Back to the Good Duke

After some months of writing other material, I am back to translating The Chronicle of the Good Duke, Louis II of Bourbon.  (I am astonished to see, by the way, that I started this translation in 2010.)  It's a fascinating view of one of the great warrior-princes (no, not Xena) of the first half of the Hundred Years War.  The best part of the chronicle is, however, what it says about the knights and squires who fought in Louis' service.  I've written an article about the Chronicle in the Journal of Medieval History, if you are fortunate enough to be near a library that carries it.

The Chronicle has its challenges.  It was written by an obscure hanger-on of the Bourbon family, one Cabaret d'Orville, who doesn't seem to be the master of the French language that he might be.  He is excessively fond of sentences that begin with "and."  I once told a friend that if I simply eliminated every "And" that began a sentence -- just the "and" not the sentence -- the Chronicle would be a third shorter.

Well, I tested that theory yesterday when I set up MS Word to search for an initial And.  And it told me that in 240-some pages there were 707 Ands I could get rid of.

Done and dusted.  Simplest bit of editing I've ever done.

Image:  Yes, that's him, as the 15th century remembered him.

A flash of truth cuts through the overheated rhetoric

A Guardian column on "alt-right" celebrity Katie Hopkins' carpetbagging critiques of London stumbles into an important truth. Marina Hyde:

For now, it falls to her [Hopkins] to explain London to the Americans. “Londoners can’t even be honest about these attacks,” she told Fox News. “Because it would mean everything they believed in was false.” >Ah, the false idols of the decadent metropolis! Had Katie spent more than 10 minutes in the World History aisle of Wikipedia, she would know there have always been people who hated cities for what they stood for. The metropolis has at many times served as shorthand for a kind of moral decay and wicked permissiveness that requires (usually forcible) regression.

“This place where monsters lurk and steal lives away in an instant,” thunders Katie of the capital’s wickedness. “For nothing.” Dear, dear – it does all seem rather terminal. I wonder what Katie would do with the failed, corruptive experiment that is London? The Khmer Rouge decided that the only solution was to empty the cities, and send their suspiciously educated denizens to the countryside. Come Katie’s revolution, perhaps Londoners will be forcibly migrated too.

Quite right, Marina. Don't forget that anyone wearing glasses will be labeled as a dangerous intellectual and eliminated.

La fin de l'Empire romain d'Occident. Rome et les Wisigoths de 382 à 531, by Christine Delaplace,

I return to my old interest in Late Antiquity today, thanks to Michael Kulikowski, who has written an illuminating review of Christine Delaplace's La fin de l'Empire romain d'Occident for the Medieval Review. A boring title, says Michael, and one would not be surprised if the interpretation offered was a hundred years out of date.

Ah, but it's not. Says Michael:

Perhaps the single most important thing here is the authorial willingness to define terms and exercise a realistic parsimony of interpretation with the evidence. For instance, her exhaustive treatment of treaties and their related vocabulary (pax, foedus, deditio, amicitia) usefully demonstrates that the frequent scholarly attempts to normalize the semantic content of that vocabulary are completely untenable; so too is reading back a normative definition from Procopius and Jordanes into the fourth and earlier fifth century.

Such observations are not wholly new, but actually applying their analytical insight to the narrative evidence exposes the role that fixed definitions of Roman treaties/foedera play in traditional narratives of Gothic history--thus producing a spurious aura of inevitability stretching from 382 to the settlement of some Goths in Aquitaine forty years later and on into the sixth century. In a similar vein, Delaplace correctly notes that Alaric and all the barbarian generals and condottieri of the late fourth and fifth centuries were primarily leaders of armies; their royal status was secondary, indeed often quite notional, and rarely a meaningful factor in their power. In this approach she strengthens Guy Halsall's demonstration that only Roman military office and magisteria constituted success for such people. To fall back on claims to royalty signified failure.

Perhaps the most insightful part of Delaplace's account of the early fifth century follows from the recognition that--whether or not you read Alaric's following, or those of other barbarian leaders of the time, in ethnic terms or instead as relatively heterogeneous mercenary armies--you cannot read them in terms of external diplomacy, or foreign foes. The more precise historical analogy is the late Roman Republic, when the Senate had to deal with rival armies loyal primarily to their generals rather than the state. Mutatis mutandis (for "Senate," read "imperial court"), the endless back and forth of 395 to 418 operated according to the same dynamic. Ethnic difference, still less "foreignness," are not what was at issue.

The book's systematic successes are in a similar vein. A ruthless refusal to retroject later evidence means that the Gothic settlement in Gaul is judged at its correct worth: there was nothing new about 418 that had not been at least implicit in the treaty of the king Wallia and the magister militum Constantius in 416. Wallia's (and then Theoderic I's) Goths were in effect a mercenary army, contracted by the Roman state because they were less likely to slip into the usurpation to which rebellious Gallic armies had long been prone. The Gothic zone of action effectively displaced the western Rhine limes south to the Loire, where, from Aquitaine, the Gothic army could operate in any direction necessary, against barbarians and potential usurpers alike. Thus, there was no kingdom of Toulouse for the better part of a century. There was a Gothic rex (who very rarely used that title) and there were sortes Gothicae, but there was no regnum till the fifth century had run its course.

Again, Delaplace has a firm grip on later fifth-century events. In particular she rejects the lionisation of the general Aëtius as "the last of the Romans," a sort of incomparable bulwark against the encroaching barbarian tides. Aëtius, she demonstrates, fundamentally weakened the Roman state, perpetuating constant rivalries in Gaul and Italy that militated against coherent policy. She shows how the "Gothic wars" of the 430s and 440s should not be read as a Roman defence against aggressive barbarian expansion, but rather as an extension of the civil war that brought Aëtius to power, the initial rivalry of Boniface and Aëtius, allied respectively with Theoderic and the Amal Berimond, was perpetuated in the next generation by Sebastianus (son of Boniface) and Witteric (son of Berimond), supported respectively by Theoderic and Aëtius. The peace of 439 is not a Romano-Gothic peace, nor a taming of the unruly federates by Rome, but rather a final settlement of two decades of rivalry: Sebastian was expelled by Theoderic, Witteric disappears from the pages of history (murdered, one imagines), and Aëtius married a daughter of Theoderic, having repudiated his second wife Pelagia, herself the sister of Berimond and widow of Boniface.

... The book concludes with a more cursory survey of the period from 477-531, but here too, the guiding principles are correct. In particular, Delaplace considers the battle of Vouillé as a stage in the sorting out of post-imperial factions that characterizes the earlier sixth century, rather than as a caesura in Gothic history. Greater detail in this section would have been welcome, but that was not the author's primary goal. One would not have thought it possible to write a strikingly novel history of the last century of the western empire, but that is precisely what Delaplace has done. It is a grand accomplishment.

Think of Attila as John Hawkwood!

Geoffroi de Charny's son, also called Geoffroi

A newspaper series you might want to know about

Keen-eyed reporters at the Globe and Mail became aware that a lot of sexual assault cases in Canada were being dropped as "unfounded." Unfounded is supposed to mean that nothing happened. That sometimes 40% of complaintants, people who went to the police knowing that such complaints often go nowhere, were being turned aside and not believed -- this made the reporters suspicious that the category "unfounded" was being misused.

Sure enough, a large-scale investigation has established just that. Likewise the Globe and Mail's efforts have cast new light on the issue of consent. Well worth reading.

Did the Irish save civilization? The reviewers of the Medieval Review weigh in

The Medieval Review

Flechner, Roy, and Sven Meeder, eds. The Irish in Early Medieval Europe: Identity, Culture and Religion New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. 288. $39.99. ISBN: 978-1-137-43059-5.

Reviewed by Alexander O'Hara

University of St Andrews

alexanderjohara@gmail.com

One needs to be wary in reading and assessing this book. There is much good in it with some fine contributions, but it is deeply flawed.The editors Roy Flechner and Sven Meeder seek to debunk so-called myths: in this case the influence of Irish monks and scholars in early medieval Europe.

In a previous publication, Flechner suggested that Saint Patrick was a tax dodger, arguing that he came to Ireland as a tax exile to avoid the fiscal burdens his decurion father would have bequeathed him. Flechner manages to sound convincing despite the fact that the imperial tax system was obsolete in Britain by the time Patrick came to Ireland, while blithely dismissing Patrick's own testimony in his two surviving written accounts.

We see a similar deconstructionist vein at work in this volume which seeks to present "an academization of the debate" vis-à-vis the more gullible work of previous scholars of a "bygone golden age when religious piety and intellectual endeavor could coexist happily...one would like to steer away from crippling biographical reverence and engage in some debunking of myths" (1).

The first myth to be debunked is that of the image of Ireland as an island of saints and scholars, which the editors claim only gained currency from the seventeenth century onwards and which they pass off as an early modern phenomenon. This is false. Already from the seventh century Irish monks who travelled to the Continent were self-consciously shaping this image of their homeland. It can be seen in the poem on Ireland, written probably by one of Columbanus' Irish monks, which the Italian monk Jonas of Bobbio inserted at the beginning of his Life of Columbanus and in Jonas' comment that the Irish flourished in Christianity more than any other people.

The perception of Ireland and the Irish as a holy island and people can be followed like a thread from Jonas to Bede's comments on Ireland at the beginning of his Ecclesiastical History to Ermenrich of Ellwangen's riff on Bede's comments in which the island is presented as an allegory of the universal Church and in the poetry of Irish religious émigrés like Colman nepos Cracavist and Bishop Donatus of Fiesole. The perception of Ireland as an insula sanctorum was not invented by seventeenth-century émigré Irish Franciscans or by nineteenth-century Catholic revivalists, but is a perception that we find already in the early medieval sources.

Despite the agenda of the editors, the volume is saved by some fine contributions. The scope of the volume is comprehensive with short chapters (indeed the brevity of the chapters is one of the laudable features of the book, as is its affordable price) that encompasses communication networks, religious exile, Irish monasticism on the Continent, especially in relation to Columbanus, biblical exegesis, penance, the liturgy, science, scholarship, ethnicity, and book production.

... Meeder's bizarre statement that insular influence at St-Gall was minimal, is also found in his co-authored chapter with Roy Flechner where they write about the abbey of St-Gall that: "it does not appear that the Irish origin of their patron saint was a significant factor in the institutional identity of the abbey" (203). One wonders what sources they have been reading, given the rich hagiographical corpus on the patron saint that survives from the early medieval community. One need only read Walahfrid Strabo's Life of Gall, Notker Balbulus' Martyrology, or Ermenrich of Ellwangen's Letter to Abbot Grimald to realize that Meeder and Flechner present not only a false impression of the source material, but a skewed and inaccurate interpretation.

Also problematical are their comments on Columbanian monasticism. Their statement that the Luxeuil monk Agrestius "made slanderous remarks about fellow Irish inmates" (195) is nowhere found in Jonas' Life of Columbanus--Agrestius attacked the monastic practices and the legacy of Columbanus, not the Irish monks, most of whom had left for Bobbio with Columbanus upon his expulsion in 610. Similarly: "the Gallic episcopacy is depicted as hostile both by Columbanus and his hagiographer Jonas. In the rhetoric of the hagiography and of Columbanus's letters...the Easter controversy is portrayed as a major bone of contention" (198). While this is true for Columbanus's letters, it is not true for Jonas, who mentions nothing about the Easter controversy, because it had been such a contentious issue, and is careful not to overtly criticize the Gallic episcopacy as they were now key patrons of the communities.

The trajectory of Gallic monasticism prior to Columbanus gave no indication that a revolution in monastic foundation would take place in conjunction with secular elites in the second half of the seventh century and their attempts to play down Columbanus' role as a catalyst in this regard is unconvincing. While social trends and the formation of new elites at this time complimented and facilitated the new wave of monastic foundation, it was by no means an inevitable development without the influence of Columbanus and his Frankish monastic successors. Indeed, running throughout Meeder's and Flechner's chapter is subtly disguised racism masquerading as historical objectivity which can be detected in such remarks as "hard to swallow for some proud Irishmen", "we meet another proud Irishman" (205), the aforementioned "Whether originality, when it is present, can be directly linked to a scholar's Irish heritage is a matter of contention" (240), and in their attempt at every opportunity to minimize the distinctiveness of Irish influence on the Continent. Their eagerness in debunking myths leads them to questionable historiographical methodology and a failure to engage with the sources on their own terms. While there is much to recommend in this book, it needs careful handling, as I hope this review has shown.

Image: I'd guess that this is a maximalist view.

The Guardian tells us what will happen when Queen Elizabeth dies

For a long time, the art of royal spectacle was for other, weaker peoples: Italians, Russians, and Habsburgs. British ritual occasions were a mess. At the funeral of Princess Charlotte, in 1817, the undertakers were drunk. Ten years later, St George’s Chapel was so cold during the burial of the Duke of York that George Canning, the foreign secretary, contracted rheumatic fever and the bishop of London died. “We never saw so motley, so rude, so ill-managed a body of persons,” reported the Times on the funeral of George IV, in 1830. Victoria’s coronation a few years later was nothing to write home about. The clergy got lost in the words; the singing was awful; and the royal jewellers made the coronation ring for the wrong finger. “Some nations have a gift for ceremonial,” the Marquess of Salisbury wrote in 1860. “In England the case is exactly the reverse.”

What we think of as the ancient rituals of the monarchy were mainly crafted in the late 19th century, towards the end of Victoria’s reign. Courtiers, politicians and constitutional theorists such as Walter Bagehot worried about the dismal sight of the Empress of India trooping around Windsor in her donkey cart. If the crown was going to give up its executive authority, it would have to inspire loyalty and awe by other means – and theatre was part of the answer. “The more democratic we get,” wrote Bagehot in 1867, “the more we shall get to like state and show.”

Obsessed by death, Victoria planned her own funeral with some style. But it was her son, Edward VII, who is largely responsible for reviving royal display. One courtier praised his “curious power of visualising a pageant”. He turned the state opening of parliament and military drills, like the Trooping of the Colour, into full fancy-dress occasions, and at his own passing, resurrected the medieval ritual of lying in state. Hundreds of thousands of subjects filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall in 1910, granting a new sense of intimacy to the body of the sovereign. By 1932, George V was a national father figure, giving the first royal Christmas speech to the nation – a tradition that persists today – in a radio address written for him by Rudyard Kipling.

The shambles and the remoteness of the 19th-century monarchy were replaced by an idealised family and historic pageantry invented in the 20th. In 1909, Kaiser Wilhelm II boasted about the quality of German martial processions: “The English cannot come up to us in this sort of thing.” Now we all know that no one else quite does it like the British.

The Queen, by all accounts a practical and unsentimental person, understands the theatrical power of the crown. “I have to be seen to be believed,” is said to be one of her catchphrases. And there is no reason to doubt that her funeral rites will evoke a rush of collective feeling. “I think there will be a huge and very genuine outpouring of deep emotion,” said Andrew Roberts, the historian. It will be all about her, and it will really be about us. There will be an urge to stand in the street, to see it with your own eyes, to be part of a multitude. The cumulative effect will be conservative. “I suspect the Queen’s death will intensify patriotic feelings,” one constitutional thinker told me, “and therefore fit the Brexit mood, if you like, and intensify the feeling that there is nothing to learn from foreigners.”