Religious Violence in the USA

Family planning doctor shot, at his church in Kansas, by Christian anti-abortionist. I wonder about the religious element here. I wonder how it'll be covered. I wonder if the journalists covering the story will have read this.

Newt Gingrich is Medieval

He says so himself. Speaking of his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism:

Part of what led to my conversion is the first time we [he and 3rd wife, Callista] went to St. Peter's together. It's St. Peter's. I mean, you stand there and you think, this is where St. Peter was crucified. This is where Paul preached. You think to yourself, two thousand years ago the apostles set out to create a worldwide movement by witnessing to the historic truth they had experienced. And there it is....

The moment that finally convinced me [to convert] was when Benedict XVI came here [to the United States] and Callista in the church choir sang for him at the vespers service and all the bishops in the country were there. As a spouse, I got to sit in the upper church and I very briefly saw [Benedict] and I was just struck with how happy he was and how fundamentally different he was from the news media's portrait of him. This guy's not a Rottweiler. He's a very loving, engaged, happy person....

And part of me is inherently medieval. I resonate to Gothic churches and the sense of the cross in a way that is really pre-modern.

Um, yeah. I've spoken many times of this kind of nostalgic, Romantic medievalism. But I'm struck by his evocation of the Gothic (no surprise, really) and a "pre-modern" devotion to the cross. Not really sure what that means. I do know, however, that Newt's no dummy so he probably has thought about it before he said it. Is he thinking of the Man of sorrows and late medieval devotional literature? Is he thinking about Francis of Assisi? Or is he thinking about Carolingian devotion to the cross? Is he thinking of power and vengeance? Is his "pre-modern" devotion to the cross linked in some way to the more "overt Christianity" he now professes, a more aggressive religio pushing outwards against non-believers? Dunno the answers to these. I hope someone will ask Newt though.

(Perceived?) Holy War in Iraq: The Rumsfeld Memos

Image: Screenshot from GQ.com, slideshow of covers to Rumsfeld's memos.


GQ now has an article online by Robert Draper, detailing Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as Pres. George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense. 2 things going on here:

--> The whole piece reads like an apologia for a certain segment of the Bush II administration -- Rice, Card, etc. Everything -- even the response to Katrina! -- was Rummy's fault. That stuff's interesting but needn't detain us here.

--> Not at all the main point of the article but contained within it, are the covers to classified intelligence memos that Rumsfeld himself (as Sec. of Def.) would deliver to the President. One of those is captured at right (again, for the full slideshow, go here). They all have images from previous day's events (mostly in Iraq) and they all have "appropriate" biblical quotations. The one in the image here, as it says, comes from Daniel 5. The whole chapter tells of the prophetic vision of King Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and the false scholars who can't understand God's plan. Daniel, however, can understand the divine writing and foretells Belshazzar's doom, how God will cast down his kindom. The rest of the quotations on the memo covers are similar but this one in particular reminded me of this:

et ipse mutat tempora et aetates transfert regna

He changes times and seasons, deposes kings and sets up kings (Daniel 2:21)

Why did I think of this last quotation? It was a favorite quotation of Pope Urban II (1088-99), the man who in 1095 stood in a cold field at Clermont, in what's now southern France, and asked his listeners to engage in a holy war. Urban believed that God would cast down the proud Muslims who then held the Christian East, including Jerusalem, and those who truly believed would find His favor as instruments of His will. There's a reason one of the chronicles of the First Crusade is called Gesta Dei per Francos ("The Deeds of God through the Franks").

Image: From a 13th-century manuscript; Christ leading Crusaders.

I'm not arguing for any sort of 1-1 comparison. Context matters. You can't simply put events, even very similar events, up next to each other and just look for similarities if those phenomena are separated by more than 900 years. Moreover, going by what Draper has to say in that GQ article, Rumsfeld used these quotations utterly cynically. He didn't care much for religion but he knew that his boss (Pres. Bush II) did. Rumsfeld thus knew that using these quotations would allow him to push Pres. Bush II in directions Rumsfeld wanted, by using language familiar to Pres. Bush II.

But then, this does suggest some similarities. Pres. Bush II perhaps would think this way and be receptive to this type of framing -- the events in Iraq as a holy war. Not Christians vs. Muslims, but the chosen people (for example, see also the image in the slideshow before the one above that has a quotation from Isaiah 26) against God's enemies. If you look at the language of the sources of the First Crusade, they too don't care so much about their enemies. I mean, they have only a very tenuous grasp of the religious difference between their enemies and themselves. The only thing that matters is that they -- the Muslims in this case -- held Jerusalem, that they stood in the crusaders' way, that they weren't Christian. This meant that they were enemies of God, that the crusaders were participants in a cosmic struggle between good and evil for the very fate of the world. You've heard this before, and you'll likely hear it again. Perhaps, I ask again, the best thing to do is to realize that it's time we stop being surprised when it happens.

Sometimes, people ask me how the Middle Ages matter. Sometimes, I want to ask them how they could possibly not.

Blogging, Twitter, and New Paradigms: Thoughts from Kalamazoo

My thoughts here are kind-of half-baked, springing from some conversations with very intelligent people at the infamous Kalamazoo. 2 panels in particular. Please bear with me.

The first, the panel I was on was, in truth, rather sparsely attended but still generated some interesting discussion around the topic of the "medieval," especially I think because we had the benefit of a specialist on East Asia and another on South Asia (but even these both fraught terms, of course). In the end, I was left wondering whether "medieval" -- or, more generally, any rather arbitrarily-decided result of periodization -- can ever tell us anything about the period itself. Does "medieval" in the end primarily useful as a way to get at a culture's/ society's myths of nation/ identity/ modernity? And relatedly, I'm increasingly shocked by how captive to late 19th- and early 20th-century scholarship we (as scholars) all seem to be. They have/ still do define the frames by which we look at the past and constrain the very questions we think to ask of our sources. The great Chris Wickham (and you have to put magnus next to his name) seemed to touch on this recently. But I'm left thinking that, pace Tony Grafton, we need someone to destroy our intellectual "coherence." Someone needs to grab hold of our most basic premises -- what we think we really know about the European Middle Ages -- and shake them to the core. Maybe this'll happen through New Media, online sources that can be manipulated in ways previously unthought of, or the prospect of the type of collaboration that only New Media can bring. I dunno. It does, however, seem like it's time to be daring.

This brings me to my second point, inspired by another panel, conveniently having taken place just after mine. 'Twas on blogging and the academy. The papers, let me say, were all excellent -- well thought-out and well-presented. But a question posed at the end by Manan Ahmed, in conjunction with an announcement made at the beginning of the panel that this would be the last year they would organize a session on blogging, in conjunction with the very sane observation made by one of the presenters that, well, things had changed in academic blogging over the past few years, got me thinking. Is blogging worth it? To paraphrase Dr. Ahmed, the revolution will now be covered in 140 characters. Yes, it will be tweeted.

And I think that's largely true. To a degree, we in academe are in the position we lamented of our parents -- a day late and a dollar short, still using the VCR. High School/ College students know and use email, perhaps they even blog themselves. But they don't use email in the ubiquitous way we do. They communicate in different ways, via txt, IM, tweet, or status update. This, of course, has long-term implications because these are the technologies that they'll bring with them to our courses and then outside of college. These new technologies are the ones that will govern our ability to communicate with them because it's how they communicate with one another. I wonder if blogging just isn't one of those technologies. Are we now just talking to ourselves?

I don't have a Facebook account (despite increasing pressure) but I do tweet, and am growing increasingly fond of doing so. The opportunities to communicate quickly and directly with people are huge, even if there remains the looming challenge of cutting through the inevitable "white noise" of so many short posts, so many followers. For example, see what happened when Oprah joined Twitter (also, check out the reporter's name).

And yet, and yet, and yet. Twitter is only good for 140 characters. (Eileen Joy would never survive, although she's gamely making a go of it on Twitter...) You just can't do the sort of long-ish, really good stuff that you can do in a blog post. So I think, in the end, I slightly disagree with Dr. Ahmed's point. The revolution will be tweeted but it'll be blogged too. You need both, a synthesis of "old" and new. The new paradigm shouldn't totally supplant the old but perhaps ought respect its contributions and then go back, take a different route, and build alongside it. It is, indeed, time for something bold.

UPDATE (5/15): See this interesting and related post by Jon Jarrett at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe. I'll post somet thoughts there as well.

UPDATE II (5/18): The NY Times now has an article about the mammoth growth in social network sites (not surprising) but also how time spent on those sites positively dwarfs time spent with email. See above for my thoughts on that.

The Next Age of Discovery

The Wall Street Journal today published an article by one Alexandra Alter on the preservation of manuscripts, digitally: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124173896716198603.html. Writ large in the article is Fr. Columba Stewart, head of the Hill Manuscript Library in MN.

HA CFP

Call for Papers


The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe invites submissions for our upcoming issues. In each issue, we plan to publish papers on any topic that falls approximately in the era between 300 and 1200 CE and within the general geographical region of Northwestern Europe and periods, and areas. Each issue contains:

*a general section of papers and notes that covers any topic in our range of dates and geography;
*a themed section of papers on an announced topic;
*a Forum section of review essays, special topics, and the like;
*a number of columns dealing with aspects of Early Medieval scholarship and research

Thus, The Heroic Age publishes the following types of materials:
*Feature Articles;
*Notes;
*Review Essays;
*Editions and Translations;
*History by Biography;*Book Reviews;
*Film and Television Reviews.

The following special sections are planned for future issues:

Issue 15: Ten Year Anniversary Issue: The World of Late Antique Britain.
For our ten-year anniversary, The Heroic Age is planning to revisit the topic of its first issue, the Matter of Arthur. Issue 15 will have three sections. The first will be historical, examining the world of Late Antique Britain, connections with the rest of the continent in Late Antiquity, and new views of the Adventus Saxonum. The second section will examine Arthur and Arthurian literature. The third section will include studies of "understudied" early medieval authors. Deadline for submissions is November 2009.

Issue 16: Alcuin and His Impact
Alcuin spans the Anglo-Saxon and Continental worlds and his influence is felt far beyond his own period and place. This issue seeks to explore the man, his times, and his influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent generations.The Heroic Age

Issue 17: Carolingian Border-Lands.
This issue seeks to explore the lands and peoples surrounding the Carolingian kingdom(s) and their impact on the Carolingians.

Future planned issues include themed sections on Old French/Provencal/Occitan studies, Charlemagne, Rise of the Normans, and Study of the Bible in Late Antiquity and Early Medieval Europe.

Articles should be 7000 words including bibliography and endnotes, and conform to The Heroic Age's in-house style. Instructions may be found under Submission Instructions. All submissions will be reviewed by two readers according to a double-blind policy. All submission should be sent to Larry Swain at haediting@yahoo.com

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

Well, kids, go, engage in the best Modern Medieval event there is! Wishing all who are going up a fabulous conference.