Читать книгу What is Medieval History? - John H. Arnold - Страница 11

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 tradition, but with a helpfully critical distance from it, is a very different case. His work was hampered by his relative lack of access to archival source materials, but this handicap inspired deep reflection on medieval society and culture, with a particular pursuit of the cultural fissures between medieval social classes. Marxism also provided a particular boost for historiography in England: the influential Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party, which existed from 1946 to 1956, established a new historiographical tradition not dissimilar to that of the Annales, but with a more clearly political intent. Its medieval element resided particularly with Rodney Hilton, whose work pursued the theme of class conflict in medieval English society.¹⁰ Past and Present, the journal founded by the Historians’ Group, though itself now no longer wedded to Marxism, continues to provide a strong platform for medieval enquiry, among other periods.

Work in America has in part followed European tides – as in other countries, many American medievalists of the early twentieth century did their training in Germany, and brought Rankean models of historiographical pedagogy back to their own universities – but has also developed its own foci and interests.¹¹ The particularly American revolution in historiography, the ‘New History’ associated with Carl Becker and Charles Beard post-World War I, was notably unpopular with medievalists, who remained staunch defenders of ‘scientific objectivity’ against this perceived relativism. The biggest influence on medieval history in the first half of the twentieth century was an underlying commitment to modernizing ‘Progressive’ politics, associated with President Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, one of the formative figures in medieval studies, Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), was a friend and adviser to Wilson; and through Haskins’s student Joseph Strayer, and Strayer’s many graduate students, one can trace a continued line of interest in the growth of the medieval state, the modernizing elements within medieval society, and so forth.

Overall, the shifts within medieval history in the twentieth century largely followed broader currents in historiography. The Rankean period of professionalization focused its energy particularly on studies of high politics, with accompanying interests in the history of the law and the development of national constitutions. Over time, historiography came to admit medieval society and economics as legitimate areas that expanded the possibilities of the discipline; religion, for example, could be analysed as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than simply ecclesiastical governance. Women became a topic for sustained study particularly in the 1970s (though pioneering work in this area dates back to the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, for example by the economic historian Eileen Power), and the presence and treatment of minorities – Jews, lepers, heretics, homosexuals, slaves and ‘Saracens’ – in the 1980s (though excellent work on Jews and heretics had already appeared some decades earlier), and in both cases American scholars largely led the way. New philosophies of history, often rather loosely and not very helpfully termed ‘postmodernism’, have occasioned medievalist engagement, most explicitly (both pro- and anti-) in the US and France.¹² The shifts had many causes, some stretching out into academia far beyond the particular field of medievalism, but all were facilitated by the entry into academe of people from more diverse backgrounds than the overwhelmingly white, male and strongly patrician founding fathers of the early twentieth century.

Developments in historiography, of which the preceding paragraphs offer but a crude summary, did not of course end in the 1980s, and the movement from politics to culture has not been a linear path; indeed, a particular move in recent times has been the looping back of culture to politics. To this, and other topics of recent interest, we shall turn in later chapters. Nor does the preceding sketch mention a host of individually important figures for the development of the discipline, such as the nineteenth-century American scholar of inquisition Henry Charles Lea, or the Oxford don Richard Southern whose mixture of intellectual and cultural history inspired a generation, or many other more recent figures such as Caroline Walker Bynum, Barbara Hanawalt, Janet Nelson or Miri Rubin (to correct the earlier gender imbalance somewhat).

But, given the constraints of brevity, what should we take from the brief introduction above? I want to suggest that there are four problems of which any student of medieval history should be aware, and one overarching issue. The last I shall turn to at the end of this chapter; let us look first at the problems.