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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Since its first publication in 2007, John H. Arnold's What is Medieval History? has established itself as the leading introduction to the craft of the medieval historian. What is it that medieval historians do? How - and why - do they do it? Arnold discusses the creation of medieval history as a field, the nature of its sources, the intellectual tools used by medievalists, and some key areas of thematic importance from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Reformation. The fascinating case studies include a magical plot against a medieval pope, a fourteenth-century insurrection, and the importance of a kiss exchanged between two tenth-century noblemen. Throughout the book, readers are shown not only what medieval history is, but the cultural and political contexts in which it has been written. This anticipated second edition includes further exploration of the interdisciplinary techniques that can aid medieval historians, such as dialogue with scientists and archaeologists, and addresses some of the challenges - both medieval and modern - of the idea of a 'global middle ages'. What is Medieval History? continues to demonstrate why the pursuit of medieval history is important not only to the present, but to the future. It is an invaluable guide for students, teachers, researchers and interested general readers.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface and Acknowledgements
1 Framing the Middle Ages
A Medieval Tale
Medievalisms and Historiographies
The Politics of Framing
Notes
2 Tracing the Middle Ages
Polyphony or Cacophony?
Editions and Archives
Using Documents
Chronicles
Charters
Images
Legal Records
Notes
3 Reading the Middle Ages
Anthropology
Numbers and Statistics
Archaeology, Science and Material Culture
Texts and Cultural Theory
Notes
4 Debating the Middle Ages
Ritual
Social Structures
Globalisms
Cultural Identities
Power
Notes
5 Making and Remaking the Middle Ages
Notes
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Map of Europe, c.900
Map of Europe, c.1360
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1(a)
Early medieval handwriting, from a late eighth-century manuscript of biblical extracts (Cod…
Figure 2.1(b)
High medieval handwriting, from a twelfth-century manuscript of canon law (Cod. …
Figure 2.1(c)
Later medieval handwriting, in an extract from a civic court record, mid-fourtee…
Figure 2.2
Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, month of February (Wikimedia Commons)
Chapter 4
Map of World Systems
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface and Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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What is History? series
Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? 2nd editionPeter Burke, What is the History of Knowledge?John C. Burnham, What is Medical History?Pamela Kyle Crossley, What is Global History?Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, What is African American History?Shane Ewen, What is Urban History?Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, with Donna Gabaccia, What is Migration History?J. Donald Hughes, What is Environmental History? 2nd editionAndrew Leach, What is Architectural History?Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic, What is MilitaryHistory? 3rd editionJames Raven, What is the History of the Book?Sonya O. Rose, What is Gender History?Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is theHistory of Emotions?Hannu Salmi, What is Digital History?Brenda E. Stevenson, What is Slavery?Jeffrey Weeks, What is Sexual History?Richard Whatmore, What is Intellectual History?Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, What is Early Modern History?
What is Medieval History?
Second Edition
John H. Arnold
polity
Copyright © John H. Arnold 2021
The right of John H. Arnold to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2008 by Polity PressThis edition published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3258-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Arnold, John, 1969- author.Title: What is medieval history? / John H. Arnold.Description: Second edition. | Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: What is history? | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A rich and compelling overview of the sources and methods used by medieval historians”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020013070 (print) | LCCN 2020013071 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509532551 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509532568 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509532582 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Middle Ages. | Middle Ages--Study and teaching. | Medievalists.Classification: LCC D117 .A72 2020 (print) | LCC D117 (ebook) | DDC 940.1072--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013070LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013071
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Dedication
This one is for Alex
Preface to the Second Edition
The primary purpose in producing a second edition is to include some new and additional material that relates to methods and debates that have become more prominent over the decade-and-a-bit since I wrote the original book. This mainly consists of expansions to sections within Chapter 3, and a new section on ‘Globalisms’ in Chapter 4. As the original introduction admits, ‘my coverage tends towards western Europe’, and this is still the case; but the original did already reach out to a wider geography on occasion, and I have here attempted to expand upon that enlarged sense of ‘the medieval’.
I have also taken the opportunity to amend the text in minor ways in some other places, for greater clarity of expression and to include some additional examples where they are particularly illuminating. As with the original book, I remain deeply indebted to a host of colleagues and their work for my understanding of the middle ages; I should note, in particular, conversations with Ulf Büntgen, Matthew Collins, Pat Geary, Caroline Goodson, Monica Green, Eyal Poleg and Peter Sarris regarding recent work in science and archaeology. I am grateful to Pascal Porcheron at Polity for prompting my further work, and for the careful labours of Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Sarah Dancy and others involved in its production. This second edition remains a work that aims to introduce ‘the medieval’, not in any sense claiming fully to represent it, or the fullness of its study.
Preface and Acknowledgements
This is a book about what historians of the middle ages do, rather than a history of the middle ages itself, though it will also provide a sense of that period. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the historian’s task, and the conditions of its possibility. Chapter 1 discusses the idea of ‘the middle ages’ and its associations, and the foundational contours of academic medievalism. Chapter 2 looks at sources, the possibilities and problems that they present to the historian. Chapter 3 examines intellectual tools which medievalists have borrowed from other subject areas, and the insights they provide. Chapter 4 tries to indicate the shape of some key and broad-ranging discussions in current historiography. The final chapter addresses the very purpose of medieval history – its present and potential roles, in academic debate and society more broadly. The book is written neither as a blankly ‘objective’ report on the field, nor as a polemical call to arms, but as an engaged survey which seeks to both explain and comment upon the wider discipline. In what follows, I assume some knowledge of, and interest in, history on the reader’s part, but little prior sense of the medieval period (roughly the years 500–1500). Rather than always listing particular centuries, I have sometimes made use of the loose division of the medieval period into ‘early’, ‘high’ and ‘late’. All that is meant by this is c.500–c.1050, c.1050–c.1300 and c.1300–c.1500. My coverage tends towards western Europe, but I have tried to indicate the greater breadth of medievalism that exists beyond; to do more would take a much bigger book.
I am indebted to various people in my attempt to chart, in so few pages, so large an area. Rob Bartlett, Mark Ormrod and Richard Kieckhefer all kindly answered particular queries at key moments. Rob Liddiard and Caroline Goodson helped me understand aspects of archaeology, Sophie Page did similarly with regard to magic and David Wells assisted my grasp of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Major thanks are due to those who very generously read and commented on individual chapters or indeed the whole book: two anonymous readers for Polity, Cordelia Beattie, Caroline Goodson, Victoria Howell, Matt Innes, Geoff Koziol and Christian Liddy; Matt and Geoff also kindly shared unpublished material with me. Any errors are entirely my own fault. Thanks are owed also to Andrea Drugan at Polity, for prompting me to write the book and for being an understanding editor during the process. As ever, I am grateful to Victoria and Zoë for giving me the support and the space in which to write.
Lastly, this book is dedicated to all those who have taught me how to teach, from my parents, Henry and Hazel Arnold, to my students past and present.
Map of Europe, c.900
Map of Europe, c.1360
1Framing the Middle Ages
A Medieval Tale
The first time Bartolomeo the priest talked to them was on 9 February 1320, in the papal palace at Avignon, and his interrogation probably took up most of one day. A notary, Gerard, wrote down his words; thus they survive for us today. Three very powerful men – a cardinal, an abbot from Toulouse and the pope’s legate for northern Italy – questioned, listened and re-questioned.
Matters had begun, Bartolomeo explained, the previous year, in October. A letter had arrived from Matteo Visconti, duke of Milan, summoning the priest to his presence. And so Bartolomeo had obeyed.
He met with the Visconti conspirators (he explained to his interrogators) in a room in Matteo’s palace. Scoto de San Gemignano, a judge, was there, as was a physician, Antonio Pelacane. Initially, Matteo drew him to one side. He told the priest that ‘he wished to do Bartolomeo a great service, benefit and honour, and that he wished that Bartolomeo would do Matteo a great service, indeed the greatest, namely the greatest that anyone living could do for him; and Matteo added that he knew for certain that Bartolomeo knew well how to do the aforesaid service of which Matteo was thinking.’ He would do whatever he could, Bartolomeo protested.
Immediately Matteo called to Scoto, the judge, telling him to show Bartolomeo what he had with him. ‘Then the said lord Scoto drew out from his robe and held out and showed to Bartholomeo and Matteo a certain silver image, longer than the palm of a hand, in the figure of a man: members, head, face, arms, hands, belly, thighs, legs, feet and natural organs.’ Written on the front of the statue were these words: Jacobus papa Johannes, ‘Jacques pope John’. The present pope, John XXII, had been called Jacques d’Euze before taking the pontifical title.
This was not the only thing written on the image. There was a sign, like a reversed ‘N’, and a name: Amaymo. The name of a demon.
‘Bartolomeo, behold this image,’ said Matteo, ‘which I have made to bring destruction to the pope who persecutes me.’ What Matteo wanted of Bartolomeo was for the priest to help finish the magical object, by suffusing the image with incense from zuccum de mapello (‘What is zuccum de mapello?’ asked Bartolomeo’s interrogators in Avignon, some months later. A kind of poison, he explained. But, he emphasized, he did not want to go along with Matteo’s plan).1
Bartolomeo told Matteo that he had no zuccum de mapello, and was unable to help. He then left, threatened by the duke to keep silent. But some time later Scoto came to see him, to ask his advice on the details of some books of sorcery. Prompted by Bartolomeo, Scoto again showed him the statue. It had been finished by a different sorceror from Verona, and was inscribed with a new word, Meruyn. All that now need happen, Scoto explained, was to hang the statue up for seventy-two nights, placing it night after night in a fire. As, little by little, the fire consumed the image, so would its target, little by little, be destroyed.
And that was all he knew, Bartolomeo explained to the cardinal, the abbot, the legate and the scribe. He had come to Avignon to warn Pope John XXII that his life was in danger.
But that was not the end of it, because some months later, on 11 September 1320, Bartolomeo was once again before this gathering of interrogators, explaining what had happened to him in the intervening period. When he had returned to Milan the previous March, he said, he had immediately been arrested and brought before Scoto. The Milanese knew that he had been to Avignon, and suspected that he had revealed the plot concerning the statue. He was imprisoned, in chains, for weeks. Scoto came to interrogate him many times. Bartolomeo told him that he’d gone to Avignon to treat a sick man, a knight who was under a magical curse. Scoto did not believe him. Matteo was very angry with him, Scoto explained; it would be better to confess now. ‘Come, Bartolomeo, tell the truth, why you went to the Curia’, Scoto said at one time. ‘Because you know absolutely that in the end it will happen that you tell the truth; and if you will not speak courteously, you will end up speaking under torture. Although I want you to know that I do not want to place you in torment, however in the end it will have to be, that you are tortured, unless you spontaneously wish to say the truth.’ Bartolomeo stuck with his story.
And he was tortured. Stripped, his hands tied behind him to a stick, a heavy stone was placed on his legs, while Scoto’s assistants yanked his arms back. They pulled him up, then released him, pulled him up, then released him. He was then untied, and led back to his cell. Look, said Scoto, we can do this to you every night. Every night until you die. Just confess.
But Bartolomeo did not confess. What saved him eventually was the intervention of another powerful northern duke, Galeazzo Visconti, Matteo’s son. Galeazzo had him freed, apologized for what had happened, hoped that he was all right. But Galeazzo was also in on the plot, and inveigled Bartolomeo into helping once again: the statue must be freshly suffused, and Bartolomeo was the man to do it – by implication, a proof of Bartolomeo’s loyalties. And by implication, prison, torture and death the alternative. Let me think about it, Bartolomeo pleaded. Very well, said Galeazzo; but ‘you should know that I have had Master Dante Alighieri come to me regarding this matter that I’m asking of you.’ Good, said Bartolomeo: I would be very pleased if he did what you are asking. But no: Galeazzo really doesn’t want to ask Dante to do it – because he knows that Bartolomeo can do it, will do it.
Two days later Bartolomeo agreed, set about finding more zuccum de mapello, and retrieved the statue from Galeazzo. He returned with it to his home town – and then he fled to Avignon once more.
And where is the statue?, asked his interrogators. I brought it with me, Bartolomeo replied. He produced a bundle tied with twine, unwrapped it, and drew out a silver figure in the shape of a man. And it was just exactly as he had described it, as the interrogators attested for the written record.2
There the story ends, Bartolomeo’s story at any rate. The struggles between John XXII and the Visconti continued for some time, and other witnesses raised against them describe their impiety, their heresy, their usury and other crimes. The pope believed himself subject to further magical attacks, and encouraged inquisitors to be on the lookout for sorcery. The Visconti themselves survived as a family for a long time, ruling Milan late into the fifteenth century without break. But of Bartolomeo the priest we know nothing more.
At first sight this is what one might call a very medieval tale. It involves tyrants, a pope, intrigue, torture and magical practices of a kind now usually described as ‘superstitious’. We may have a fairly vivid mental image of some of the more lurid parts of the story, not least because this kind of middle ages has inspired (directly or indirectly) various aspects of modern culture. Film, television, novels and comics have pictured a dark, grubby, bloody middle ages: The Name of the Rose, Braveheart or the various films about Joan of Arc, for example. There is a similar template for future barbarism: Mad Max, Robocop and The Hunger Games (Katniss Everdeen having distant kinship with Robin Hood) all bear the imprint of a certain kind of medievalism. ‘I’m gonna get medieval on yo’ ass’, as Marcellus Wallace threatens his erstwhile torturers in Pulp Fiction. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones famously replays the horrors of late medieval politics with added sex and dragons. So, in one sense, Bartolomeo’s experiences are familiar.
But there is more here than immediately meets the eye. Matteo Visconti’s plot against the pope may look typically ‘medieval’, but it contains elements that, on reflection, may surprise us. And it sits at an intersection of themes, lives, geographies and forces that are far more complex – and interesting – than those stereotyped depictions, which Umberto Eco once called ‘the shaggy middle ages’, would suggest.3 Take magic. Everyone ‘knows’ that the middle ages was a superstitious age, full of witches, demons, spells and the suppression of the same by the Inquisition. But the magic in this story is located not where we might expect to find it: not in the simple hut stuck at the end of the village, inhabited by a poor widow and her cat, but in learned Latin books, read and owned by clerics, right at the heart of the city and intellectual culture. This was not in fact unusual: while healers and soothsayers were found in rural medieval parishes, the kind of magic described here was very much a clerical subculture, available only to those with a Latin education. The roots of this magic were not ‘pagan’ in the sense of pre-Christian primitivism; nor was it, within medieval terms, a set of irrational ideas. Learned magic derived in part from classical scholarship, in part from ideas about hidden (‘occult’) natural forces and in part from a long tradition of Christian theology, which saw demons as constantly present – and, in certain circumstances, harnessable to good or bad ends. Learned magic and science were intimately connected, and would continue to be for several centuries to come.
Nor were ecclesiastical attitudes to this magic always quite what one might expect. The Inquisition did not automatically pursue its practitioners, not least because there was no such thing as the ‘Inquisition’ in the sense of a permanent and central tribunal until the mid-sixteenth century (with the exception of Spain, where the Spanish Inquisition began under secular direction in 1480). While inquisitors into heretical depravity were appointed directly by the papacy, their practical powers were largely dependent upon the cooperation of secular authorities in any particular area. Furthermore, local bishops, parochial priests and monastic orders could have different ideas from inquisitors and the papacy about desirable orthodox practice and the demands of the faith. The ‘Church’ was a complex and in some ways wildly heterogeneous edifice. The procedures that were used when interrogating Bartolomeo were inquisitorial in the sense of being a legal technique, and one could describe the cardinal, abbot and legate as ‘inquisitors’ only while they were engaged in interviewing the priest. Torture was involved in our story, but although it had indeed been permitted since 1252 in heresy trials, in this case, as we saw, it was the secular authorities in Milan that tortured poor Bartolomeo.
In any case, Bartolomeo’s tale is not a story about magic at all. It is really about politics and communication. Despite all the evidence alleged against them, nothing happened to Matteo or Galeazzo Visconti, because the pope simply didn’t have the power to touch them. The very reason that John XXII was in Avignon rather than Rome was that northern Italy had become too politically fraught for him to stay there (the papacy had moved to Avignon in 1309, through a combination of pressure from the French monarchy and factional political fighting in Rome; there it remained until 1377). If the Visconti were attempting to assassinate the pope, it was because of political matters: a few years before Bartolomeo’s reports, John XXII had been attempting to stop conflict between Milan, Brescia and Sicily. Matteo Visconti had agreed to the terms of a peace treaty, but the pope had then, in March 1317, declared that Ludwig of Bavaria held the title of Holy Roman Emperor illegally. Since the Visconti based their right to rule Milan on claims of a past imperial appointment, this threw them back into conflict with the papacy and Milan’s neighbours; and in 1318 Matteo was excommunicated. In theory, excommunication was a very serious matter: one was removed from the community of the Christian faithful, denied the sacraments and, unless reconciled before death, denied entry into heaven. But John XXII had been a little too lavish in his use of excommunication as a political weapon, and contemporary commentators were quite clear that the political struggles going on were nothing to do with matters of faith.
So much for the politics (the complexities of which, if further explicated, could easily fill this entire book and a shelf full more). What of communication? Several forms and facets were apparent in Bartolomeo’s tale, not least the very document in which it was recorded. Inquisition was a highly textual form of inquiry, and the rich details given above – all of which are drawn directly from the evidence – demonstrate in themselves the development of a particular kind of written technology. The magic being discussed was written magic, and although this was innately arcane and specialized, the existence of books and written documents in general was far from rare. A northern Italian city such as Milan was by this period a highly literate society: some estimates suggest that the majority of adults in this kind of milieu could read and write in the vernacular. This was admittedly the likely pinnacle of medieval literacy; in other countries, in rural areas and in earlier centuries, access to texts would sometimes have been much more limited. But mechanisms of communication were always more complex than a stereotyped picture of the middle ages would suggest. As we have already seen, matters of local, national and international politics involved the flow of information across Europe. Even in the countryside, villages might well have a notary who could act as the conduit for written information. And it was not only documents that could bring news, but also people. Bartolomeo travelled with relative ease between Milan and Avignon; the Visconti were capable (presumably through spies) of discovering where he had been in advance of his return. Trade routes linked together various European centres, and indeed connected Europe to the Middle East and North Africa (a topic to which we shall return in a later chapter). Letters, reports, recorded interrogations, archives, sermons, songs, stories and images all circulated across European kingdoms. It was not as information-rich an age as the twenty-first century; but neither was it as isolated or ignorant as is often assumed.
For much of the middle ages, writing was seen as an artisanal skill, something that highly intellectual authors would not stoop to perform themselves; they would, rather, dictate their works to a scribe. Someone like Bartolomeo would have thought of himself as ‘literate’ (litteratus), but by this he would have meant particularly that he could read Latin rather than the vernacular, and that through reading Latin he was steeped in the wisdom and traditions of Christian intellectual thought. One could be fluent in writing a vernacular language – as, for example, many merchants would have been – and yet still be seen as illitteratus, lacking in Latin. However, at this very time and place, such conceptions were being challenged by a marginal figure in Bartolomeo’s story: Dante Alighieri. He appears within the tale as an alternative expert upon whom the Visconti could allegedly call. Dante was indeed connected to the northern Italian aristocracy – dependent upon them for his livelihood – and we know from other sources that he had knowledge of learned magic; but there is no direct evidence that he had any connection to magical plots against the papacy. Where Dante really matters is in his own writing, perhaps most famously The Inferno, a vision of Hell that also commented on the society and politics of his time. The key thing about the poet was that he wrote, proudly, in Italian. He was not the first medieval writer to do such a thing, but he was perhaps the first to make a virtue of it, and to claim the ascendancy of the vernacular, as a poetical language, over Latin. And this made him famous, sufficiently famous that he could be invoked by Galeazzo as a credible, albeit veiled, threat to Bartolomeo.
This was a world in motion, some of its essential elements changing in this very moment. Thus, if one scratches the surface of ‘the medieval’ something more complex appears. In introducing the study of medieval history, my first task has been to demonstrate that things are not quite as they initially seem. Yes, it was an age when religion loomed much larger than in many modern European countries. Yes, it contained knights and ladies and monks and saints and inquisitors and all the other inhabitants of a thousand lurid historical novels. But it was neither simple nor unchanging. It was not even ‘one’ thing, in part because when studying the middle ages one may be engaged with more than a thousand years of history and thousands of square miles of geography. But also because if one asked John XXII and Dante Alighieri about the nature of papal power, one would receive two radically different answers. That is, to put the point more broadly, every element of ‘medievalness’ is situated within a certain perspective, differing between different times, places and people, rather than one universal and univocal feature of the period.
Medievalisms and Historiographies
Over a couple of decades at the end of the seventeenth century, a classical scholar at the University of Halle in Germany, Christopher Cellarius (1638–1707), published a book under the title Universal History Divided into an Ancient, Medieval and New Period. Cellarius was far from the first person to subdivide western history into three periods: in his self-conscious links back to a classical tradition, the Italian poet Petrarch (1304–74) had inferred a difference – a darkness – about the period intervening between his own time and the antique past. The lawyer and classicist Pierre Pithou (1539–96) had talked of ‘un moyen age’, and the antiquarian William Camden (1551–1625) similarly of ‘a middle time’. The passing notion of a ‘middle age’ was not new, but what Cellarius did was to build a complete framework for historical time around the concept. And his book was a textbook, imparted as foundational knowledge. Then and ever after, western historians have talked of ‘antiquity’, ‘the middle ages’ and ‘modernity’.
The important thing to note here is that, from the first moments of its inception, ‘medieval’ has been a term of denigration. For Petrarch and later humanists, for the antiquarians, for Pithou and for later Enlightenment philosophers, what mattered was the classical past, and the ways in which it informed and was renewed by the ‘modern’ world around them. Both the ancient ‘then’ and the contemporary ‘now’ were thrown into stark relief by the darkness in between: a darkness of ignorance, decay, chaos, confusion, anarchy and unreason. As the early modern period ‘rediscovered’ (largely via the very middle ages it disparaged) texts and artefacts from the Greek and Roman past, using them as models for its own cultural productions, the middle ages came to stand for a gross barbarity of style and language. Medieval historians were disparaged for their failure to conform to classical modes of rhetoric. Its art was seen as hopelessly unsophisticated, its literature as clumsy, its music similarly lacking. The judgements passed on medieval politics were of a similar, almost aesthetic, vein. As the economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–81) characterized the period:
The kings without any authority, the nobles without any constraint, the peoples enslaved, the countryside covered with fortresses and ceaselessly ravaged, wars kindled between city and city, village and village … all commerce and all communications cut off … the grossest ignorance extending over all nations and all occupations! An unhappy picture – but one which was only too true of Europe for several centuries.4
As the last century of study has amply demonstrated, Turgot’s caricature of the middle ages is grossly distorted. But its spirit continues to reside: we, no less than Enlightenment philosophes, tend to look down as we look back, feeling at a gut level that something from the middle ages must be basic, crude and probably nasty. They believed the earth was flat, didn’t they? (No, that’s a later myth.) They burnt witches, didn’t they? (Not very often, that was mostly in the seventeenth century.) They were all ignorant, weren’t they? (No, there is substantial intellectual culture visible in Carolingian times, there were universities across Europe from the thirteenth century, and the beginnings of experimental science, among other things.) They never left home, hardly knew the world around them, right? (No, there were trade networks connecting Scandinavia, central Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.) But, surely, they behaved barbarically: constant local violence, waging wars against people they didn’t like, torturing people, executing criminals? (And none of this happens today?)
This initial, vast accretion of grime is the first veil that must be removed in order to do medieval history seriously. Put aside preconceptions about the period: some may have elements of truth to them, but they must be treated as a matter for investigation, rather than a foundation. The middle ages were what they were – the many things they were – rather than only the summed ‘failures’ of future ages’ expectations. The medieval was not simply the opposite of what is deemed ‘modern’; it was something much more complex, and, as we will see, something still interwoven with how we are today.
The second veil to be penetrated is bestowed by the politics of medievalism. The middle ages have frequently been an object of ideological struggle, even when being disavowed. Thus, for those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian humanists who condemned the preceding centuries to ‘darkness’, a major consideration was the desire to deny any continuity between the old Roman Empire and the medieval Holy Roman Empire – because of the legitimacy this would confer on the existing Holy Roman Emperor. For the Enlightenment philosophes, a major factor in denigrating the middle ages was its apparent religiosity, in thrall to the command of the Catholic Church: something against which the defenders of Reason, in the eighteenth century, continued to struggle. The nineteenth century brought, in several European countries, a more positive attitude towards the medieval: France, for example, fell in love once again with chivalry, while Germany looked back to a powerful combination of law and empire, and England glowed with quiet pride over its long history of parliamentary constitutionalism. But these reinventions of the medieval were also political, informed particularly by different strands of Romantic nationalism. Because of events in the mid-twentieth century, we tend to see this as most poisonous in Germany, and certainly German historiography in the nineteenth century sought the roots of its Volksgeist in the medieval past, and looked back to the ‘glory days’ of the Empire. But it was a weakness to which every European country was prone, and while the medievalisms that it fostered varied according to nationality, they shared the tendency to romanticize, mythologize and simplify the medieval past.
This is not to say that this reappropriation is all that the nineteenth century gave us. General histories of modern historiography tend to talk of a ‘revolution’ in historical method in the nineteenth century, associated particularly with Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and German historiography more broadly. While there are reasons for being suspicious of some of the claims made by and about Ranke with regard to how revolutionary the use of primary archival sources actually was,5 it is definitely the case that the foundations of modern, academic history were laid by Germany in the nineteenth century, and that a focus on archives and source analysis was a primary part of this. Some version of Rankean historiography informed the creation of academic history teaching, and subsequently postgraduate training, in France, Italy, England, the US and elsewhere. As various writers have shown, it was rare that the adopters of von Ranke’s ideas understood them quite in the way he intended: they tended to reify the notion of a ‘scientific method’ in an unwarranted fashion, and failed to see the abstract, spiritual element in Ranke’s call for the historian wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (‘only to show what actually [or, more accurately, ‘essentially’] happened’).6 Moreover, while Ranke had broad interests in the Renaissance and Reformation periods, his followers tended to restrict their focus to high political history, based on study of governmental archives, which meant that pre-existing interests in social and cultural history were sidelined as rather ‘amateurish’ pursuits.
In England, in particular, the professionalization of history over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was played out in the study of the middle ages. This partly followed the German example – in both countries, it had been medieval records that formed the basis for the great series of edited sources, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (begun 1826) and the Rolls Series (begun 1857) – but also reflected both an English pride in its long constitutional history, and an English abhorrence for current political argument. The middle ages, it was felt, was a suitably distant period for university study, unlikely to lead to unseemly debate and dissension among modern undergraduates. For Oxford and Cambridge, in the pre-war years, medieval history was political precisely by dint of being apolitical: no current religious debates or party political issues to cause upset, and hence a suitable arena of study for the developing minds of the Empire’s future administrators. A succession of Grand Old Men of English medievalism is associated with both universities in the late nineteenth century, but none of them is now read for any present insight. They excluded from their middle ages anything that unbalanced the smooth progress of the ship of state; assumed rather than analysed the case for English ‘exceptionalism’, thus furthering England’s tendency to look inward rather than outward; and a thick blanket of social and political complacency slumps suffocatingly over their prose. The interesting research and teaching were being done in London and Manchester, by figures such as A. F. Pollard and T. F. Tout; and the most exciting work was by a scholar of law, rather than history, F. W. Maitland.7 Maitland is still worth reading today, for while later research has corrected some of the details of his work, his sensitive understanding of law’s structural relationship to society continues to inspire.8
The next ‘revolution’ in historiography also had a strong medieval element, this time in France. Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, two graduates of the École normale supérieure, had a new vision for what history could become. The perspectives associated with the pair have become known by the title of the journal they founded: the Annales. Febvre’s work concerned the early modern period, but Bloch was a medievalist. They wanted to broaden the horizon of historiography, free it from the pursuit of factual political narrative and explore instead the fields of geography, society, culture, even the psyche. Strongly influenced by sociology and anthropology, Bloch’s vision of the middle ages was complex and panoramic. His two-volume Feudal Society attempted to construct an analysis of the period, changing over time, that emphasized structural connections that ran vertically through all of society. Scholarship has moved on here in various ways, and (as we shall see in Chapter 4) arguments about the nature of feudalism have altered considerably since Bloch’s day; but his attempt at writing a complete history, sensitive to all parts of the medieval landscape, remains a solitary beacon. Bloch’s other great legacy was his book on historiography, Apologie pour l’histoire, ou Métier d’historien (published posthumously and translated into English as The Historian’s Craft). Despite being unfinished – Bloch, a member of the French resistance, was still writing it when murdered by the Gestapo in 1944 – it continues to provide a brilliant introduction to doing history.9
The Annales mode of historiography continued strongly, never following a strict orthodoxy, but, rather, a broad perspective and set of complementary inclinations. Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff developed Bloch’s legacy, the former pursuing in particular the important shifts in socioeconomic structures, the latter more interested in the cultural mentalité of the period. For all the French medievalists, Marxism provided a useful set of intellectual tools, and in the case of Duby in particular, encouraged the careful study of economic relations in understanding social structures. There had been earlier Marxist works of medieval history – Gaetano Salvemini had published a book on late thirteenth-century Florence in 1899 that considered its society in terms of class structures – but it was the Annales that brought theory sustainedly to bear on the period.
This is not to say that Bloch, Duby, Le Goff and others were all Marxists in a personal sense; indeed, in a broader perspective, the Annales group were distanced from the more explicitly Marxist traditions. It was, rather, that the French educational system, then as today, saw the insights of Marxism as part of the intellectual landscape. In the latter half of the twentieth century, there were some medievalists writing within Communist societies: a number of East German scholars, and the Russian Aron Gurevich. The work of the former was deleteriously affected by their political context, restricted to following the Party line on topics such as medieval heresy (where one had to parrot the perspectives of Friedrich Engels’s brief comments in his Peasant War in Germany) and the reflexive conflation of ecclesiastical and secular powers. Gurevich, inspired by the Annales
