality reenactment leading (perhaps) to a better understanding of the Middle Ages, I began to discover that there were plenty of other individuals and small groups doing similar things. One example will suffice. Early on, when I was particularly interested in witnessing some actual jousting, I discovered a non-SCA group in Ontario which was putting on jousting shows. It was led by a man named Shane Adams who was a veteran of Medieval Times, the medieval dinner theater show. Shane from childhood wanted to joust and when Medieval Times came to Ontario from Florida, he signed up. He was disappointed to find that Medieval Times jousting was not the real thing and he became dissatisfied enough with just acting in their show to form his own troupe. In 2002 I witnessed them joust in Elgin, Ontario; the next year I was part of the show in the exalted role of Squire – since I actually had some experience in handling horses they were glad to have me. One thing I learned from the experience of working with Shane's troupe was how dangerous and exciting and thrilling jousting was even in a modern context. When the experienced, fully armored knights came riding out on their huge horses for the climactic contests at the end of the show, the audience went completely wild, filling the arena with sound. Clearly, even in the 21st-century, jousting was not a trivial pursuit. It is or can be a true embodiment of one aspect of medieval culture.

This was just the beginning of my contacts with jousters and other non-SCA re-enactors.

These re-enactors (and I want to be clear that I mean in general military and chivalric re-enactors) come in a variety of flavors. One way to distinguish them would be to divide those who began with a fascination with armor from those who were fascinated by the sword. The first group wants first-class, authentic armor, and when they get it (through vast trouble and expense), they want to use it as it was meant to be used. The sword-lovers learn how to use their weapons in the manner of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance; sooner or later they want to use techniques that are appropriate to armored combat, and they begin acquiring armor. You can see how the groups can come close to merging; but thing that distinguishes them is the fact that in the half-century since the founders of the SCA re-invented medieval tournament on the basis of a few mostly-inaccurate assumptions, actual treatises written in the fourteenth century have been discovered, republished, translated, and interpreted. These sword manuals are the key to the sword-lovers’ practice. There are a variety of schools of HEMA or WMA – Historic European Martial Arts or Western Martial Arts -- based on the Holy Scriptures of the Italian master Fiore or the German master Lichtenaur or some other historic master-at-arms.

The armor-lovers are not necessarily less learned than the sword lovers, but tend to be interested in a rougher, all-out form of combat; there's much less interest in theory and systematic training, and more on bringing an opponent down to the ground. This kind of conduct does not look like fencing, medieval or modern, but much more like wrestling. The most prominent example of this kind of fighting reenactment is the Battle of Nations competition invented in Ukraine and for most of its history a competition chiefly between Eastern European "national teams." When I first heard of Battle of Nations my immediate reaction was "I would hate to be the official who tries to referee Russian reenactors fighting Polish reenactors.” And sure enough the reality did not disappoint. The Russians in particular had no hesitation in using tactics designed to seriously injure their opponents. Stories circulated that the Russians were in fact sponsored by gambling interests, illegal ones that that. When Americans with an SCA background first attended Battle of Nations, there was an immediate culture conflict between the brutal young Russians and the Americans who had come up in a tradition in which fighters “didn’t break their toys” (opposing fighters) so that there would be no shortage of opponents. There was a schism in which many of the national organizations left the old umbrella organization and formed a new one which purported to be more honest and transparent in regard to business affairs and more – chivalrous?—on the tournament field. One result of this conflict is that American veterans of Battle of Nations formed a new US-based league which featured a rougher style of competition than SCA tournament combat, taking on as it did certain features of Battle of Nations.

I have mixed feelings about the Battle of Nations and other “real combat” activities. Perhaps I should heartily disapprove, but I can't escape the connection. This summer I ran into a prominent SCA fighter who was instrumental in setting up the new American organization for “real combat.” He thanked me for making available the phrase "deed of arms" which he found very useful for describing the activities that he and his friends were engaged in. He felt that the interaction between my scholarship and his style of re-creating medieval combat was teaching him and his friends a great deal about the actual past.

Who am I to say he is wrong? There should be some intellectual gain, however limited, however biased towards the modern, in all the creation of imaginary medieval kingdoms I have indulged in over the last four decades. As Dr. Janice Liedl of Laurentian University points out in a forthcoming article, both science fiction and historical fiction have their place in coming to grips with the scattered pieces of historical evidence which is all any of us have to anchor our understanding of the actual past. The facts are always too few and we always have to conjure up connective tissue make a coherent picture of what used to be. In the era of Game of Thrones and Assassin’s Creed historians and their scholarly methods are only a segment of creative historical inquiry. The conclusions we reach using them are no longer quite so privileged. We can moan about this or we can adjust. The adjustment is not so radical. It is merely a recognition that if the past is important it will not attract the attention of sober historians sober historians only. All kinds of imaginative energy will be generated by the widespread interest of all sorts of people. If our expertise is not going to become ignored and irrelevant, we will have to learn to live with popular, one might even say poetic interpretations of the facts. It won't be so hard; after all historians have been doing this for thousand years.

That’s one view of the challenges facing historians in our changing intellectual world. It probably isn’t yours. Variety is the spice of life, or rather an essential aspect of reality and of our efforts to deal with it. Wish me well on my highway – I will continue to work; I wish you well on yours.

Books available from: Freelance Academy Press Witan Publishing

Review of Burgess and Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time

This is the kind of work I was doing at the beginning of my academic career.  It's good to see this coming out.

From the Medieval Review:

Burgess, R. W., and Michael Kulikowski. Mosaics of Time: The Latin Chronicle Traditions from the First Century BC to the Sixth Century AD. Volume I: A Historical Introduction to the Chronicle Genre from Its Origins to the High Middle Ages. Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 33. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Pp. xiv, 444. €100.00. ISBN: 978-2503531403.

   Reviewed by William Adler
        North Carolina State University
        William_adler@ncsu.edu


This impressive volume, the first of a planned four-volume series on the Latin chronographic tradition, represents a robust challenge to the widely-held and largely unchallenged assumption that the medieval annals derived from notices embedded in the margins of Easter tables of the seventh and eighth centuries. To make their case that so-called "annals" are part of a continuous and ancient pre-Christian tradition extending back long before the development of Easter tables, Burgess and Kulikowski (hereafter B. and K.) trace the development of the chronicle genre from its beginnings in ancient Egypt and the Near East, concluding with the twelfth-century universal chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux.

Underlying the communis opinion about the medieval origins of annals is a putative distinction between "chronicles" and "annals." More sophisticated in structure and style, the former are traditionally thought to originate, either directly or indirectly, in the great Christian universal chronicles of the third and fourth centuries. The terse annotations and tabular listing of years that make up the content of annals reveal their more humble roots in medieval Easter tables. Insofar as it misleadingly reinforces an artificial disjunction between annals and the older chronicle tradition, the authors discard the category of "annals" altogether, subsuming it instead under the broader category of "chronicle." In their usage, the term chronicle encompasses works marked by a year-by-year annalistic structure, wide scope, paratactic style, and brevity in the narrative of events. Subsets of this genre would include consularia (annotated consular lists) and Paschal chronicles (chronicles written within the framework of an Easter table).

In their systematic dismantling of the received wisdom about the origins of medieval annals (or, more properly, medieval chronicles), B. and K. first demonstrate that the chronicle genre was neither uniquely nor even primarily Christian in character. Nor did the Christian adoption of the chronicle, at least initially, have anything to do with the Easter computus. For Julius Africanus (early third century), the study of chronology was at least in part a matter of providing an empirical foundation for Christian apocalyptic speculation. Following the precedent set by Hellenistic Jewish authors and representatives of other peoples of the Near East, Christian apologists also found comparative chronology a highly effective means of confirming both the antiquity of their religion and the derivative character of Greek civilization. Early Christian experiments in comparative Greco-Jewish chronology contained the seeds for more ambitious undertakings, including the great universal chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea.

Eusebius's chronicle plays a justifiably outsized role in the authors' exposition of the antecedents of the medieval Latin chronicle. His incorporation of material from Hellenistic olympiad chronicles, his fresh approach to long-standing chronological problems, and the inventive tabular structure of the second book of his chronicle (the so-called Chronici Canones) show it to be a truly original piece of scholarship. Thanks to the translation and continuation of the Canons by Jerome, the work became well-known in the Latin-speaking world, offering Christian writers in the West a vision of the past that securely integrated Christianity and Rome into the panorama of the rise and fall of nations and kingdoms. Under its influence, the chronicle soon became the dominant form of historical writing throughout the Middle Ages. At the same time, however, medieval chroniclers found it difficult to take over Eusebius's system of reckoning time without modification. In place of olympiads, regnal years and the Abrahamic era, medieval chroniclers found other systems more to their liking, including consular dating, universal years, and most significantly, the Dionysian anni domini familiar from the Easter Tables of the seventh and eighth centuries. While the so-called medieval "annals" may have introduced some new wrinkles into the genre, they have closer links with the ancient chronicle tradition than do the fuller narrative "chronicles" of the Latin West. Aside from the name, the latter have nothing in common with the chronicles of Late Antiquity.

Apart from its value as a corrective to--indeed, a complete inversion of--the conventional explanation of the origins of medieval "annals," the wide scope of this volume (and a thorough index) will make it an excellent, albeit occasionally demanding, introduction to the chronicle in Antiquity and the Middle Age. To avoid taxing readers with potentially distracting details, eight appendixes (as well as appendixes to the footnotes) elaborate at greater length topics treated in the body of the narrative. While a single thesis informs the treatment of the evidence, the authors never lose sight of the sources themselves, the analysis of which is painstaking and nuanced. In anticipation of Burgess's planned monograph on the textual relations and origins of the Irish chronicles, B. and K. set forth an original argument identifying hitherto overlooked ties between Irish chronicles and the medieval and late antique chronicle tradition. Although the overall orientation is in a westerly direction, the authors also include a brief but instructive account of the development of Byzantine chronicles. If interest in chronology is defining of the genre, many Byzantine works termed "universal chronicles" are better classified as breviaria, no more deserving of the designation "chronicle" than their medieval Latin counterparts. Why the annalistic style of recording the past virtually disappears after Theophanes in the ninth would require a study of its own. But the authors' decision to extend the scope of their analysis eastward helps to bring their findings about the Western tradition into sharper focus. To keep the study within a reasonable length and to avoid digging into subjects with which they are less familiar, the authors limit their discussion of Eastern chronicles to Byzantium (227). But as they rightly recognize, sources from the non-Greek speaking Eastern churches can offer another perspective on the survival and transmission of the ancient chronicle tradition. Because they preserve closer ties with Eusebius and Alexandrian chronography, Syriac and Ethiopic chronicles are in some ways better witnesses to this older tradition than their Byzantine counterparts.

The authors are also to be commended for their exemplary exposition of the durability of a genre often caricatured as an inferior and sub-literary form of historiography, amounting to little more than an uncritical accumulation of disjointed events. In response to the charge that they lacked any unifying narrative thread, the authors compare the structure of the ancient chronicle to a mosaic (hence the title of the book). Like the tiles of a mosaic, "the meaning of history...lay not in the details, but in the overall picture offered by the complete work" (33). Claims about the inferior literary quality of the chronicle are both true and irrelevant. As a branch of technical and scientific literature, chronicles, unlike narrative histories, were meant to be used, not to be read as self-standing literary monuments. The practical applications of the chronicle, its underlying "macro-narrative," and its treatment of the past uno in conspectus also explain the survival of the ancient chronicle tradition well into the Middle Ages. In this new setting, the genre proved flexible enough to accommodate various styles and content, ranging from brief notices inserted into Easter tables to more discursive annalistic records. The decentralization of power brought about by the collapse of the Carolingian empire had its own role to play in the spread of the genre to remote parts of the former Frankish kingdom and beyond. Historians involved in the work of fashioning national identities found the long reach and open-ended tabular structure of chronicles like Eusebius' Canons an ideal way to fuse local events with the broader sweep of world history. And because rhetorical skills or even extensive research were not mandatory, the composition of a chronicle was within the reach of writers of only modest literary aptitude. The accessibility of the genre in the Middle Ages resulted in what B. and K. call a "democratization of history": "anyone could be a historian and many took up the task" (129). At the end of their discussion, one thing is unmistakably clear: whether it served as a tool for antiquarian research, apologetic, apocalyptic speculation, or Easter reckoning, the chronicle was a highly functional instrument, in constant evolution and reinvention.

Occasional lapses and questionable claims are virtually inescapable in a work of dense technical content, ranging over more than 1300 years, and traversing so many regions and cultures. It is an overstatement to say that Philo's voluminous allegorical commentaries on the Pentateuch were intended mainly to establish the dependence of Greek philosophers and lawgivers on Moses (108). While it is true that the foundational principle of Africanus's chronicle was millennialist his interpretation of Daniel was, interestingly, non-eschatological. The terms of Daniel's apocalypse of seventy weeks were in his view completely satisfied in Jesus's ministry (cf. p. 117). In their discussion of the reception of Eusebius's chronicle, the authors state that Syncellus criticized Eusebius' Alexandrian critics Panodorus and Annianus (fifth century) for misdating the Incarnation by following pagan wisdom (i.e. Claudius Ptolemy). Syncellus actually faults only Panodorus for this failing (229).

In some cases, the authors also overplay the influence of apologetic on ancient Jewish and Christian chronicles. The two were not necessarily inseparable. From the admittedly little that survives from Demetrius the Jewish chronographer, there is little reason to suppose that he was at all interested in establishing the superior antiquity of Moses and the Jews. Sorting out chronological and exegetical problems in the biblical text, not comparative chronology, seems to have been uppermost in his mind. In their discussion of Christian chronicles, B. and K. state that "apologetic was the essential purpose of Christian chronography" (120). That observation would probably apply better to Tatian, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria than to Africanus and Eusebius. While the latter writers were undoubtedly influenced to some extent by apologetic, they were hardly beholden to it. At a certain point, the scientific requirements of the discipline required them to direct their energies elsewhere. For Africanus, the comparative dating of Moses is more a question of historical method than fodder for anti-Greek polemic. From reading the preface to Eusebius's Canons, one might reasonably draw the conclusion that "even had he wanted to," Eusebius "could hardly have dissociated himself from the apologetic tradition" (120). But his handling of conventional topoi of Christian apologetic chronology invites a different conclusion. In the first book of his chronicle, Eusebius allows that in the pursuit of chronological accuracy, no sources from the past should be exempt from scrutiny and doubt, not even the biblical record. Although initially making the de rigueur case for the overall superiority of Septuagint chronology to competing versions of the Bible, Eusebius (unlike his predecessors) does not adhere dogmatically to its testimony. And after determining that his predecessors had drastically inflated the length of time from the Exodus to the building of the temple under Solomon, Eusebius arrives at a date for Moses much later than the one sanctified by tradition. What all of this suggests is that even a writer as committed to the defense of the Church as Eusebius could dissociate himself from time-worn clichés of Jewish and Christian apologetic when he found them at odds with his own independent judgments.

To the extent that nomenclature lies at the heart of their thesis about the origins of medieval chronicles, the authors' lengthy exposition of the essential features of the chronicle genre is bound to elicit the most interest and criticism. B. and K. recognize that ancient writers are not nearly as scrupulous as they are in their terminology. They also allow that their fine-grained distinctions between "chronicles," "chronicle epitomes," "chronographs," "breviaria" and "epitomes" are unlikely to fine wide acceptance among medievalists (62). But they do make a compelling case both that the differences are substantive, and that any progress in reconstructing the development of the chronicle will require a more descriptive taxonomy than the one currently in scholarly use. There are places in the narrative, however, where the strict terminology becomes unwieldy, especially when it comes to describing hybrid works.  To remain true to their own exacting standards, many works ordinarily classified as universal chronicles now have to be categorized as something else, either as "chronographs" (Africanus and Syncellus), or as history "tricked out with the clothing of the chronicle" (Dexippus, p. 285). The more fundamental question is whether their claims about a connection between medieval "annals" and the ancient chronicle tradition are true by definition. That is, do compositional and structural similarities based on their own definition of the chronicle genre establish historical continuity? The authors have not ignored the question. As their painstaking analysis of the textual history of the Latin chronicle shows, the similarities between "annals" and ancient chronicle are not purely generic; there are also direct and traceable genealogical links.

How time flies…

Our history grad students were presenting historiographical surveys of their major research papers to the members of the history graduate faculty. One paper was about the representation of the Vietnam War in comic books of the time. It turned out that I was the only person in the room who remembered the Vietnam War. Man, that was fast!

A student working on that project made the statement that it was one of the most important events in American history. I said, "Really? I was around back then and I don't think so. Yes it was important, but it was no Compromise of 1850."

Much mirth resulted.

You will wait in vain for a historian of modern times to make such a good witticism about the Middle Ages.


Image: John Brown at Harpers Ferry.

Worlds of Arthur, by Guy Halsall

I know Guy Halsall and correspond with him fairly frequently. I think he's a very good historian. So when he wrote a book with a riproaring commercial title like "Worlds of Arthur" it was only a matter of time before I got around to having a look.

Frankly, I don't know how commercial this book is, or how much impact it will have on even the more serious readers among the general public, namely the people who actually shell out their own money to read books on serious subjects like post-Roman Britain and King Arthur. Certainly Halsall tries very hard to reach those people, and does a much better job than most academics do on similar projects. But the book is a thorough debunking of certain ideas about Arthur and his place in history, and is already provoking a mixed reaction.

Halsall believes that trying to find the real Arthur behind the legends is entirely futile, and he classifies most efforts to do so as pseudo-history.  It is possible that somebody named Arthur led British forces against Saxon invaders, but the simple truth is that we know nothing about any such person and can't  reconstruct his life and career. The few written sources we have for this two-century period (410-597) does not allow us to do it and unless some miraculous discovery turns up new information (and none has appeared for many centuries) we will never find Arthur. A lot of professional historians agree with this, but I doubt that anyone has made such an uncompromising presentation of this fact – the unknowability of Arthur – as Halsall does here. 


Halsall is equally interested in revising a framework that scholars of the past have imposed on our understanding of post-Roman Britain. To simplify, Halsall does not think that British history of the fifth and sixth centuries is best understood as a fight between "the Britons" and "the Saxons," a long contest which resulted in the expulsion of Britons from most of what is now England. In line with developments in other parts of Western Europe, English ethnic identity came to dominate because older identities, specifically the Roman identity, were no longer relevant to a Britain where the Roman economy and society had collapsed.

Halsall both discusses changes in our interpretation of British archaeology over the last 40 years, and offers his own reinterpretation, which he frankly labels as speculative. It's an interesting interpretation and one I find fairly persuasive, though in this period we will never have certainty.

One of the best things about this book is that Halsall discusses how people use and misuse evidence for difficult historical problems in great detail. This may put people off, but it is one of the most transparent discussions of what historians do in interpreting the often difficult to understand early Middle Ages that I've ever seen. It is not likely to be everybody's cup of tea. But have a look at this discussion of DNA evidence and how it can deceive, especially people who want to be deceived.

Even with these data, an even more serious problem concerns the move from DNA to conclusions about ethnic or political identity. Ethnic identity is multi-layered. It is deployed (or not) in particular situation as the occasion demands, and can be changed. DNA cannot give you a sense of all the layers of that person's ethnicity, or of which she thought the most important, or even if she generally used a completely different one, or when and where such identities are stressed or concealed. A male Saxon immigrant into the Empire in, say, the fourth century, would – one assumes – have DNA revealing the area where he grew up, but he would probably increasingly see himself, and act, as a Roman. Saxon origins would have little part in his social, cultural, or political life, and even less for his children, if they stay in the Empire. If he returned home with the cachet of his Imperial service, it might have been his Roman identity that gave him local status. He might even have called himself a Roman. However, if a distant male relative moved to Britain 150 years later, his DNA might be very similar but, in complete distinction, he might make a very big deal of the Saxon origins. They would, or could, propel him to the upper echelons of society. DNA tells us nothing about any of this. What is pernicious about this use of genetic data is its essentialism. It views a person's identity as one-dimensional, unchanging, and as entirely derived from that person's biological and geographical origins. In short, it reduces identity to something similar to 19th century nationalist ideas of race. Everyone sane knows that people moved from northern Germany to Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. In that sense, these expensive analyses tell us nothing we do not already know. In their implicit reduction of identity to a form of race, masking all the other contingent and interesting aspects of cultural interaction and identity-change they risk setting back the understanding of this period by more than a century. Moreover, they provide pseudo-historical and pseudo-scientific ammunition for present-day nationalists xenophobes and racists.

If you teach history, wouldn't you want your students to be exposed to such a clear discussion of a historiographical problem?  One with real relevance to the present?

Image: Tintagel. People in the 12th century thought this was an Arthurian site.