MEDIEVAL HISTORIOGRAPHY SINCE 1965.   Term Paper ID:19938 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Assesses revisionism in studying Middle Ages. Modernism compared to other eras, role of science & reason, ethnocentrism, spirituality, sexual mores, society & politics, art.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Assesses revisionism in studying Middle Ages. Modernism compared to other eras, role of science & reason, ethnocentrism, spirituality, sexual mores, society & politics, art. Paper Introduction: The purpose of this research is to examine medieval historiography generated since 1965, to explore whether and to what extent subsequent historical interpretation of the medieval period has continued earlier lines of thought. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal outlines of development that motivated modern historiography as discussed by Norman Cantor, and then to deal with the extent to and reasons for which significant changes in interpretation and focus of interest in medieval subjects have occurred. When Norman F. Cantor wrote Reinventing the Middle Ages in 1991, a category of revolution had been going on in the humanities disciplines in general and interpretation of the medieval period in particular, for a couple of decades. Cantor limits his own study to the formative and institutionalizing Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. This is apoint to which we shall return. The Pauline version of this was that theflesh "suffused the body with disturbing associations . "Thus," says Richards, "threats to the established socialstructure or to the existing ideological structure of society provoked thecreation of negative stereotypes embodying the threat [ofindividuality/otherness]" (Richards, 199 , p. Marenbon's creation ofa structure in which to explore such writings and the biographies of thephilosophers and theologians concerned is decisive in this regard: The study of medieval thought calls for the skills of both the historian and the philosopher: the historian's in order to understand the presuppositions and aims which made the concerns of thinkers in the Middle Ages so different from those of modern philosophy; the philosopher's, because the achievements of medieval thinkers can only be appreciated by the close philosophical analysis of their reasoning (Marenbon, 1991, p. Ingram, David. . In fact, Bynum's argument ismuch more complex than one that argues the feminist content of monasticpractices. Women remained on alower plane than men in all spheres of daily life in the High Middle Agesas in other periods of history. New York: Routledge. (199 ). The content of intellectual history, inother words, is less important to Marenbon than the context in which itemerged. This general approach to the social context of history can bediscerned in the historical work of others as well. Historiography, in short, became as much a feature of historicalinterpretation methods as the process of examination of the period. Unlike Barlow,Howard does not have to settle or to elucidate a historical argument abouta political agenda. (1982). Blumenberg and the philosophical grounds ofhistoriography. To besure, the book comprises a series of essays, one of which presents evidenceof a tendency among some monastic sects to refer to figures of maleauthority within the sect in maternal terms. It isthe transformation and enlargement of a capable and savvy political-religious personality into an extraordinary personage of myth andspirituality. (199 ). At the same time, the Church was becomingincreasingly institutional and as an institution sought to preserve itsmoral authority. A side effect may have been that an unreal standard was being set upthat persisted into later periods, but Bynum's purpose is to show thesocial and organizational content of the employment or manipulation ofspiritual images. She cites the philosophical hostility ofEnlightenment rationalism toward the faith-based Middle Ages on one handand the tendency of Victorian criticism to diminish the allegoricalliterary form in comparison with the presumptively more elegant and refinedsymbological literary forms of the 19th century on the other hand. (1988). Cantor limits his own study to the formative andinstitutionalizing years of medieval studies in America and Western Europe,which roughly parallel the years of the modern and postmodern periods ofthe twentieth century. The world was about to be devoured in the flame of theSecond Coming; therefore, the distraction of sex made no sense and celibacywas the proper condition of the faithful. The central feature of this process appears tobe a rethinking, rereading, and reordering of priorities with respect tothe artistic, literary, and philosophical legacy of medieval sources.Attracted by the strangeness of the Middle Ages, historians of the modernperiod also seem drawn by what the former period implies or explains aboutthe latter. (1986). Richards, Jeffrey. Brown, Peter. 2 et passim). 19). An examination of historicalstudies of familiar subjects more recent than 1965 reveals a furtherrefinement of the social science methodology as applied to history. Just as Barlow's focus on Becket is less spiritual and heroic thancareer-oriented, so Howard's biography of Chaucer deals less with theliterary icon and more with the careeristturned-writer. Fromthat point of view, the death of one or the other as an aspect of thedispute was a foregone conclusion. Pi-Sunyer, Oriol. The purpose of this research is to examine medieval historiographygenerated since 1965, to explore whether and to what extent subsequenthistorical interpretation of the medieval period has continued earlierlines of thought. Bynum's title--Jesus as Mother--may be misleading in this era of so-called political correctness. The perception of the past: Spanishhistoriography. Howard, Donald R. Jesus as mother: Studies in thespirituality of the high Middle Ages. What is crucial as far ashistoriography is concerned is that his method is to capture the sense ofchange in society that was a parallel to the persistent changes inChaucer's own life: The decline of the Old Humanism was occurring during the time of Chaucer's grandfather; by the time his father was a young man, it was already old-fashioned . In thisview, one of the principal violations of the modernist historiographer isignoring the verities of human experience that the social sciencedisciplines address in favor of a convenient historical bias. In significant part, Barlow addresses the problemsassociated with mythification of Becket, which he traces to the complexfeudal loyalties of the late 12th century in England and to the emergenceof competing judicial traditions of common law and ecclesiastical law, aswell as questions relating to secular authority over religious clerics whocommitted crimes. (1991). The subtext and context, not the text, is the mostrevealing historical document. Because he extricated English literature from the medieval, instituted in English those accomplishments and effects that have meant literature to us since" (Howard, 1987, p. What to make of Howard's methodological approach to Chaucer is thathe looks at Chaucer as a convenient symbol of a sea change in the verycontext in which history is created. Brown develops theidea that celibacy was directly connected with the social values of aChristian spirituality that equated denial of the flesh with directaccessibility to divine experience. NewYork: William Morrow. xvii).Howard's work is too massive to detail here. It has always important for historians to placetheir subjects in social and cultural context, but Cantor demonstrates thatthe medievalist commentators of the twentieth century were perforce obligedto view their antiquarian subjects from a dual critical perspective: oneaspect explored the primary data of the period, and another aspect exploredthe premodern scholarship, interpretation, and history of the period. Consider as an illustration Colish'sdiscussion of the historiography of literary criticism of medievalallegorical tales from the Enlightenment, through the Victorian era, andinto the modern period. Skepticism but not hostility, respect but not romanticism, theenactment of the scientific method but not the celebration of the moralsuperiority of science--such differences between modernist and premodernhistorical temperaments are what Cantor asserts are at the heart of thebest historiography and historical interpretation. Brown's view is that the conventional assessment of earlyChristian celibacy reflected a dourness among the faithful that wastransplanted to later spirituality and that remains a dour feature ofmodern religious life. 1-15. In an effort to explore who the medieval people were and whattheir time was, the reinterpreters of the age have pointed in the directionof who we are and what our time is, and something about what the currenttime means or fails to mean. Ingram gives a more recent treatment of the modernist perspective onromantic versus hostile historiography of the premodern period when henotes that there is a residue of premodern thinking among some historians.Among the most important of these in the current period is Hans Blumenberg,who rejects the modernist-progressive thesis of what Ingram refers to as"functional reoccupation" (Ingram, 199 , pp. This approach to history emphasizes the interconnectedness ratherthan the remoteness of highly disparate period. Creating a medieval world picture and projecting themselves into it were one therapeutic recourse by which sensitive and benign twentieth-century people sought to regain their sanity and get control of their feelings in the evil times of slaughter and madness (Cantor, 1991, pp. 3). Instead of a positive moral value,celibacy was a positive spiritual value. History and theory 29: pp. 77). (1991). Chaucer: His life, his works, his world.New York: Fawcett Columbine. It is also a critical assessment ofinstitutional realities and a strong skepticism of the moral weight ofsupposedly moral institutions. This, in conjunction with a critical reading ofcontemporaneous accounts of the murder, demonstrates a willingness tofollow the truth of whatever was or was not said about an event, in orderto understand how it came about. For example, in discussing the work of F.W. It must be noted that Pi-Sunyer is writing in197 , in the waning years of the Franco political regime in Spain; the workof subsequent Spanish historians might therefore be a useful field offurther research. The plan of the research will be to set forth theprincipal outlines of development that motivated modern historiography asdiscussed by Norman Cantor, and then to deal with the extent to and reasonsfor which significant changes in interpretation and focus of interest inmedieval subjects have occurred. Cantor himself refers to theretromedievalism of some modernists, hard and logical on the outside,perhaps indeterminate on the inside, (Cantor, 1991, pp. This is the context in which he explains Chaucer's early life as acourtier, his success as a diplomat on the Continent, and what today wouldbe called his mid-life crisis, after which he concentrated on writing andduring which he produced The Canterbury Tales. Withoutthis defining structure, the new student of medieval thought might bemisled into sorting through philosophical arguments on their merits,without due consideration given to the intellectual environment in whichthe arguments were put forward. On this,a more programmatically modernist view, the appropriate critical stancewould be to look at what the allegory reveals about the time and aboutliterary forms more generally, rather than to start from a moral orpolitical position on the form or the period and invent a history that ispredicated of a biased historical method. The apocalyptic vision graduallydisappeared, but the elevation of celibacy to the status of a rarefiedmoral value, within the context of the enlarging society of the Church inEurope and the Middle East, is Brown's chief subject. the reader will begin to understand how, if he (or a modern philosopher) shared the training, assumptions and aims of thirteenth and fourteenth-century scholars, he would approach the problems which interest him now by posing the sorts of questions which medieval thinkers asked and answering them using the techniques which they favoured (Marenbon, 1991, p. 119) once thedispute between king and archbishop became a matter of public record. . Reasoning in this context has to be understood as the cognitive andsociological frame within which specific ideas were developed. This was a critical issue at a period of apocalyptic feeling amongthe faithful. But, as he explains, the renunciation of the fleshby early Christians reflected an almost mystical attachment to the notionof transfiguration of the soul. No less significant for Barlow is thefact that he views Becket's life as the 12th-century equivalent of acelebrity career. This is the approach of theanalytical investigator much more than the simple recordist or credulousinterpreter of meaning. In this regard, Pi-Sunyer criticizes the "disinclination" of modern-day historians working inSpain to take account of the methods of social science in dealing with theSpanish medieval period. Thereis, however, evidence that since 1965 historical methodology has undergoneeven further transformation and refinement. That is,Blumenberg rejects the idea, based on a presumptively scientificexamination of the past possible only in the modern period, that the pastimplies the future as far as culture, values, and even institutions andevents are concerned. . What does the so-called triumph of science in the modern world asapplied to medieval interpretation mean in practice? The ultimate effect of such acritical stance would be to make any analysis more objective, more neutraltoward values, looking at what they are rather than what they are not orperhaps what they ought to have been. This is not a clever way of avoiding the content of the argumentsthemselves, but what becomes clear in Marenbon's work is that knowing thatphilosophers and theologians worked from a social and political agenda andtoward an abstract argument can facilitate appreciation of such arguments.It helps to know, for example, that, as Marenbon explains, although mostmedieval intellectuals were Aristotelian, William of Ockham, originator ofOckham's epistemological razor, developed his views of the reality ofabstractions based on a definite rejection of Aristotelian realism. It is that social climate and howit changed from the first through fifth centuries that preoccupies Brown. It is from the premise of social and intellectual change, asillustrated by Chaucer's position in literary history, that Howard seeksChaucer's "back story," containing and describing the imminent decline offeudalism and the myth of chivalry, and the beginnings of a large-scaletransformation of the culture. Cantor wrote Reinventing the Middle Ages in 1991, acategory of revolution had been going on in the humanities disciplines ingeneral and interpretation of the medieval period in particular, for acouple of decades. 11 -12 . Herview is that even in the 2 th century, literary critics of medievalallegory fall into rationalist or romantic schools, and she advocateslooking at the allegory in historical context, as a feature of its time andsuited to its time rather than a feature illustrative of the imperfectionsof the time and the immaturity of the form (Colish, 1975, passim). Thomas Becket. This did not mean, she says, that therewas an increased respect for actual women by men. Wilson, Stephen. Rather, there was an abstract idealizationof feminine virtues to which men, especially the higher kind of men, couldaspire or appeal as a socializing influence in the religious community. Cantor, Norman F. (197 ). Compare the approach that Colish advocates for looking at the MiddleAges to one that embraces rather than disavows bias. That is, it may be misinterpreted as afeminist in search of feminist values prototypes in the Middle Ages. Inother words, sexual stereotypes were put in service of a social ideal. . She suggests that well into the 2 th century there was acontemplative component to the evaluation of the Middle Ages, a view thatdiffers slightly from that of Cantor, who stresses modernist historians whotreated culture more than contemplation as a feature of understandingmedieval life. Cantor explains: No book written about the European Middle Ages before 1895 or so is still worth reading except for curiosity's sake because the data base was inadequate and because the phantasmagoric screen of now-obsolete Victorian assumptions shaped perceptions of the past that are too remote from the understanding of the late twentieth century to be worth bothering about" (Cantor, 1991, p. Contrast it with theEnlightenment and Victorian periods of history writing, which emphasizedthe vast differences between medieval and (then) modern worlds, the formerin a way that excoriated medieval world values and the latter in a way thatserved to romanticize the earlier period. Some of the transformation, aswe shall see, reflects changes in the environment of the humanisticdisciplines in general. But Howard's unraveling of Chaucer's life suggeststhat Chaucer's life and work, as a personal transformation, wasillustrative of a society and culture that was also in transformation:literary history was changing; the English language was changing rapidly;the political economy of all Europe was changing; during Chaucer's life thevery climate of Europe changed, as we know from the little ice age.(Howard, 1987, p. . If Cantor's analysis of how medieval history has been and can be doneshows that medieval history anticipated modern history, the details of thehistoriography of the Middle Ages, outside the scope of Cantor's study,show why and how it did so. When Norman F. There is, to be sure, an element ofhostility evident in Barlow's account of Becket's life. That is, the focus was on the life beyondearthly life and the conscious wish to have an ultimate experience of life,a connection with the divine. The problem with thinking and writing criticallyabout the context of society and culture in the Middle Ages in Spain hasthe unfortunate effect of validating their vision of Spain through myths oforigin emphasizing the enduring qualities of the Iberian experience. In the background of Cantor's statement is the line that marks thedifference between a historical attitude that is critical of earlierperiods and examines the past from the perspective of the supposedly moreenlightened present, and one that views earlier periods critically but alsothinks critically about what the past reveals or perhaps implies about morerecent periods. But . This new definition brings spirituality very close to what the school of French historians known as annalists call mentalite; the "history of spirituality" becomes almost a branch of social history, deeply influenced by the work of structural-functionalist anthropologists and of phenomenologists of religion (Bynum, 1982, p. 3). To put it another way, the intellectual climate in which ideasemerged in the Middle Ages can be instructive in reflecting how and in whatkind of climate ideas emerge in any period. Together with the triumph of thescientific method and the ever-enlarging data base, as Cantor terms it, ofordinary facts of history, the shift in attitude explains much about thedramatic interpretive shift from antiquarian to authentically modernisthistorical temperament. One effect of thisapproach is to simplify what popular wisdom may erroneously consider to bethe unduly complex or bewildering array of medieval thought. But Cantor deliberatelyconfined his own study to work that had been done to the year 1965. Later medieval philosophy (115 -135 ).New York: Routledge. Butthe heart of Marenbon's contribution to the philosophy of history, orindeed the history of medieval philosophy, is not in the content of thephilosophy itself. In his criticism of the nationalistic historiography,Pi-Sunyer does two things. 31). In other words, she is looking at the social context inwhich events were encoded and decoded. 191). Of particularinterest in this regard is Marenbon's anthology of philosophical andtheological writings of the 12th to 14th centuries. . (1987). This is a departure from thepersonalization of historical heroes. Both high art and lowart have survived into the modern period. The body and society: Men, women, an sexualrenunciation in early Christianity. Maitland,Cantor cites Maitland's view of Parliament as an instrument of executivestate power in the international political economy, in particular the"foreshadowing of the political consensus that runs from Washington throughLondon, Paris, and Berlin to Moscow in the closing decade of the twentiethcentury" (Cantor, 1991, p. . 44). In Barlow's case, what one knows about the vicissitudesof modern celebrity and high-profile political careers could be applied toa rethinking of the events surrounding the work of Becket and the socialand political context of the religious figure's conflict with adeterminedly secular king over the question of power in the culture. We have already noted that the methods of social science, togetherwith the earlier, more institutionalized use of the scientific method, haveaffected modernist historical interpretation. There is but a shortlogical leap to the equation of otherness with estrangement, andestrangement with isolation, and isolation with sin, to the extent that sinillustrates the isolation of the soul from God. The conflicts were personified in Thomas Becket andHenry II, and, as Barlow argues, "Thomas's past--his dependence on the kingand his worldliness--doomed him to failure" (Barlow, 1986, p. Ingram rejects Blumenberg'sapproach as too credulous of progress in the conventional sense of the termand believes that the skepticism of the progressivist philosophy of historymakes more sense. Cantor suggests that medieval studies became a psychoemotional anchorfor scholars undoubtedly troubled by the onrush and diffuse character ofmodern experience. Historical Journal 19: pp.135-161.----------------------- 2 by Chaucer's time scholasticism seemed formalistic and abstract, frigidly academic, and irrelevant to the realities of life (Howard, 1987, p. What is vital in this connection is to refrain from asserting anattitude of presumptive superiority of the modern period over that of themedieval period. 341-355. Indeed, according to Blumenberg, the presentreflects a progression of thought from contemplation to an outward and(implicitly) more socialized modern age. Marenbon, John. Richards shows that thesociety of the Middle Ages, characterized by conformity, was also thebreeding ground for moral and social intolerance Barlow's biography ofBecket focuses not so much on the saintliness of the man as hismythification in death as in life. 48). That is, Howarddoes not focus on Chaucer as an active participant in great events or inthe development of the heroic record of England but as chronicler of thetime in which he lived and as a primary repository of the future of Westernculture: In a modern biography of a medieval figure we want what Barbara Tuchman calls a "prism of history,' and for a poet we want what Hugh Kenner calls an 'X-ray moving picture.' How do we know Geoffrey Chaucer at all? New York: Columbia University Press. (1975, June). In any case, Bynum indicates that evidence of a tendency incertain medieval writings and rituals to locate spiritual values in suchfeminine associations as the cult of Mary and the equation of spiritualsensibility with feminine virtues had the effect of establishing a provinceof human experience as feminine. References Barlow, Frank. Asshe puts it, the stereotype expressed "some of the basic values that areimplicit in the life of a religious community." She continues: The maternal imagery of medieval monastic treatises tells us that cloistered males in the twelfth century idealized the mothering role, that they held consistent stereotypes of femaleness as compassionate and soft (either weak or tender) and that they saw the bond of child and mother as a symbol of closeness, union, or even the incorporation of one self into another (Bynum, 1982, p. Similarly, when Cantor cites Marxistinterpretations of the Middle Ages, he observes that post-medievalphilosophy can facilitate explanation and analysis of phenomena of theperiod. 1). The intellectual climate of theMiddle Ages is: A modern reader finds a set of presuppositions and concepts he cannot share, and methods he cannot understand. Chaucer himself lived in the latest of the MiddleAges, dying one year before the 15th century, the year of the Renaissance,began. It is a tacit irony of Howard's work that,as he charts the movement of the culture toward the high achievements ofthe Renaissance, he also charts the birth, as partly exemplified inChaucer's life and work, of a truly popular culture. xv). An important element of modernist historical interpretation is thegrowth in importance of the perspective of the social sciences. Additionally, so great was the impact of negativeexperience of modern war, that modern medievalists entirely rethought eventhe most commonly accepted historical interpretations of early periods ofWestern culture. Though an aspect of the richness of medieval history,it is not the ultimate factor to consider. Inother words, the context in which the various histories were written becameas important to medieval studies as the context of the medieval perioditself. . Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press. Cantorlocates the principal reason for this in the phenomenon of the ineluctabletriumph of modernism, which one may say included a culture of scientism asan unprecedented social and political transformation of the Western world.Cantor explains his assessment of medieval interpretation: The great medievalists who are the focus of this book, like all creative thinkers and artists, fashioned their interpretations of the Middle Ages out of the emotional wellsprings of their lives, and these lives were in turn conditioned by the vast social and political upheavals of the twentieth century, especially during the dark times from 1914 to 1945. Colish, Marcia L. It isironic that medieval Spain, perhaps unlike other areas of Europe, wasinformed by both Christian and Muslim cultures. In effect, Jeffrey Richards takes up where Brown leaves off, in hisexploration of the sexual mores of medieval groups, particularly minoritygroups. What makes this study different from more familiaraccounts of Becket's murder is its lack of romanticization of Becket as afigure of moral stature against the dissolute figure of King Henry II.What becomes clear on reading Barlow is that the social and politicalmilieu of the time provided a context for competing ideologies of equalmoral weight. (1976). First, he shows the severe limitations ofromanticizing the past, and, second, he illustrates the power of themethods of modern social science that Cantor cites to make reinterpretationa feature of modern history. Even more important, he sees Chauceras emblematic of intellectual transformation, which marks what is mostimportant about the collective memory of human experience. To thedegree social science helps explain or interpret contexts of experience andthought, it can be understood as providing a structure upon whichreinterpretations of history and historical analyses can be based. Bucknell Review 18: pp. the body'sweaknesses and temptations echoed a state of helplessness, even ofrebellion against God, that was larger than the body itself" (Brown, 1988,p. A view of the past: Action Francaisehistoriography and its socio-political function. 42-43). Instead, he declares that the value systems of themodern age represented a definite break with the past, that the past isremote and can and must be interpreted (i.e., judged) from the superiorvantage point of the present. Medieval allegory: Ahistoriographical consideration." CLIO 4: pp. . the study of how basic religious attitudes and values are conditioned by the society within which they occur. Inventing the Middle Ages: The lives,works, and ideas of the great medievalists of the twentieth century. The ethnocentrism of themodern Spanish scholarship that Pi-Sunyer cites, on the other hand, has afurther effect, which is to limit the effectiveness and credibility of thehistorians involved. One canappreciate the context of faith from which all relevant thought proceeded,even if one cannot accept that context as appropriate to modernphilosophical meanings. This can be seen as the prevailing attitude of medievalhistoriography that follows Cantor. . However, hedocuments the manner in which certain facts about Becket's political lifehad been suppressed by those of his contemporaneous biographers who had avested interest in assigning him the stature of mythic figure. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Richards charts the emergence of the moral value of individualismby the time of the Middle Ages as well as (in general terms) the notion ofotherness, as opposed to earlier concepts of commonality of moral andphysical experience. 411ff) butattracted by features of the Middle Ages that appear to answer theindeterminacy of modern experience. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press. If one has little enough tolearn from the content of medieval ideas, one could do worse than noticethat the medieval intellectual environment was at least as valid for itstime and possessed as much social and intellectual integrity as theintellectual environment of the postmodern popular culture. Sex, dissidence and damnation: Minoritygroups in the Middle Ages. Brown's treatment ofthe cult of celibacy in the Christian church of late antiquity illustratesthat what became the institutionalization of celibacy as a positive moralgood by the late medieval period, a feature of the moral and social life ofcareer religious that persists to the present day, was in fact somethingquite different. It is the background of that dispute,played out against Becket's voluntary exile and eventual murder, thatBarlow explores. Bynum,for example, explores the culture of spirituality in the Middle Ages, butfrom a perspective that explains that the very term spirituality issuedfrom the reifying of medieval spiritual culture on the part of Victorians.From there Bynum proceeds to explain that what constituted spirituality inthe Middle Ages was part of a culture of shared social values and that sheis about the business of exploring the content of those values: Recently the history of spirituality has come to mean . If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.

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