Blog Forum 4: Jeff Sypeck on "Applied Medievalism"

Welcome to the 4th (and perhaps final, unless I get more submissions...) of our Blog Forum posts. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of these have generated, I think, some good discussion, so I encourage you to check them out and add your thoughts to the comments. It's never too late to talk about interesting stuff.

This current contribution comes from Jeff Sypeck, who blogs at Quid Plura and has a nifty book (now in paperback!) on everyone's favorite Frank, Charlemagne.

Please comment/ discuss below. Or send longer responses directly to me and I'll be happy to add to the ongoing forum.

---

In recent weeks, blogging medievalists reacted to Charlotte Allen's article about Kalamazoo with calls to counter public misperceptions about what medievalists do. Some of you spoke vaguely but enthusiastically about the prospect of public outreach. Which makes me wonder: Why?

That isn’t a rhetorical question; nor is it a confrontational one. You have a lifetime to explain why the Middle Ages are important to study, and countless persuasive answers to give. Instead, think practically. Define why you're anxious about the image of medieval studies and what you'd hope to accomplish through outreach in the first place: More funding? Greater respect from administrators? Increased enrollment in your undergraduate courses? Social, political, or religious change? Your answer is bound to be deeply personal; medievalists do not, after all, speak with a single voice.

Nonetheless, the public would like you to speak. Oprah recently convinced millions of viewers to read a novel about cathedral-building. The death of Gary Gygax got the full-page Economist obit. A second Narnia movie is now earning millions. World of Warcraft boasts 10 million subscribers. Last year, “Barbarian Week” on the History Channel was advertised on bus stops and billboards. A Ren fest flourishes somewhere in the United States all but two weekends of the year. The medieval and the pseudo-medieval are everywhere. Short of a heavenly voice demanding Sing me hwaethwugu!, you will never hear a louder invitation to speak to a curious public.

For nearly two years, I've been promoting a book about Charlemagne for newcomers to medieval history. During that time, I've rarely needed to persuade anyone in trade publishing that the subject was "relevant," and when I set out to schedule public talks about the book, very few venues needed any real convincing either. I found receptive audiences at continuing-ed programs for retirees and also at libraries, where teachers and parents brought high-school-age kids. I spoke to university writing teachers about the medieval traditions in which they unknowingly work; I discussed Charlemagne's French mystique at a tea salon in suburban New Orleans; and more than 100 people attended my presentation at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. I've heard from a wide range of budding medievalists, including writers, teachers, genealogy buffs, and pilgrims planning to walk the Via Francigena. But the most heartening emails, the ones that hint at an expanding market for medievalism, came from satisfied readers who wrote, in effect, "I don't usually read this kind of book, but..."

If you really do enjoy discussing medieval subjects, then these sorts of exchanges are a pleasure. (It's both peculiar and satisfying when your neighborhood librarian shouts "Hey, Charlemagne Man!" when he greets you in the grocery store.) Unfortunately, these opportunities require time--a commodity that I suspect is in short supply when you're a young, energetic prof on the tenure track. Becoming a freelance writer or speaker requires you to build an entirely separate network of contacts and engage in activities for which academia has no real roadmap. Discussing your work with the general public runs contrary to your training, which emphasizes communicating with other specialists. An inclination to engage in outreach can't be learned, and scholars who shrink from the very sound of it shouldn't be pressured to try. But if the notion intrigues you, start by examining your own temperament. Are you comfortable putting on burlap and gamboling at Ren Fests, or are you more the public-library and book-club type? Scito te ipsum--and then decide whether to check out the calendars at nearby libraries and museums; contact your local chapter of the SCA; find out when the local schools are studying medieval Europe; look into adult-education programs; or submit op-ed proposals to local and national media. And if someone asks if you're "into all that Dungeons-and-Dragons type stuff," be patient; you're signing on to answer those questions, too.

Be warned: "applied medievalism" is fraught with peril. Sometimes, you'll have a blast; occasionally, you'll misjudge, and your audience will be depressing in its smallness. Regardless, you'll be happier and more productive if you see outreach as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. You may not win the minds of the professional culture warriors, but you can refute them through persuasive examples and the proper mix of passion and dispassion. They themselves may not care about the substance of your response, but others will be watching with interest. Whether those bystanders lean left or right politically, whether they're religious or irreligious, something medieval is bound to beguile them. So go ye therefore, medievalists, and demonstrate to all the nations that you really can answer those who hear what you study and ask, “What on earth do you do with that?”

Blog Forum 3: Magistra on "Early Medieval Historical Argument from Soup to Nuts"

Welcome to the 3rd of our Blog Forum posts. The 1st and 2nd of these have generated, I think, some good discussion, so I encourage you to check them out and add your thoughts to the comments. (Our current contributor also has a longer post as a reaction to Cybermedievalist's contribution.)

This current contribution comes from Magistra, who, not so very long ago, was inspired by another post trying to justify history-writing as a whole. Here's her take on doing the same for medieval history.

Please comment/ discuss below. Or send longer responses directly to me and I'll be happy to add to the ongoing forum.

---

An interview and writing a conference paper have kept me from blogging for a bit, but they’ve once again got me thinking about why my research and my interest in early medieval history matters, or more specifically why it should matter to people who aren’t into medieval history. I came across a very interesting blog post on this a few weeks ago, by Timothy Burke of Swarthmore College, which tries to list broad justifications for writing history as a whole. I wanted to take his categories and see what early medieval topics might fit into them. I’m choosing topics, rather than specific books, since a book may often fit into several categories.

1. The past is prologue: a contemporary issue or practice has its roots or determinants in the history we are studying.
2. The past is not prologue: a contemporary issue or practice that is commonly understood to be determined by history is not, and we’ll demonstrate that by telling you about that history.
I’m putting these together, because for most of the themes below you can argue either for continuity or discontinuity with the early Middle Ages, and people have done both: ethnic/national/European/Western identity, English constitution, practices and beliefs of the Catholic church

3. The past is analogue: a contemporary issue or problem resembles some past issue or problem; the historical example has just enough distance from our own situation that we understand ourselves better.
The Roman empire as analogue (particularly to the US), relations between different religions and cultures (whether positive or negative)

4. The past is another country: our own times are made more particular by looking at just how different the past really was.
Most of early medieval history falls into this category, but there are some areas where this is particularly significant: mentalities and intellectual history (particularly political thought), gender, demography (when you realise just how nasty, brutish and short life was).

5. The past helps us make N as big as possible: it is a source of data for making generalizations, formulating models, constructing claims about human universals.
These kind of models are mainly useful in socio-economic history, for example, in looking at pre-industrial societies or the mechanics of empire. Ideas of human universals are also less usefully evoked e.g. in models of gender roles as eternal.

6. The past challenges generalizations, models and universals through attention to particulars and microhistories.
I don’t know of any microhistories for Europe for the early medieval period (though there’s Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou for the late medieval period). Anyone know of any? There has been useful recent work done in demolishing some of the early medieval ‘universals’ e.g. ideas about ‘barbarians’ or ‘Germanic culture’ or ‘the church’.

7. The past is procedural: we study it to learn how dynamic processes or change works out over time (without worry so much about the consequences of the history we are studying).
I think a lot of recent work on both the ‘Transformation of the Roman World’ and the ‘Feudal Mutation’ could be described in this way: there is less emphasis than in earlier works on such events as being about the roots of our own society and more about why change happens.

8. Hindsight is 20/20: we study a frozen moment in time because we can understand far better the total spectrum of social relationships, causal relationships, etc. than we can understand the present (here we choose richly knowable examples to study).
Not sure there are many such moments in our period.

9. Nothing actually ever changes in history; change is an illusion; some systems or practices always remain the same. We study the past the same way we would study the present, to understand a single system which is continuous over time.
This is now limited mainly to the more doctrinaire Marxists and feminists, who want to discuss the eternal oppression of the lower classes/women.

10. The unknowability of the past is humbling: we study it to learn about the permanent limits to our knowledge, or about the difficult range of epistemologies involved in knowing the past.
Given the fragmentary sources, just about every topic in early medieval history explores this theme at some point.

11. The past is ideology or discourse: we don’t really study it, we just build powerful contemporary claims from our representations of history.
Since medieval history was one of the first subjects seriously studied (and we are still sometimes using editions printed in the 16th century), there has been a lot of work done on the historiography of the Middle Ages over the past 400+ years.

12. The past is detection: we study it because we like solving puzzles and mysteries.
There is a particular concern in the study of the early Middle Ages about what our sources are lying about or concealing from us: the narrative of Carolingian history, for example, is interesting because of the efforts at systematic propaganda by the regime. The construction of genealogies and chronologies is also full of these puzzle-like elements, in a way less often seen in better documented societies.

13. The past is entertainment or personal enlightenment: we study it because it has great stories, or because of the pleasures of narrative.
Because early medieval historians liked strange and memorable stories, early medievalists have some of the best of them at our disposal.

14. The past is heritage: we study it to form or enforce national, ethnic, religious or personal identity, or to combat attempts to destroy heritage.
15. The past as it is known in modern Western society is anti-heritage: it is associated with imperialism or domination, and we study historiography to combat or contest that domination.
The early medieval period is significant for many Europeans as the moment when ethnic identities and histories (from Scots to Slavs) first appear in written sources. But it’s also the age of the ‘first English imperialism’, among others. And much of the early drive for early medieval women’s history/gay history came for the wish for ‘a history of our own’, which was simultaneously combating the dominant belief that women and gays had no history (or no ‘important’ history).

One reply to the original blog post wanted to generalise 15 to ‘history as a call-to-action, as motivation to change the future’. I don’t think much early medieval history is motivated by this (or rather, I think people who want to change the future don’t normally start from early medieval history), but you might put something like John Boswell’s work on homosexuality in here.

16. The past is memorial: we study (recite it, really) it to honor what people did or sacrificed on our behalf.
This is most common now in some forms of religious history, with an emphasis on saints (particularly missionary saints or founders of religious orders) as creators of ‘our’ church. I think it’s now less common for political or ‘national’ heroes to be memorialised in this way, though possibly the cult of Clovis still reveals this.

I would add another category:
17. The past as possibility: the road not taken
Even though I’ve done some speculating myself, I’m not a great fan of early medieval counterfactual history, which often seems not to get much beyond the level of Edward Gibbon’s idea that if it hadn’t been for Charles Martel we’d all be Muslims. But I do think there has been some useful work done on ‘alternative’ church history, which has pointed out that the development of many doctrines in their particular forms was not inevitable. (One example is Mark Jordan’s ‘The invention of sodomy’.)

I would say that my own research predominantly ends up being under heading 4 (the past as another country): gender then was different, which also has implications from heading 2: our current gender system is not simply derived from earlier culture. But I also see my work falling more generally into 3 (past as analogue), as a study of how Christianity is adapted to the moral norms of a particular society. I was writing a chapter on attitudes to war in the Carolingian period in 2002, and couldn’t help but be struck by parallels on the justification of war. And I’ve written in most of the other categories at some time in this blog.

So for readers of this blog, are there any important early medieval examples of the categories I’ve missed (it obviously focuses more on my particular fields of interest)? And why do you write (or read) history, whether it’s medieval or not?

Blog Forum 2: Witches, Warlocks, and Demons

I'll take moderator's privilege here for the 2nd post in our Blog Forum.

Please comment/ discuss below. Or send longer responses directly to me and I'll be happy to add to the ongoing forum.

---

Recently, there have been witch-hunts in rural Kenya. According to the article, about 100 people, armed with torches & machetes, stormed into a village and just started killing people suspected of practicing witchcraft. The local shaman (!!!)* explained that there probably weren't witches in that town and that old vendettas were most likely to blame. Belief in witchcraft, however, is apparently widespread, even beyond Kenya's borders.

The point I want to focus on, however, is the very 1st sentence of that initial CNN article.

"It may be difficult for modern-day Western cultures to fathom, but in Western Kenya, beliefs in ghosts and witches are very real."

No. Just no. This is a convenient fable that we tell ourselves sometimes -- a fable that makes (many of) us feel safe and secure, one that makes us feel like we have nothing in common with our past. But a fable isn't true.

So, let's talk about the West and its witches, warlocks, and demons. And let me, if I may, start with the Middle Ages, or more specifically with the Christianization of Europe.

Pagan antiquity is filled with examples of discussions of the supernatural intervening directly in this world and, in this sense, little changed once we entered the Middle Ages. The supernatural, on both sides, good and evil, were constantly present in the day-to-day events of this world. God's plan, made manifest in the shape of historical events, could only be actualized with the help of men and women working both for and against that plan, guided oftentimes by angelic or demonic beings. Often, this can be best/ easiest seen in monasticism. For example, think of the trials of St. Anthony or St. Guthlac or, as Michael Moore has written about, the battles St. Odilo and those of Cluny waged against Satan and his minions. But, I would argue, in the late 10th and early 11th century, these supernatural battles moved beyond the cloister and beyond the realm of the purely spiritual. God (through the Archangel Gabriel) succored Charlemagne in the ca. 1100 Oxford Song of Roland. On the 1st Crusade (1095-99), legions of the crusading dead returned to aid their brethren retake Jerusalem from a race influenced by demons. Earlier, demons and Satan himself wandered the 11th-century countryside whispering lies in heretics' ears. They continued to work their evil through the late Middle Ages, eventually inspiring/ conspiring with witches. The witch-craze, a more early modern than medieval phenomenon, only ended around 1700. The witch trials in Salem, MA (USA) were one of the last known episodes in the West.

The traditional narrative is that Enlightenment killed this kind of superstition. And that, I think, is what the CNN reporter above was alluding to. "We, in the civilized, enlightened West don't believe in such things anymore." Indeed, it would be comforting to believe such things. The Huffington Post article on witches I cited above says as much: "Just modernize the hell outta Africa and they'll leave those superstitions behind. Just like we have." But, as I've argued elsewhere (in a slightly different context), these ideas haven't gone away. They surround us, leaving us awkward gaps in polite conversation. They leave us, I think, wanting to bury our collective heads in the sand, pretending -- hoping -- these ideas will just go away.

Remember Seung Hui-Cho. His was a life tormented by demons, both metaphorical and (to him and many in the community of his upbringing) quite real. As I said then, Cho lived in

a world populated by God and the Devil, in which they are both still active forces in the world; a world where Cho could choose sides in this struggle and think that he was doing God's work; a world where violence in the name of religion is justified because the stakes, one's immortal soul, are so high.

But was Cho just an outlier? He was, of course, also tormented by mental illness. Unfortunately, no.

Many pentecostal evangelicals believe in the real presence of demons, at work in this world. Journalist Matt Taibbi has a new book, which, in part, details his time spent at Pastor John Hagee's (recently in the news) megachurch in Texas -- home to thousands of worshippers and reaching, via various media, likely millions more. Here, Taibbi found explicit and repeated references to the role that demons actively play in today's world. (Here's a good precis of what I'm talking about, available via Rolling Stone.) And there's more.

Bobby Jindal, the current Republican governor of Louisiana, and likely on John McCain's shortlist to be VP, is a convert to Catholicism. Gov. Jindal seems to be a supremely intelligent man -- a former Rhodes Scholar, and a graduate of Brown University. Moreover, he was accepted at, but declined to attend, both Harvard & Yale's Medieval & Law Schools. But, in 1994, Gov. Jindal also says that he assisted in an exorcism. (The image at the top of this post comes from pg. 17 of Gov. Jindal's article.) In an article entitled (aptly) "Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare," Jindal recounts how a good friend of his was tormented by a demon (that even caused, it seems, her skin cancer) and how he and his friends in a campus Christian fellowship aided in making the demon leave. Gov. Jindal meant this all literally. That demon was there, in that room, in his friend, tormenting her and her friends, causing her pain, forcing her into making poor decisions, ruining her life. That demon needed to be, and was, confronted both spiritually and physically.

These beliefs, shared by Kenyans and Americans, are not aberrant. A 2005 poll, taken by Harris Interactive, found that 73% of Americans believe in miracles, 68% believe in angels, 61% belive in the devil, and 28% believe in witches.

People in Kenya aren't dumb or "superstitious." Those horrific acts aren't "hard to understand." All you need to do is look in our society's mirror or, better yet, take a moment to talk to your local medievalist.

---

* I recently talked about all this to a friend who's an African historian and a specialist on Kenya. He said that the "shaman" referred to above was likely a "witch-smeller," who is responsible for finding out who the witches are in the community. These guys are almost always male and are always the "good" guys. Witches can be male or female but are always evil. My friend also mentioned that this part of the country is entirely Christian and so, as I guessed above, has no problem intellectually holding modern Christianity and such "superstitions" side-by-side.

Blog Forum 1: Cybermedievalist on "Why I Care about Medieval History, and So Should You"

Welcome to the 1st of our Blog Forum posts. This comes courtesy of Cybermedievalist, who originally posted this precise, thoughtful meditation on the relevance of the Middle Ages in April 2008.

Please comment/ discuss below. Or send longer responses directly to me and I'll be happy to add to the ongoing forum.

---

Explaining why you care so deeply about your particular academic specialty tends to be an awkward question, I think. When I say that I study medieval history, and especially issues of gender and spirituality in the tenth through twelfth centuries in northwestern Europe, people usually look at me with pity, confusion, or total incomprehension. Part of the reason for this, I know, is that most people were not taught history in a way that was engaging and involving and seemed relevant to contemporary concerns. Another part of the reason is that whatever pre-digested pablum passing for history they were fed in high school and/or college taught them a completely incorrect story of European history that goes something like this:

First there were the Greeks, and they were totally awesome because a tiny fraction of them practiced a form of government that sort of vaguely resembles representative democracy, like we have in the glorious old U.S. of A. And they had some nice art. Then, there were the Romans, who were pretty great because they created this really big empire, conquering lots of people and imposing their language and culture on a huge swath of the known world. And they built some really nice buildings. Then Jesus was born and lots of people became Christians and the Romans persecuted them, but they won out anyway and the Roman emperors became Christian. Then the Romans were conquered by a bunch of smelly, hairy German barbarians and European culture went to hell in a handbasket for a thousand years. During the Dark Ages, some rich people lived in castles and beat the hell out of each other, the Catholic Church pushed everyone around, and the poor people lived and died in squalor when they weren't getting the hell beat out of them or being pushed around by the Church. Art, culture, and science were suppressed by these ignorant, benighted people. Then, there was the Renaissance, hurray! Reason, enlightenment, and education returned to Europe, the arts flourished once more, and science was born. They "discovered" the (inconveniently inhabited) Americas. These people were like us! They were individuals with free intellects, unfettered by primitive superstition and engaged in a free search for Truth and Beauty. During their time, Europe becomes the Europe we know and understand, and their enlightened and rational descendants eventually went on to found the glorious U.S. of A.

Hopefully, some of you got a version of history that isn't quite this much of a caricature, but I know damned well this is pretty close to what most of you heard. Well, those of you who bothered to stay awake anyhow. The problem is, it's basically a load of horse pucky. This story of history is influenced by many different elements including American triumphalism and manifest destiny, Victorian anti-Catholicism, and fifteenth-century Italian snobbery. If there is any period that can be rightfully called the "Dark Ages" at all, it's only the couple of centuries after the Roman political order finally dissolved, replaced by the emerging kingdoms of the Germanic peoples the Romans hired to defend them from other "barbarians." It might, I repeat, MIGHT be appropriate to call that period a Dark Age simply because the details of how it all happened are quite murky on account of the fact that the Huns, Goths, Franks, Saxons, etc. were people of energy and action who did not spend a lot of time penning propaganda accounts of their activities like the Romans did.

The story of the Middle Ages, so called by relatively modern historians because they regarded it as an inferior period between the Roman Empire and the "Renaissance," is really the story of how people of very different languages and cultures created a new and unified political, social, cultural, and religious order from a startling diversity of elements. This story is, of course, full of missed opportunities, false starts, and roads not taken as well as of soaring achievements that continue to be vital elements of our modern culture. One could point out, for instance, that the book, the university, and the concept of romantic love were invented in this period. It's also a story of the ongoing tension between cultural unity and cultural diversity. Equally fascinating are the things that could have happened in this period and for various reasons didn't. An issue that interests me particularly is the existence of multiple understandings of womanhood in the earlier part of the period, and how and why some models that proposed a much more equal status for women failed to make the cut in the long term.

Despite what you probably learned in school, the story of the middle ages is as much the story of Western civilization, the story of "us" if you will, as any other part of history. The story of how these people, great and small, created an entirely new society out of such diverse elements, and of the ongoing tension between unity and diversity, has obvious and continuing relevance to the diverse society and world we live in today. I hope that when I myself begin to teach, in another couple of years, I will be able to communicate this story of the middle ages to students.

Upcoming Blog Forum

The blog forum is on. I've received a few submissions, so what I'll do is post the 1st beginning on Mon. 6/16, then invite comments, responses, and discussion for a few days. Rinse and repeat. Please spread the word far and wide.

Let me emphasize here that the "submission deadline" is rolling, so feel free to send other things in any time, even after the longer posts start to go live. You can do so either via email or simply as a comment somewhere on the blog.

UPDATE: We now have 4 entries. 2 for next week (Mon. & Thurs.), then 2 the following (Mon. & Thurs. again). Keep 'em coming in.

Reminder: Call for Submissions

Just a reminder that the initial, tentative deadline for submissions to our attempt at a blog forum, is this coming Friday (June 14). I've received 1 already and I'm cooking 1 up right now, so that should start us off.

If you're wondering exactly what I'm looking for, well, I don't have a good answer to that. My suggestion, other than to look at the call for submissions, would be to look at this post by Karl Steel. (And there are plenty of others like that out there.)

If you have something you'd like to share or have any questions, please post a comment or email me. I don't e-bite.

One More For the Road

I thought more folk should be aware of this, the latest in Allen's anti-medievalist war.

And Now For the Rest of the Story.....

Ok, that's an overblown title....but just adding to Matthew's post from a couple days ago, this article appeared in Inside Higher Ed this morning. Not precisely "medieval", but it does talk about the current administration's desire for a "no child left behind" like list of things a student should learn, and since the medieval period is so often overlooked in these kinds of schemes, it is something we should watch and be aware of.

Does the Medieval Academy have a lobbying arm?

Call for Submissions (?)

Building off of Larry Swain's initial post, the comments engendered by my little response, and (more generally) by BABEL's recent session at Kazoo and 2 sessions I'm hoping will get accepted for next year's Kazoo, I want to run something by you, oh internets.

How about a blog forum about what medieval studies and/ or medievalism has to offer a wider public? But not pitched to other academics? How would you talk about a topic of your choosing to a group of community members in a public library, for example? How do you talk about "relevance" (or the lack thereof) to undergraduates? etc.

So, let's try this. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Details:

• Use the questions above as general guidelines. Feel free to do something else related, if you so choose though.
  
• You can either email me a link to something you've already written somewhere else or you can email me "new" text and (with your permission) I'll post it here.
  
• Anonymity will absolutely, positively, be respected.
  
• I welcome anything thoughtful, be it short (~ 1 PP) or long.
  
• This can also be an ongoing conversation, so as this goes on, longer responses to earlier posts (responses too long for comments) are welcome.
  
• Please spread the word far and wide, to blogs, listservs, etc. We welcome, of course, people who don't normally blog and people outside of academia.
  
• Initial deadline for submissions will be next Friday, 6/13.
  

Update/ Clarification: The deadline is not hard-and-fast. Let's call it simply the "1st of many" deadlines, just to get the ball rolling. I certainly won't turn a thoughtful contribution away...

Yeah, what he said

Our very own Larry Swain takes Charlotte Allen (and her "Dark Age for Medievalists") to task.

I won't add much here, except to say these few things:

1. read Larry's take
2. pay attention to what he says at the end about being vigilant. I'll 2nd his concern that this may well be part of a concerted effort to undermine the authority of academics and the university as a whole
3. think about all the above in light of the rumored desire to create a "No Child Left Behind" for Higher Education
4. I'll repeat my question here, that I posed elsewhere, when do the rest of us medievalists start writing our own descriptions of what we do in more popular publications (outside the blogosphere)?