Justin Trudeau – a giant among men?

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

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

Trudeau greets the refugees

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

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

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

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

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

The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert A. Heinlein

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

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

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

From The Medieval Review

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

Reviewed by Justine Firnhaber-Baker

University of St Andrews

jmfb@st-andrews.ac.uk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-------- Notes:

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

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

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

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

A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance and the Late Medieval Banquet, by Christina Normore

From the Medieval Review (online book review source): Normore, Christina. A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance and the Late Medieval Banquet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 261. $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-226-24220-0.
Reviewed by Claire Sponsler
University of Iowa
claire-sponsler@uiowa.edu
In February of 1454 in the city of Lille, Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, sponsored a banquet whose purpose was to promote a crusade against the Turks who in the previous year had captured Constantinople. Although the propaganda effort failed (the crusade was never undertaken), the banquet itself made quite an impression, as well it might, given that it featured among other entertainments an actor dressed in white satin to represent the Church of Constantinople, entering the hall on an elephant led by a giant Saracen; twenty-four musicians who played their instruments inside a gargantuan pie; and marvelous automata that included a tiger battling a serpent in a desert landscape and a boy riding a golden-horned stag, the two singing a duet as they circled the tables set up for the banqueters. The Feast of the Pheasant, as this astonishing event came to be called, made it into the historical record in unusually detailed form, most notably in the Memoirs of Olivier de la Marche and the Chroniques of Mathieu d'Escouchy, and while it is not the only banquet discussed by Christina Normore, it serves as a running example of the complexities of feasting in late medieval culture--her topic in this multilayered and ambitious book.
It might initially seem odd that an art historian would choose banquets as an object of study, but that, as Normore stresses, is exactly the point, both for art history and for the cultural history of medieval Europe. By focusing her eye on feasts, Normore demonstrates what the history of art stands to gain by broadening its scope beyond the traditional high arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture in order to take in a form that is usually relegated to the so-called, and lesser, decorative arts. What the cultural history of medieval Europe reaps, even more importantly, is a less anachronistic (because less constrained by modern categories of aesthetic activity and notions of individual talent) and hence more accurate view of the insistently mixed-media and collaborative arts of late medieval and early modern Europe, such as feasting, that drew together politics, ethics, religion, and other spheres of social life under the guise of entertainment.
Because Normore is an art historian, it is no surprise that she approaches her subject matter chiefly through the visual and provides detailed close readings of the objects and representations found in lavish feasts, while also turning to other pictorial sources such as manuscript illuminations to underscore her claims. The generous use of illustrations in the book lets the reader track Normore's analysis and offers a tantalizing glimpse of late medieval banqueting in action.
But this book moves well beyond the analysis of discrete visual objects. Normore signals her ambitions by setting feasting within the larger context of festivity more generally, a move that allows her to examine the wide array of activities that took place at banquets, activities that combined the culinary, visual, and performing arts into one complex whole. More specifically, her aim is to demonstrate that feasting "helped form a culture deeply invested in discernment" (3), and thus aided in the creation of a court culture grounded in the exercise of aesthetic judgments.
After an introductory chapter aptly titled "Setting the Table," which does the work of laying out the general argument and considering the interpretive issues surrounding a study of feasting, Normore begins in the first chapter, "Between the Dishes," by asking what, exactly, an entremet was, charting the term's ambiguity when used by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Francophone authors, for whom the word's semantic range included performances, material objects, and foodstuffs. Normore argues that entremets "complicate the separation between media" and, because their production required the collaboration of many different craftspeople, they complicate the separation between "makers" as well (42). Here as elsewhere, Normore is keenly alert to the difficulties of terminology and definition, to the limits of an approach based on a modern taxonomy of artistic forms, and to the need to read with rather than through the material evidence that survives to tell us about these important cultural occasions.
Echoing her claim that the feast was more than just visual display, she pays attention to the sounds and smells of banqueting, as well as to the impact on those who participated. The next four chapters take up various aspects of the way feasts shaped late medieval elite society, by looking at the relationship between banquets and those who participated in or observed them (chapter two, "Spectator-Spectacle"), the success with which feasts intervened in the political sphere (chapter three, "Efficacy and Hypocrisy"), and the meaning of lavish banquets within the ethically-charged notion of magnificence (chapter four, "Dining Well"). The last of those chapters rejects the tendency of modern scholars to equate magnificence with overabundance and instead considers how feasts could function as places "where virtue could be practiced and learned" or as locations where dining could make visible "key concepts of systematic ethics" within a courtly milieu (104). Chapter five, "Stranger at the Table," turns from politics and ethics to an inquiry into feasting's aesthetic ends, particularly in its use of strange and wondrous displays that provided courtly society with "marvels to think with," as Normore cleverly puts it (138).
Readers hoping for an up-close look at one feast will be grateful for the final chapter, "Wedding Reception." Focusing on a specific example, the first night of banqueting that celebrated the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in 1468, this chapter aims to strike a balance between anthropologically-oriented studies of feasting as a general social practice and historically-grounded analyses of individual banquets. Normore argues that while it is only within the broad context of late medieval marriage and gift exchange that the complex symbolic and sensory nature of the 1468 banquet can be understood, nonetheless "the specific iconographic and sensual program" (165) of this particular event had distinctive meaning for the marriage at hand: the feasting may have gestured toward all marriages, but it spoke directly to Charles and Margaret's. The conclusion to this chapter serves as a kind of last word for the book as a whole: "the creators of the feast, from the planners to the final participants, worked not only with a particular iconographic program but also within a shared understanding of the proper behavior, values, and aesthetic modes of wedding banquets in particular and feasting in general" (191). In a sentence that drives the book's point home, Normore insists that only when the individual and the general are brought together "can we truly begin to appreciate how and why banqueting captured the imaginations and influenced the actions of late medieval men and women" (193).
By pointing to the complex cultural and artistic interactions of the banquets devised for the Burgundian court, A Feast for the Eyes makes a welcome and sophisticated addition to an emerging body of work on the persistent mixing of media that characterized the public culture of late medieval Europe. Returning representational forms and recreational activities that have now been slotted into separate disciplinary niches--art, music, literature, theater, politics, religion, food--to their thoroughly entwined states in late medieval culture, Normore joins a new wave of cutting-edge work in medieval studies. As resolutely as its subject, A Feast for the Eyes escapes scholarly categories and invites the appreciation of a wide range of 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.

BS on the gender-equity cabinet in the new Canadian government.

I have heard a lot of people complaining about the artificiality of the 50-50 split in the membership of the new Canadian Cabinet – it’s half men half women. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau promised this during the campaign and he delivered on his promise immediately. His action became controversial and a whole bunch of people seem to still be talking about if it were some great crime against democracy and good government. Trudeau is guilty of the crime of arbitrarily appointing people who might not be the best candidates for the job. Even people I generally respect, like a columnist in the Globe and Mail, have said similar things. Both men and women are upset.

I have to say I think the whole fuss is ridiculous. Exactly when was this golden age when the best people in the country or even in parliament or even in the ruling party got their positions purely on the basis of objective criteria, of fitness for the job? For a long time there were no women at all in parliament and thus none in the cabinet either. Since women got the right to vote and the right to sit in parliament, they have been a distinct minority in parliament. Was this based on objective criteria?

Let’s look at how the sausage is made when picking a cabinet. Objective criteria? Anybody knows anything about Canadian politics knows and that if there is one and only one member of the victorious party elected from Saskatchewan or New Brunswick, that person will be in the cabinet. The winning party needs a representative in that province, it needs to convince people in that province that the federal government takes them seriously. If the government neglects to include people from that area, they can kiss goodbye the possibility of winning seats there next time around. Would anybody seriously put forward the idea that the single MP from Saskatchewan miraculously is one of the 20 or 30 most capable people in parliament or even in the ruling party as a whole? That this person deserves their seat at the cabinet table because they fulfil certain objective criteria?

No, cabinets are chosen by looking at what candidates you have and deciding, yes, some of them are more talented than others, but also by deciding some of them will appeal to one constituency or another. Cabinets are chosen to put together a political coalition, but also to advertise the party to the public and give people an indication of what and who the ruling party thinks is important.

The Liberals are saying to the Canadian public that they think women have been undervalued in the past, and they will not be undervalued now. How sincere the Liberals are and how they will actually act is another matter entirely. The promise Justin Trudeau made and the actions that he took in choosing his parliament were advertising. If you are not impressed, well, that’s perfectly all right, but let’s not pretend this is some horrendous deviation from good government.

Close to the Edge

I was in Colorado recently and more than once, for obvious reasons, this song by Yes popped into my head.

Thank you, Yes for joy and pleasure over the decades. PS. From a comment on YouTube: "I was a little girl when this album came out but my siblings were 9 and 11 years older than me and this music cranked on their stereos, along with all the other earth-shattering music of the time. It was like being in the company of angels hearing these artists..."