My Quest for the Middle Ages 9781474470155

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MY QUEST FOR THE MIDDLE AGES

In memory of my parents To Hanka To Barbara and Thomas

My Quest for the Middle Ages JACQUES LE GOFF In collaboration with Jean-Maurice de Montremy Translated by Richard Veasey

Edinburgh University Press

This book is based on a series of conversations between Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Maurice de Montremy. The text was completely revised by Jacques Le Goff. © Editions Louis Audibert, 2003

Transferred to digital print 2011 Copyright in this English translation, Richard Veasey First published 2003 by Editions Louis Audibert 3 rue Corneille, 75006 Paris Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Monotype Bembo by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Longsight, Manchester, and printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 2083 4 (hardback) ISBN 0 7486 2084 2 (paperback) The right of Jacques Le Goff to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture – Centre national du livre. Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture – National Book Centre.

CONTENTS

Foreword

vii

1

Becoming a Medievalist The Middle Ages – Darkness or Light: Commonplaces A Revolution: The Book.A Problem: Sources

1 4 11

2

A Long Middle Ages The Idea of ‘Renaissance’ A Millennium and its Division into Periods 1215: The Fourth Great Lateran Council

23 25 30 36

3

Merchants, Bankers and Intellectuals The Invention of the Economy Another Space: Thought Francis of Assisi. Mendicants in Town

45 49 54 58

4

A Civilisation Takes Shape Heaven Comes Down to Earth Hell, Purgatory, Paradise Europe or the West? Feudalism The Prestige of the Law

65 66 75 80 86 89

5

On Earth as in Heaven Medieval Humanism Heretics, Jews, Outsiders . . . Angels and Demons Mary the Protectress. Dying ‘In the Faith’

95 98 104 109 115

6

Epilogue

121

Bibliography of Jacques Le Goff’s Work

127

Index

131

FOREWORD

Jacques Le Goff set out on his quest for the Middle Ages at a very early age, as will be seen at the beginning of these conversations. It all began with a young reader’s heartfelt response to the forest of Ivanhoe, to the novel’s appealing characters, to Walter Scott and the historical novel . . . The young lad from Toulon was, of course, as yet unaware that the words novel and history bore witness to a long tradition which reflected a human, spiritual and material adventure.Already, however, an inner landscape was taking shape which he would continue to explore until the present day with the ‘cultured concern’ of a learned scholar, a teacher, and the leader of a research team who has remained irremediably and incurably curious. Curious in his desire to fathom emotion, poetry, the elusive. Curious too to understand the men, women and sensibilities of a bygone age; and as fervent in his curiosity about the world in which he lives with its rumours and passions as he has been about the past. For Jacques Le Goff the inquiry, or the quest as one might call it, has never ceased. And the Middle Ages to which he has devoted his studies have been much more than a period. Early on, it was Jacques Le Goff’s intuition that he was dealing with a world and a civilisation which were at the same time very close and very distant. Despite the intense effort to forget – sometimes even to deny – which allowed our culture to affirm itself in opposition to its origins (to the point of fashioning the cruel term ‘Middle Ages’), the great thousand-year period about which Le Goff is so passionate touches us closely. It really is an issue for us, as we are often ‘medieval’ when we flatter ourselves with being modern and then often reflect a stereotypical ‘Middle Ages’ when we think we have immersed ourselves in the age of cathedrals, knights, husbandmen and merchants. The codes and values of this past which is both close and remote are much more alien than we think; and yet we owe them much more than we are willing to admit.

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As someone who is curious and therefore seeks to understand things, Jacques Le Goff has come to realise – and made others realise – the extent to which people in the Middle Ages did the same.As a historian,he readily admits that,if he has contributed to our changed view of the Middle Ages, they have contributed to his changed perception of the present. In the course of these conversations, this great medievalist offers us a synthesis of his work. He explains how he came to write his books and how an overall view of this civilisation gradually emerged; a civilisation which shaped Western culture both for better and for worse. Fernand Braudel spoke of an ‘economy-world’. Jacques Le Goff invites us to discover a ‘civilisation-continent’. For Europe does indeed emerge gradually from his research across both space and time; a Europe the frontiers of which are more cultural than geographical, and a Europe which was never entirely one Christendom, even if for centuries it thought it was. Jacques Le Goff shows clearly how this ideal enabled the Middle Ages to develop – before giving rise to our own world, though not without certain ruptures. Christianity itself represented a parallel development, emerging within a defined geographical area, the West, to which originally it did not belong. The city of God entered the earthly city, but neither found its place there nor became part of it. It did no more than make its presence felt, because the earthly city was worn out, whereas the heavenly city knew nothing of the ravages of time. This was the teaching of Saint Augustine, endlessly taken up and discussed by medieval thinkers.The men and women of the day thought that the world was nearing its end, that humanity was used up, in decline. Nonetheless, they went on inventing, improving, perfecting things. In their imagination, theirs was a closed world, its values solidly embodied in places and objects. At the same time, they were pilgrims journeying towards another world, expecting to reach another place, looking forward to another dimension of time.They created something new, even though the very idea of ‘newness’ was abhorrent to them.And we might ask ourselves whether our constant desire for ‘the new’ does not betray, conversely, lethargy and an opposition to progress. We project our own dark shadows upon the Middle Ages without seeing just how enlightened they were. As we revisit medieval civilisation with Jacques Le Goff, we discover the dynamism and reasoned optimism which our predecessors

Foreword

ix

displayed. For all that, they are not idealised. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when we are only too ready to give way to ‘great fears’, such rediscoveries may afford us pleasant surprises. J.-M. M.

These conversations took place every fortnight from 21 February until 24 July 2002. Jacques Le Goff revised, expanded and developed the text during the months of August and September.The questions, kept for the most part to a minimum, have been retained – reflecting the true nature of the written text – in order to preserve the rhythm and scope of Jacques Le Goff’s answers, which make him a worthy heir of his medieval masters, who always sought to hold their audience’s attention.

1 BECOMING A MEDIEVALIST 1 In the vast forest covering ‘the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster’, two men are conversing in the year 1194: the swineherd Gurth and the jester Wamba. They are the first characters the reader meets in Ivanhoe (1819).The landscape, as Walter Scott takes pleasure in describing it, sets one dreaming:‘The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades . . . Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a carpet of the most delicious green sward . . .’ That is how, in 1936, I discovered the Middle Ages. I was twelve years old and living in Toulon where my father taught English. I already loved history – indeed the idea of studying it had occurred to me around the age of ten. Unfortunately I no longer remember why . . . Reading Walter Scott, there remained no further doubt. History confirmed its hold over me and assumed the guise of the Middle Ages. It was a Middle Ages set in a bewitching physical landscape: the forest, of course, then the castle of Torquilstone, the siege and storming of which occupies a good part of the narrative, but even more perhaps the tournament at Ashby with its pavilions, its tents, its tumult, its colours, its galleries where common people, attendants, ladies, knights, monks and priests thronged together. I do not claim to have discovered, at this tender age, the importance of civilisation in material terms; still less, loving Ivanhoe as I did, was I critical of history as it was taught in the school syllabus which is often reduced to no more than an account of political events and of ‘great men’. Of course I was unaware that a certain Annales group had existed since 1929, which became so important to me almost forty years later. I was seized with a similar passion on reading Le Dimanche de

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Bouvines (1973) (translated as The Legend of Bouvines:War, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages, 1992), in which Georges Duby made me relive my memories of the tournament at Ashby. Seeing how Duby highlighted the ‘military-industrial’ complex in jousts and battles, I experienced the same pleasure I had felt in the past at the striking entrance of the unknown knight – in gold and steel armour – bearing on his shield ‘Desdichado’, the Disinherited. He it was who would challenge the fierce Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert.A tournament was truly a very big thing. It could be compared with a Formula One race, involving as it did technical and financial investments, commercial spin-offs and vast networks of sub-contractors, etc. Duby added to these images, which had lost none of their power to enchant, the analyses of the historian, explaining in depth what at first glance seemed merely colourful storytelling. In the meantime I had become a medievalist. My reading of the novel had one immediate and unexpected consequence. Moved by the suffering caused to the Jews by the Normans in the novel, and especially the ordeals experienced by the pretty Rebecca – accused of witchcraft by the truly vile Bois-Guilbert – I wanted there and then to become involved in action against antisemitism and racism. But some of our friends suspected that these organisations were masonic and anticatholic.This worried my mother, who was of partly Italian origin and deeply religious, and she made me go and talk to the archpriest of Toulon cathedral who reassured me. I could be a militant in this movement.The truly dazzling Rebecca was one of Elizabeth Taylor’s first roles in Richard Thorpe’s superb Ivanhoe of 1952. In hindsight, this anecdote is revealing. The study of the Middle Ages has always had repercussions in my private life. Often, having approached a topic in medieval culture or history, I have looked at current issues differently; serious issues such as war or violence, and apparently more trivial ones such as food. Not that I have ever taken food less than seriously! The Middle Ages have certainly never provided answers to current problems. On the contrary, just as I have worked on them, they have worked on me as a person engaged in the twentieth and now the twenty-first century. To paraphrase a remark of the writer and critic Stanislas Fumet (1896–1983), a history of the Middle Ages is discernible in my own life. As a historian I have received ‘presents’ from history. It has also impelled me to become active. My reading of

Becoming a Medievalist

3

Ivanhoe is inseparable from the enthusiasm aroused in me by the Popular Front in that same year, 1936. No other events that I can remember inspired me with the same fervour.The Liberation did not give me the same joy. It neither cancelled out the defeat and the bitterness of the dark years, nor the discovery of the horrors. But for me 1936 represented on the one hand the spirit of Robin Hood and on the other progressive social legislation. I later realised that I transposed my emotions (my problems too, unconsciously) from the present to the past.The Middle Ages captured me simply because they had the quasi magical power to take me to a different world, away from the troubles and mediocrity of the present and at the same time to make that present seem clearer and more burning. Notre-Dame de Paris did not have the same effect on you? I enjoyed reading Victor Hugo’s novel later on, in the context of school, though I did not have the same freedom there. Furthermore, I think Notre-Dame de Paris is too well written; fine language triumphs over content.And the content in Hugo is not the Middle Ages, nor is it the life of a cathedral.The content is the book itself, its tremendous vision. Hugo, of course, draws on Walter Scott. It is not, however, or is no longer, a historical novel. It is a vision. Yet I would not want people to think that Ivanhoe was the only thing to trigger my interest in the Middle Ages.The period was then part of the fourth-year syllabus. I was fortunate in this class to have an exceptional teacher, Henri Michel.Though he was not a medievalist, he was a good storyteller; he knew how to interest his pupils and he dealt impartially with sensitive issues. He was not content simply to describe but sought to explain.A militant socialist and agnostic, Henri Michel nonetheless spoke well of the Church, which won me over, for I was a practising Catholic child as my mother wished; whereas my father was anticlerical, antireligious even. From the outset, Henri Michel made one thing clear: ‘In the Middle Ages, the Church dominated everything’. My devoutness at the time – albeit relative, but nonetheless sincere – found this appealing. I appreciated that a lay person treated his subject competently and with respect. Henri Michel played an important part in the Resistance during the Second World War and became an acknowledged specialist of the period. I still have intense admiration for him and deep gratitude. As far as historiography is concerned, he remains the great specialist of the Resistance and the Second World War.For me,though,

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he is the great historian of the Middle Ages.That, indeed, is the power of the historian: the ability to talk about all periods if not all civilisations. History emerges from the questions posed by historians. THE MIDDLE AGES – DARKNESS

OR

LIGHT: COMMONPLACES

How were the Middle Ages seen at that time? The perceptions I had then have been modified, obscured almost by my subsequent work. Let us just say that two images were superimposed: a ‘dark’ Middle Ages and an idealised Middle Ages. Thanks to Henri Michel and then other teachers, I was able to break free of these two perspectives. Unfortunately, they still affect the way people think to this day. Despite its scientific successes, the rich vein of French medieval scholarship has done nothing to change the way the media think or popular ideas. I am sometimes disheartened to find that the two clichés which originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are still intact: on the one hand that of a gloomy, obscurantist Middle Ages and on the other that of the suave age of the ‘troubadour’. They pervade films, historical novels, advertisements. Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor at the International Court of Justice, recently denounced the ‘ethnic cleansing’ carried out by Slobodan Milosevic as a ‘medieval’ practice! I will not even discuss the disparaging portrayal in the film Les Visiteurs,1 even allowing for the fact that it was a burlesque.The way of thinking which underpins these preconceived judgements reveals, moreover, a false and simplistic view of progress and of history in general. Even educated people fall back on approximations which were already out of date in my youth.‘We are no longer living in the Middle Ages’ proclaim the right-minded when faced with violence, acts of barbarism and unruly mobs.Set against this is another stylised perspective derived from romanticism. Picking up a recent popular refrain which debases the work of a great historian, the Middle Ages are described as ‘the age of cathedrals’, of noble, simple faith. It was thought of as an age of the artisan and the scholar, the scale of which was both human and divine. The ‘dark’ perspective, the first of these traditional views, can be traced back to humanism, to the so-called Renaissance (the first ‘dark1

Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942), a film by Marcel Carné set in a medieval castle where two minstrels arrive as agents of Satan.

Becoming a Medievalist

5

ener’ of the Middle Ages was Petrarch), and was unfortunately adopted by the Enlightenment. It was firmly entrenched in influential circles in the Third Republic.The second perspective, that of the ‘cathedrals’ was created, on the other hand, after the Revolution when Chateaubriand – challenging the Enlightenment – was writing his Génie du Christianisme (1802) with its praise of nature and of the gothic, of simplicity and the ideal. For all that, it is a great poetic work. This popular French conception of the Middle Ages, which was taken up and developed by Charles Péguy,2 proved seductive to the Left and Right alike before the war. Indeed, it was responsible for great successes such as the productions put on by touring theatre companies which Jacques Copeau and then Jean Vilar established during that period. Out of this came the festival of Avignon and the spectacular use made of the celebrated courtyard of the Palais des Papes. But this is not the Middle Ages. With the best of intentions, the great film director Marcel Carné merely created an inferior representation of the Middle Ages in Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942). Then there are the fond illusions about guilds and chivalry, the sentimentality surrounding the courtly code and the Rabelaisian bonhomie of the fabliaux. The Middle Ages, which Verlaine referred to as ‘immense’ and ‘fragile’, a heroic age, sometimes violent and barbaric but splendid nonetheless, had become a second-rate spectacle with cardboard characters. André Gide confessed he was unable to read the Chanson de Roland (the only thing retained by romanticism was the horn blown at Roncevaux). Furthermore, no one explored the extraordinary world of medieval literature which is difficult to get into but so rewarding when one succeeds in doing so! What would European culture be like without the chansons de geste, Arthurian tales, El Cantar de mio Cid, Dante and Chaucer? Literature such as this, offering neither too rosy nor too dark a picture, is the expression of its age and of the men and women who lived then, full of life and vigour, incredibly creative and not given to easy truths, to reactionary moralising or to the aesthetics of Saint-Sulpice. The Vichy regime’s insistence on exploiting one particular vein discredited in the end these ever more regressive images.And if I may say so, the ‘rosy’ version simply inverts the ‘dark’ one. To settle its scores with the Enlightenment (or its view of the Enlightenment), Pétainism 2

Poet and essayist whose mystical rationalism displaced his earlier fervent socialism. He published both a poetic drama and a long poem about Joan of Arc.

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lauded the amenable nature of faith and order which it saw in ‘its’ Middle Ages, which was so in tune with its own values. One had to understand that everything had been vitiated by modern interpreters and undermined by corrupt foreign figures. Though I was made aware of this view of the Middle Ages, I did not adopt it. At the time I was reading Walter Scott and benefiting from Henri Michel’s lessons, I saw the Middle Ages as a distant world, different from our own despite its contemporary echoes. Barbaric practices and sublime, impressive figures existed side by side.The Middle Ages were no longer part of us, they had disappeared, vanished like a dream. My only glimpse into the medieval past at the time was at Mont Saint-Michel, which I saw at the age of nine and which reinforced the sense of distance. Saint-Michel ‘threatened by the sea’ as the people of the Middle Ages thought. For them, the sea was disturbing, wild, an ever-present reminder of biblical chaos, something which had escaped the incomplete establishment of order at the Creation. Perhaps I sensed their spirit of adventure: to take on with such slender resources the unknown, the open sea . . . My true discovery of the Middle Ages as something ‘concrete’ occurred later, in 1939, when I was fifteen.That was when I at last saw medieval remains.There are none to be seen in Toulon, which developed much more recently. On a trip to the Pyrenees, we changed trains at Toulouse and the few hours we had to wait for our connection we put to good advantage by visiting the city.That was when I saw the abbey-church of Saint-Sernin, the largest Romanesque church in France, which was a revelation to me. I was profoundly moved by it. But it was clear to me that it belonged to another world, far removed from the beginning of the twentieth century in which I lived.Who had built it and for whom? How might one get to know these men and women? I was certainly happy not to be living in the Middle Ages. I imagined it lacked many everyday comforts which were already available to us at the time; that is at the very end of the 1930s.Yet I experienced a certain nostalgia, as if we had emerged not so long ago from the Middle Ages, as if those broken links deprived us of something, distanced us from people I would have liked to listen to.The tournament of Ashby derived its brilliance from the people who thronged there, so close to us and yet so different. I felt they were nothing like the crowd at a football or rugby match.

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I was young.Yet many things were disappearing. Others were being invented. I was six years old when the talkies started. Our family didn’t have a telephone but it existed. I could see quite clearly the changes it brought to our relationships in space and time.The same is true of the car (again we did not have one) and everything connected with daily life, such as the appearance of refrigerators, which happened later. For years, people’s lives were governed by the age-old rhythms of the ice house, in which blocks of ice were stored which had been bought at depots or from men who sold them door-to-door. Then, suddenly, refrigeration was within our control.We were no longer at the mercy of the weather. I experienced that ‘sense of history’ – the only one which was never to be shaken; and yet . . . I was fully aware that we were entering another era. I realised that these material changes in our everyday life were a fundamental constituent element of history. Once more, I knew that history was not confined to battles, kings and governments.A certain way of being and thinking was fading, customs were dying out. Later, I was to call this occurrence a change of mentality/mentalité. It accompanied material changes. Of course, I wasn’t able to perceive the various layers which successive centuries had left as traces in our lives. However, I saw clearly that elements of the Middle Ages were part of our world, our existence, that the Middle Ages were over and done with but had left their legacy. To conclude, I would say that the pace at which things disappeared quickened with the 1914–18 war, which had left its scars as well as gulfs and voids which I felt all around me.At the time of the defeat of France in 1940, I was sixteen. I lived through the Second World War.Yet I did not have the sense during this period that a world was coming to an end in the way that those close to me and their contemporaries had told me they felt about the 1914–18 war. History for me in the 1930s was like crossing a threshold – the Great War about which everyone talked – in order to rediscover a different way of life,‘average people’ such as ourselves who now seemed almost exotic though only twenty years had elapsed. It was as if my parents’ youth belonged to another world. And then the cinema burst upon the scene, heralding the future. You spoke of nostalgia . . . Yes, though we must be clear. My Middle Ages owed nothing to those vogues for the neo-medieval which I have just been talking about.

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Nonetheless, I derived a nostalgic pleasure from them which is intrinsic to history in general and experienced, I believe, by all historians; that is to say the nostalgic pleasure of a struggle against death. History immerses itself in the past, brings back to life what had disappeared and prolongs it, or at least imagines that it does so, whilst recognising in a vague way that it may only be a reprieve. On the one hand there is the pleasure of bringing something back to life, on the other the nostalgia of illusion. So, for me as an adolescent, being a historian resembled other professions which had been created as a way of life and of making a living. I felt close to doctors and artists – doubtless, in the latter case, because of my mother. She taught the piano. I saw and understood that all one had to do was place one’s fingers on the keyboard in order to breathe life into old works, so that the echoes of distant eras were heard by us. A history teacher (at the time I had not thought of becoming a researcher) did not seem very different from a pianist. One had to interpret, learn, transmit and at the same time bring back to life. Documents were like scores and, to make a comparison with the doctor, the past was like the human body which needed to have life, some sort of life . . . Of course, I did not use technical terms to describe what attracted me, but I can today say that early on I was interested in two types of history: social history and cultural history.Two sorts of history which came together in my undeniable curiosity concerning ritual and liturgy. Hence tournaments. Hence, equally, the Church. As I have said – unlike my mother – I did not have strong religious feelings, but as a young lad from Toulon I was sensitive to the postTridentine, southern form of Catholicism which I knew.The Second Vatican Council and the upheavals of the 1960s swept all that away. Even those born in the 1950s have only a vague idea of what it was like. For those born after 1960, it is Double Dutch. These memories of mine may have been recreated. I do believe, however, that the difference already existed in the 1930s.There was a difference but not the sense of something alien. I observed these old liturgies without being actively or emotionally involved. Moreover, they were not as old as all that.They took root in the seventeenth and deepened in the nineteenth century with its burning commitment to restoration. Not much of the medieval church remained. But the old rituals still retained a strong presence and my attitude towards them, like that of many others, was ambiguous. I was both in sympathy and out of sympathy with them.

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I could say the same thing about other practices, such as the endof-year prize giving at which the masters wore gowns.There was the endless recitation of the names of those receiving awards and the handing out of books and certificates. From the fourth year, such ceremonies seemed strange to me, as fascinating and ‘medieval’ as the tournament at Ashby. Unconsciously, I felt the need to go further than Jules Ferry3 and to see the school as it emerged from history. So, from secondary school on, you had decided that you would teach history even if you did not become a historian. It was not that straightforward. My studies caused no major problems in themselves.The content was more problematic. I was sitting my baccalaureate. It was the spring of 1940. In the middle of my unseen Latin translation, the invigilator, who had momentarily left the room, announced on his return that Hitler had invaded Belgium. The bombing of Toulon in May by the Italians caused us to leave the town (my father, for health reasons, was unable to go down into shelters). We sought refuge in the vicinity of Sète, in a place in the country offered to us by neighbours. I registered for the oral of my baccalaureate in Montpellier, the headquarters of the local authority, which I would take when it was possible to do so.Whilst standing in the famous ‘Egg’ square, loudspeakers broadcast Pétain’s speech announcing he had asked Hitler for an armistice.A passing soldier took off his uniform and, in his under-clothes, proclaimed that he would no longer wear a uniform which had been dishonoured. The French, a minority of whom joined the Resistance, the majority becoming the vile courtesans of the old man whose shameful, quavering voice I had listened to, were represented for me by the public protest of that ordinary soldier, until, that is, I learned of de Gaulle’s declaration of 18 June. After I had passed the baccalaureate, I went into hypokhâgne and khâgne4 in wartime Marseilles where I had wonderful teachers and classmates, some of whom have remained my best friends. The time came when I should have done ‘forced labour’ (Compulsory Labour Service) for the Germans, but I spent several months in the maquis in the Alps. At the end of 1944, when Paris was liberated, I entered 3

4

Prime Minister during the Third Republic. He initiated laws making primary school education free and compulsory which were anti-clerical in spirit. Hypokhâgne is the first year and khâgne is the second-year class preparing for the entrance exam to the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

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khâgne at the Lycée Louis le Grand. It was less animated, less inspired than Marseilles, but extremely efficient. I went on to the Ecole Normale in July 1945. I believe that my modest, marginal experience of the Second World War, together with my long-standing thoughts about history as a concrete science, made it impossible for me to put up with a dry and dusty sort of history; the sort which, as I later learned, Lucien Febvre described as one in which peasants were only seen ploughing in monastery registers and collections of documents. At the same time, I followed courses at the Sorbonne which was accepted practice then.They were a bitter disappointment to me.With one or two rare exceptions, I was totally demoralised by the historians at the Sorbonne, so much so that I thought of abandoning history. I encountered nothing of what I had begun to discover in Toulon and Marseilles.At one point I was tempted to switch to German language and civilisation.The concept of ‘civilisation’ appealed to me. A cultural approach, the notion even of civilisation, the crossing of disciplines, carried with it a sense of the living, of bringing people and a social fabric back to life; something which seemed not to be part of historians’ history during that period. At the lycée I had been passionately interested in German language and literature and surprised myself that I was able to draw a distinction between Germans and Nazis. In khâgne at Marseilles, a wonderful teacher (I had had very good ones in Toulon, too) called Henri Pizard introduced me to the rich worlds of Goethe, Heine, Rilke and Thomas Mann. He was killed at the liberation of Marseilles (his death a terrible, tragic accident). I was thinking in some way of paying homage to his memory, but I was soon to be disappointed once again. Behind the fine idea of civilisation lay nothing more than narrow formulations.And philology spoiled everything. So I came back to history, thanks mainly to the courses on ancient history which I found the most interesting. But one needed certain skills – mostly of a technical nature (archaeology and epigraphy) – which I did not have and which I did not find appealing.Yet they held my attention.These technical skills made me grapple with the major problem for the historian: that of documentation. I have already said there is a nostalgic pleasure in what we do, but that pleasure is the ultimate reward. First of all, one has to come to terms with certain fundamental issues: how to research and use documents.You cannot do this job without sources and without knowing how to exploit them with truly scientific rigour.

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That is how I discovered palaeography, the science of deciphering ancient languages. It involves reading in two senses of that word: deciphering and interpreting. Handling manuscripts fascinated me. In most cases they are made of animal skin, parchment, which is enjoyable to touch.You have a physical sense of the scribe’s work, his ink, his pen, the codes he uses, his minor quirks, his labour. Palaeography confirmed me in my love of the Middle Ages.Without any doubt it directed me firmly towards research. But that did not prevent me from enjoying teaching, both at a lycée for a short period (a year in Amiens, 1950–1) and in the Faculty of Letters at Lille (1954–9). From my earliest vocation I have retained the love of communicating the results of my research, of sharing them with other researchers and of cooperating with them. In this way I am bearing the torch passed to me by my father and a teacher like Henri Michel. I will talk later about another great scholar, Charles Edmond Perrin. He was a rigorous and humane teacher who captivated me completely and guided me towards the Middle Ages at the Sorbonne, even though we did not share the same view of history. Later still I will come to two medievalists who opened up the world of medieval history for me: Maurice Lombard at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and Michel Mollat du Jourdain at the University of Lille. A REVOLUTION: THE BOOK. A PROBLEM: SOURCES To the layman, talk of epigraphy, manuscripts, printed texts sounds like one and the same thing. These are sciences concerned with sources. But they require different techniques and correspond to different periods. Epigraphy has its own logic, as do manuscripts, printed texts and images, etc., which structure the historian’s approach. To undertake any historical study of Antiquity without archaeology and epigraphy – the deciphering of inscriptions – would be a joke. As a consequence, historians of Antiquity have a different relationship with their subject from that which historians of the contemporary world have with their archives.The nature of the documents available to us influences our way of thinking about the period studied. A historian of the French Revolution argues on the basis of sources which, if I may say so, do not ‘function’ in the same way as those used by a specialist of the First World War.The Middle Ages are inseparable from

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the manuscripts which they produced. They are also the product of those manuscripts. Antiquity expressed itself on scrolls which suggests a relationship with a particular text. Moving backwards and forwards by hand is a more time-consuming process. The positioning of lines and paragraphs is dependent upon the surface on which the scribe, or the reader, can press.The idea of the sentence and of punctuation is different from ours.And so on and so forth. Lastly, the scroll is hardly conducive to silent reading. Even if they knew perfectly well how to read and write, the powerful men and the scholars of Antiquity were in the habit of being read to because specialist readers were quicker at manipulating scrolls, freeing their masters from such material constraints. In the same way, they also preferred to dictate things. The widespread use of the codex (the book as we know it with its bound sections and pages) marked a shift. The codex or manuscript volume is quite a good marker of the beginning of the Middle Ages, at the end of the fourth century. It favoured a personal, internalised form of reading, even though totally silent reading was not widespread until the thirteenth century. Until then, you have to visualise even solitary readers mumbling to themselves or, at least, moving their lips. The ultimate arrival of silent and even more interiorised reading corresponds to a new period in the Middle Ages. It implies a profound change in the nature of memory, since the ease of use of the codex and the development of margins enabled one to move backwards and forwards with ease. Margins, notes, etc., were familiar to people in Antiquity. But the surface and shape of the scroll could not be used in a rational manner. With the codex, that became a reality. And so the individual reading to himself became established. In passing I would point out that I moved away from English history, of which I was very fond, partly because the Royal Court of Chancery in England maintained for a considerable time the longstanding use of the scroll. It makes referring to them a taxing and cumbersome business. Then there is writing itself.Tell me how you write and I will tell you who you are, the writing-room to which you belonged, the court, group and milieu. The reform of writing during the reign of Charlemagne marked a new beginning and had profound consequences.Around 800, scriptoria – the rooms in which scribes worked and which were mostly in monasteries – led to the predominance of a small form of handwriting, the ‘Caroline minuscule’. The word ‘Caroline’ comes from Carolus,

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Charles.‘Minuscule’ (lower case), of course, distinguishes it fundamentally from ‘capital’ (upper case). In Antiquity, inscriptions especially were written in upper case, making them more legible but necessarily more schematic. Caroline miniscule was introduced for religious and political reasons. Charlemagne and his entourage wanted a reliable, uniform edition of the old manuscripts, especially of the Gospels and the writings of the Church Fathers, the text of which was established on the basis of the oldest and most accurate manuscripts available to them. In order to establish a body of writing such as this, a new script had to be perfected. All the texts would be written in Latin and in the same way. It was the basis of a civilisation, a development which gradually changed the way knowledge was transmitted and taught.This fundamental restructuring of writing laid the basis for the establishment of universities, which occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One can actually see by looking at manuscripts what an important turning point the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were. Caroline miniscule disappeared. Writing became uneven, personalised, with a range of abbreviations. It proved that people wrote quickly, capturing the spoken word. From then on, there were teachers and numerous students.There were those who had the authority to address people at large and those who wrote things down.The ability to write quickly meant that one could express fleeting thoughts, intuitions, variations. Inner thought processes developed still further. Memory changed yet again. Many thirteenth century treatises, including those of the most authoritative figures such as Thomas Aquinas, were written up from notes taken at lectures.Thomas himself has left us a number of examples of his own handwriting – terrible, abbreviated writing – which shows us the crazy speed at which thoughts develop, are self-generating. It was the age of cursive script and of abbreviations. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a new order, a new refinement occurred with the arrival of the humanists and in particular of Erasmus.This marked the beginning of a different period rather than a different civilisation. Printing shops began to distribute a new kind of text. Of course, manuscripts were still produced for a long time and some source materials could only be written by hand. However, they no longer had exactly the same function.The historian reacts differently when dealing with printed texts rather than manuscripts. Another major change is taking place in our own time with the computer.

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It was a great pleasure for me to discover medieval manuscripts, even if many were only facsimiles or photocopies. It was of paramount importance. Subsequently, I took the trouble to increase my knowledge of other sources,in particular medieval archaeology and the study of art works and illustrations.Working with documents forms the basis of the distinction between the ‘true’ historian, the professional historian,and those who deal with things secondhand.Whatever their qualities, they are only amateurs, so-called historians. One might say that all history takes place in the production of documents and the deciphering of documents which are called sources. A process takes place between history in the making and history as it is told, noted down, in which the historian preserves the lives of real men and women.The written record the historian produces represents a great labour on behalf of humanity which does not wish to be forgotten. The term source bothers me. On the one hand, it is seductive because it makes the document a living thing, a source of life. On the other, it can lead – and has led certain historians – to think that history ‘comes from sources’, that it emerges ready-made from the documents. Positivist historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thought it sufficient first to gather documents together, then to analyse them critically as to their authenticity (to prove that they were not forgeries – and the history of forgeries is a splendid historiographical story in its own right) and believed their work was done. I learned from my teachers in the Annales school that the historian creates the document, confers on traces and vestiges, as Carlo Ginzburg would call them, the status of sources.The list of questions historians draw up for themselves and the ones they ask (an essential part of their profession) form the basis of historiography, of history. Medieval archaeology has for a long time been undervalued, because traces of the period are often part and parcel of subsequent additions and modifications, whereas the remains of Antiquity are more easily detected. These traces appear as ruins, marks in fields, remains covered by other very different remains. For a long time, archaeology had a particular reputation as a second-rank documentary source. In the absence of texts, one had to use it in the study of Antiquity. Archaeological sources appeared less transparent than textual ones, which fitted in with the lazy view of the historian as someone who let his sources ‘speak for themselves’. Yet often the written word is better at lying than at telling the truth.

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In the 1950s and 1960s I experienced the regulation of archaeological activity in France which (for excavations in particular) halted archaeology on sites later than the year 800. Charlemagne was victorious, the text triumphed and archaeology ceased. I can think of few crazier or more ludicrous ideas. Fortunately today, throughout Europe, archaeology relating to medieval times is active and fruitful. It is no longer restricted, moreover, to excavation, to the study of monuments or to the quest for beautiful objects alone. It is concerned with whole sites, such as towns and villages.The excavation of ‘deserted villages’ has greatly increased our knowledge of medieval rural life. Archaeology is also concerned with what might be termed ‘material culture’, and this has become an important subject for historians. The most visible, the most obvious thing of all, namely the omnipresent medieval image, was overlooked. It was interpreted for a long time from an artistic angle – which is as it should be – but by the same token its documentary value as evidence, as the expression of something was often underestimated. Historians, whether imbued with romanticism or hostile to it (and in my view the two camps are alike in this sphere), have not always accepted that the work of the artist or craftsman was more than a fine piece of work made by a creative individual.They did not see that it also bore witness to rules, codes, practices, commissions.The individual – itself a concept dear to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but out of tune with medieval thinking – who created it certainly expressed his own personality, but also did so according to a number of important conventions peculiar to the period. Those belonging to the romantic tradition valued beauty above all else. Beyond whatever rules were in place, they looked for individuality, genius. As a result, they overlooked the importance of the rules themselves. An image is another kind of text. Was the purpose of these rules to convey a message to the public? The idea of the ‘public at large’, who have to be convinced by popularisation and mass production, is a modern one.The question was not posed in that way in the Middle Ages. The message was addressed in the first instance (or ultimately, if you wish) to God. Any object which we would call a work of ‘art’ (the word did not exist in the Middle Ages) was an imitation of divine creation or of nature, itself the creation of God. There were works and

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those who commissioned them: the Church, powerful people, notables and established communities. These are the key people, those who made commissions and wanted it to be known. For a long while the medieval artist was an artisan whose work was commissioned. To the historian the work of art, the image and its themes, are a source, for two reasons.Works express a sensibility but their meaningful content transcends the personality of the artist, the individual who commissioned them and those who receive them. Just as historians have resorted to the notion of mentality in the world of ideas, so they resort to that of collective sensibility to draw out the historical meaning of a work of art.They must also remember that a large part of the art created was addressed to the Christian community as a whole, and that it formed an essential element of the liturgy, which itself gave structure to the medieval community.Thus artistic documents, images were concentrated in places, buildings where the liturgy was most obviously and frequently performed, namely churches and public places. Some images were kept for the privileged few or for God, hidden sculptures, illustrated manuscripts, church treasures. But even the rarest things were put on display as religious objects, and their rarity made them even more powerful. The nineteenth century has given us a great deal. But in this area it sometimes weighs too heavily. Our celebrated Ecole des Chartes bears this out. Created in 1821 by Louis XVIII, in the wake of the vogue for the ‘troubadours’ (the influence again of Chateaubriand), and reformed in 1846, the Ecole des Chartes had as its mission to preserve and resurrect documents written in medieval Latin and old French, an archive which had been endangered and despised by the Enlightenment and then the Revolution. The prestige of the newly founded Ecole was part of a wider movement,which brought together the world of the imagination which inspired Hugo (and Jules Michelet) and a desire for scientific knowledge of the past, imbued with a spirit of nationalism. The notion of heritage, which is so characteristic of the nineteenth century, came into existence at this time. At the beginning of the century,Alexandre Lenoir, the founder of the Musée des Monuments Français in 1796, also brought together collections of decorative objects saved from the Revolution. He published in 1804 his Musée des Monuments de France and went on to found the Commission des Monuments Historiques, made famous by Prosper Mérimée. A tomb was built at the same time at the Père-Lachaise cemetery for Abelard

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and Héloïse. Soon after, Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) appeared on the scene, a man of genius and a rigorous analyst of the Gothic style (in Carcassonne and Notre-Dame in Paris), for whom this style of art was the product of an imagined democratic medieval spirit. These initiatives, which were maintained under the Third Republic, produced some excellent work which resembles that carried out at the same time by the great German school of philology. Unfortunately, the return to sources, to manuscripts and to palaeography was restricted essentially to legal documents: charters.Was not the regime of Louis XVIII itself based on such a charter? It must be said that for a long time the Ecole des Chartes focused exclusively on a single area of medieval studies.With the best of intentions, it restricted, not just the Middle Ages but history in general, to a study of institutions. Scholars there were fully aware that the Middle Ages were to be understood as a system, a whole, though for them the Middle Ages did not represent a civilisation. But whereas in the Enlightenment lawyers had condemned the Middle Ages because of the word feudalism, these scholars had interpreted it in a neutral sense. It is a concept which still muddies our ideas of the Middle Ages, which I will come back to (in Chapter 4). For the moment, let us just say that the notion of feudalism is essentially a legal one. It relates to the possession and transfer of property, of a fief, governed by a contract. As far as the lawyers of the Enlightenment were concerned, the medieval system they wished to destroy (which was done during the Revolution) was organised around the fief and encapsulated in it. They derived their global conception of the Middle Ages from this legal aspect, which was of secondary importance (even if inseparable from the social bond between lord and vassal).We know just how fervently the revolutionaries trampled on anything remotely connected with the ‘horrors’ of feudalism. It was, I think, a form of psychodrama. The legal, economic and social structures which derived from absolutism no longer had much connection with the more distant practices of feudalism. Modern historians, whilst retaining these terms, have enriched them and given them greater complexity, a more social and anthropological than legal dimension.Today, we almost never introduce the idea of the fief into our historical studies of the Middle Ages, which goes to show just how much things have changed. In order to move away from an interpretation which was above all legalistic, the range of sources had to be broadened. It was necessary

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to refer to things which nineteenth century historians had either not read or considered not worth reading, such as sermons, confessional works, practical theology, commercial accounts, etc. In this way you discover a different Middle Ages and a different history. You inferred that sources changed with the spread of printed materials. Subsequently, we have had the mechanical reproduction of images, of sound and of audiovisual material. Added to which, archives of all kinds are being preserved. Does that affect the work of the historian? In fact, medievalists are lucky. Even though their ways of working have broadened, they still allow them to encompass their subject matter. I do not think, on the other hand, that anyone working on modern history and especially contemporary history can retain the same methods unchanged. Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944), then Fernand Braudel (1902–85), Georges Duby (1919–96) and myself have all been specialists either of the Middle Ages or of the Renaissance, which for me is also a ‘medieval’ period. Similar choices were made by those who belonged to the important German, Italian and Anglo-Saxon schools of history, to name just a few.We were not alone. The relationship historians have with their sources, on which they depend, plays an important part in their choice of period. The Middle Ages and the sixteenth century offer a happy balance in the quantity of material available between the paucity of sources relating to ancient history and the plethora relating to modern and, above all, contemporary history. My own orientation I owe to the Annales school, which I discovered when I was studying for the agrégation. I had a great stroke of luck. Profound changes took place in 1950, the year I sat the exam. In the autumn of 1949, the minister of education radically altered the board of examiners. Members of the Annales school assumed responsibility for the agrégation in history which was presided over by Fernand Braudel.The most innovative historian was undoubtedly the little-known medievalist singled out by Lucien Febvre, Maurice Lombard (1904–65). He was a specialist of medieval Islam and taught at the less well-known Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. It was founded in 1868 by Napoleon III’s last minister of education, the historian Victor Duruy, to create a form of higher education based on the seminar, working with small groups, as opposed to the more rhetorical than scientific practices of the Sorbonne where lectures were given

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to large passive audiences.Those at the Ecole Pratique were copying Prussian practices which seemed pre-eminently modern, as the war of 1870 was to confirm. The bold new form of teaching was not however immediately matched by the content.Teaching in the history section – the fourth devoted to the historical and philosophical sciences – was little different in its conception from that of the Ecole des Chartes.As well as the innovative and outstanding fifth section – devoted to religious sciences and owing something to the spirit of Renan – Victor Duruy had planned a sixth section for economic and social sciences. But it was so groundbreaking that there were not enough historians to give lectures and take seminars and it was not established. Nothing happened until 1947 when Lucien Febvre, a professor at the Collège de France and chairman of the fourth section at Hautes Etudes, created the sixth section which immediately caused a stir and provoked intense hostility. I was lucky enough to be around at this time.The initial stages of a revolution such as this are usually exhilarating and creative, which was indeed the case. I was actively involved with those taking the agrégation who met in the stairwell and small rooms of an isolated wing of the Sorbonne, which is where Hautes Etudes were accommodated (until 1968 when the sixth section was thrown out by the fourth section). It was a revelation to me. I was captivated by two great historians, Fernand Braudel and Maurice Lombard, and discovered there was a new kind of history, that the history I had dreamt of did exist. I knew I was right in wanting to ‘do history’ and in particular medieval history. I entered a profession which has been one of the joys of my life and still is. Everyone knows Marc Bloch’s celebrated remark:‘The historian is like the giant in a fairy-tale; when he smells human flesh, he knows he has found his prey’.The Annales historians taught me that the way one approaches facts and documents gives rise to the history one produces. We take nothing on trust, but rather ask questions of our sources. In return, they require us to be critically aware of the way our own minds work. That is how the ‘new history’, as it was called, was born (though it is no longer so new). It was a novatio (novelty) as medieval scholars would have called it somewhat fearfully. They introduced new ideas whilst attempting to hide them, because the Church did not like anything new, believing that, after the Fall, the world was in a constant

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state of decline. The discipline of history as a whole was marked by this novatio. It broadened its scope to include private life, manners, mentalities and sensibilities. I am not complaining. I do, however, think that modern history (running traditionally from the Renaissance to the Revolution) and especially contemporary history (post 1789) – though the periods are somewhat arbitrarily chosen – has to rethink its methodology, establish new approaches; adopt different problematics/problématiques, to use an ugly expression. Do you have doubts about what people refer to as ‘contemporary history’? Absolutely not. I am one of those at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS5) who has backed the Institute of Contemporary History (IHTP) which has had a considerable and creative influence, and one of my close friends, François Bédarida, was its first outstanding director. I do, nonetheless, question the idea now that time has elapsed and our notion of the ‘contemporary’ has evolved. You have to understand that contemporary history remains a huge and engrossing field of study, full of potential risks and rewards. One has, however, to approach it differently, if only because of the nature and vast scope of the sources.Where I might have tens of documents at my disposal, sometimes spread over several centuries, historians studying the present day are confronted with hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of sources, covering just a few decades: written and sound archives, as well as architectural, iconographic, cadastral and urban source material, etc.To that extent, the tools are no longer appropriate for the task. I am not saying that it would be impossible to study the present day. I simply repeat: one has to study it in a different way and rethink the rules.When the historian’s relationship with the documents changes, it marks a change of period.Also, the historian’s relationship with the near past, which we call the present, is different. Jules Michelet (1798–1874) could have total control over his archive material, even though it was extensive, when he wrote his Histoire de la Révolution française (1847–53), just half a century after the events took place.With the twentieth century, archives have grown out of all proportion. New possibilities have opened up: the creation of teams of researchers, the quantitative analysis of information using computers, looking at things from different angles, etc. 5

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.The main body which funds research in literature and the human sciences.

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Techniques such as these are not confined to historical study of the present day. You yourself have used them in looking at the Middle Ages. There is a boomerang effect. Medievalists have recognised that they sometimes face similar difficulties to those encountered by historians of the present day, so they have borrowed from them. Specialists of various periods are always talking to each other. For example, the significant number of sermons produced during the Middle Ages has been overlooked for a long time.The quantity is huge, even though not all of them were written down and many manuscripts have been lost.The medievalist is swamped by them.He therefore has to find appropriate methods of dealing with the sheer volume: statistical analyses of the vocabulary, the incidence of them, the geographical spread, etc. But this is rare for our period and applies essentially to cultural history, to the history of mentalities to be precise. It would not really be appropriate, on the other hand, for economic or political history. Counting was not something they did in the Middle Ages, before the twelfth century.They did not like to count.When people in the Middle Ages used figures, they did so on the basis of symbolic numbers: three, seven, twelve and multiples of them, or when they wanted to mark something special they would use a thousand or even a million. Even present-day historians have been carried away by the use of the term millennium, which is mixed up with the idea of the Apocalypse (rightly denounced by Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence6). Millennium in the Middle Ages meant nothing more than ‘very long period’. But it has subsequently given rise to fantasies surrounding millenarianism and speculations about the end of the world; a spectacular example of which would be the ‘terror’ felt as the year one thousand drew near, which was a typically romantic idea.7 What we find at best in medieval figures is orders of magnitude. Medieval people wanted to convey that an epidemic had caused significant losses, that a certain battle was important, and so on. So much so, that historians hardly ever use numbers, except on odd occasions. We often come up against the absence of documentary evidence or the fact that texts reveal nothing.That is one of the limitations of being 6 7

F. Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, 1888. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 1931. The most recent excellent study is André Vauchez, L’attente des temps nouveaux. Eschatologie, millénarisme et visions du futur du Moyen Age au XXe siècle, Brépols, 2002.

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a medievalist, which means we have to resort to special ways of doing things. Peasants in the Middle Ages did not write.They figure only indirectly in our sources, in what scholars say about them.Yet they represented more than 80 per cent of the medieval population.Things are little better concerning women, who logically made up half of that population. Only in rare cases did they produce manuscripts, which does not mean that either they or peasants were silent, idle or without influence during this period! Historians can, within certain limits, give them a voice. As historians, we have to face the fact that there are gaps, that things are missing and we are closer in that respect to our colleagues dealing with ancient and pre-history rather than to those working on contemporary history. We can, however, fill these gaps if we make great efforts in our methods and intelligent use of our imaginations. One of the tasks facing future medievalists is to break down those silences of the Middle Ages which still exist.

2 A LONG MIDDLE AGES 1 All medieval historians must ask themselves how they define their period. I was no exception to this rule.At the beginning of the 1950s, the traditional way of defining the Middle Ages, implicitly thought of as Western, was still generally accepted.They began in 476 and ended in 1492. In 476, Odoacer, the king of the Heruli, deposed the young Romulus Augustulus,then fifteen years of age and the titular ‘emperor’ of the West.The Heruli, who were distant descendants of Scandinavian people, lived beside the Black Sea. In fact, what happened in 476 was no more than an isolated event.The real Emperor, Zeno, ruled from Byzantium. As such, he was the most influential figure in what were still essentially the intrigues and affairs of Rome in the region. So much for what happened at the beginning. Let us move on to 1492. Christopher Columbus discovered America and the Spanish Christians seized Granada from the Moors and thereby completed the re-conquest (reconquista) of their land. As Alphonse Allais asked: would someone falling asleep on 31 December 1492 and waking on 1 January 1493 know that the Middle Ages had drawn to a close and the Renaissance begun? In my view, as I have already said, historical facts are created by historians. It is all the more true of periods. Nothing tells us we are moving into or out of an era. As a historian, I have inherited a ready-made division into periods, but I must question its artificiality which sometimes falsifies the perception we have of things. When, under Charlemagne, codices and Caroline minuscule became more widespread, Antiquity had clearly come to an end, but in other areas of the same civilisation it could of course persist. Conversely, certain characteristics of interest to us medievalists began to emerge in late Antiquity which historians, rightly in my view, have for some time projected forward, as Henri Irénée Marrou

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(1904–77) had already suggested they should.The use of the precise term late Antiquity is to me crucial.We no longer speak about the Late Empire (Bas-Empire) with its connotations of decadence and implying there was an Early, more ‘advanced’, Empire (Haut-Empire) stretching from Augustus to Constantine. In this perspective, the ‘early’ Empire lasted until Constantine converted it to Christianity and the ‘late’, non-Christian Empire was marked by the return of paganism. Everything points, however, to an organisation at the pinnacle of its power from the time of Constantine (the beginning of the fourth century) to that of Justinian (the sixth century), a period of at least 300 years . . . I wish to say at once that I favour the notion of continuity and turning-points rather than the idea of the clean break. History is a continuous process. Things evolve as a result of a series of changes which are not always simultaneous.We can speak of a period having changed when a certain number of factors affect spheres as different as the economy, customs, politics and science and when they interact to create a new system or at least a different landscape. Change never occurs on a single day, in a single place, in a single area of human activity. For us, the French, the Second World War began in 1939. For the Americans and the Russians it began in 1941, but for the Czechs it was more like 1938. Likewise, we suggest that the Ancien Régime came to an end politically in 1789. Ideologically, I would say it had been dead for almost a century, from the time of the heated debate surrounding Jansenism. Culturally, it persisted in large areas of nineteenth-century life, due in some measure to the whole Napoleonic venture. François Furet has demonstrated the extent to which the French Revolution continued well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, the terms ‘high’ and ‘low’ are no longer used in French to qualify the Middle Ages or the Empire. The Lower Alps have become the Alps of Upper Provence and the Lower Pyrenees the Atlantic Pyrenees.We can do without these terms high and low which have certain connotations, especially in history. They reflect a very medieval cast of mind in which high carries with it the sense of something old and venerable having authority, whereas low suggests what is recent, imperfect, decadent. For people in the Middle Ages, the present day was the culmination of a long steady decline from the perfection of the past. In order to understand this paradox more clearly, we should turn our attention back to the Middle Ages.

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The word and the idea of the ‘Middle Ages’ appeared in the work of Petrarch and the Italian humanists of the fourteenth century.They spoke of a medium tempus (a middle age) or, in the plural, media tempora. The idea is clearly expressed in the English term Middle Ages, in the Spanish Edad Media and the German Mittelalter. The German word Alter as well as meaning age does, however, have the connotation ‘venerable’, the word alt (old) implying a certain prestige. In French, on the other hand, the word moyen has taken on a more derogatory meaning, having almost lost its strictly formal meaning of ‘middle’ – intermediary.We speak with a certain disdain of a ‘middling’ result, a ‘middling’ show, a ‘middling’ standard, etc. We should recognise at once Petrarch’s medieval cast of mind. Like many humanists, he sought to rediscover Antiquity in all its purity, as Antiquity was the ‘high’ point from which humanity had sadly continued to move away. He felt that a true renaissance was about to begin and that Christianity would emerge from the long darkness of the Middle Ages. In seeking to rediscover the past in all its truth and greatness, stripped of the accretions which had built up over time, he wished also to reform the Catholic Church. It had moved too far from the city of God, the Civitas Dei proclaimed by Saint Augustine, and had become compromised and weighed down by worldly concerns of the day. Throughout the Middle Ages, people sought reform by returning to original truths. It was Charlemagne’s intention to initiate reform when he introduced Caroline minuscule and the revision of biblical texts, encouraging a return to true scripture and uncorrupted sources. THE IDEA

OF

‘RENAISSANCE’

Medium tempus, then.A middle age. But in relation to what? To Antiquity, on the one hand, and the future, on the other. Humanists believed they were emerging from a nameless period, an in-between age. Referring to a Judaic theory of the Ages of the World, scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries believed humanity to be in the sixth and final age, the culmination of continuous decline.Against all the evidence, some said that men were shrinking and ‘growing old’. Compared with the ‘giants’ of heroic times, they were intrinsically worn-out and dwarfish. Others went so far as to suggest men were born ‘older’ than their forebears. Glorifying the past did, however, raise questions. Antiquity – from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century – derived its values from

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Christ, from the Apostles and from the Fathers of the Church. It was the time when Christianity took root. But it was also the time of other gods, of non-Christian writers, of pagans and idolaters.This was only a slight embarrassment to Christians in the Middle Ages. Antiquity had, after all, undergone conversion. In one way or another, all the great Greco-Roman writers had proclaimed the revelation to come. They were enlightened precursors, if not yet sufficiently so.That is why figures such as Cicero and Aristotle, when he had regained his reputation, were referred to alongside the Fathers of the Church, without any sense of contradiction. Saint Augustine himself had quite blatantly drawn attention to pagan writers and the system of the seven ‘liberal arts’ which encompassed the whole of knowledge. There remained the problem of the future. Where were these vague, uncertain times leading, this in-between age which people of the Middle Ages were living through? To a ‘renaissance’ of course, or rather, as we shall see, to a series of renaissances! For the humanists, it was not the return of Antiquity. They would be dazzled, on the contrary,by an Antiquity which was still to come,resembling what had gone before but not its exact copy. Christianity would rediscover itself in its original perfect state. In the Gospels, Nicodemus the Pharisee asked Jesus: ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?’ (John 3). Jesus replied that his rebirth would be ‘of water and of the Spirit’. Christians in the Middle Ages were anticipating just such a renaissance of the spirit.They saw themselves as colourless, caught between two equally coloured periods, and this was the reason for their own self-deprecation. But we must not use words incorrectly.The term ‘Middle Ages’ did not exist before the end of the seventeenth century and the idea of the ‘Renaissance’ was only fully realised during the nineteenth. In the year 1676 Christopher Cellarius (the Latinised form of Keller) published in Jena a history of the medieval period written in Latin.As was then customary, he employed the phrase medium aevum instead of medium tempus and the nuance mattered. The word ‘era’, aevum, replaced the word ‘time’, tempus. Charles du Cange used similar terminology in his Glossarium published a few years later in 1688.A more radical approach was adopted in the eighteenth century which set itself up as the Age of Enlightenment and cast the Middle Ages into outer darkness.The English have even used the term ‘Dark Ages’. From the eighteenth century on, the Middle Ages ceased to be the

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colourless period medieval people thought they were living through and became a dark age trapped between Antiquity’s dazzling past and the luminous future of the Philosophes. It was a barren time, characterised by an absence of reason and taste. Before Walter Scott and Chateaubriand reinstated it, the word ‘Gothic’ was synonymous with all that was ugly, strange and graceless, and the criticism it implied was directed essentially at the Church.Voltaire said it openly in his Essai sur les moeurs (1756) as Leibniz had before him.The Middle Ages were synonymous with clerical obscurantism. The future as envisaged by the philosophers of the Enlightenment was not, as we have seen, some vague renaissance prefiguring the End of Time which medieval people had looked towards. It was, henceforth, inseparably bound up with progress. Soon, history and progress came to be viewed as one and the same thing as history unfolded inevitably towards a better future. This, at least, was an idea upon which the nineteenth century staked its reputation. People in the Middle Ages, on the other hand, only saw progress in terms of the end of history, transfiguration and the escape from time. There was still some ambiguity, however.When those involved in the events of 1789 thought of themselves as Latin or Roman and praised Antiquity, they adopted ideas which Enlightenment thinkers held dear. More than they realised at the time or than we realise today, they also revived a medieval tradition. As one example, I will outline the story of Cola di Rienzi (1313–54), an artisan and avid reader of Livy. He sought to establish a ‘republic’ in Rome, gaining the support of Petrarch and, for a time, even that of the Papacy which was then in Avignon. He cited Roman law, referred to texts from Antiquity, opposed the great landowners, the baroni romani, and dreamed of the worldwide renewal of Christianity. I will not go into details about his ‘commune’ which was an integral part of the urban growth taking place in Italy in the fourteenth century. What interests me is the profoundly medieval nature of his imagination, which also looks back to Antiquity. Cola sought to recreate the old Rome so that the true Church might flourish. Wagner’s opera Rienzi of 1841, which sets this episode to music, is an interesting conjunction of a ‘bourgeois’ revolutionary mind, of Germanic anxieties, and of a reinvented Middle Ages; a Middle Ages which was brought back to life in the nineteenth century, at once awe-inspiring and magnificent, violent and commonplace. As a subject it fascinated people, which was not always to its advantage.

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There then appeared on the scene the Swiss German Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), an important but troublesome figure for medievalists.A historian of art and civilisation, close to Nietzsche and a lover of Greece, it was he who first devised the division into periods which still hampers us today. Burckhardt created the theory of the clean break, drawing on his great love of the Ancient World, and was fired by his enthusiasm for Italian art of the Quattrocento, our fifteenth century.He can be said to have invented the Renaissance with a capital R, cutting it off somewhat peremptorily from the Middle Ages and isolating it. Burckhardt made much of the antithesis between the Age of Darkness and the Renaissance which was not yet clearly defined or dated.Whilst The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) is a great work, it did create a decisive split. The word ‘modern’, an old medieval word which meant ‘recent’ or ‘present’, took on a new meaning which had begun to appear with the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.To be modern was no longer simply to belong to the present day, but to be better, more flourishing, at the forefront of progress. So, people sought signs of the modern everywhere in the past, thereby muddying the waters. (Since then, we have invented the term ‘post-modern’, but that is another story.) From Burckhardt on, whatever was modern represented the crowning achievement of evolution and the meanderings of a thousand years of history (our Middle Ages) were skipped over in the process. Modernity marked the beginning of serious matters, with the full flowering of a civilisation characterised by progress, reason and unbounded knowledge, etc. Modernity, or the pursuit of Antiquity by other means, came by chance to represent the end of history.Europeans simply had to perfect their ‘modern’ discoveries and put the finishing touches to their political system, which would of course be a universal model.This mixture of neoclassical eclecticism and essentially Italian models was all the rage in the years 1860–80.At the time, there seemed to be no alternative. I do not wish to challenge Burckhardt’s intellectual stature, his erudition or the soundness of his methods. His success was, however, a catastrophe. Not only did he reinforce the idea of a dark Middle Ages, he accorded one region special importance. Italy was indeed a brilliant example, often culturally in the vanguard, but its political evolution lagged well behind. As a result, he clouded the European perspective one needs when studying the Middle Ages. His thesis can be challenged

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in a number of respects.Yet the idea persists in people’s minds that there was an ‘advanced’ region and ‘backward’ regions, that a balance had been achieved and that a certain ideal could not be bettered. Burckhardt’s vision of history did of course fit in with German cultural expectations in the nineteenth century.The genius of a divided Greece and a fragmented Italy heralded the genius of a German state extending from Prussia to Austria, which would overcome its divisions and be the new Rome, the new Athens. Let us not forget that the Germanic Holy Roman Empire only ceased to exist in 1806, barely half a century before Burckhardt embarked on his great work. He made Germany and Europe look to the South, inspiring a certain nostalgia (Sehnsucht nach Süden) which created all kinds of imbalances. We should, however, say at once that Burckhardt showed his genius by creating a system out of what was already a general movement embodying a passionate quest for origins and a belief in history as the cornerstone of nationalism. The different national bourgeoisies of Europe turned away from Antiquity which had long fascinated them, pushed to the background the ephemeral cult of an imagined Middle Ages fostered by the Romantics, and discovered in history a narrative which underpinned the idea of the nation and lent legitimacy to its ultimate pre-eminence. Many people came to choose the Renaissance as their starting point: Luther in Germany and the Reformation in England. We see this very clearly in France with Jules Michelet. For a long time, he had explored the Middle Ages which both aroused his enthusiasm and moved him, because he discovered there representatives of the common people such as Joan of Arc and Jacques Bonhomme – a symbolic, imaginary peasant. But in 1869, the preface he wrote for the seventh volume of his Histoire de France revealed a quite different outlook and a violent break with early Romanticism. Nothing good existed, he said, before the Renaissance, which was the dawn of the present era and symbolised by the twin giants: Rabelais and Luther.1 If the nineteenth century showed more interest in the Middle Ages than either the seventeenth or the eighteenth, it only partially restored its reputation, apart from a few isolated cases.The Middle Ages became 1

In my article ‘Les Moyen Age de Michelet’, published in volume 1 of L’Histoire de France, edited by Paul Viallaneix in the Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Flammarion, 1974, pp. 45–63 and included in J. Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age, Gallimard, 1977, pp. 19–45, I tried to show that Michelet changed his viewpoint from that of a ‘sunny Middle Ages in 1833–1844’ to that of a ‘dark Middle Ages in 1855’; a viewpoint which appears again in the famous preface of 1869 to L’Histoire de France.

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a part of folklore, the childhood of the nation from which it emerged into adulthood with the Renaissance. Every nation wanted to be seen as the new Italy, the height of modernity, etc. At a time of colonial expansion, the idea of the ‘native’ was developed, creating the perspective in which Africans would from then on always be seen as primitive. As for Arabs and Asians, various metaphors drawn from the Middle Ages were applied to them, particularly ones relating to chivalry and feudalism.As if in colonising these primitive, feudal people, we brought them Enlightenment and wakened them from their long medieval sleep. A MILLENNIUM AND

ITS

DIVISION

INTO

PERIODS

The division we still use (476–1492) is quite recent, then. It comes from the nineteenth century. It reflected the needs of schools and universities which were expanding at the time. Teachers needed dates, frameworks, points of reference.They wanted to provide structures, which of itself is no bad thing. But the way one structures is never a neutral act. Establishing a date which marked the end of Antiquity was of less concern than knowing when the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance, and therefore the modern world, began. Many favoured 1453 which marked the fall of Byzantium and the end of the Roman Empire, although fifteenth-century Europeans for the most part lived through these events without any sense of trauma. It does, however, provide a neat balance with the year 476. Just as the Middle Ages began with the end of the Western Empire, so the Renaissance began with the end of the Eastern Empire. Indeed, the fall of Byzantium drove a number of scholars steeped in Greek culture towards Europe.They brought with them the Greek world which we inherited. The die was cast. They handed us the baton and we could forget about the Middle Ages.The modern world enjoyed direct contact with Greece rather than through the agency of medieval clerics who knew little of it in any case. Greece came to represent Antiquity par excellence. These nuances of interpretation can be seen in the preconceived ideas which surround the learning of ‘dead languages’. Latin was the dominant language of the Middle Ages, so Latin culture was considered rustic, especially that associated with the Church.True Latin was confined to the period from Cicero to Tacitus, that is to say from the first century BC until the second century AD. Thereafter, it fell into

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decline. So most writers who enriched the world of medieval studies – especially the Fathers of the Church – could be dismissed. Greek, on the other hand, had been restored to a place of honour by the humanists and was considered refined, subtle and bold. On the one hand, you had the droning kitchen Latin of the priests, on the other aristocratic Greek as spoken by those with open minds. Let us remind ourselves what historians such as Henri-Irénée Marrou, Paul Veyne and Peter Brown have so clearly shown. From the end of the Roman Empire, Mediterranean culture was entirely Hellenistic and essentially bilingual. Latin and Greek thought were not in opposition. The fifteenth century also benefited from the prestige of printing. Said to have been created somewhat arbitrarily in 1450, it was perfected by Gutenberg (c. 1400–68), who enjoyed a powerful reputation in Germany.The fact that he printed the Bible, a little before Luther’s own translation became the cornerstone of the German language, conferred great prestige on Germany itself. Finally, we come to 1492 about which there was agreement. Discovered by an Italian in the service of Spain, America was the crowning achievement of Western dynamism. The United States, which themselves became a great power in the nineteenth century, appreciated the significance of this.The fall of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in the same year provided a happy coincidence, at a time when Islam seemed to imperialist Europe like the very embodiment of ‘medieval’ practices.The French too had their moment of glory in 1492 when Charles VIII began the wars in Italy, that same Italy so highly-prized by Burckhardt. Choosing dates to define a period is, however, troubling. If, for example, one looks in Italy for works of art, intellectual movements or monuments which represent a clean break with the Middle Ages, one cannot find them, or if one does they begin in the thirteenth century. Do the pulpits of Nicola Pisano, father and son (1260–1310), the baptistery doors in Florence dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century, the works of Petrarch (1304–74), or the dome of the cathedral in Florence by Brunelleschi (1420–36) belong to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance? And if we study the culture of the conquistadors and the conversion of the ‘Indians’ to Christianity, we are still in the Middle Ages.And even the celebrated wars in Italy are in no way innovative from a military point of view. The techniques and strategies are medieval. Change is only perceptible from 1520–30 onwards. I have even heard a military historian state that General Wallenstein

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(1583–1634), one of the major figures in the Thirty Years War, was the last great medieval commander! To return to the point I have been making: changes never occur all at once, in every sphere of activity and in a single place.That is why I have spoken of a long Middle Ages, which – in certain areas of our civilisation – lasted and sometimes flowered well beyond the accepted dates. In the same way, it is wrong to talk about the market in economics before the end of the eighteenth century.The rural economy only rid itself of famine in the nineteenth century (except in Russia). The vocabulary of politics and economics only changed decisively with the French and the Industrial Revolutions, reflecting changes in institutions, in modes of production and in the ways of thinking which accompanied them. It was the moment, too, when science was finally rebuilt and no longer medieval in origin (Galileo, William Harvey, Isaac Newton, etc. . . .). The Renaissance is your enemy, then? Yes, if you see the Renaissance as a kind of sausage machine. Of course not, if you view it as a moment in our civilisation! Since Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) published his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960), all historians have agreed that there was not one but several Renaissances, and that logically as a concept ‘renaissance’ is an integral part of medieval history.The Middle Ages can only be understood if one assents to the idea of successive renaissances and successive reforms. At least from the time of Charlemagne, these were perpetual demands. For Luther, the Reformation was one of a whole series of reforms. The Middle Ages spanned more than a millennium. How does one break these thousand years down into periods? The Middle Ages were dynamic and extremely creative, though people did not talk in such terms then. Whereas our society readily applies the word ‘historic’ to the least significant of events (a football score, a fall on the Stock Exchange), the Middle Ages totally avoided the celebration of anything new. On the contrary, within the Church, which encompassed all intellectual life, the word novitas, newness, filled those who heard it with fear and hostility.To describe an author as new was to condemn him, to accuse him almost of malevolent heresy.The many creative people who lived in the Middle Ages denied any suggestion of the kind and claimed to be imitators of respected

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and established figures.They simply took old ideas, they said, dusted them off and gave them new life. Saint Thomas Aquinas, who had an immensely fertile mind, would have been shocked had anyone suggested he was an innovator. In his mind, he was simply going back to sources.Anything new, novus, was apocalyptic and only a few brave, provocative souls declared themselves innovators in a positive sense, such as the earliest mendicant orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans at the beginning of the thirteenth century.The official life of Saint Dominic is full of references to new, newness (novus, novitas). So, in following the lead set by Etienne Gilson and Erwin Panofsky and looking out for renaissances, one is able to establish periods. The first of these would seem to be the Carolingian Renaissance (from the end of the eighth century into the ninth century).Historians drew attention to it quite early on, figures like Jean-Jacques Ampère (1800–64), the son of the famous physicist, who published his Histoire littéraire de la France sous Charlemagne in 1839. At the same time, the Germans also began to publish documents quite methodically. The importance of the Carolingian period was perhaps exaggerated on both sides of the Rhine for nationalistic reasons, as people asked whether Charlemagne was French or German. The issue is of little consequence to us, but it was important in the nineteenth century. Were Charlemagne to have a German background, the first Renaissance could be centred on Germany. As we have seen, however, the age of Charlemagne, characterised by its quest for an authentic edition of the Bible and by the reform of writing, laid the foundations of a civilisation with, on the one hand, exegesis and, on the other, the art of reading and writing.The Middle Ages was the age of the Bible and of books in general.That brought with it further upheaval, the consequences of which historians are only now beginning to comprehend.The status of the image changed, reflecting the new relationship which developed between the Bible and other books. The Byzantine Empire, as we know, was twice torn apart by a serious crisis. Between 730 and 787 and again from 815 to 843, iconoclasm, the destruction of images, became an official religious doctrine. It was not just one of those specious, sophisticated ‘Byzantine’ quarrels, but a cultural revolution, followed by a counter-revolution which was sometimes more like a civil war in which whole regions broke away.

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Thanks to Charlemagne, those around him and his prelates, the West avoided the same fate. He declared himself neither for nor against the veneration of images and refused to enter the debate surrounding aniconism – whether representation should be banned. He drew on the tradition established by Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), whose Letter to Serenus of Marseilles justified the role of images saying that they should be neither forbidden nor venerated.In addition,his theologians misinterpreted the translation of the acts of the Council of Nicaea in 787, which the Empress Irene had convoked to justify the cult of icons. It was therefore in part unwittingly that a new position began to emerge. Be that as it may, images were authorised and the drama surrounding them was ended. Having avoided the quarrel, Charlemagne ruled out any argument about the liturgical function of images.They were seen as intermediaries between man and God and the representation of God was not considered to be a pagan or an idolatrous act. It inspired devotion rather than worship of the image itself. In this respect, the West differed from Byzantium. In allowing images to be seen as instruments of salvation, the West differed also from the two religions which forbade representation, Judaism and Islam.The image was nothing more or less than an instrument. From then on ‘Roman’ Christianity was unlike either Judaism, Islam or ‘Greek’ Christianity. It moved the debate on to other issues.There was no further controversy about images until Luther’s Reformation,apart from a few isolated difficulties.The choice made was responsible for the development of Western art, which gives pride of place to the human face and figure. The approval of images played a large part in the development of one fundamental cult, that of the Virgin Mary whose place in acts of worship was something new and came about because she figured in the Passion of Christ. Images of the Passion were indeed revered by all levels of society because of the wide distribution of the crucifix. Through the use of these images, the faithful grew accustomed to seeing God in human form, which was a logical extension of the central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. It is important to realise, however, that the image preceded theoretical speculation about it. Devotion was first expressed in images and then in speech.‘I do not seek, I find,’ said Picasso.The same was true then when people discovered things through images.Theological discourse was a secondary means of discovery, and images often revealed

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things which were subsequently clarified by clerics.As illustrations of biblical texts, they inferred and anticipated the commentary which was to follow. Should we remind ourselves of the important passage in Genesis in which Man is created in the image of God? ‘Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostrum’ is the text in the Latin Vulgate which translates as ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’. The image represented and expressed what the faithful believed.They had an intuition of what reasoned argument would then make clear. After the Carolingian Renaissance, there was a second one in the twelfth century. Once the idea of renaissance had been accepted, certain medievalists began to see them everywhere, so prevalent was the desire for renaissance and reform in the Middle Ages. But if the periods we have proposed are to remain valid – otherwise it is a pointless exercise – choices have to be made even if they oversimplify, as they always do, developments which were often less clear-cut. The great Italian-American medievalist, Roberto Sabbatino Lopez, once asked the question: ‘The tenth century, still another Renaissance?’ For him, the issue in question was the extent to which the West ‘took off’ around the year 1000, a subject which has recently given rise to pointless debate. Nothing happened in the year 1000 but, as Georges Duby has clearly shown, the period from 980–1040 was one of critical ferment in the economic and social sphere (an upsurge in the clearance of land for cultivation, and a growth in the number of knights, castles, villages and soon of domains), and in the spiritual sphere (the movement in support of the truce of God, the construction of churches, the myth of Jerusalem which prepared the way for the Crusades).We can confine ourselves, therefore, to the work published in 1927 by the American Charles Homer Haskins, which gave rise to a great deal of further research. It was he who introduced the idea of a second, twelfth-century Renaissance. This was a much more important and profound Renaissance than the Carolingian one. It affected all areas of knowledge, philosophy as well as theology, and reinforced the huge interest in works of Latin Antiquity. Greek Antiquity was for some time still largely unknown, with the notable exception of Aristotle who was partially rediscovered in the twelfth century, and only became fully known in Latin translation from Arab sources in the thirteenth century.

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Material change was seen at the social level with the widespread development of urban schools, which were essentially secular in contrast with the old monastic schools. Corporate universities were also set up alongside religious establishments.The word ‘secular’ has to be understood, of course, in the Christian sense of the word. Lay people were members of the Church who did not belong to the priesthood. The idea of being outside the Church was inconceivable! A new kind of literature also appeared at this time, or literature as we have come to think of it in the West.The term itself appeared during the twelfth century. Initially, it was poetic in form, expressing the ideals of chivalry and courtly love. But a new, unknown genre, which was not part of the Greco-Roman tradition, began to appear: the novel. Many significant narrative texts belonging to the Hellenistic tradition did of course exist and were later thought of as novels (The Golden Ass by Apuleius, the Aetheopica of Heliodorus, etc.). But they in no way resemble the novels in circulation at the time, which were works of fiction in ordinary language as opposed to Latin.The contents were often profane, ‘secular’. The legacy of Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1135–c. 1183) is wellknown. Epics and chansons de geste reflected the world of Charlemagne and courtly romances that of an imaginary King Arthur. 1215: THE FOURTH GREAT LATERAN COUNCIL What do we understand by the word ‘secular’? In the Middle Ages, the word referred to Christians who had not been admitted to holy orders by the Church as opposed to clerics who had. The dialectical separation of powers which this implied was as old as the teaching of Christ:‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’. On the one side was the Church, on the other the secular authorities, principally those of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, descended in part from Charlemagne.The two were separate but they confronted one another with some vigour in an attempt to achieve pre-eminence.The Church’s aspiration to reform also echoed an older desire to free itself from involvement in the temporal world. Gregory VII, who was pope from 1073–85, initiated the immensely important reform movement which bears his name and which was implemented throughout the twelfth century. It is generally accepted that Gregory sought to free the Church from all compromise over money and to rid it of ‘impurities’ of various

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kinds and especially contamination by impure liquids such as blood and semen. The oath of celibacy, often violated by clerics, was to be permanently enforced and engaging in warfare was strictly forbidden. The reaffirmation of ideals was an attempt by him to free the Church from involvement in temporal affairs so that the Papacy could devote itself fully to spiritual matters.There was, of course, a certain ambiguity in this. When the Pope emphasised the essential distinction between God and Caesar, he sought to establish the supreme authority of the Church. It would be the incarnation of true power, thereby reducing the subordinate, less prestigious powers to a ‘secular’ role and denying them control of those temporal affairs. The social consequences were considerable with everyone, including lay people, called upon to engage in reform. In comparison with the clergy, they were definitely second-class Christians but they were used to that.They had accepted it from the time when monastic life achieved its high status during the seventh and eighth centuries, establishing as ultimate values withdrawal from the world, celibacy, chastity and poverty. Gregorian reform kept lay people in a subordinate position, but gave them a newfound dignity. They were fully-fledged Christians with growing duties and responsibilities and a role to fulfil as partners in dialogue with the clerics. Of utmost significance for Western civilisation was that Europe escaped theocracy and allowed secularism to coexist with religious life. A series of essentially European ecumenical councils took place, contact having been lost with the Eastern churches, and they culminated in the fourth Great Lateran Council (1215). Held in Rome, the seat of the Papacy which had assumed total authority in the West, the Fourth Lateran Council turned the daily and spiritual life of lay people upside down. The Fathers of the Council instigated the practice of annual confession for all Christians over fourteen years of age and promoted marriage by requiring mutual consent and the publication of banns. As a consequence, marriage became a truly Christian institution, an ideal state, whereas previously it had been devalued in deals done between assorted groups. The Fathers also condemned heresy, usury and the Jews. The Council was a key moment in history when the Church lent its support to the great flowering of Christianity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but it also encouraged repression in an attempt to safeguard the ideals of their reforms (the condemnation of heretics, of Jews, homosexuals and lepers). It paved the way for the Inquisition.

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One cannot overemphasise the revolutionary consequences of compulsory heard confession, made in secret by the individual to the priest. It marked a break with those rare, open, and necessarily showy, confessions which were exclusively concerned with things done in the public domain. Now, it was a question of looking inward, of examining one’s conscience.An inner world was opened up which was to become the preserve of psychology and psychoanalysis. On one occasion I met Michel Foucault in the library of the Dominicans of Saulchoir in Paris. We had an animated discussion about the Fourth Lateran Council and I ventured the following observation: ‘Psychoanalysis turned confession into a horizontal activity, with the confessional box being replaced by the couch.’ My formulation was inaccurate, I have to admit, as the confessional box only appeared during the sixteenth century. Until then, one made one’s confession seated next to the priest in a quiet corner, which is exactly what one sees today at large public church gatherings such as pilgrimages, World Youth Days, etc. I would maintain, however, that there is a vertical dimension to the act of confession. It links above and below, the here and the hereafter, and is concerned less with actions than with intentions leading to actions.The consequences of this were enormous. The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as we define it, is then simply the third . . . You are right. I consider the ‘great’ Renaissance to be a medieval one, as I do the Protestant Reformation. The main issue is when this Renaissance turned into something else and the Middle Ages effectively came to an end.As I was saying, one must not look for a single moment or a significant date, but for a series of moments. I have already made clear that the Middle Ages did not end at one specific time. I should like to return briefly to the great medieval Renaissance of the sixteenth century. Politically, one might think that the Middle Ages ended during the Wars of Religion. And the well-known principle: Cujus regio, ejus religio (one locality, one religion), certainly confirms a medieval view of things: a locality, a lord, a set of customs.At a time when Rome seemed distant, whatever it liked to think, the ruler and the bishops established a certain number of practices. I would even say that the division of Christianity into two camps (the Roman Catholics and the Reformed) was an affront

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to medieval people but did not surprise them.They were already used to there being two or three popes at the same time, kingdoms excommunicated and wars against the Pope,etc.So,from this perspective,there was no clear break, even if we accept there was a definite split. But the word religion now appeared, which was absolutely foreign to the Middle Ages when religion embraced everything. Its meaning was restricted to religious orders. ‘Entering upon a religious life’ meant taking monastic vows. The great American economist Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) has shown, for example, that, until modern times, the economy of primitive societies did not exist independently but was ‘an integral part of what we refer to as religion’ (see Chapter 3, p. 49). The current meaning of the word goes back to the sixteenth century and its emergence as a concept marks a real break, as it enabled a person ultimately to think of himself outside the framework of religion, which if not seen as a relative state was at least distanced. He could choose. The Middle Ages as a way of ‘looking at the world’ persisted in both camps. It only broke down with the growth of a scientific outlook which developed from the time of Copernicus (1473–1543) to that of Newton (1642–1727). As far as technology and social life were concerned, the Middle Ages lasted until the eighteenth century. It gradually gave way to the Industrial Revolution, with the more marked separation of the rural economy. The emergence of the idea of the market and an awareness of specifically economic concerns heralded a decisive change. Until then, questions relating to the economy were of a moral nature: what did people think about wealth and poverty? In the eighteenth century the economy achieved its autonomy and sought to become an instrument of cause and effect. There remains, finally, the problem of Italy. Since Burckhardt, as we have seen, the Renaissance was synonymous with Italy.That, I do not accept.A level of excellence was indeed achieved in Italy at every stage in the Middle Ages. But Italy was markedly and constantly different from this civilisation, a notable exception to it in many respects. As examples of its achievements in the Middle Ages one might mention its successful urban development, the dynamism associated with religion, and the flowering of geniuses such as Dante (1265–1321) and Giotto (c. 1266–1337). What marked it off from others in the Middle Ages was the absence of a monarchy, of truly Gothic art, and above all the fragmentation of its towns and the strange nature of its internal wars. There is something anachronistic about

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studying Italy as a single medieval entity. It is an abstract idea created after the event.There were, in fact, several Italys. The Italian Renaissance raises similar issues. It was atypical during the fifteenth century, as the example of Machiavelli (1469–1527) shows. In many respects this Florentine was a medieval figure, more so perhaps than other Italians of his day. In other ways he leaped ahead of his times, involving himself in political ideas about the ‘prince’ and absolutism as they came to be discussed in the seventeenth century. Having attributed to Italy a central role in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it would be absurd to cut her out. I simply want us to remember that making Italy the model which the rest of Europe must fit in with presents certain difficulties. It is difficult to determine the end of the Middle Ages.But when did they begin? So far, we have decided upon 476, Romulus Augustulus and Odoacer . . . Fortunately, we have abandoned the idea that Greco-Roman Antiquity came to an abrupt end. We talk instead of late Antiquity. With the Empire still in existence, this was a major period which, of course, led to the Middle Ages in the Western World but also to the Eastern Byzantine and Islamic civilisations, which ought no longer perhaps to be characterised as medieval.As soon as we turn our attention away from the West, chronology (the sixth to fifteenth centuries) is inadequate when discussing the Middle Ages. It is not meaningful to apply the epithet medieval to Arabia, India and Japan.What periods are we referring to when we speak of the Middle Ages in Islam, India and Japan? It is an abusive extension of a Western perspective. And with regard to the American continent, who would study the Aztecs in terms of the Middle Ages? But the Western division into periods which has given us our Middle Ages has until now been generally accepted. Until late Antiquity came to an end, there was a single culture in the Mediterranean region. Subsequently, other geopolitical entities established themselves, without obliterating what pre-existed them. Some were linked to the continent of Europe and so to the Middle Ages, which were in no way universal. Others were linked to Arabia and North Africa and so to the Moslem conquests. Others still were bound up with central Asia and so were exposed to Turkish and Mongol culture and to the non-Arab Moslem world; and also to the Byzantine world and ultimately to Russia.

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One can forget about Romulus Augustulus so far as Europe is concerned. He was of no consequence.We should not be seduced either by the equally ideological notion of the ‘Great Invasions’. Augustus and Tiberius had already repelled the ‘invaders’, who undoubtedly belonged to the world of Antiquity. Ancient Greece had fought the ‘barbarians’, a term it invented so successfully. Charlemagne had waged war against the ‘invaders’ from the North and the South but he was clearly part of medieval culture. For me, change was bound up with the spread of Christianity which developed little by little from within. Initially, the Empire was converted to Christianity and then converted the invaders, even though it was itself to disappear in the new structure which emerged. For the Middle and Near East, change occurred through the spread of Islam, a progressive force which came from outside, from Arabia. The Western Middle Ages did not develop according to a coherent plan. It resulted from a process of acculturation in which GrecoRoman as well as ‘barbarian’ customs gradually intermingled. It was also born out of its confrontation with Islam. In the beginning, there was no specific reason why the Western Empire – which included North Africa – should become ‘European’. From the Moorish conquest of Spain (eighth century) to the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans (fourteenth century), the West did not see itself as a geopolitical entity. It only took shape by acknowledging it existed in opposition to a world it perceived as hostile. The timespan you have chosen is very long.The Middle Ages, you say, lasted more than a thousand years.Within this timespan, however, there are shorter periods: two or three hundred years between one Renaissance and the next.The closer one gets to the present day, the shorter the periods seem to become: from the Revolution (1789) to the end of the Empire (1815), from the Restoration to the Revolution of 1848, or, for some, to the fall of the Second Empire (1870) and so on.What is more, we are only talking about France.The more recent the past, the smaller the periods become . . . That, indeed, is the paradox. We multiply the number of periods for the most recent past as a way of trying to come to terms with it, so that we can offer an interpretation, and in so doing we move towards a situation where we fall back on the equivocal notion of the ‘generation’.The war generation (meaning the Second World War), the baby boom generation, the generation of 1968 . . . These periods of approximately twenty to twenty-five years are

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a way of coming to terms with what we refer to as the ‘acceleration of history’. As a tool, it has certain merits. It establishes points of reference. But the underlying problem remains: when does a ‘generation’ begin? The people of my generation were born in 1924.A new generation began when their children were born in the 1950s, let us say. But for men and women born in 1934, the picture is entirely different.Another ten years means slight differences in the way people live and try things out. What about those born in 1920,1917 or 1913;and again in 1944,1950 or 1958? The two great wars can, of course, be used as points of reference. Those who rely on the concept of the generation, knowing how slippery it is, try to tie it in with major events, which may of course vary from country to country. It means nothing to the rest of Europe to talk about the ‘Mitterand generation’ (1981). At best, one can talk of a First World War and a Second World War generation or the generation of 1968 because these were significant moments for the West as a whole.Americans, on the other hand, might propose 1917, when they first became involved on the Old Continent, or suggest that the great crisis of 1929 was a turning point. Germans could point to 1933, the terrible year in which Hitler came to power . . . Actually, the concept of the generation was created in order to highlight the events of 1968, and it was those involved at the time who did so. From a demographic point of view, the ‘generation of ’68’ involved one age group taking over from another and represented a crisis that affected the whole of the Western World, from the United States to the Eastern Bloc. Involvement in ’68 also echoed what had happened in ’48, an idea forged after the upheavals of 1848, which again affected the whole of Europe. Like his predecessor, the activist of ’68 is a former rebel who has become middle-class (or gone back to his middle-class roots) and joined the ruling elite, apart from a few hardcore individuals who have in some cases sadly gone astray. Is that enough to define a period? It is adequate as a definition of 1968 itself. I would argue that the term ‘generation’ could be applied in this case, and perhaps this case only. A different question arises from the idea of the generation: that of the conflict between parents and children, which is not the same thing as a conflict between the young and the old. This, in my view, has been more important in the way history has evolved. It enables one to define much larger periods, such as that, for example, from

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1848–1968, which ultimately makes sense in relation to the transmission of values and of education, but not necessarily in the political sphere. I come back to my previous point: different areas of human activity cannot always be defined in terms of the same periods. Can one talk about the conflict between generations in the Middle Ages? Yes, there were conflicts between parents and children, but only in private.The medieval mind had no conception of a generation. It was not until the Fronde that conflicts arose apparently between generations, when ‘barricades’ were seen and the word itself was first used in the sense which it retained until May 1968.The first barricades were put up in 1648. Should we think of those involved as ‘Revolutionaries of 1848’ before their time? In any case, nothing like it was seen in the Middle Ages, except to some degree in the Pastoureau movement, though that was a somewhat marginal affair. It was a form of crusade which on three occasions mobilised shepherds and poor young men, some of whom were indeed very young. The first wave of activity occurred in 1212, a second in 1251, whilst Saint Louis was a prisoner in the East, and a third in 1320. The Pastoureaux wanted to take over from the knights who had been unable to liberate the Holy Land. They set out and very quickly resorted to violence, attacking Jews they came across as well as rich clergy.The Jews were rebuked for not having converted, as wholesale conversion would have heralded the Last Days preceding the Second Coming.The ‘perverted’ clergy were charged with sullying the Church, the purification of which would likewise bring about the Second Coming. Initially tolerated, the Pastoureaux were quickly challenged and dispersed. Some did join the royal armies, but the movement broke up. It cannot be interpreted as a conflict between generations or as a social conflict (the poor against the rich), because it was clearly a religious movement, linked to Messianic expectations. In fact we have no documents relating to young people in the Middle Ages. In a largely illiterate, peasant society, few traces of them remain. It is significant that Georges Duby could only study one group, albeit an important one, the knights. Because of demographic growth, these young nobles could obtain neither lands nor wives, and not even possible benefices from the Church.There were not enough positions for everyone, and so they were sent off to the Crusades. Thus the Papacy exploited for its own ends those who were the

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victims of economic and demographic expansion in the tenth and eleventh centuries.This is a good example of the way in which material and spiritual influences came together.The Crusaders (and the Papacy) truly believed in the Crusades. But material factors were no less important. One could, in all good faith, achieve salvation and grow rich whilst pursuing an ideal and do so within the eschatological perspective of the End of Time. But we have moved away from any long-lasting historiographical perspective . . .

3 MERCHANTS, BANKERS AND INTELLECTUALS 1 The Middle Ages are like a continent.When I set out on my journey at the beginning of the 1950s, they were by no means virgin territory. Several generations of historians had produced vast amounts of work. I had no plan, no programme when I started other than the topic of my thesis which was to be about medieval universities.The thesis itself was never completed, but bits of it appeared in things I wrote, especially my book about ‘intellectuals’ in the Middle Ages. Chance, my brief career as a teacher (one year in the lycée in Amiens, 1950–1, five years in the Faculty of Letters at Lille University, 1954–9), and changes in French publishing led me to subjects I would not have chosen on my own initiative,in particular that of merchants and bankers to which I devoted my first book in 1956. The years 1950–60 were of particular significance. Until then, historians wrote above all for their fellow historians, with one or two exceptions, and their readers were in institutions of learning.The main aim of their work was the furtherance of scholarship on very specific points and the advancement of knowledge.What they produced was not readily accessible to the public at large, but this was not their concern.The theses, articles and learned papers they wrote are absolutely indispensable and form the basis and life-blood of further research.They remain the touchstone for us to verify or invalidate the more general works written for a non-specialist readership. A new genre began to develop between 1950 and 1960 in several European countries and especially in France. Editors, themselves often historians, commissioned works which were not aimed at a university audience.Whilst they accepted proposals we put to them, they became above all the initiators, which was something new. Our world was traditionally governed by the subjects chosen for theses and for major series of lectures based on the syllabus of the agrégation. But editors then began to make unexpected suggestions which

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overturned the usual order of things, requiring us to look at issues in a different light. It was an important moment in cultural history.These editors of series, the new types of books and the different approaches, demanded on our part a different kind of writing and the opening up of hitherto unexplored areas. Pierre Nora is a good example of the editor-historian. He created the ‘Archives’ collection for Julliard (1964), directed the ‘History Library’ for Gallimard from 1970 and, in particular, masterminded the vast undertaking Lieux de Mémoire (1984–93). He wisely and appropriately distanced himself somewhat from so-called ‘new history’.This provocative and eye-catching label was used to describe several ways of approaching history and suggested a fundamental renewal of the subject (from material culture to mentalities, from serial history to historical anthropology). Pierre Nora played an active part in this process of renewal. The History Library covers a wide spectrum. It includes the revival of classic works, such as Marc Bloch’s Les Rois thaumaturges (1924), which had been undervalued because the historical approach was too advanced for its time, as well as recent research. Michel de Certeau, Georges Duby, François Furet, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and many others are also represented. Together with Pierre Nora, I helped produce three collective volumes in this series, Faire de l’histoire, which outlined new problems, new approaches and new subjects. I published in the same series several of my own books which I particularly valued: Pour un autre Moyen Age (1977), La Naissance du Purgatoire (1981), L’Imaginaire médiéval (1985) and Saint Louis (1996). As a young historian in the 1950s, I had foreseen none of this. Certain things roused my curiosity and I turned them over in my mind, but I did not really know where I was going. Like a good student, I had enrolled to do a thesis at the Sorbonne and ‘registered’ my subject, as one did. As I have said, I had in mind a thesis on medieval universities as a way of extending what I had done for my higher diploma (today’s master’s dissertation). I had already worked on this and written it up in Prague, where I had a scholarship. This came about by chance. Having entered the Ecole Normale in the summer of 1945, I went on a trip with my fellow students to the zone occupied by the French army in Germany (near Lake Constance) and then to Austria (the Tyrol) at the instigation of the Second Armoured Division. At Innsbruck, a French lieutenant who had been to the Ecole Normale asked me to deliver a parcel to his brother who worked at the Directorate of Cultural Relations on the

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Quai d’Orsay. He then encouraged me to think about a scholarship in Czechoslovakia, where the French were trying to break down the illwill generated by their stance over Munich. I took a Czech language course at what was then the School of Living Eastern Languages (known today as INALCO). After the exceptional year in Prague, I was unable to pursue my research on medieval Bohemia because of the descent of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. But I did complete my study of The Foundation of the Charles University of Prague (1347–1348) and developed a great love of Slavic countries through my interest in their ‘European’ culture.Although this path was now blocked, a new opportunity opened up ten years later in Poland, again by chance. Central Europe is close to my heart as part of the unified Europe for which I continue to strive. As well as Czechoslovakia, which has become the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, which we must not forget, Hungary began to attract my interest in the 1970s and still does. I am not particularly interested in honours, and I did not wish to become a member of the Institute,1 but I am proud and happy that certain foreign colleagues have awarded me an honorary doctorate. I have honorary doctorates from the universities of Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and Cluj. It is a great joy to me. The subject which I registered in the 1950s at the Sorbonne was, in fact, somewhat different. During my stay at the Ecole française in Rome in 1952–3, which I will come back to, the chaplain of the school, the Abbé Brien, who befriended me, pointed me towards one specific type of source material, thirteenth-century manuals for confessors, where I discovered an area of research which appealed to me even more. I wanted to study ‘attitudes to work’. I had observed that the constitution of universities in the thirteenth century partly grew out of a new conception of the ‘teacher’.The university teacher differed from the monastic one who was traditionally seen as a model. I had noticed too that in the thirteenth century work had become the focus of concern and conflict.This was in the context of urban expansion; and towns were an important dimension of the cultural and social mix in which I was interested. The thirteenth century had to come to terms with begging on the one hand and ‘leisure’ (otium) of the monastic or aristocratic-military kind, on the other. 1

Institut de France, a learned body incorporating the various Academies of the arts, sciences, etc.

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I did not complete my thesis – and will say why later on – but I remained keenly aware of the technological, social and intellectual problems which surround work. Work is still an issue which divides medieval civilisation and the contemporary world, and the evolution of work is one of the principal factors governing change in our current society. I should perhaps have done so already, but I must now mention one teacher who played an important role in my professional life and career, the medievalist Charles-Edmond Perrin who was a professor at the Sorbonne. I was a student and disciple of his. Perrin was a historian of the old school, but his knowledge, his awareness, his merited prestige and his humanity raised him above his rather sad colleagues. He trained me to do things with scientific rigour but did not challenge my own particular interests, though he was often disconcerted by them. He occupies a special place in that small group of teachers I wish to salute and to thank. He accepted the subject I chose and the outline plan of its development. My career took me first to the lycée in Amiens (1950–1). I then enjoyed a period of research at Lincoln College, Oxford where I discovered that the medieval university was not dead (1951–2), and at the Ecole française in Rome (1952–3). In 1954, I became an assistant lecturer in the Faculty of Letters in Lille.There I met a great figure with whom I established a close friendship, Michel Mollat du Jourdain. He was an outstanding medievalist but was equally interested in the history of the navy and was an innovator in this field. His work as a historian did not prevent him, however, from becoming actively and wholeheartedly involved in causes which to him were extensions of his Christian convictions, especially the ATD-Quart Monde which concerned itself with the most deprived people of the world; and he did this in an unassuming manner. I wish to pay tribute to him for this work as well, because he was not merely a historian preoccupied with knowledge and erudition. He was one of several committed Christians, both laymen and priests, who helped me, an agnostic, with my work, suggesting or opening up avenues of research without ever seeking to influence me or impose their point of view or their own inner experience. Michel Mollat du Jourdain let me take over his seminar on the salt trade in the Middle Ages, which as a subject seems rather technical but was, in fact, fascinating. Salt at this time was the only means of preserving foodstuffs.To study salt was therefore a way of studying one of

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the first and most important commodities at the beginning of the Middle Ages, at a time when commerce hardly existed. Until the eleventh and twelfth centuries, trade was rather restricted, except for this one vital preservative. It happened also to be a necessary part of the human diet and was equally important in the raising of stock and as a soil conditioner. As a result, I was asked to produce a little book for the famous ‘Que sais-je?’ series (published by the Presses Universitaires de France) which was then expanding. It was supposed to be about trade in the Middle Ages but, having always preferred human rather than abstract topics, I changed the subject to Marchands et Banquiers du Moyen Age (1956). I was thirty-two years old. THE INVENTION

OF THE

ECONOMY

It is no surprise that trade involved merchants, but why do you put such emphasis on bankers? Because a new social category appeared in the Middle Ages: the merchant-banker. The two worlds were intertwined. Until the eleventh century, there was little in the way of trade. Certain things changed hands through monks and especially through two groups of ‘foreigners’, Jews and Syrians, which was the generic name for those who came from the Near East.Very few traders were specialists.The same was true in Antiquity where in Rome, for example, trade was simply one of the functions of the equestrian class, the knights. But in the twelfth century, merchants appeared on the scene who were involved in another activity: banking. As he went from place to place, the merchant needed to change money; to have it checked.The business of exchange, which takes its name from the counters he would set up (banco in Italian), enabled merchants to exploit the differences between currencies. As trade grew, they gave up carrying coin thanks to the invention of bills of exchange.These made it possible for one merchant to lend money to another, by means of a written document, and the sum would be repaid at a later date elsewhere. It was a form of credit loan which meant that the merchant dealt in another currency in a different place. Credit and exchange overlapped and the two activities produced interest. A market even developed in bills of exchange which were bought, sold and swapped. The historian can trace the rapid development in the thirteenth and

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fourteenth centuries of a new order.The merchant became an expert in the business of accounting and made use of the practical manuals of commerce produced for him. He was a practical man of intellect on a par with the university academic. The merchant banker did, however, face a moral dilemma. The medieval Church, under the influence of monastic asceticism and aware of the condemnation of usury in the Bible, had learnt to despise money. And here were merchants who not only made money a part of the social fabric but took a personal and professional interest in it. Merchants were a new social group who, moreover, gained their wealth by taking risks and with only a slender chance of success. As good Christians, they sought to justify the money they made. They compensated for their involvement in the ‘impure’ world of money with a cultural dynamism that placed them on an equal footing with the only two prestigious social groups which existed until the eleventh century: the nobles and bishops who were patrons and commissioned what we refer to as works of ‘art’.The word did not exist in the Middle Ages, and the term art in its modern sense first appeared in the nineteenth century. Others before me have, of course, studied the emergence of merchant-bankers. But, apart from a small group of historians – amongst whom I would like to mention the Frenchman Yves Renouard and the Italian Armando Sapori, both of whom have given me help – few were interested in their cultural role which had an impact on religion as well as on ideas, the arts, etc.And the merchants themselves tried to incorporate their activities within the framework of a Christian life. They went to mass, had masses said and kept the sacraments, so much so that the Church accepted their existence without any apparent hostility.It did not,however,give them the guidelines they required.There was the traditional suspicion of money, but little else had been elaborated regarding what they did. Though it went on condemning ‘Mammon’ – the false god of money – but nothing more, the Church found itself awkwardly placed as it allowed merchants to pursue their activities without knowing where they fitted in. The problem of usury finally became something to think about. What was legitimate profit? What was usury? How did you distinguish the one from the other? To what extent was speculation acceptable? At what point did it become sinful? These questions raised issues concerning the measurement of time. Merchants sold time, but time belonged only to God.

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These were questions of great importance in medieval intellectual life.The manuals of confessors echoed precisely the problems of conscience faced by merchants and the confusion of the men of the Church. I went on to explore other aspects in a second book La Bourse et la Vie (1986), thirty years after Marchands et Banquiers. I must jump ahead a little. At the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, where I taught from 1962, I led a small research group and was able to link this research with my seminar teaching. Once again, I was dealing with towns, where great economic, social, cultural and religious changes took place. I was particularly interested in a new type of religious person, the mendicant. They did not depend on a religious order or on the land for their livelihood, but on alms, freely given.They translated their calling from the isolated, rural community of the monastery to the heart of society where they became active. The two principal mendicant orders, the Dominicans, officially known as Friars Preachers, and the Franciscans, Friars Minor suggesting humility, enjoyed spectacular growth at the beginning of the thirteenth century.The number of religious houses increased in relation to the demographic and economic development of towns. I produced a map of these towns, ranking them according to the number of monasteries they had, and showing how they reflected the new medieval society. I was engaged in research which fascinated me, where history and geography came together, the places and networks in which history was being made. I opened up a second area of research which developed out of the first.The mendicant friars were preachers who espoused poverty and the spoken word represented one of their principal forms of direct action, though they also sometimes wrote books. Jean-Claude Schmitt and I have referred to a ‘new form of speech’ in the thirteenth century. We have collected together the texts of numerous sermons, which had either been given or drafted in outline and which served as models. To make their preaching livelier and more appealing, their sermons were filled with anecdotes drawn from daily life. What my research focused on was the everyday life of men and women in the Middle Ages, including the humblest, which was depicted in stories known as exempla in medieval times. In our seminars and collective research on exempla, I came across a number of mendicant friars who had dealings with usurers! Outstanding research in this field is still being done by Jacques Berlioz and Marianne Polo de Beaulieu.

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So I went back to the question of usury in the Middle Ages, dealing in concrete terms with the relationship between economics and religion.I made use of the concepts developed by that great economist Karl Polanyi in his book Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies (1968). I looked at the way in which people in the Middle Ages understood an activity to which they could not yet apply the term economic. This rather learned Greek word was borrowed from Aristotle during the thirteenth century and referred only to the domestic economy, the efficient management of one’s estate. Several councils severely condemned usury. Kings like Philip Augustus (1211) and Saint Louis (1254) hounded usurers, who were told to expect terrible suffering in Hell. One would imagine therefore that the Church would have been violently opposed to merchants. It is true. Money was still regarded with suspicion. It still is today. François Mitterand’s comment about those who made profits on the Stock Exchange, who ‘grew rich in their sleep’, could have come from a sermon in the Middle Ages. Usury was repeatedly condemned and violence was used against both Jewish and Christian usurers. Yet one cannot say there was a confrontation between the Church and the merchants.The cliché that the Church was against economic progress was one of those old Enlightenment attitudes, taken up again in the nineteenth century. The truth is quite different. From the eleventh and twelfth centuries, money acquired a legitimacy. People were aware of the danger it represented, that it was an obstacle on the road to salvation, but within the context of truly moral ‘economic’ activity it was lawful. Michel Albert recently drew a distinction between two kinds of capitalism.According to him,American capitalism accepted the intrinsic value of money, whereas Rhenish capitalism retained a more moral framework. Rhenish capitalism which extends from Switzerland to the Low Countries, taking in Germany and the eastern part of France, gives us a fairly precise idea of the balance which merchants and theologians sought to establish in the Middle Ages. How did money become legitimised? There was visible wealth. It was greater and more widespread and differed from the traditional wealth of the powerful.Without resorting to a pseudo-Marxist interpretation, according to which material change causes social change, there is a certain weight of evidence that trade

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developed and fostered further development. Everyone, including the clerics, benefited from this success in one way or another, and not just materially. Success itself was a form of legitimacy and it went hand in hand with important theoretical work. The Church’s criticism of usury, which was directed equally at interest, was easily sustained so long as usury was in the main carried out exclusively by Jews; Christians having off-loaded this ‘sinful’ but indispensable activity onto them.Trade did, however, grow throughout the twelfth century.Wealth circulated. Money was exchanged much more frequently and the nature of exchange altered. Usury was less and less the sole prerogative of Jews. People in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries began to see for themselves that interest did indeed differ from usury. Jews increasingly specialised in loans for consumer purposes, which were made at a very local level, between neighbours.Those who fell into debt were all the more uncomfortable about borrowing money from a neighbour because it was for their immediate needs: food, clothing, their material well-being, the means to survive. Economically, usury was not of major significance. It was conspicuous, despised, but marginal. The same could not be said of Christian merchants who handled large sums of money.Clerics therefore tried to legitimise this new kind of usurer, who gradually ceased being referred to as usurers and became what we call ‘merchant-bankers’. Firstly, it was recognised that they did a job.They did not grow rich ‘in their sleep’, they worked! As Saint Paul said: ‘Now to him that worketh (merces in the Vulgate), is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt’ (Romans 4: 4). Hence the saying:‘The labourer is worthy of his hire’. It was work which gave legitimacy, and merchants were given the credit, if I may use that expression. What they did was useful and this was also in their favour. They imported essential goods which were not produced in Christian countries. Once trade began to grow, people in the Middle Ages realised it was ‘international’, which really meant there were still links between the West and the East. Merchants found themselves legitimised by the Church on these two grounds,but they added a third by their own actions.They quickly gained prestige through their patronage of the arts and of culture, two areas of activity closely identified with Christian life. Patronage allowed merchants to ‘redeem’ their sins. It also enabled them to express their taste and their aspirations in the spiritual realm and in the

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world of the imagination. It is quite significant that, in executing the commissions they were given, those who collaborated with the merchant-bankers gradually became artists, even though up until then no distinction was drawn between artists and those engaged in other ‘arts’, that is to say professional manual work. Giotto (c. 1266–1337) was a striking example. His ‘patrons’, who were Florentine merchants, considered him an artist in the modern sense of the word.They made use of him. He served them. Chiara Frugoni has brilliantly demonstrated in a study of the iconography of Saint Francis how Giotto, under the influence of his patrons, toned down the fascinating yet ambiguous image of the saint, who despised money but was celebrated by businessmen. ANOTHER SPACE: THOUGHT You have used the word ‘intellectual’ several times. It features in the title of your second book Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age, which appeared in 1957. It is perhaps surprising, as the idea of the ‘intellectual’, in the sense in which you use it, arose towards the middle of the nineteenth century and only became widespread at the time of the Dreyfus affair. The word – which I freely admit I have shifted back in time – appeared to me to be the right one the more I worked on the merchant-bankers. A new group also began to appear which sought to respond to the preoccupations of the new urban society. To refer to them as ‘scholars’ is inadequate.The term covers several different sorts of learned people, both priests and non-priests, and most of them teachers.To call them ‘academics’ or ‘theologians’ would be too restrictive. Knowing Prague as I did and being interested in the so-called Eastern bloc countries, I was aware of the specific role played there by that nebulous body referred to as the intelligentsia, which is much larger and more diversified than its French counterpart and which, moreover, is part of a tradition going back to the nineteenth century and which has remained unbroken despite violent political events.These European ‘intellectuals’ seemed to me to correspond to the new type of person we see in medieval times. Dante (1265–1321), for example, was neither a priest nor an academic, yet he expressed better than the scholars the new Christian vision of the world. He was a great intellectual and his influence would be considerable. I must repeat how much I owe to another remarkable man, Father

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André Brien, for the direction which my research took. He was the former chaplain at the Ecole Normale and later became Rector of the Catholic Institute in Paris. I met up with him again in Rome where he was doing theological research.Whilst we were walking in the ruins of Cicero’s villa atTivoli,I talked to him about the importance which merchant-bankers attributed to their moral values and he suggested I broadened my study to include medieval Christianity’s attitude to various professions. In this connection, he drew my attention to the manuals for confessors which were produced in great numbers from the thirteenth century and were of very considerable interest. I embarked on a study of different forms of work, commercial as well as intellectual. When it introduced compulsory annual confession, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) created a great need. Priests had no experience of personal confession extended to the whole of their flock.They requested manuals for their own guidance and for the guidance of the faithful.What one finds in them is a choice of questions, answers and advice. I have looked at a number in Siena, Florence and Padua which contain dozens of questions corresponding to the particular ‘status’ of a person, in other words their trade or profession. I found in them a lot of detailed information about the moral world of different professions, as the compilers of these manuals specified what confessors should ask their interlocutors depending on whether they were peasants, cobblers, weavers, dyers, etc. Early on, merchants were mentioned very little, which proves they were not considered workers or providers of work. But as the years passed, their association with work began to be recognised and became an issue of prime importance. These confessional guides enabled me to study more deeply the world of the merchant-bankers.At the same time, I discovered another group of people, including in particular the writers of the manuals, who seemed to me to be what one might call intellectuals.These men (the women, even the great Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, worked only within a monastic frame of reference) used the ideas they developed to play an active role in society.When one talks of scholasticism and the knowledge it spread, one thinks of rarefied philosophy or serious theology. One forgets it was spread abroad through many different channels. So, when Michel Chodkiewicz, who later became managing director of the publishing house Seuil, asked me to write something for a new series, I suggested a book which mirrored Marchands et banquiers, namely Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age. In this way, I was able to extend

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the research I had begun on universities for the thesis which I did not complete. Like the merchants, these intellectuals, to start with, had no legitimacy. They represented something new at a time when, as I have said, newness was suspect. Like the merchants, they achieved legitimacy through work, intellectual work in their case. The issue arose as towns gradually developed. Until then, it was essentially monasteries, as well as bishoprics and a few important courts, which maintained centres dedicated to writing and study, the scriptoria. Towns now began to develop both their own markets and their own schools, where they taught grammar, the drawing up of deeds and contracts, and law.The teachers in these urban schools were scholars, but almost always non-priests, and so they were not immediately recognised. At the beginning of the twelfth century, Saint Bernard reproached bankers not only for selling time, which belonged to God alone. He was equally suspicious of teachers who sold knowledge for money, since students had to pay for their education. In his view, knowledge should have been free, as it too belonged to God.The same points which had been used to justify banking were put forward as a counter-argument in this case. These new professionals who specialised in knowledge provided a service and deserved financial reward. In addition, they were useful like merchants and had their place as paid workers. Things changed gradually, of course, but progress was rapid between 1130 and 1230. Teaching until the twelfth century was linked to monasteries and cathedrals and was based on commentary and exegesis of the Bible. Even if he was a layman, the teacher used the methods of the preacher, who imparted to the townspeople at large information which was originally meant for students. Before universities were established – and that means from the time of the scriptoria introduced by Charlemagne – knowledge was rooted in original exegesis. Whereas with Muslims commentaries on the Koran were hidebound within a strictly traditional outlook, European exegesis developed critical methods in which we already see scientific principles at work. Reasoning and discussion were at the heart of this new intellectual life.The scholastic method was based on an enquiry (quaestio) involving the teacher and the student. This disputation (disputatio) resulted

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in a conclusion, the decision (determinatio) of the master. A university curriculum was established going from the bachelor’s degree to the licence (licencia docendi, an authorisation to teach).The doctorate was the ultimate achievement.Things have scarcely changed since . . . There is a ‘jump’ from the scriptoria of the Middle Ages to the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When he wrote his Sentences, the theologian Pierre Lombard (c. 1100–60), who taught at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame in Paris, proposed a structured manual of extracts and précis of the Bible. He did not restrict himself to compilations and repetitions of previous commentaries. He was interested in the internal logic and content of texts. His Sentences provided the basis of university teaching and were obligatory for every would-be theologian until the fifteenth century. We can detect a method in them which is the same as that which underpins thirteenth-century Summa, the most famous of which are those of Thomas Aquinas, who also taught at the University of Paris. The difference lies in the object studied. Pierre Lombard applied himself to the Bible. He transformed the Scriptures into an organised system of quotations expressing truths. The great scholastics of the thirteenth century went further and orchestrated the whole of knowledge (which, as there was no other, was Christian, even if it did include ‘pagan’, ancient, Jewish and Arabic knowledge) within one rationally organised structure which resembled theology. It was a Summa, a word which reveals clearly their encyclopaedic ambitions. (The thirteenth century was also a century of encyclopaedias.) Thomas Aquinas compiled the most remarkable of these Summa in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. He incorporated, in a Christianised form, the most rational philosophy of Antiquity, that of Aristotle, who for a long time was viewed with suspicion in universities. As a consequence, he flirted with the theories of Aristotle’s Arabic commentator, the Andalusian Averroes (1126–98), who elaborated the theory of the ‘double truth’, according to which the same phenomena fell within the scope both of earthly human truth and of divine truth, each of which held true though they were not of the same order.Thomas Aquinas certainly did not go that far and rejected Averroes. However, he quoted and respected him. Even the word ‘scholastic’, from the Latin word scola, a school, directs one’s attention back to the schools and to the idea that knowledge was taught. It also implied a broader, universal method of teaching which was appropriate for a new institution called a ‘university’: a

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‘body’ of teachers, a corporation, a ‘total entity’ dedicated to knowledge. Father Marie-Dominique Chenu summarised these changes in two books which were published in 1957.The first introduced La Théologie au XIIe siècle; the second went further: La Théologie comme science au XIIIe siècle.2 The crucial words are ‘as science’.The word ‘theology’, I might add, is a twelfth-century invention, the work of Abelard, a great teacher of the pre-university era. This new development could only have occurred in the town where the mendicant order of Dominican Preachers lived, which was founded in 1215. The older network of monasteries and Episcopal schools was not adapted to this task. FRANCIS

OF

ASSISI. MENDICANTS

IN

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Should one talk of revolution in the thirteenth century? No. Firstly, as I have said, because the notion of revolution was absolutely alien to the medieval mind which preferred the idea of renaissance, and above all because the origins of renaissance go back a long way, the thirteenth century did not represent a break with what had gone before. I have already cited the case of Pierre Lombard. I could mention too the remarkable figure of Peter the Chanter (he died in 1197), who also taught for a long time at Notre-Dame in Paris. John Baldwin has pointed out that he gathered around him a ‘circle’, very like our own intellectual circles, which was neither a court nor a salon but an informal focus of study and debate. Before him, another Parisian, Peter Comestor ‘le Mangeur’ (the devourer of books) wrote a scholastic history which turned the Bible into a history book for his students. Peter the Chanter himself said that, at the same time as he studied and taught the Scripture, he took notice of the dynamic town in which he lived and which he preached to. Nothing escaped him. He showed a special interest in the trades and professions: the lawyers, the soldiers, the merchants and even the minstrels. He dealt with practical problems, whether related to war, taxes, commerce and prices. His influence on the drafting of the first manuals for confessors is particularly marked.Through him we can clearly see how a network spread from the student body to the population at large, embracing every 2

I met Father Chenu regularly from 1957 on, at a time when he was fully aware of the intense suspicion of the Vatican. I cannot find the words to express how much I owe this extraordinary Christian intellectual both as a theologian and as a person who honoured me with his friendship.

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milieu.The two main weapons in his armoury were the sermon and the book. For us, one of the main roles of the intellectual is that of critic. Being a critic in the thirteenth century would appear to have been difficult. When, in 1957, I decided to use the word intellectual, I was not just thinking of the intelligentsia in Eastern European countries in the nineteenth century, but of the work done in the 1930s by Antonio Gramsci, who was an intelligent Marxist. He drew a distinction between two kinds of intellectuals: those who were critical and those who were part of the system, serving the powers that be. Apart from one or two heretical trouble-makers, who were few in number and inevitably marginal, intellectuals in the Middle Ages were naturally part of the system.They worked within a group framework and were inspired by the desire to be useful. Here again, we have the twin values of work and usefulness which gave legitimacy to both merchants and intellectuals.Yet the critic did have a place which was acknowledged.That too is something new. In the twelfth century,Abelard had said that the new theologians (he doubtless invented the term) should employ Aristotelian doubt.This was five centuries before Descartes. Many people were disturbed by Thomas Aquinas, for example, despite his prestige. The order of Preachers to which he belonged often challenged his arguments. Stephen Tempier, the sad, vain bishop of Paris, took him to task during his lifetime (1270) and condemned him roundly three years after his death (1277). Of course,Thomas’s obvious faithfulness to the Church together with the mystic ardour of his final years prevented him from being accused of heresy, that most terrible weapon of the Middle Ages which was therefore rarely used, contrary to what people often think. Rather than directly criticising his theology, his adversaries attacked his system of thought, his method, which is proof, if proof were needed, that the medieval intellectual was not simply a cog in a machine. He experienced dissension, created it, but wanted to remain a member of the body of society which for him was one and the same as the body of the Church. With its merchants and intellectuals, the town was then a melting pot of a civilisation. The hugely important figure of Francis of Assisi (Francesco di Bernardone, 1181 or 2 to 1226) bears this out. The son of a cloth

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merchant,he was born at a time when towns became centres of power. His youth was marked by the recurrent conflict between his native town of Assisi and the town of Perugia. In 1198 he was a horseman in the war which they fought and was taken prisoner. In 1205, he again wanted to fight against the supporters of the Empire. He fell ill, and after that broke dramatically with his father and the society to which he belonged. In 1209, together with a few friends he founded a mendicant order which involved moving around and was therefore radically different from a sedentary, monastic order.This was his reaction to the appearance in towns of the ‘new poor’. Coming as he did from a merchant background, the question of money was quite naturally a preoccupation of his.‘It is easier to enter Heaven from a hut than from a palace’, he said, as he settled on a small patch of land beside the simple chapel of Portiuncula. He preferred streets, squares, modest dwellings. When, following strained relations with the Papal Curia, he wrote his Regula Prima in 1221, which they forced him to re-write, Francis made known his wish to live as a ‘minor’ friar, humble and modest. He opened up the Gospels to: all children and infants, the poor and the rich, to kings and princes, to workers and farm labourers, to serfs and masters; to all virgins, to chaste and married women, to lay people, men and women, little children, adolescents, the young and the old, the healthy and the sick, to the humble and the mighty, to all peoples, families, tribes and languages, to all nations and everyone on earth.

In inventing what became the ‘Third Order’, he created a new and flexible form of religious life in towns and for his own times. Like the Dominicans and other mendicant orders, the Third Order welcomed those who sought to share the spiritual life of the Franciscans but did not wish to live in a community or break with their family and profession. Francis popularised a non-clerical, lay form of religious life. It is true that Francis had no economic doctrine, but he was familiar with the workings of the economy.When he broke with his family and fellow cloth merchants, his intention was to apply to the letter Chapter 10 of St Matthew’s Gospel: Freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves . . . And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence. And when you come into an house, salute it.And if the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it.

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Francis rebelled against what some in more recent times have referred to as the ‘horrors of economics’. He did so with a rigour and intelligence which I do not find amongst the opponents of globalisation. He was not content simply to reject things, he thought about them. He chose poverty, but did not question the sincerity, the real faith of the merchants. So far as money was concerned, he adopted the same principle as he did in every other sphere; he imposed his rule only on himself and his brotherhood. It did not extend to society as a whole. He was absolutely true to his vocation. Others were free to heed it and draw their own conclusions. This explains the prestige of the minor friars and their popularity among the mendicant orders.They frequented the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, were in the world without being of it, and waited for change – conversion – to take place from within amongst those who heard them. Francis was reluctant to exercise power, to the extent that he hesitated a great deal about founding his order. His only rule of life was blessed poverty and praise and wonder at Creation. He had no vision of utopia, no millenarian anticipation of a glorious eventide, or of a perfect society.According to Francis, the Franciscans had no vocation to rule.They were the leaven which fostered the development of wellbeing; a constant focus of uneasiness which reminded the rich and the learned of their duty. Two monks show how fruitful these intuitions were. The first, Peter John Olivi (c. 1248–96), was a Franciscan of conviction.Though he was venerated after his death, some of his works were condemned in 1326.As a theorist of absolute poverty, he loathed the corruption of the Church. Nonetheless, he thought about wealth and wondered how the rich might achieve salvation. He thereby opened up a way which numerous other mendicants followed. Dante certainly heeded his teaching in Florence. The second crucial figure belonged in part to the tradition established by Olivi. St Antoninus, a Dominican (1389–1459), was Archbishop and patron of Florence and Florence, one has to remember, was the major economic and artistic centre. Antoninus was also close to the political and financial genius, Cosimo de’Medici, but he was above all preoccupied with charity, prayer, privation and penitence. He was a zealous reformer of the Church in Florence. And in order to understand better those with whom he spoke, he did his utmost to analyse the way the economy worked.Antoninus proposed

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a definition of the notion of value. I myself undertook an analysis of his ideas, which I did not complete, for a Festschrift dedicated to the great Marxist historian Pierre Vilar, who studied the late scholastic movement in Salamanca in the sixteenth century. Let us simplify things by saying that a very important idea emerged for the future of the Western World: a man of means knew he might figure amongst the damned, but by constantly repenting and performing acts of forgiveness he hoped he might be pardoned.Thus the rich man, out of anxiety and through acts of charity, placed his posthumous capital in Purgatory.This great medieval creation was the place where souls in a state of sinfulness were painfully purged as they awaited their entry into Paradise, thereby avoiding Hell. The idea of acceptable wealth therefore became clearer.The code of the ‘just price’ was proposed, in the same way that others were simultaneously discussing the concept of the ‘just war’, in the spirit of Saint Augustine. Can one, as you suggest, talk about the science of economics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and all the more so in the fifteenth century? For the great scholastics of the thirteenth to the fifteenth century the economy was embedded in religion, to use Karl Polanyi’s phrase. Only with the Jesuits in Salamanca at the end of the sixteenth century do you find real economists.These Jesuits, teaching at the University of Salamanca where the principal was Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), introduced genuine economic concepts and arguments into the scholastic tradition established by Thomas Aquinas. Precious metals from America and the use to which they were put in the Casa de Contratación in Seville had modernised the science of economics which was no longer medieval. The economy as a subject in its own right only became established in the eighteenth century with the Physiocrats and the idea of the market. So far as the Middle Ages are concerned, let us leave the rural economy to one side. It did, of course, dominate society. But even though agricultural techniques as well as an increased sense of a good return developed across Europe, it was above all the towns which set the tone from the tenth century, despite the fact that medieval people only became aware of their importance in the eleventh century. It was there that a ‘market’ of some sort was created, although the idea had not been defined in the modern sense of the term. Commerce was the new thing in the Middle Ages, with the sea playing an important part, in Italy to the south and in Germany and the Baltic

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to the north. Contact with the outside world involved a major restructuring of internal networks and came about because of constant technological invention.A breakthrough occurred when the Portuguese and then the Spanish perfected the caravel. Initially, it was a high-class fishing vessel with a shallow draught and could, therefore, risk approaching unknown shores. Engineers developed increasingly bigger craft which were true to the original model. They were not too costly and were unlikely to run aground. Christopher Columbus reached Cuba and Jamaica in caravels, though not without difficulty. There is a paradox here. Olivi and Antoninus both belonged to a mendicant order.They were voracious readers and steeped in knowledge.Yet the ‘poor friar’, as you made clear in your Saint-François d’Assise (1999), rejected learning as well as money. You have to understand Francis’s mistrust of learned doctors. He saw knowledge as a form of property because books were expensive. Becoming learned meant one risked owning things, achieving power or sharing in the exercise of power. Francis was never on good terms with the princes of the Church or the prelates who taught in universities. Having said that, we come back to his attitude to money. Francis thought that knowledge could help one to resist the temptations of luxury. He gave his disciple, Antony of Padua, permission to study at university. And it was not long before Franciscans were some of the most learned and boldest of teachers. One of the numerous ironies associated with Saint Francis is that, after the great basilica of Assisi, a sumptuous basilica was built on the site of the simple church of the Portiuncula, below Assisi, which had been his dwelling, and that the Mendicants who settled there became powerful. According to you, the renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was characterised by Christianity coming closer to people. To simplify things, until the twelfth century God was first and foremost the Father.Then the figure of the Son took precedence; God was incarnate, came down to earth and values were made flesh.The main framework of my ideas concerning the Middle Ages can be seen in my work on merchant-bankers and intellectuals.The appearance of these two new social categories ‘marked’ medieval civilisation. They left a rich legacy in the form of economic, institutional, mental and religious structures.

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The Middle Ages achieved a balance between reason and faith, between the conventions of reason and those of faith.Thus, what we call the West came into being. Today, the balance between faith and reason is still pivotal, even for an agnostic like me.The great minds of the Middle Ages dominate our thought, despite the fact that modern science has produced a real revolution. I feel I was born somewhere between Bologna and Paris, Compostela and Rome, between 1150 and 1250.

4 A CIVILISATION TAKES SHAPE 1 At the beginning of the 1960s, Raymond Bloch, who was by the way an authority on the Etruscans, made me a disconcerting offer. As the editor of a series devoted to major civilisations published by Arthaud, he proposed I write the volume on the Western Medieval World; it was to be a major study with an original collection of illustrations. Such a comprehensive and all-embracing work as he wanted me to produce presupposed a vast knowledge and a great deal of thought.I was thirtysix at the time and the two little books I had written did not really constitute an ‘oeuvre’. I felt I did not have sufficient experience. There were two things in my favour which convinced me I should take the gamble. I had spent several years doing research, without any teaching, thanks to the CNRS and the periods I had spent abroad.This had enabled me to study a considerable number of documents, principally at Oxford (1951–2) and in Rome (1952–3). Furthermore, in my teaching I had encouraged my students to develop a sense of the general culture, so that they did not have a fragmented or a compartmentalised view of this long period. Literature featured prominently amongst the medieval texts which I had read for my courses, whereas medievalists traditionally drew on juridical and administrative documents. I had also taken an interest in images and the whole field of art. In short, the project seemed to fit in with the ideas of the Annales school, whose view it was that, in order to renew itself,history had to make use of little known or insufficiently exploited documents. Raymond Bloch’s request coincided with another I received. Pierre Bordas had asked me to write a text book for fourth-year pupils between the ages of twelve and thirteen. Like Arthaud, Bordas were counting on pictures not to ‘illustrate’ but to ‘illumine’ in a larger sense a view of the world, the sensibility and the codes which define a civilisation. It was not a question of drawing on a ready-made stock of material. I had to hunt out, propose and then

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produce what seemed to me important.With school children as my audience, I had to make an effort to synthesise and to explain. Does the word civilisation not suggest too vast an area? One might have referred to a medieval Western culture. No, we are confronted by a civilisation, a truly coherent body. It started to take shape in the sixth and seventh centuries, achieved its high point in the thirteenth century, and began gradually to fall apart in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I prefer the very medieval term body to that of system.Ways of feeling and thinking, so close to the heart of Marc Bloch (a great teacher to me, though I never knew him), together with the perception of space and time over this long period imply a shared conception of the world, a Weltanschauung, to use the terminology of Max Weber. I might possibly have adapted this German expression, but it seemed both too philosophical, too ideological, and too limited, and it obscured the ‘material culture’ which we got to know better in the second half of the twentieth century as a result of archaeological work on medieval sites. I realised too, as I delved into manuals of confession and read countless sermons, that the Middle Ages fashioned concepts of politeness, of moral behaviour, of urbanity even, which were extremely new inasmuch as the controlled urban expansion was itself without precedent.A form of urban manners developed alongside the courtly behaviour of the nobility. Only the word civilisation allows us to harmonise the values of both the higher and lower social orders. Lucien Febvre emphasised this opposition: in the French intellectual tradition, one uses the term civilisation; in the German scientific tradition that of culture. HEAVEN COMES DOWN TO EARTH There is then a tacitly or explicitly accepted framework. Western medieval civilisation was profoundly, intimately affected by the notion of Creation. Men and women in the Middle Ages believed in the God of Genesis.The world and humanity existed because God willed it through an act of generosity. These men and women also wanted to know more about it. Scholars tried to calculate the date of Creation according to figures drawn from the Bible. Until the seventeenth century, it was generally agreed that the Creation took place four or five thousand years before

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the birth of Christ. I would add at once that the figure is not as we would understand it today.When they spoke of five thousand years in the Middle Ages, they were referring to millions of years in our terms. For them it was an unimaginably long time ago. Scholars established a chronology, but not without debate. They ascribed dates to actual events, etc.This implied a critical reading of the Bible, which they did not simply reproduce word for word but analysed as an ‘incontestable’ source of information. It began with an account of the Fall (Adam and Eve).Then there was the long ascent, via the history of the Patriarchs and of Israel, up to the birth of the Saviour.There followed each episode in the life of Christ, each of his teachings which served as exemplars to be followed by every man and woman.This canonical compendium closed with the Apocalypse of John of Patmos which provided a colourful, metaphorical means of thinking about the Last Judgement and the End of Time which would follow. It was a way of imagining eternal life as it would be fulfilled within a totally transformed Creation. I am one of those who deplores the way in which thinking about the End of Time involving the Apocalypse has strayed into the realm of wild imaginings which, however splendid they might be, are nonetheless irrational and mystifying. At Cambridge in the seventeenth century, they still taught that the world had been created four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ, at nine in the morning on 26 October.We may laugh today about such calculations. Yet, certain American fundamentalists, who call themselves creationists, maintain to this day a literal belief in the text of the Bible, despite the scientific absurdity of such a position.Without in the least giving any credence to their system, one can understand the logic of it. It rests on the idea that the Bible is a work of history and Genesis a cosmology. From this point of view,the creationists reflect a view of sacred texts which is quite close to that shared by the greatest minds over many centuries. Medieval exegetes of course sought secondary meanings in texts, allegorical and spiritual interpretations of them. They did, however, accept the primary, literal meaning for its documentary value. For the Middle Ages and beyond, the story of the Creation posed no problems as such. It simply contained certain obscurities, as well as ellipsis and contradictions, which were apparent to them and which they sought to dispel. Theirs was a bold approach. In attempting to ‘make history’ from

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the Bible, they prefigured certain modern methods, even though their premises were of course wrong.The great leap forward was only made at the end of the nineteenth century when other books, older than the Bible, were discovered and when scholars no longer accepted the Scriptures as a factual source book. Before the first advances in Egyptology and Assyriology were known, there was general agreement that the Bible was the oldest book in the world, and therefore the most venerable and the truest, since what was old was by definition more reliable than what was new. You have therefore to show what they understood by the Creation and by their belief in God the Creator. For that belief is, in the end, central. The notion of creation is linked to a conception of God, of nature and of man, the coherence of which was maintained. It was thought out, adjusted and readjusted by a body which was itself coherent: the Church.There was a correspondingly hierarchical society, centred on the idea of dominium: sovereignty, lordship. Dominium introduced divine rule on earth, was its incarnation. It was a hierarchical vision in which hierarchy was not to be understood as a one-way relationship with the king on high and the people beneath him. It was reciprocal. God became incarnate and man was deified. Here we have Heaven coming down to earth, to which I have already alluded. Heaven dwelt among us, which of course reinforces our deference towards majesty. But if Heaven was brought down to earth, that means that the earth, in its turn, was transformed, that man was caught up in a process of ascending. For the men and women of the Middle Ages, the hierarchy did not have the rigidity of absolutism and the Ancien Régime. Let us not forget that the ‘horror of feudalism’ – the Ancien Régime – so despised by the revolutionaries was in fact a system of government which had been remodelled in the 1600s. The hierarchical, monarchic state which preceded the Ancien Régime in France did not have the same characteristics. If the medieval king was above his subjects, he stooped towards them and they could reach up to him.The humblest villein was convinced he could speak to the king, that he was as accessible as a good father, or rather as if he were God on earth. And the king himself thought he was the father of his people or an intermediary between them and God. I subsequently tried to understand, through Saint Louis, the structure of a medieval monarchy as a body, which the

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scholastics considered to be the best of all political bodies, in the Aristotelian sense of the term. The Incarnation too presupposes the existence of a history.There was a time before and after Jesus, and the era of the Old Testament looked towards the coming of Christ.When he ascended to Heaven, he ushered in a new era, which, in turn, looked towards the End of Time. Because medieval society, as we have seen, did not appreciate anything new, the time to come carried with it no sense of progress as we understand it. It was, however, a signpost. Humanity had received the promise of salvation after the Fall and we were granted it at a precise moment by a specific figure: God made man.Thereafter, everything was directed towards the Second Coming. It was the end of cyclical time, beloved of Antiquity, even though it was subsumed into the liturgical calendar. Medieval Christianity not only overturned man’s relationship with time, with cycles and with duration. It strove also to incarnate the incarnation, if I can put it that way, thanks to the Eucharist. Each mass, everyday and everywhere, made God present amongst men hic et nunc, here and now. To receive the host was to become a member of the body of Christ, to belong to the mystical body of the whole of mankind, the living and the dead. This is not some far-fetched theory.The medieval Church, indeed medieval society as a whole, strove to live it in a down-to-earth manner.Thanks to sustained work on the liturgy and the sacraments, they were able to do so.The Eucharist itself, communion, only achieved its ‘definitive’ form in the thirteenth century with the introduction of the festival of Corpus Christi. From the very beginnings of Christianity, the Eucharist was the model of all that existed, of all that was valuable. It was the body of Christ, which bound every faithful individual within a higher, mystical body. Better still, the Eucharist anticipated the resurrection. Through the body of Christ reborn, the believer was introduced to the resurrection which he would only appreciate fully after his death, when he would be transformed into a glorious body, assuming, of course, he had secured his salvation through a combination of personal struggle and the grace of God. Never was there a more physical age than this spiritual one. The belief in the resurrection of the body, which is the opposite of reincarnation, structured the society in a wholly original way compared with other religions and societies of the same period.

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Why do you attribute particular importance to Corpus Christi? Corpus Christi, which the Church today celebrates as the feast of the Holy Sacrament, falls on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday (the eighth Sunday after Easter). It was first celebrated in Liège in 1246. In 1264, Pope Urban IV extended it to the whole Church and it was marked by a solemn procession organised in each town and village. The Holy Sacrament thus made a truly regal ‘entry’, followed by the people of the town who were themselves on show surrounding the body of Christ.A medieval procession was a display of the entire hierarchy, everyone in his place with his colours and insignia etc., from the most important to the most humble. The potent pattern of festivals within a calendar created the basic temporal framework for the whole society. After a long effort by the Church, Corpus Christi was a crowning achievement amongst the other special feast days (from the Latin: feriatus). Urban IV introduced it especially to mark the importance of the Eucharist, at a time when the faithful only rarely received communion. Before Corpus Christi was introduced, only those who received communion regularly saw the body of Christ. Now it was displayed to everyone in a magnificent and glorious procession. It was one of the consequences of the celebrated Fourth Lateran Council, with the spreading of confession and the emphasis on communion. Corpus Christi confirmed quite decisively the choice made by Western Christianity. Like every religion, Catholicism had two opposing methods at its disposal to strengthen the faith and organise the liturgy: through display or monstrance, as it was referred to in old French, or absence and secrecy. The West chose the former. Byzantium and Eastern Christianity preferred a form of withdrawal, thereby acknowledging the pressure which Judaism and Islam still exercised in relation to the display of images. In the orthodox tradition, everything was based on concealment. Even within churches, the sanctuary was not immediately accessible or visible.The centre of the iconostasis was pierced with three doors and decorated with icons. There is a comparable gradation in Western churches.The faithful cannot directly enter the chancel, and the consecrated host is placed within the tabernacle, but in the West, everything is immediately visible, even from the end of the nave.There is no sense of a hidden mystery which is then revealed as is the case in the orthodox liturgy. Furthermore, the Western Church does not hes-

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itate to place the Holy Sacrament in a monstrance and then take it from the church in a procession. In the East, processions take place around icons. Similarly, medieval kings symbolically entered the throng of their people, whereas with the absolutism of the Ancien Régime, the process was reversed. No king in the Middle Ages would have set himself apart as Louis XIV did at Versailles. At Corpus Christi, the monstrance was placed under the most sacred and sanctifying object of the Western Middle Ages: the canopy. To proceed through the town under a canopy was a regal act par excellence. But let us make one thing clear.The Corpus Christi procession did not adopt a royal ritual; rather the royal ritual was inspired by it. The physical and mystical body of the king was paraded under a canopy because the Holy Sacrament had already been so displayed. The Incarnation came first. The West retained a more or less accurate memory of imperial rituals. For a long time in court circles they questioned whether the king should remain inaccessible, as was the case in the East, or whether he should show himself. Corpus Christi tipped the balance, and the king showed himself. Until the end of the Middle Ages, politically speaking, it was considered preferable for the king to live in the city, amongst his people. When he travelled, the king of France made a solemn ‘entry’ – worthy of Corpus Christi – into every one of his towns to show that it was his.When the people of Paris went looking for ‘the Baker, the Baker’s wife and the Baker’s boy’ at Versailles, their action harked back to a distant past: the king was expected to return to live in the city, in the midst of his subjects.What is more, the fact that the Parisians symbolically chose bread as a metaphor, in addition to their very real fear of famine, did not happen by chance.The host was the true bread through which the real presence was revealed. I am not, of course, saying that the revolutionaries had theological intentions, but their symbolic gesture had deep roots.And thanks to Mona Ozouf, we know to what extent revolutionary festivals were an attempt to reinvent for republican ends old liturgical practices. The failure of the poetic and utopian revolutionary calendar was, on the other hand, a demonstration of the shining success of the Western Christian calendar. In order to ‘de-Christianise’ France, the revolutionaries understood that they had to dismantle the structure which the Church had adopted. Time was both a framework and a teaching device for the Church. The Middle Ages, under the direction of the Church, worked on

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the calendar until the Council of Trent and the introduction of the Gregorian version in the sixteenth century.As a result,they completely remodelled the way time was organised and how people lived it. Medieval Christian time drew on the two most important and meaningful calendars which already existed in the geographical area where Christianity established itself. For ordinary everyday life, they adopted the old pagan calendar instituted by Julius Caesar, the Julian calendar with its twelve months. They changed it significantly, however, by borrowing from the Jewish calendar the crucial date of Easter and the concept of the week.Though the Christian calendar is firmly based on the sun, those Christians who did the calculations could not provide a fixed date for Easter.The irregularity remains to this day and is particularly inconvenient for the school calendar. Only recently in France, for example, have the dates of the Easter holidays been separated from the festival of Easter itself. And in my view the adoption of the week was one of the most profound changes made to the calendar.The pattern of seven days with Sunday as a holy day (modelled on the Creation), which trades unions still battle over, focused attention on when one did and did not work (respect for Sunday as a day of rest was strictly controlled during the Carolingian period). It regulated economic activity and, in my view, made a positive contribution to productivity in the West during the Middle Ages. Settling the date at which Creation took place, and therefore the beginning of history and of the calendar, was a very important issue. The medieval Church accepted the calculations of a sixth century Greek monk, Dionysius Exiguus, which he based on the few references made in the New Testament.According to him, the Incarnation and birth of Jesus occurred in 754 in the Roman calendar (which itself began with the supposed date of the founding of Rome).That became year 1 and the calendar was divided into periods before and after Christ. The year 0 did not exist, which still makes it complicated to calculate centuries (a division which first appeared at the end of the sixteenth century) and millennia. But Dionysius was mistaken. Today it is thought that Jesus was in fact born in 4 BC. In any case, the new calendar was only gradually adopted by Christianity and did not spread to all the elites until the tenth century.The slowness with which it was adopted is one reason not to accept the alleged ‘fear of the year 1000’ invented by the Romantics.Only a handful of clerics knew they were living in the year 1000!

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Late Antiquity and the high Middle Ages also introduced other important innovations in the way time was measured and lived. At a time when the monastic pattern of life was a powerful influence, monks adopted a timetable in which they divided the day into canonical hours, from their very early waking hour (matins) until bedtime. Furthermore, as a way of providing a framework for the activities of the surrounding rural community, they invented a sound calendar of bells in the seventh century, which led to the construction of numerous steeples whether as part of the church or as separate bell towers. The morning and evening angelus henceforth marked the daily lives of men and women in the Middle Ages. From the thirteenth century, church time often conflicted with secular time, that of the towns (with their belfries), which I have referred to as the merchants’ time because its function was to measure work. Finally, at the end of the thirteenth century, the mechanical clock appeared which, though it often functioned badly, divided the day into equal hours.The personal watch, which remained rare until the nineteenth century (there was no sense of personal time in the Middle Ages), was first produced in Milan at the end of the fifteenth century. It was in the fifteenth century as well that a secular timetable, that of the merchant,came into being alongside the increasingly archaic timetable of the monk. Two calendars existed side by side which were distinguished by the date at which the year began. One was employed in ecclesiastical and lay chancelleries for dating deeds and official documents. But the date itself was variable, indicating the fragmentation of institutions within medieval society, and defined what are called ‘styles’. This makes it difficult for medievalists to establish a properly certified chronology. The majority of these fixed ‘styles’ revolved around Easter.The medieval civil year began most often in March. According to the Church, the liturgical year provided everyone with a concrete summary of the story of Salvation. From the tenth century, it began with the first Sunday in December, Advent Sunday, which prepared for the coming (adventus) of Christmas, the day of the Nativity or the Incarnation of Christ, which from 354 on was 25 December. The year culminated with Easter, the day of Christ’s Resurrection, and was given new impetus at Whitsuntide when the disciples received the Holy Spirit from Christ who had re-ascended into Heaven. This liturgical calendar introduced a cycle within the linear timeframe of the civil calendar.

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The other major contribution, after the commemoration of the life of Christ, was the introduction into the calendar of saints’ days, which reinforced the commemorative aspect.The Church continued to create new saints and introduced a feast day on which they would all be celebrated,All Saints, and this became very popular in the ninth century. As Peter Brown has clearly seen, saints were the privileged dead. In the eleventh century,as a way of sanctioning new relationships between the living and the dead, monasteries began to keep memorial books, obituaries (dates on which a mass would be said for someone who had departed this life). The establishment of lineages created ancestors. Pressed by the monastic order at Cluny, the Church in the eleventh century added to the celebration of All Saints the commemoration of the dead on 2 November – All Souls’ Day, which is still widely respected today. Thus was born in the Middle Ages a Europe which remembered and commemorated something which has become more marked in our times with the unforgettable horrors of the twentieth century. This grew out of Christianity, whose founder, Jesus, told his disciples when he introduced the Eucharist at the Last Supper:‘Do this in remembrance of me’. Thus the pagan cult of the dead which had survived strongly in the countryside was Christianised and turned into an act of devotion. With the celebration of Halloween, which is a commercialised and Americanised throwback to the Celtic festival of the dead, one has a better understanding of the vigour and tenacity of the medieval Church. The calendar was already a form of catechism. Time and history were based on the twin pillars of the Creation and the Incarnation (Incarnation being, moreover, a re-Creation).The calendar united the living and the dead at the level of the family, the wider community, and of humanity at large. As a commemoration of the dead, it seems to me that even in a secularised form 2 November retains the memory and awareness of something completely different from that evoked by the creators of Halloween. In the context of comparative history, which in my view should be one of the major concerns of the historian, it would be interesting to compare these forms of behaviour with those of the Mexicans for whom festivals of the dead are of such importance. I suspect a certain successful syncretism has taken place since the sixteenth century between pre-Columbian, Indian practices and medieval forms of Christian practice imported from Europe. But perhaps the Mexicans address themselves to death rather than the dead.

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The Christian calendar was completed in the thirteenth century and the introduction of Corpus Christi, which I have already talked about, was the cornerstone of the whole system. The next thing to be introduced was the Jubilee, modelled on the Jewish Jubilee of the Old Testament, a show of solidarity when debts were erased every fifty years. Pope Boniface VIII was the chief instigator of this in 1300. It was a great success, bringing crowds of pilgrims to Rome as well as being a sign of a return to the origins of faith, an affirmation of unity in an increasingly divided Christianity and a programme of peace for the future.The perspective opened up did not turn out as expected but, in its desire to affirm the supremacy of the Pope, the Church showed that the calendar was a bond, an instrument of solidarity. With the growth of individual readers, Books of Hours became more widespread in the thirteenth century.They were manuals designating acts of devotion according to the hours of the day.They were meant for those who knew how to read, powerful lay people and above all women.They demonstrated a certain increase in the importance of the laity and of women within a Christian society defined by the calendar. We know moreover that Books of Hours, often richly illustrated, were amongst the finest miniature works of art in the Middle Ages. HELL, PURGATORY, PARADISE Even though the Middle Ages did not share the modern concept of progress, did they think that history was going in a certain direction? One might argue that the Middle Ages were pre-Marxist, to the extent that Marxism, as a form of utopian socialism, was an atheistic millenarianism. This is not simply a joke on my part.There was a millenarian tradition throughout the whole period, as has been clearly shown.The word did not imply they believed the world would come to an end in the year 1000, but conveyed the idea that humanity had to go through a certain number of periods,‘measured out’ in the Apocalypse, at the end of which the breath of the Holy Spirit would spread throughout the earth. It would be the moment of Parousia, the glorious Second Coming of Christ. According to the Apocalypse, this would usher in a reign of a thousand years before the Final Judgement. Of course every millenarian vision interpreted the ‘signs of the

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times’ as a call to immediate action. Humanity had entered or was about to enter the final period. Though it had already been challenged by Augustine and constantly condemned by the Church, millenarianism ‘returned’ in numerous guises, whether in simple forms which were quickly eliminated (generally popular movements) or more elaborate forms which captivated the powerful, the highest orders of the clergy and certain popes.The attraction of millenarianism often went hand in hand with the need for reform: the signs of the times announced that the hour was approaching when Christianity should purge itself of its vices and prepare for the final days: the great upheaval. The Calabrian monk Joachim of Fiore (c. 1132–1202) put forward the most ambitious and complex theology of intellectual and mystical millenarianism. His work was in turn rejected, promoted, then condemned (after his death), then partially restored to favour, though he constantly aligned himself with the Church and produced in 1200 a will proclaiming his submission and fidelity. Joachim of Fiore had a ‘historic’ vision of humanity. He described the history of the world as a succession of three Ages, in accordance with the structure of the Trinity.The age of the Father extended from the Creation to the birth of Christ. The Age of the Son began, of course, with the Incarnation and was still in existence in the present time.This was soon to be followed by the Age of the Spirit, an age of spiritual expansion and illumination, following a fundamental reform of humanity when, in its changed state, it would be ruled over by saints.This Age was the dignified preparation for the Second Coming, the Last Judgement, the general resurrection and the End of Time. Cardinal Henri de Lubac (1860–1935) has shown this to be an optimistic vision of history. It left a lasting mark, notably in romantic philosophy and in the work of G.W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and therefore of Karl Marx (1818–83). The ‘end of history’ postulated by the former and the ‘final struggle’ anticipated by Marxists would perhaps not have disconcerted people in the Middle Ages. If the Church abandoned the theory of Ages, how did it define the direction which it nonetheless believed history was taking? Its answer was ‘providence’. Thomas Aquinas, who was critical of Joachim of Fiore, defined providence as ‘the plan by which the end of things was ordained’. God’s providence ensured that history unfolded in the right way.

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Of course Thomas Aquinas and all theologians were aware of the problem which this thesis raised. If God granted men free will, if neither destiny nor fate existed, God could not control mankind, even to bring about its salvation. From another perspective, one could not make God, who became incarnate, a remote being who was content to set the machine in motion and then watched impotently as it functioned well or badly.This was the problem of predestination which had already deeply troubled Saint Augustine and came back with a vengeance at the time of Luther and the Reformation. Thomas Aquinas overcame the problem in an extremely clever but over-subtle manner. What he said was that: ‘divine providence made certain things, but not everything, necessary’. One should not therefore attribute to providence minor events and accidents. Thomas’s view was that God had a project which was intrinsically good, namely Creation. Man, to whom God had granted free will, was at liberty to sully the good which God intended, to lessen or obscure it, but he was also free to make amends and to return ever closer to the sovereign good. It would be fulfilled only in eternity and not in his lifetime.That is when we would experience the full and entire goodness from which we came.This represents one of Thomas’s most profound convictions, according to which, in the words of philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973),‘everything which is, is good inasmuch as it is: being and goodness are interchangeable terms’. It goes without saying that Thomas’s views were not accessible to everyone.They were not readily accepted, even when sanctified by his canonisation (1323) and by his elevation to the exalted rank of ‘doctor of the church’ (1567). One has also to acknowledge the ready acceptance at all levels of the idea of ‘fortune’, which was not exactly a Christian concept. The image of the great ‘wheel of fortune’ occurred everywhere, in art, in literature and in discourse. The wheel of life began at the bottom with the babe in arms, raised the child to adulthood, established the mature man, before casting the old man back down once more when life came to an end.The same was true of power. Fortune raised you to a rich and powerful position; the wheel turned and you were cast down.The fact that fortune was sometimes represented as an angel and sometimes replaced by God was of little significance.The wheel of fortune contradicted the idea of providence. The contradiction did not, however, give rise to serious debate in the Middle Ages. It must have been so marked that people seemed to

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wish to avoid it, for there were flaws and evasions at the heart of this civilisation which was so controlled in its search for coherence. This gives me the chance to expound a conviction of mine which underpins my reading of history; I am suspicious of the term ‘philosophy of history’. I make the rather banal observation that societies have at all times exhibited what one might call inconsistencies.These internal contradictions are especially due to the imperfect mixture of historical strata which each society inherits and to the different speeds at which the diverse constituent parts of a civilisation develop. A society does not move forward as a whole at the same pace.Actual historical time is heterogeneous. Societies viewed within a historical perspective seem to me to exhibit internal tensions, rather than contradictions, and the conflicts to which they give rise are the dynamic of that society. The Middle Ages seem all the more dynamic to me because they conceal numerous powerful tensions. Time does not exist without space. Perhaps the wheel seemed a better representation of time. For that to be so, the Middle Ages would have had to have a cyclical idea of time, and this was not the case despite the wheel of fortune. Though it went in a cycle,the liturgical year was paradoxically a means of imposing the idea of linear time.The Church used the recurrence of seasons and festivals to restate on each occasion that humanity was moving from a beginning to an end, and that the end was not a return to the beginning but a rebirth into another life, an ultimate, timeless world. Of course, men and women in the Middle Ages struggled to imagine a world beyond which occupied no visible space and was not part of time.This explains the extraordinary lengths to which people went to visualise these ‘places’: Heaven and Hell, and that still more subtle invention: Purgatory, to which I devoted a book in 1981. Purgatory was, as one might say, a waiting room for average and ordinary (mediocres, in Latin) sinners who could not go directly to Paradise but who did not deserve to go to Hell.Almost every Christian might think, therefore, that he would pass through Purgatory to be cleansed of his sins. It was comforting. Everyone thought they might avoid going to Hell.Yet they found it difficult to imagine this vague, grey place where the soul languished in the knowledge that it was so close to God, but still could not be with Him. It became a less terrifying version of Hell, and it was temporary.

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The ambiguity is clear. Hell was hideously earthly, so much so that it was an underworld.That was no surprise.The wicked were punished according to their sins and condemned to a perpetual extension of all that was worst in space and time with the added burden of their wrongdoings. On the other hand, they tried to represent Paradise in ever more ethereal, celestial and ineffable terms, suggesting a kind of space and time as far removed from them as it was possible to imply whilst using images. There was also a contradiction implicit in the thought that it would be possible to make up for past errors after death. The notion of Purgatory forced them to define a certain kind of space and time where the Church taught that space and time ceased to exist. It was an intermediary space between the world and the beyond, between individual death and collective resurrection. When you prayed for souls in Purgatory, had masses said for those who had departed this life, and strove to obtain indulgences, you were recompensed by the Church in the form of days. The Christian thus obtained, for himself and for others, whilst he was alive, a reduction in the time he had to wait.As a consequence of his prayers, his penances, the sums he paid, tens, even hundreds, of days could be subtracted from his time in Purgatory, days which were long in the after-life. There were specific tariffs which Protestants made fun of.What did these days represent, when elsewhere one professed that days did not exist? ‘For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night’, says Psalm 90. Giving Purgatory spatial dimensions had significant consequences. It increased the power of the Church whose help was needed to reduce the length of time one spent in a place as uncomfortable as Hell, even though one’s stay was not eternal but varied in length. Before Purgatory was created, historically speaking, man depended on the Church’s jurisdiction during his life on earth, on ecclesiastical judgement. After his death, he was subject solely to divine judgement. But in Purgatory, souls (which retained a sort of human form) were henceforth subject to the combined authority of both God and the Church. The Church extended its authority, its dominium, beyond death. My study of Purgatory made me realise that a civilisation was defined principally by its mastery of space and time. Medieval civilisation could only achieve a sense of itself by adding a mastery of time and space in the hereafter to that which it exercised in the here and

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now, on earth. It was based upon the idea that no impermeable barrier existed between the natural and supernatural worlds. Eternity which would abolish space and time was really pushed further out beyond the realm of history. In addition,Purgatory changed utterly the relationship between the living and the dead. The dead in Purgatory retained no power over their own destiny and salvation, even though their acceptance into this realm held out the hope of their ultimate accession to Paradise. The length of their stay and of the torment they endured depended on the living, on their intercessory prayers. Before the end of the twelfth century, the living prayed and made donations to the Church for the soul, pro anima, for the souls of those who were dear to them; but the mechanism and the effectiveness of those devotions remained vague and mysterious. Purgatory provided an explanation. It guaranteed once and for all the solidarity of humanity, unifying it in space and time. One is faced here by yet another of the internal weaknesses of the Middle Ages, which as a civilisation it again failed to confront. As a powerful tool in the hands of the Church and powerfully implanted in the minds of the people, Purgatory posed more problems than it solved. It was the weakness exploited by Luther in 1517 when he stood out against the sale of indulgences, from which the Church, and especially the Holy See, derived considerable funds. But one fact is beyond question. Until Purgatory existed, life and death marked the separation between ecclesiastical and divine authority, between the jurisdiction of the Church and that of God.The living were answerable to the judgement of the Church, the dead to that of God.With the existence of Purgatory, they had joint authority.The reach of the Church extended beyond the grave. EUROPE

OR THE

WEST?

Medieval civilisation made great efforts to represent the invisible.Was the same thing true of the visible world? This was divided into what I would call a micro-space, of which everyone was aware, and a macro-space, which was not so easily seen and measured. They had few instruments available to interpret the real world. So far as the macro-space is concerned, one is struck by how much men travelled in the Middle Ages. From the time of Charlemagne,

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when contacts with the East were reduced and commerce had not assumed the importance it later acquired, news travelled fast. Distant lands intrigued people. Clerics only had a vague and often fanciful notion of what they were like, and maps were fantastical. Certain geographers who had to describe central Europe, Poland, and the Ukraine, simply wrote down: Ibi sunt leones,‘lions are found here’! But expeditions were undertaken very early on in the search for new routes. Michel Mollat produced a very fine book on ‘explorers’ in the Middle Ages. Though it may surprise people, I should point out that there was considerable maritime and river travel during the Middle Ages. On land, there were no effective means of transport. The Arab-Muslim world in the East had its routes and caravans but, from early on, the West chose the sea. In truth, it had no choice. Despite its atavistic fear, geographical circumstances made it inevitable.The sea was treacherous and frightening, and there were a large number of images which bore witness to this: storms, shipwrecks, monsters from the deep, Jonah and the whale and other Leviathans. Yet despite all this, pragmatism prevailed. Western countries in medieval times had to rely on the sea. It had to be mastered, even though it was the very image of chaos, a non-place. Substantial technological advances were made in navigation.Think of the early importance of the great Italian maritime cities and of the 200 towns which belonged to the Hanseatic League, stretching from the Low Countries to the Gulf of Finland. These concrete achievements may be contrasted with improvements in map-making which came later. We have already seen how imprecise maps of continents were, representing the landmass. Marine charts, on the other hand, improved more noticeably, which was a logical development. So much so that at the end of the thirteenth century, the Catalans perfected coastal maps, the ‘portulans’, which became more and more accurate. Finally, when Christopher Columbus set sail, the West braved the high seas. Did the West in medieval times have a sense of its boundaries? Was it aware of itself as an entity? It saw itself as a Christian civilisation, more frequently as Christendom, forgetting as usual the Eastern Church. It was bounded to the west by a vast ocean which led nowhere. To the east and the south were different, hostile, and largely pagan religions.What is more,

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the Western medieval world had no plans to conquer anyone, unlike the Muslim world. As its name implies, the Spanish Reconquista was a re-conquest, a reappropriation of its own land. The same is true of the Crusades. Westerners, who were called Franks by the Byzantines and Roumis or Romans by the Muslims, did not claim to be conquering new lands. They believed they were reoccupying lands where they originated. Palestine was just as Christian as Rome. If Byzantium seemed to many a strange town, the same could not be said of Jerusalem where Christ had died and risen again. Jerusalem, as maps erroneously but wishfully illustrated, was at the centre of the universe. There was certainly a sense of Europe, which was clearly Christian and which shared common values and interests. It had emerged from the Western Roman Empire and was characterised by a change of axis. To refer to the Mediterranean as ‘our sea’ (mare nostrum) no longer made sense.This had become a frontier, whilst over a period of several centuries the civilisation spread northwards, far beyond its Roman boundaries. The West remained undecided about the East.Western scholars, following the Greek tradition, fixed the boundaries of Europe at the river Tanaïs, the Don. It was not a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’, to use de Gaulle’s expression. Russia was doubly excluded because she had been converted to Christianity by Byzantium and had suffered invasion by the Tartars. From a geopolitical point of view, the medieval legacy was, as we have seen, somewhat unclear. It opened the way to conflict and the heritage it left was ill defined. The future problems in Central and Eastern Europe were already latent. Europe was in gestation, an implicit rather than a conscious entity.This is the principal theme of my thinking and research at a time when Europe seems to want to achieve unity. Within the macro-space, as soon as Christianity itself becomes the focus of attention, the scale changes.You talk then of a micro-space. Indeed, with Christianity as one’s frame of reference, things are different. Its micro-spaces (states, towns, principalities, seigneuries, bishoprics) are an enduring legacy. The coherence of medieval civilisation was based on them. Our own civilisation owes a great deal to them as well. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christianity was unified and diverse, unified and fragmented at one and the same time; as is the

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Europe we have inherited from the Middle Ages. It is a misunderstanding of history to see a united Europe and nation states as opposing concepts. We must first establish the relationship which existed within Christianity between the centre and the periphery. Most historians, aware of the predisposition to hierarchy in the Middle Ages, see the development of Europe in terms of an expansion from the centre outwards. In this perspective, the medieval Western World developed somewhere between the Ile de France and the German Rhineland and spread to the north and east, linking up with the remains of Antiquity in the countries to the south. I myself am more concerned with the fringes: firstly, because Rome, the focal point of Western Christianity, was no longer centred on the Mediterranean but existed on the frontier separating East and West. Though it was geographically on the fringe, Rome was, however, ideologically at the heart of this civilisation. Medieval Christianity had not forgotten the parable of the lost sheep.The good shepherd left his flock to seek out the missing sheep, because he did not wish to lose a single one.The medieval Church was concerned for those at the fringes, and it was often there that the shepherds of the flock were to be found. Ireland, where Latin Christianity had been secure from major invasion, became the cradle of the new evangelisation of the continent in the seventh century. Saint Columbanus (c. 540–615), to cite one example, preached reform in Gaul and founded numerous monasteries from the Rhineland to the Apennines, where he died in Bobbio in 615. Subsequently, Scandinavians, western Slavs, Germans and Hungarians became a major focus of attention for Christianity and, in return, influenced it in countless ways. And what about the enduring influence of those Mediterranean places where Christians came face to face with Islam: Italy, Sicily, Spain and Portugal? But we should not imagine the same coherent pattern developing throughout Christianity, the development that is of ‘national feelings’. The division and re-division of France during the Hundred Years War, which was interpreted in fiercely ideological terms in the nineteenth century,ought not to mislead us.This was a struggle between two monarchies.A number of powerful princes, such as the Duke of Burgundy, had their own reasons for becoming involved.What we had here was a major dispute over inheritance and all that it entailed: issues relating to succession, to patrimony, to the way things were shared out or

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swapped, and to the regrouping of land. Networks of appurtenances and personal loyalties were established and then broken up until some sort of equilibrium was achieved when the English were driven out. The final phase of these conflicts between dynasties and princes, which began with the Treaty of Troyes (1420) and then the coronation of Charles VII (1429), was characterised by intense hatred of the English, which was the obverse of an attachment to the Crown of France. People fought for the king as head of the country not of the nation. This was the world of Joan of Arc. ‘Nations’, in the plural, meant hordes of pagans and infidels as opposed to the people of God. A single ‘nation’ referred to a certain number of people – students, artisans, merchants – who shared common origins or interests.The way they were defined is often surprising to anyone familiar with the future of the Continent. For example, Germans were thought to belong to the English nation according to the University of Paris in 1470. The inhabitants of Picardy and Normandy were not French, as opposed to the Spanish and Italians who were. And this was after the Hundred Years War. Nations were essentially both a reality and a problem for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the other hand, geopolitical entities did develop in the West. Only very slowly and unevenly did they become states, in the shape of the three great monarchies: France, England and Spain. And Spain was only unified at the end of the fifteenth century when Castile and Aragon, León and Navarre came together, having already been absorbed or marginalised.These monarchies formed centres of gravity within changing networks made up of more or less powerful towns or cities and seigneuries. One has to begin in the fourth and fifth centuries in order to understand these things, because that was when the veneration of relics began. Relics were a fixed point of reference in a world seeking its identity, and the cult of them provided an early marker of what was to become Europe. Relics were the physical – bodily – remains of those acknowledged as saints. By extension, an object which had touched the body of a saint was also a relic. Greco-Roman Antiquity only valued objects which recalled heroes or great men. Like Judaism, moreover, Greek culture held that one was defiled if one touched a corpse. Christians overturned everything. Saints would be resurrected. They would be amongst the elect on the Day of Judgement.They would intercede on

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behalf of their own.They had to remain physically present within the community. People visited their tombs as they visited their patron (patronus, the protector, the defender). They wanted to be buried near these tombs.The body of the saint as well as objects connected with it were, in effect, the saint himself, who was an intercessor with God from whom he could obtain miracles on behalf of the faithful in this life and indulgences in the world to come. Churches, and indeed a number of buildings, were constructed around relics.The faithful made pilgrimages to them which, within a region and often across a whole continent, led to the development of ways, roads and routes. These were often very different from the pattern of Roman roads and only partially coincided with them. Until the eleventh century, Europe was a network of sanctuaries, which sometimes formed a basis for commercial trade. But, over the years, commerce created other focal points around fairs and ports where banking also began to develop. This commercial network wanted of course to achieve legitimacy by finding its own relics. But these relics had no more than secondary status, making a place holy without being the cause of its holiness.The acquisition, transfer, theft or falsification of relics often caused heated arguments throughout the Middle Ages. The emergence of the three great monarchies, of urban centres of power and of seigneuries only really occurred as a consequence of the double network of relics and trade.This was reinforced by the demise of the political and geographical notion of Empire, in spite of the prestige of Charlemagne who tried to recreate it in a new form. The three Ottos had their dream, of course, which they nearly fulfilled between 936 and 1002. Otto III made his former tutor, Gerbert of Aurillac (Sylvester II), pope in 999. He also made Rome his capital and, with the support of the Pope, appeared to re-establish the Christian empire. His sudden death in 1002 at the age of twenty-one brought this to an end. In 1075, Pope Gregory VII, who introduced the Gregorian reforms, excommunicated the emperor Henry IV and bid him come to him at Canossa to make a humiliating request for forgiveness.Without anyone really being aware of it, the Empire continued to exist as a real power.The area of Germany was part of a complex system of principalities,larger or smaller kingdoms and other duchies.France explicitly and England de facto separated themselves from the Empire, which maintained a shaky hold over Italy. It too was fragmented into principalities and cities, not to mention the Papacy which carved out territory for

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itself, the pontifical lands, the Patrimony of St Peter. The dream persisted, inasmuch as several monarchs had imperial aspirations. Nor must one forget the whole Napoleonic enterprise and Hitler’s crazed vision of the great German Reich. FEUDALISM Amongst the ‘changing networks’, you mentioned seigneuries. You rarely use the word feudal, though a lot of people do. As you have seen, many of the words we use to describe the Middle Ages are of recent origin. Religion, in the sense we understand it, appeared in the sixteenth century; feudalism in the seventeenth and crusade in the eighteenth. That does not stop me from using these words and using others which are equally ‘anachronistic’, such as intellectuals. Seigneury is closer to the ideas and language of the time. As Georges Duby has splendidly reminded us, the Middle Ages were rural and firmly attached to the soil. Most of the other networks relate to the countryside. In the beginning there was a scattering of Roman domains: the villae (all the names of places which end in ville). Towards the year 1000, these villae were structured differently and two types of places began to take shape. On the one hand, there were a number of houses belonging to farmers or artisans involved in repairing or supplying things which formed a ‘village’. On the other, there were strongholds which offered protection and minor forms of arbitration: the ‘seigneuries’. At the centre of the eleventh-century village stood the church. It was surrounded by a graveyard, as the dead had to be as close as possible to their patron saint or saints. Not all the inhabitants of villages were farmers, as artisans were an important group within the society. They were ‘cocks of the walk’, minor notables if you prefer, whose traces we see in certain family names. So we have the millers: Meunier, Müller, Miller, and the blacksmiths: Le Faivre, Lefèvre, Fabre, Smith, Schmidt, etc. and Le Goff in Breton! During the eleventh century as well there was a new phenomenon which Pierre Toubert called incastellamento (the creation of castles) with reference to Italy, and which Robert Fossier described as encellulement (the creation of small strongholds).The failure of the imperial model and the absence of strong centralising powers (monarchies were still not firmly established) favoured the emergence of figures of

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authority, who lived in cities in the case of Italy and in the countryside in France and England. In times of need, men, animals, crops and implements were gathered together in such places for their protection. Towns became fortified. In the countryside, natural or artificial mottes with fortifications, keeps and castles began to appear.Thus was confirmed the role of the seigneury which, as the name suggests, exercised control and authority. The noble of lower rank was rewarded with a fief in return for services rendered to a superior.The word fief, which is of German origin, referred to the gifts given or received by the parties involved in a conflict which had ended. It therefore implied that bonds were forged through the process of exchange. Lords, like the heads of modern businesses, sought to transfer a fief to their children, and it therefore gradually became synonymous with real estate or with dues received on a hereditary basis. Fiefs were taken over or shared between lords which gave rise usually to armed conflict.Thus developed an ideology, a mystique even, of chivalry around the social bonds which existed between lords and their subjects or between lords of higher and lower rank. I would point out, however, that the system of fiefs, or feudalism, was not, as has often been said, a force which led to the destruction of power. On the contrary, it became established in response to an absence of power. It was the unifying force in a profound reorganisation of systems of authority, an indispensable framework for the emergence of ‘states’. Feudalism was at its height from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.In contrast to the seigneury,which both preceded and continued after it, feudalism, in the strict sense of the term, did not exist throughout the Middle Ages. Marc Bloch, Georges Duby and more recently Dominique Barthélemy have drawn a distinction between two ages, one of the seigneury, the other of feudalism. The first feudal period concerned mainly the upper strata of rural society: lords and their vassals who in the eleventh century were predominantly knights. As this process evolved from the end of the eleventh century, it resulted in all the inhabitants of the seigneury coming together in domains which were military, economic and juridical entities, in which the lord exercised the power of the ban, of total command.This is the concept of dominium, of the seigneury.When people in the eighteenth century violently attacked ‘feudal’ practices, such practices were but a distant and dismembered relic of a system which had already been greatly weakened by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

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You stress that lords also existed in urban environments. As towns grew they radically altered the physical landscape and they had a distinctive layout which, with a few exceptions, was unlike that of the town of Antiquity. This was due both to the nature of public buildings, apart from one or two, and to the houses.The function of towns had changed. Towns and cities existed at the intersection of several rural networks.They also formed networks with or against each other. In Italy, but also in Germany, they were the central focus of power – a seigneury – through systems of commercial and political alliances. This was particularly pronounced in Italy, where towns vied with the Empire and the Pope, or indeed both. Were there places which existed outside the network of the town and the countryside,‘outside the law’, as we would say today? There was a zone where the law was exercised with care and through negotiation: the forests. In England, notably, forests belonged to the Crown as separate enclaves. People were frightened of the forest. It was dark, dense and they could lose their way.Animals roamed around and brigands sought refuge there, not to mention hermits and outlaws such as Robin Hood! I have compared Western forests with Eastern deserts. But people in the Middle Ages actively exploited the forests, doing major clearances which reduced the size of these zones of uncertainty. Again, one should not forget those other areas of the natural landscape, the ponds, which were totally controlled. Christian civilisation needed fish for the important periods when the Church expected everyone to abstain from eating meat, especially in Lent, which lasted forty days. Given the difficulties of transporting and preserving fish, it was essentially caught in fresh water during the Middle Ages. Not until the fourteenth century, when the herring barrel was perfected in northern Europe, was sea fish such as the herring brought inland over large distances. Many ponds were created artificially and belonged to monasteries or collectively to villages. One can still see signs of them today in certain regions of France such as the FrancheComté.

A Civilisation Takes Shape THE PRESTIGE

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The land as you describe it presupposes the development of rules, codes and laws. It was therefore regulated by the law. Never having been very concerned with legal matters, I have paid too little attention to them over a long period.Thanks to the great legal historian Gabriel le Bras, whose important research was mainly about marriage, I have now rectified this.Through his work, I realised how much law could teach us about intellectual and social life and that it determined what went on in the town as well as the countryside. Immediately one refers to the law, one thinks of Roman law, of the imperial legacy which was so marked in the West.The importance and creativity of the law in medieval civilisation have also been underestimated.This is doubtless because Roman law was written down, whereas medieval law was based on oral customs and traditions. But this is to draw too marked a contrast.The Middle Ages, a civilisation characterised by the book, constantly modelled, remodelled and established statute law. As we have seen, the medieval mind was inclined towards the universal at the same time as it subscribed to the here and now, to what was embodied in a single person or place. From the twelfth century on and inspired by the renaissance in Roman studies, statute law was written down. Powers which were not yet states, developing monarchies, needed texts to refer to and especially a good knowledge of the various customs to which regions, towns and villages subscribed. As Gabriel Le Bras has shown, the setting up of all this coincided with the most important juridical innovation of the period: canon law (from the Greek kanôn, a rule). It regulated the way the Church functioned and also its relations with society, which underlines how important it was in a world where the Church was involved in everything. In addition, it meant that legal matters deeply affected the way people thought. For a long time,the Church could refer to things which were essential for its own organisation: texts written by the Church Fathers, papal documents, ancient decretals which were often false. It was now of the utmost importance for them to be sorted out, for contradictions to be eliminated and for principles to be established.The work was carried out around 1140 by one or several monks in Bologna – Gratian is usually credited with this – in the Concordantia discordantium canonum, the ‘concordance’ or reconciling of conflicting texts.

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It was a sort of anthology, drawn from thousands of juridical texts and other sources, including the Scriptures and the writings of the Church Fathers.The texts chosen were classified and sought to give answers to questions which arose when the authorities appeared to disagree. This remarkable work, emanating from one of the most dynamic of Italian towns, was rapidly accepted. It was called the Decretum Gratiani, which reveals the prestige it enjoyed, as a decree was at the time something which came from a person in a position of power.Additions were made to the Decretum Gratiani throughout the Middle Ages, drawn mainly from the decretals of the Popes. Medieval civilisation relied on the law to define problems and justify decisions. It answered the profound concern for security which made itself felt in all areas, from the economy (the first forms of insurance appeared in the fourteenth century) to religion.The reorganisation of the sacraments was a way of removing anxiety, of offering points of reference. In the Dies Irae the sinner refers to himself as an accused man standing before a judge and consistently uses the vocabulary of a trial. Is not God the Father, a fearful but just judge, and God the Son, man’s best advocate? Terrifying though it might be, the ‘day of wrath’ of the Last Judgement – with its imagery of the Apocalypse – was reassuring, because it involved a process of accusation and defence and the certainty that there would be true justice. Purgatory, in particular, allowed for a whole range of punishments which dispensed with the idea of all or nothing. Everyone might reasonably hope that he would not suffer the supreme punishment of Hell. The development of law also went hand in hand with the emergence of monarchies. They answered the need for political security. There were few lawyers in the court of Philip Augustus who reigned from 1180 to 1223.A century later, Philip the Fair was surrounded by a host of celebrated ‘king’s legists’. The famous image of the oak of Vincennes beneath which Saint Louis administered justice is a splendid illustration of the way things evolved, with the king striving to maintain a balance between the new men of law and traditional customs. By placing himself informally in the shade of the oak, and being aware for certain of the symbolic, reassuring nature of this tree, Saint Louis brought together juridical and non-juridical forms of governance. He himself greeted the litigants, listened to what they said but did not immediately make a ruling, turning instead to one of the lawyers and asking him to decide accord-

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ing to the law. Doubtless, they discussed things to clarify the situation and avoid any future ambiguity. In certain respects the king did not pass judgement. He made an effort to determine the nature of the law and to rely on a specialist to act according to the law, which had often not yet been established. In those creative medieval times, the law was in a state of ferment. Everyday life in the town was also brought within the compass of the law.Towns created institutions to settle legal disputes, making use of numerous lawyers whom they trained. And ordinary townsfolk could have access to one or other of these people, who formed a hierarchy ranging from the simple expert to university teachers, and including legists, notaries, etc . . . Of course we must nor delude ourselves. Medieval law, like our own, had its deficiencies, its cumbersome aspects and its injustices. Moreover, the Inquisition was set up as a juridical process of inquiry and information gathering to eradicate heresy. When Gregory IX, himself a man of the law and pope from 1227 to 1241, made it a major weapon of his papacy in the struggles against heterodoxy, he enshrined paradoxically the rule of law.The Inquisition’s respect for procedures and codes, including those relating to torture, is well known.We also know that the obsessive fear of heresy was one of the darker aspects of medieval Christianity.And its success was limited. How does one explain this obsessive fear? Christianity had its own logic, linked no doubt to monotheism, from the moment the new religion became established. During late Antiquity, violent conflicts arose concerning important points of doctrine, notably the definition of the Trinity and the divine nature of Christ.Very quickly the idea of heresy emerged, a Greek word which originally meant a ‘sectarian choice’.The bloody conflict surrounding iconoclasm was resolved in the East with the establishment of orthodoxy, the ‘true doctrine’. Those who rejected it were from then on considered heterodox, ‘people whose belief was other than true’. And since the Eastern Church depended on the Emperor, all heterodoxy was de facto politically suspect. A comparable process existed in the West, but the separation of powers altered the way it developed. It was up to the ecclesiastical authorities, and above all the Papacy, to define heresy. It would have remained a religious controversy had the Church not provided the basis of order and legitimacy. In this respect, the heretic committed a

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double crime of lese-majesty, against the majesty of God but also against that of religious and secular authority. He was therefore politically suspect. If it was the Church’s role to identify him, it was the job of the ‘secular arm’, the lay authorities, to re-establish order.The punishment was bound to be extreme, given that it was a crime of lesemajesty. In practice, the fight against heresy involved the authority of both. As a result, the Church put pressure on the secular powers, suggesting that if they did not behave as ‘truly Christian’ lords, rooting out heresy, their legitimacy would be at stake. In return, when the secular powers were confronting social or political dissidence, it was in their interest to denounce those involved as heretics and to force the Church to authorise what they did to them.The trial of Joan of Arc at the instigation of the English was one of the most striking illustrations of this. From the eleventh century, the accusation of heresy was used more and more frequently to eliminate the critics of authority or authorities, including those of the Church. At a time when people were calling for the Church to be reformed,those who strongly condemned its corruption were seen as heretics,even if their acceptance of the fundamental tenets of Christianity appeared ‘orthodox‘. Purely doctrinal heresies were few in number in the Middle Ages.The most celebrated, that of the Cathars, which mobilised the forces of the nascent Inquisition and of the king, was not truly speaking a heresy but rather a different, non-Christian religion, a strict form of Manicheism. Historians cannot, however, pronounce on these matters. It is not for them to say whether such and such a heresy is or is not fundamentally at odds with Christian teaching. They note that the Church decreed this or that group of people to be heretics and seek to understand what happened, knowing, what is more, that the documentation came almost entirely from the powers that be. More profoundly, I believe the obsessive fear of heresy to be the dark side of that great medieval project to form one body.Texts show this clearly.The Church, therefore the whole of Christianity, formed one supposedly harmonious and hierarchically structured body. Anything which did not adhere to it was at once threatening and distressing. Idealistically and with unstoppable logic, the Inquisition wanted to save the heretic. Until the final moment, the final second before his execution, the heretic was expected to confess and recognise the error of his ways. He would still die, but he would be saved.The torture he had endured on earth would prevent him from going to Hell and, after

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the necessary period in Purgatory, he would rejoin the heavenly host of Christians. Let me give another interpretation of the parable of the lost sheep. When a sheep goes astray, the shepherd seeks it out so that it can rejoin the flock. But if the sheep is stubborn or threatens the rest of the flock, it is cast aside. This period which gave birth to genuine humanism could not avoid one of its nastier side-effects: exclusion, which might even mean death.

5 ON EARTH AS IN HEAVEN 1 I was struck by a curious passage whilst reading L’Histoire de Saint Louis, written towards the end of his life (1305–9) by Jean, sire de Joinville, seneschal of Champagne, companion and friend of King Louis IX of France.The crusaders were in the town of Acre.The king had summoned a council to resolve a serious matter: should they remain in the Holy Land or return to France? Joinville was one of the few who recommended they should stay.At the meal which followed, the king did not speak to Joinville. Joinville, believing him to be angry, described the scene as follows: While the king was hearing grace at the end of the meal, I walked over to a barred window . . . and put my arms between the bars . . .While I was there, the king came and lent on my shoulder and placed both hands on my head. I thought it was his grace Philippe de Nemours who had tormented me a great deal that day because of my advice to the king; and I said to him ‘Leave me in peace, Lord Philip’. By chance, I unfortunately knocked the king’s hand which fell to the middle of my face; and I recognised it as the king’s hand by the emerald ring he wore on his finger.

When he wrote these lines as an octogenarian half a century after the events, Joinville allowed his emotion to show. The king had touched him. In further passages, the seneschal went back over other brief contacts. They express more than affectionate familiarity, with perhaps a certain touch of irony and of jest on the part of the king who, following the example of Saint Francis of Assisi and unlike traditional monks, knew how to laugh.When he was canonised in 1297, Louis IX became Saint Louis. Joinville had never doubted his saintliness. He, Jean de Joinville, was therefore someone who had seen and touched the holy king, been close to a living relic, and this cast a glow over his old age. As described by Joinville, the king’s gesture was not a chance occurrence. It suggested the laying on of hands as practised by Christ.

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Joinville also revealed the importance of touch to the medieval imagination. Everyone remembered that when Christ rose from the dead he allowed doubting Thomas to feel his wounds. Again we have an image of the Incarnation. Joinville’s memories reveal the extent to which he felt close to Heaven while still on earth. Although he was certainly courageous, devout, full of majesty, the king was also unaffected, jovial and at ease with others. When he was urged to abandon his ship which was at risk of sinking off the coast of Cyprus, did he not assert:‘No-one cherishes his life more than I do mine’? Over the many years I worked on my book Saint Louis (1996), I frequently came across the same love of earthly life in numerous different people.As good Christians they believed life was worth living and that they were preparing for salvation here and now not only with acts of penance but also by measured enjoyment of this world. Like Francis of Assisi whose spirituality had left its mark on Louis IX, they brought heavenly values down to earth. As much as the evolution of exegesis of the Bible and of theology from Abelard to Thomas Aquinas, this ‘descent’, a propitious feeling of nearness of God, enabled me to refer to a medieval humanism. The idea of humanism is usually restricted to the Renaissance. In this area as in many others, the Renaissance was an extension of the Middle Ages. Let us reject, once and for all, the idea that humanism was largely anti-religious or hostile to the Church. Apart from the exceptional and complex case of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), most Renaissance writers, thinkers and artists revealed how strong the religious basis of humanism was.Their enthusiasm for the myths and allegories of Antiquity was fused with Christianity. From the Middle Ages on, poets and theologians incorporated Greco-Roman Hellenistic gods in a Christian ‘programme’.The break occurred later, doubtless in the seventeenth century.And it was only in the nineteenth century that the polemical line opposing humanism and Christianity developed. The predilection of the medieval mind for things concrete seems to favour a biographical approach to people. I am not interested in biography as such. In this respect, I am like Bourdieu who referred to the illusions of biography. It only appeals to me if, as in the case of Saint Louis, I can draw together around a specific character a body of material which throws light on a society, a

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civilisation, an era.These are what Pierre Toubert and I have referred to as globalising figures. There was little interest in the individual in the Middle Ages (more in the thirteenth than in preceding centuries) and so the number of people of biographical interest is very limited:Abelard, Saint Bernard, Saint Francis of Assisi, the Emperor Frederick II, Saint Louis . . .At one point while I was studying the voluminous dossier on Saint Louis, I posed the provocative question:did Saint Louis really exist? What I discovered in the source material was less an individual than a succession of stereotypical models. Because he was considered a good king and a saint, no-one described him as he was but as they thought a holy king should be. This was not a question of propaganda or of falsification, but a cultural fact. If one refers to someone as a saint, his life can only be the perfect expression of an established code for describing saints. Then along came Joinville who, as opposed to clerics writing the Lives of saints as a form of hagiography, produced his memoirs. He saw himself as a witness in the process leading to the canonisation of his friend the king (which he was). ‘Saint Louis as I knew him . . . The Real Saint Louis’ might have been the title of what he wrote. Unlike the standard hagiographers, he did not call it the ‘Life of Saint Louis’, but as a way of underlining what he knew to be the truth about the king: the History of Saint Louis. It was only after having read and reflected on Joinville’s memoirs that I thought I could try to write a book about Saint Louis, which is, in some respects, an anti-biography. During a discussion I had with Bertrand Tavernier about his film La Passion Béatrice (1987), which was set in the Middle Ages, he made the following observation:‘I realised in choosing the Middle Ages that it was a suitable period for a film, because they were not interested in the psychology of men and women, and the cinema does not convey the psychology of individuals.We can capture people, voices, gestures, places, objects, stories, but not their psychology’.This made me realise again why the Annales school were so reticent about biography. Neither my essays on Francis of Assisi nor my book Saint Louis were truly speaking biographies, more anti-biographies. In seeking the truth about a person, one must take into account a whole period including all its problems but not engage in psychology which is of no use to the medievalist, even though the ‘examination of conscience’ was introduced in the Middle Ages. Marc Bloch exemplified this in Les Rois thaumaturges (1924). To understand the ‘true’ Saint Francis or the ‘true’ Saint Louis – because I remain convinced

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that truth emerges from what the historian does – one has to rethink one’s notions of time and narrative, of the imaginary and of culture. In this respect, we are much closer to anthropologists and ethnologists than to psychologists. I was able to show, in a study undertaken with Pierre Vidal-Naquet and reprinted in L’Imaginaire mediéval (1985), that the ‘madness’ suffered by Yvain, who was banished by his wife Laudine in the Chevalier au Lion by Chrétien de Troyes, told us little about his personality. As a result of failing to keep a promise,Yvain was forbidden to return to his wife’s household, to his own world. He became a wanderer, lost in the forest, naked and eating only uncooked food. The story unfolds of a knight who lost his status and became a man of the woods. He reverted to a ‘savage’ state before being reintegrated into his familiar, feudal world.This tale offers us a splendid variation on the symbolic and social system of which the forest was a part in the Middle Ages. It also reveals how fruitful an anthropological approach can be as a way of establishing the ‘truth’ about this period. In order to understand Chrétien de Troyes you need to have read Claude Lévi-Strauss, himself a great reader of Chrétien’s work. MEDIEVAL HUMANISM You seem to suggest with the example of Joinville that men and women in the Middle Ages took as a model the imitation of Jesus, who represented God in our midst.Was it from this angle that humanism developed? We are ill informed about the existence of possible atheists in the Middle Ages. Saint Anselm answered the objections of those ‘madmen’ who claimed that God did not exist in various theoretical texts. In his view, such madmen corresponded exactly to the madmen referred to in the Old Testament.They were abstractions.Anselm cited no specific real person who professed to be or to have been an atheist.As we have seen, heretics were considered guilty of holding false beliefs, not of possible unbelief. In the Middle Ages, men had to confront God and their values were derived from Him. Moreover, as the Incarnation was at the heart of Christianity, the imitation of Jesus, of God made man, was the very basis of medieval humanism. But medieval man only slowly came to that conclusion. From the sixth century, Pope Gregory I, Gregory the Great, drew particular attention to the biblical figure of Job. His Moralia in Job, one of the first manuals of medieval humanism, made a strong impression

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on people throughout the period. Job was one of ‘the Just’ who suddenly experienced an inexplicable succession of misfortunes, to the point where he lost everything and suffered contempt. He was a prefiguration of Christ and represented the complete humiliation of man in the face of God. But it was through his humiliation, which was transformed into humility, that he ultimately achieved reconciliation. Like Job, the Christian of the early Middle Ages achieved salvation by abasing himself before God. He was raised up to the heights as he had been cast down to the depths. He was not a slave but a servant: the ‘suffering servant’. God retained the image of the benevolent Father, who was still to be feared. Job was entirely in his hand. The hand of God, often represented in painting or by sculptors, emerged from the clouds of Heaven to impose His law and establish order. He was an almost invisible God who, as we have seen, was above all embodied in the image of the Father. Christians in the Middle Ages, including the clerics, certainly had difficulty in representing and even conceiving of the Trinity.The definition of three Persons who were one and the same God (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) had already triggered lively debate in late Antiquity. There was a fierce argument concerning the profession of faith (the Credo,‘I believe’) centred on the simple word filioque.We have to come back to this because the argument caused, or was the pretext for, the breach between the East and the West. Following violent controversy surrounding the definition of the Trinity, the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) defined the nature of the relationship between the three divine Persons, in opposition to heretical views, and drew up the formula of the Creed.Together, these were ratified by the Council of Chalcedon (451).The Creed summarised the doctrine of the Christian faith in a short text which was solemnly recited at all important church services, as it still is today. It is regularly used in Catholic liturgy under the name of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed,‘creed’ meaning ‘shared faith’. In the Council version, it was stated that the Holy Spirit (the third Person of the Trinity) ‘proceedeth from the Father’.The whole Creed was written in Greek which was the standard language of the Empire. In Latin, the language of Rome, this became: Credo in spiritum sanctum (I believe in the Holy Ghost), dominum et vivificantem (the Lord and giver of life), qui ex Patre procedit (who proceedeth from the Father).A number of theologians, however, wanted it to say ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit who proceedeth from the Father and the Son’, which corresponded to

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the Latin addition: filioque (and of the Son). So it was formalised as: Qui ex Patre Filioque procedit’ – ‘Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son’. A fierce quarrel was triggered by the word filioque. Charlemagne made a clumsy decision on the basis of a wrong translation, as neither he nor those close to him had mastered Greek. So the West adopted the word filioque in its Creed and the East rejected it, which was the pretext for an official break between the two Churches. John-Paul II, on behalf of the Catholic Church, recently suspended the obligatory inclusion in the Creed of the troublesome filioque. So far, it has had no effect on the attitude of the Orthodox Church. The historian cannot enter into this debate, nor does he wish to. He simply realises that it was an explosive issue. The Trinity and the Holy Spirit were a constant cause of confrontation, and even of heresy. The medievalist simply has to acknowledge that, in spite of the inviolable dogma of one God, the three Persons of the Divinity seemed to retain their own particular individuality throughout the Middle Ages. Even better, the relative importance of the three and the manner in which the faithful ‘weighed them up’ gives us a good idea of what was understood by ‘God coming down to earth’, which to me is the key to medieval humanism. The concept of God in the early Middle Ages was not the same as that of the twelfth century or of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was as if Joachim of Fiore’s ideas (the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, the Age of the Spirit), though condemned by Rome, had seized the imagination of men and women at this period in some deep-seated way. Initially, emphasis was placed on the Father, then the Son came to prominence rather more, whereas the Spirit was the subject of a great deal of thought the nearer they got to the reforms of Luther and Calvin. By simplifying the chronology, which was undoubtedly more complex, one sees an evolution in the way they viewed God, even though he remained One from the point of view of dogma. After 1000, God emerged from the clouds and proclaimed His majesty. He was a king, an emperor. Man stood before him as a subject, but not without his own identity and personality, like other subjects. Boethius (c. 480–c. 524), a great theologian and an unfortunate minister of king Theodoric, had earlier established the basis of a Christian notion of the person, drawing on his impressive reading list which included Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Plotinus and Augustine . . .

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A new and stronger evolutionary process happened in the twelfth century, when theological thinking was not confined to the monasteries but also took place in urban and episcopal schools, notably the one in Chartres. In innovatory places such as these, the relationships between man and God were not as strict as those pertaining under monastic rule. They rediscovered the Bible through new readings of it, which highlighted the creative word of God:‘Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram’, ‘Let us make man in our image after our likeness’ (Genesis 1: 26).The notion of ‘image’ came to be a dominant one. Other medievalists have noted the change of perspective without, I think, giving it due weight. In my view, the re-centring of theology around Genesis had a profound effect on the way in which society and spirituality evolved. As a consequence, God, in the person of Jesus, offered a likeness in which man was made and which he strove to imitate ever more strongly. Such steadfast spirituality persisted and grew throughout the Middle Ages and culminated in the celebrated Imitation of Christ, written by the Rhinelander Thomas à Kempis between 1420 and 1441. As imitations or copies of God, men (and women for whom Mary was a more likely model) had in them a divine spark.‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them’ (Genesis 1: 27).There were magnificent representations of Jesus in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. From that time on, medieval humanism changed noticeably the relationship with the body, which was no longer mortified as it had been by monasticism.Made in the likeness of God,man hoped to see his suffering body transformed into a glorious body like Saint Francis and, to a lesser extent, Saint Louis. Even if he was still concerned to subdue the weaknesses of the flesh, the pressure was no longer the same. Saint Augustine, who had been tempted by Manicheism in his youth, now attacked it. The ancient Church rejected the clearly defined opposition of good and evil and especially the idea that there was a ‘principle of evil’, since God having created everything created only good.That did not, of course, solve the problem of the existence of evil and of sin, but ‘original sin’ and God’s acceptance of Satan’s action, provided an explanation.The threat of dualism, of God against Satan, forced the Church to emphasise the union of the body and the soul which would be saved together.Thus the Church attacked dualism, which acknowledged the radical opposition of body and soul. Satan, however, maintained a tension between good and evil.

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Catharism, which developed in the twelfth century, was a reaction against feudalism and the optimism of the new humanism. Thus, it marked a return to pessimism.And the strictness of its code explains the violent reaction of the Church and the secular authorities. But, as I have already indicated, the theological, ideological and political implications of Catharism were complex.As it spread, for many men and women it represented a healthy reaction to the corruption of the Church. It offered a clearer,simpler message.Its ‘reformed’clergy were closer,it was believed, to the original Church, with the perfecti rising above the opposition between clerics and lay people. I will not go into detail, as I would have to deal not just with the best known example, the Cathars of southern France, but also with those in Bulgaria, Bosnia and northern Italy. I still believe, as I have already suggested, that it was less a deviant form of Christianity than a different religion using, on occasion, seemingly Christian rituals and vocabulary.Without in any way supporting the terrible repression they suffered, one has to acknowledge that, had the Cathars been successful, the West would have had to endure some very dark days. Certain fundamentalist movements today give us some idea of what it might have been like . . . A paradox remains. Humanism developed and ‘civility’ increased. But it was still the era of the Crusades, whether to the Holy Land or against the Albigensians. This is, I fear, something experienced by all civilisations, the very opposite of what is best about them. The twentieth century, for example, could be characterised as the age of youth, of expansion, of advances. On the other hand, it also experienced wars, totalitarianism, violence and injustice on a scale which equalled our achievements. However, I do not wish to play down the darker aspects of the Middle Ages. The Crusades, for example, deserve to be condemned wholeheartedly.With our long historical perspective, we see today the negative side of the Crusades, and I hope that Moslems will equally come to see the negative role of the jihad and the excesses which issued from it.The Crusades may be partially explained – if not justified – in terms of the Church’s constant effort to bring peace at the end of the eleventh century! Pope Urban II made this clear when he summoned the Council of Clermont in 1095 and told Western Christians they should cease their unending internal wars.

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With the growth of seigneuries and fiefdoms and with the development of commerce bringing an increase in population, the stability of Christianity was threatened by the excessive number of young men. In a society in which the law of primogeniture prevailed, what was to be done with all the young knights whose elder brothers deprived them of land and who were also unable to obtain a wife? Instead of arguing over land in Europe, they were promised an inheritance in the birthplace of Christianity. Their energy and violence were directed against the loathsome Moslems, the Infidels. This led the Church to elaborate its ideas on the ‘just war’. Here again we have a paradox. Theologians tried to think about war, to moderate it, in some cases to justify it, developing a doctrine formulated by Saint Augustine. Peace remained the Christian ideal.War was one of the many consequences of ‘original sin’. It was only legitimate or ‘just’ if the person declaring it was endowed by God with auctoritas (authority) and potestas (power). Augustine made it clear that authority was given only to the prince who held power and not to any head of a clan. Thus the Church condemned all forms of war which were not entered upon and prosecuted by what we would refer to as ‘state powers’. And the Church reserved the right to approve or condemn them, since it was the supreme auctoritas. As monarchies grew stronger, they drew upon their potestas as a way of preventing seigneurial wars. Saint Louis in particular was uncompromising over private wars. And during the Hundred Years War, the kings of France unfailingly called on the Church to use its auctoritas to condemn the kings of England.The Papacy, though it offered to arbitrate, refused to pronounce on the rights and wrongs of the English and the French, on the principle that any war which it had not authorised was unjust, especially if Christians were fighting each other. In the final analysis, the issue hinged on the criteria for war that the auctoritas had at its disposal and the basis on which it decreed that a war was just. Saint Augustine provided an answer. A war was just if it was not inspired ‘by a desire to do harm, out of cruel vengeance, unassuaged, implacable hostility, a desire to dominate and other similar attitudes’. In short, the Church excluded wars of conquest but allowed wars of self-defence. So far as the Crusades were concerned, it was sufficient to declare Islam the aggressor. Christianity was not conquering the Holy Land, but repossessing territory which had been taken from it. In the words of Saint Augustine:‘Just wars avenge injustices’.

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Current events reveal that the problem remains the same: those who go to war do so on the basis of their own conception of justice. As a way of giving war a Christian gloss, of controlling it – sometimes to its own advantage – the Church favoured a metamorphosis of the very idea of the miles (the warrior). He became miles Christi, a soldier of Christ. He fought for a good cause as the defender of God and the protector of the widow, the orphan and the poor. During the course of the eleventh century, the ritual of a knight being dubbed grew up.The Church gave it a liturgical character thereby making it more like the investiture of ‘defenders’, in the service of the weak. It revealed a strong desire to humanise soldiers whose excesses were only too well known. I recall that Richard the Lion Heart – unfortunately idealised by my beloved Walter Scott – wore a necklace of severed heads during the Crusade of 1191–2. The Church pursued its effort of containment. Between 980 and 1040, it introduced the Peace of God, exemplified mainly in the ‘Truce of God’. It was a powerful movement, mobilising the common people, clerics and even nobles, and imposed the suspension of hostilities for a certain period.Truces of this kind allowed possible negotiations to take place.They also included ritual penances, requests for forgiveness, and an impressive celebration of relics. The Church systematically organised a series of peace campaigns of this kind, bringing together crowds of people. For the first time, the people had a more or less structured part to play as participants in the debate. HERETICS, JEWS, OUTSIDERS . . . Surely, it is only one step from a ‘just war’ to a ‘holy war’? I would ask you to look again at the remarkable work done by Jean Flori. The Fathers of the Church offered no basis for a ‘holy war’ as opposed to a ‘just war’, and this was even more true of the Gospels. It took a number of theologians of the Reconquista, prelates with backgrounds in chivalry like Urban II, or popular preachers like Peter the Hermit and a number of others, to suggest there was a higher form of just war, the so-called ‘holy’ war.This largely post-dated the Moslem jihad. I do not, however, believe that the jihad had a direct influence on the holy war. It was, rather, the distorted culmination of a ‘movement for peace’. But the Crusades gave new life to the jihad which was abating. Islamists today still use it as one of their arguments.

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Thus, on several occasions the Church misapplies what it had gained from humanism in its desire to maintain order and purity within Christendom.To preserve internal peace, it went to war against external forces. So as to contain any threat of disorder, it defined those considered non-conformists or outsiders who were to be marginalized or excluded. Robert Moore has clearly identified a wave of persecution which took place as a means of protecting Christianity which was moving towards an ideal, perfect state, free from all stain. In a similar spirit, the theory of the ‘purity of the blood’ was propounded in Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and this led in due course to racism in the nineteenth century.A parallel movement of compulsory conversion (of Jews and heretics) gave rise to the excesses of missionary zeal which was part and parcel of colonialism in the sixteenth century. We have seen what happened to heretics. The treatment of male homosexuals too was increasingly harsh.They were given the infamous title of sodomites and accused of a ‘crime against nature’. Here again, the logic was paradoxical. Medieval humanism promoted a positive view of nature and man’s place within it, but it excluded by the same token what it considered to be ‘unnatural’. Crimes which were ‘against nature’ thus became heresies with the consequences we have seen. In this context, we should mention the evolution of the attitude towards the Jews. It too was part of the same impetus which led to the Crusades. Though it was subordinate to the New Testament, the Old Testament remained the Holy Book for Christians, their work of reference. They had not forgotten that the Jews were a chosen people, or that God became incarnate as a Jew. We know that anti-Jewish feeling was based on the idea that the Jews had wanted to suppress Christianity, were stubbornly opposed to conversion and to becoming part of the ‘new Jerusalem’: the Church.They refused to recognise Jesus as the Messiah and were considered solely responsible for his death. They were deicides. From the twelfth century, they were accused of murdering Christian babies and of desecrating the host. In anticipation of their possible conversion, they were therefore set apart as a kind of example, a fossil people, the victims of all kinds of humiliations and preconceived ideas. People knew them only too well. Christians did not even raise the question of Jerusalem, as it was obviously the most important Christian city. It could not possibly be considered Jewish.

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The ambiguity surrounding the Christianisation of Jerusalem became apparent as the crusading spirit developed.The idea of returning to the well-spring of Christianity began to look like a way of settling accounts with those who also claimed the Holy City to be their birthplace. If Christians were the chosen people and Jerusalem the fountainhead of their religion, the rights of the Jews were without foundation. By a strange reversal, they were usurpers. The first real pogroms did not begin in central Europe until the eleventh century. They took place all along the routes followed by the Crusaders. And persecutions became more marked in the countries from which they came: France, England, the German Empire . . . Saint Louis,for example,viewed anti-Jewish feeling as an indispensable form of purification in advance of the Crusade.Through the purifying process, in which prostitutes, heretics, etc. were included, his kingdom would become worthy of the great expedition.The Crusade was announced in 1244 and they set out from Aigues-Mortes in 1248. Defeated, Louis returned home in 1254, haunted by the sense of his own responsibility for their failure and by the need for political and moral reform. As a result, he became more tolerant.Though a priori well-intentioned, his attitude nonetheless illustrated the importance of the phenomenon. He imagined himself to be an ‘honorary bishop’ of the Jews and hesitated between protecting and persecuting them. Only during the last year of his reign, 1269, did he accept, under pressure, that they should be required to wear the infamous sign of the wheel, introduced by the Lateran Council of 1215, which prefigured the yellow star. One has the impression that religious humanism was bringing people into line . . . All this happened a thousand years or more ago.Attitudes of mind, the bases on which judgements were made and the material circumstances prevent us from making direct comparisons, which one is tempted to do, because the Church still exists. Many of the values it defended at the time, which to us seem either strange or shocking, should not cancel out the positive values which remain, even amongst those who are no longer members of the Church or have ceased to believe. Certainly, the Church exercised control, kept a watchful eye and punished people.You have also to take into account the extent to which it brought freedom, calm and an appetite for life. Not only did Saint Louis respect the numerous days of sexual abstinence which the Church

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imposed on husbands, he called for this practice of asceticism. Jean-Louis Flandrin, who broke new ground with his study of medieval sexuality, thought that the dictates of the Church coincided in part with deepseated tendencies in the culture and in the thinking of the masses.These included an awareness of times which were holy, as revealed in peasant calendars, and a sense of what was impure, of not doing what was forbidden. One should not imagine that the people were severely conditioned by clerical elites. Things would not have functioned without a certain degree of consent on their part. And there is nothing to prove that the obsessively strict practices outlined in confessors’ manuals were followed to the letter. Witnesses have reported that Saint Louis sometimes paced up and down in his room during periods of abstinence, tortured by desire,until the appropriate moment came.It seems that he then hurried to the queen without delay. There are many other cases of a similar zest for life. Men and women were full of vitality. When he met ‘his’ king, Louis IX, for the first time, Joinville was dazzled by his brightly coloured clothes, his fine presence and that certain splendour he had about him. When he saw him fighting the Saracens in Egypt, he thought him ‘the most handsome knight’ he had ever seen.And though the king inclined towards asceticism and mortification – the hair shirt and flagellation – Joinville drew attention to his capacity for laughter, noting on several occasions that:‘he laughed out loud’. Joinville also passed on an amusing anecdote, which took place when Louis was camped near Acre. A delegation of Armenian Christians wanted to approach the king whom they admired. Joinville passed on their request, saying: ‘Sir, they wish me to show them the holy king, but I have no wish as yet to kiss your bones’. At this, Saint Louis burst out laughing. As it happens, he was someone who venerated relics, having built the massive reliquary of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris for the Crown of Thorns. The question of laughter fascinates you.You have even written an essay about it: Rire au Moyen Age. Laughter may be peculiar to man, but we do not know what made people laugh in the past. Paul Veyne once remarked that the most eminent scholars of ancient civilisation would not even know how to say ‘good morning’ were they to find themselves in imperial Rome. How did people greet each other apart from using official or written formulae? So, what did make people laugh in the Middle Ages?

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Laughter, which links the body with the mind, tells us how medieval humanism evolved, and that is something which has preoccupied me. It provoked lively debate in the Middle Ages even though there were numerous farces and comedies. Was laughter disrespectful, uncouth, subversive? Monks who were very strict in their observances often thought so.They drew attention to the fact that nowhere in the Bible was there a reference to Jesus laughing, whereas Satan and the wicked were always sniggering and Jesus wept. When silence was broken by laughter, heresy was in the air. As one might have expected, theologians examined the archives and came up with expert opinions.The great Aristotle, no less, spoke of it as being ‘exclusive to man’. The Bible, moreover, presented the unchallengeable figure of Isaac, son of Abraham and father of Jacob, whose name meant ‘Let God laugh!’, evoking God’s benevolence and the joy it brought mankind. But one comes across other forms of laughter in the Scriptures with implications of sarcasm, cruelty and ungodliness. There is therefore a subtle gradation from, on the one hand, the angelic smile and harmonious laughter of the elect and, on the other, the horrible carnal laughter of the crowd mocking Jesus as he was crucified. Not to mention the sickening laughter of Lucifer. In addition, there was irony, which came somewhere between the laughter of exultation and the laughter of derision. For clerics in the thirteenth century, it implied the opposite of what was said. Could anything be more ambiguous? Everything depended on shades of meaning.The parables of Jesus were not without irony, and irony was used freely too by Saint Louis and numerous teachers such as Thomas Aquinas. But medieval people also had a strong sense that there was another kind of irony which was disparaging, rebellious, disrespectful. Here we witness the process of that evolution. The monk, representing the early Middle Ages, saw himself first and foremost as someone who shed tears, showed contrition. He cleansed himself in a wicked world.The mendicant friar, on the other hand, laughed readily like Francis of Assisi. It was his way of showing he was not a monk. One should not, however, systematically oppose the laughter of the Renaissance and the tears of the Middle Ages as Mikhail Bakhtin did in his otherwise splendid book on Rabelais and his World.They knew how to laugh in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was not always sunny and smiling. In the thirteenth century, that great saint Albert the Great, the teacher of Saint Thomas Aquinas, asserted that earthly laughter foreshadowed the laughter of paradise.

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ANGELS AND DEMONS There is still some ambivalence. Did this civilisation enslave or liberate people? The image which medieval Christians had of God as it evolved over the centuries tells us something about the twin impulses of constraint and fulfilment. From the tenth and eleventh centuries, emphasis was placed on God the Son, the Christ figure of the Last Judgement inspiring fear on occasion. Gradually, however, numerous images of an intimate, benevolent Jesus became more familiar. But the Christ of a spring-like Easter morning was nonetheless the poor, suffering Christ of the Passion. Francis of Assisi was the embodiment of this contrast. He loved laughter, happiness, Creation and the creatures within it. He also received the stigmata, bearing witness on earth, in his own flesh, to the sufferings of the crucified Christ. The earliest Friars Minor wanted to follow naked in the footsteps of the naked Christ, truly as ‘poor as Job’.We have seen how successful they were. I wish to draw attention here to the ‘angelic’ aura which surrounded the first mendicant friars, Saint Dominic but especially Saint Francis. The poor little brother had more than one encounter with angels, and it was from an angel that he received the stigmata. Messengers with a mission, as their name suggests (from the Greek angelos), angels are mentioned in both the Old and the New Testaments. But from the ninth century, systematic treatises were written about them, by the Irishman John Scotus Erigena for one. In the twelfth century, there was a flourishing body of literature, especially concerning guardian angels.These mysterious figures granted to each one of us were close and wonderfully woven into the fabric of everyday life; an image, if one were needed, of the presence of Heaven on earth. Of course, all angels inspire dread since they come from God, as Rainer Maria Rilke pointed out at a much later date. But at the time, the Church sought to reassure people. Honorius of Autun (Augustodunensis; c. 1080–c. 1157), an Englishman living near Regensburg, referred to guardian angels in his account of the truths of the faith, the Elucidarium, suggesting, however, that his knowledge of them had been recently acquired. Doubtless, guardian angels became a distinctive part of the subtle heavenly hierarchy around the year 1000. Guardian angels were invisible protectors offering extra security against the Devil.They helped in the difficult task of examining one’s

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conscience which the faithful were not in the habit of doing for themselves. They watched over each individual, commenting on or reproaching him for what he had done. In this respect, they were like permanent representatives of one’s confessor. We are beginning to recognise the twin aspects of humanism: openness with control. But above all, angels brought with them a sense of light, of familiarity, sometimes even of fantasy, in a world where there were many sources of dread.They added a link in the chain of intercessors along with the saints and the Virgin Mary. It is not by chance that the two most representative gothic statues of the thirteenth century are the beautiful statue of God the Father in Amiens and the ‘smiling angel’ in Rheims. What about the devil? Many people today think of the Middle Ages as ‘gothic’ which they associate with assorted devils, people possessed, witches, burnings at the stake, instruments of torture. This again is part of a persistent ‘dark’ tradition.Added to which there were many spectacles involving diabolical and fiendish apparitions from the ninth century onwards which seem to have given certain performers free rein to have fun and exaggerate things. In passing, I would point out that future historians might draw overhasty conclusions were they to concentrate on certain disturbing images produced for educational purposes by Western societies in the fight against smoking, alcoholism and road accidents or to make people aware of the suffering in the world caused by famine, epidemics, genocide, etc. They would have to give equal weight to those ever-present images evoking an ideal or comfortable lifestyle, making people feel pleasantly secure. The same thing was true in the Middle Ages. The writers of sermons painted an exaggerated picture of Hell in order to make Paradise more attractive.They knew full well that appealing images of heavenly bliss would have less impact on people’s imaginations than conjuring up frightful and terrifying scenes of torment. It is true that the Devil was initially a creation of Christianity and singularly elaborated upon in the early Middle Ages.There are numerous references in the Old Testament to evil spirits and loathsome powers.They are equally to be found in the New Testament. Jesus cast out many devils and was himself tempted in the desert by the Devil – diabolos in Greek, the slanderer and causer of confusion.The Gospels mention Satan, the enemy, fourteen times without defining him.They also refer to demon(s) in the singular and the plural, picking up the

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Greek idea of the daimon, favoured by Socrates and well-known to philosophers, which referred to an unnamed, often local power. It fell to the Fathers of the Church to resolve the issue of wickedness, a question of the utmost seriousness since it had to do with the problem of evil and the story in Genesis of the fateful serpent which caused the first couple to go astray. Theologians quickly rationalised matters. Devils, demons and other evil spirits became synonymous, representing the vast army of those under the command of Satan, their leader.The early Middle Ages preferred often to call him Lucifer, the ‘bearer of light’. First of the angels, created by God, he was free and good as would be Adam and Eve. But he sought to rival God thereby provoking his own fall and that of his supporters, whose clear aim was to drag men down with them. In the story of the Fall, he played a prominent role. All forms of dualism and Manicheism were rejected because Satan was circumscribed and exposed as an inferior being compared to God, having neither existent nor pre-existent form. God’s triumph was thereby guaranteed.Yet everyone was still caught up in an uncertain world where, on the one hand, you confronted the terrifying image of the Devil himself and, on the other, a motley collection of middleranking and lesser devils.The latter were in fact only spiteful pranksters, teasing people so that they broke their china or made mistakes in what they were writing. But you had to know what kind of devil you were dealing with so that the penance or exorcism was suitable. After all, a remedy could always be found. Amongst the unclean spirits cast out by Christ was a man called Legion: ‘“My name is Legion”, he said to Jesus, “for we are many”’ (Mark 5: 9). Then Jesus ordered Legion to go amongst the swine. Suddenly,there were two thousand of them and they rushed down and threw themselves into the sea.This story illustrates well the uncertainty in which Christians found themselves in the Middle Ages. One person says of himself ‘we are many’. How could one be two thousand? The different types as well as the hierarchy of devils helped them to see things more clearly; and the more Satan and his servants were flushed out, the larger were the ranks and the greater the strength of his adversaries: angels, saints, the Virgin Mary, Christ, but also the Church and all the sacraments. We have to take into account at this point the spirit of combat. There was a real ‘fear’ in the Middle Ages. Jean Delumeau, the author of a superb series of essays on Christianity and the Church, perhaps

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sometimes exaggerated it early on. But fear never overcame the will to fight even in the lowliest peasant. It is preferable, therefore, to talk of continual vigilance, of watchfulness, coupled with fear and hope. The great age of witches, of fears, of people being possessed was the era of Descartes not of Thomas Aquinas . . . God hidden in the clouds, the paternal figure of Christ at the Day of Judgement, the more fraternal image of Jesus in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. One is aware of the growing desire for heavenly values embodied in the Trinity to be given earthly form.What is there to say about the third Person? Since Antiquity, the Holy Spirit has been represented as a dove, which is a beautiful image.When God recreated the world, the first creation having been washed away in the Flood, a dove brought Noah an olive branch, which signified that a new era was beginning.When John baptised Jesus in the river Jordan, a dove came down from Heaven, as the voice of God was heard proclaiming Jesus as his son. Since the time of the earliest Christians, the dove has symbolised the soul flying up to Paradise.Animals had a prominent place in medieval humanism. Their symbolic role was crucial. But, as Jacques Voisenet has pointed out, they were generally on the side of the Devil, of evil. In Genesis, God granted Adam the power to name them. But they were most reluctant to obey him. Nor did they always guide him towards salvation. Though the dove may have been divine, coming down from Heaven and showing the way for man to follow, it seems that men and women in the Middle Ages had difficulty in conceiving God in the form of a bird. God appeared to them above all in anthropomorphic guises. The liturgy framed things properly.The disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, fifty days after the resurrection and ten days before the Ascension. Jesus ascended to Heaven and would only return at the End of Time. But he sent down the Holy Spirit which enlivened the young Church, gave it the gift of tongues, charisma, the power of healing, inspiration, and the zeal and fervour to convert people.The Acts of the Apostles evokes this in referring to ‘tongues of fire’ which sat upon each of the disciples.This scene was frequently represented in the Middle Ages, but tongues of fire were associated with Pentecost and not easily transposed. The dove represented a stronger, more realistic symbol. It fitted better the different forms adopted by the Holy Spirit, such as the Annunciation, when the Spirit came upon the young woman and

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Christ was conceived, and the more abstract representations of the Trinity. The dove of the Holy Spirit also had its ‘political’ uses. The Capetian kings of France emphasised the story of the baptism of Clovis where the appearance of the dove sanctified the dynasty. Admittedly, it was not easy to understand the Trinity and even less so to penetrate the somewhat abstract mystery of the Holy Spirit. It was more difficult still to admit a priori that a divine being could take the form of a bird. Nonetheless, Christians in the Middle Ages felt that the dove introduced into daily life something of the sacred, and crowds were often rallied by the rushing wind of Pentecost, the tongues of fire and the purity of the dove.The Holy Spirit embodied the fervour of the prophets, the enthusiasm for reform, the renewal of the Church and the announcement of the End of Time which would precede the Last Judgement. For this reason, the medieval Church placed particular emphasis upon spirituality. It drew attention to the presence of the Holy Spirit in the major sacraments of the liturgy: baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist and ordination.As a consequence, we still have several wellknown prayers such as Veni Creator (the ninth century prayer,‘Come creator Spirit’) and Veni sancte Spiritus (the twelfth-century prayer, ‘Come Holy Spirit’). Without Pentecost there would have been no Church, and the emphasis upon spirituality was a way of strengthening the foundations of the faith and, as usual, of exercising control. Heretics often referred to the Holy Spirit . . . The Holy Spirit was equally a source of inspiration to older religious orders seeking renewal as well as to the growing number of younger orders, which of course included the mendicants. It caused the dove to take flight and breathed life into the disconcerting image of the Trinity. We should also recognise the increasing importance of various brethren of the Holy Spirit.These groups were particularly thriving in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and they helped to make medieval humanism a living presence in hospitals and other institutions of urban society.The brethren were bound together by prayer and by mutual aid, which the faithful themselves initiated. They offered something to people both in towns and in the countryside who had begun to feel that structures were breaking down. The interdependence which had slowly developed from the eleventh century was in need of some renewal, a new ‘breath of life’.And the

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fear of dying alone was one notable, if not unique, example of the loss of a sense of solidarity. Prayers for the dead had to be said on one’s behalf to make sure that one would at least go to Purgatory if not to Paradise. I do not believe that the rapid expansion of these groups of brethren can be explained by a resurgence of the plagues in 1348, as others have suggested. There was a deeper crisis in the system, in the whole body of society. Characterised as the auxiliary of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit brought succour and strength to the faithful.The brethren of the Holy Spirit granted it privileged status, but so too did the many groups that grew up and which invoked the name of one or more patron saints.As well as praying for each other and helping one another, they clubbed together to provide for the poor.The secular authorities were often suspicious of them because they set themselves up on their own initiative and managed their own affairs. For its part, the Church made sure that they remained within the bounds laid down for worship, for processions and for charity. Pictorial representations of the Trinity being raised up, with God the Father bearing the crucified Christ and above them the dove of the Holy Spirit, multiplied throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and had a distinctly theological function. As one example, I would cite Masaccio’s splendid Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican church in Florence. Supporters of a new kind of reform in the fifteenth century existed alongside the brethren, though they were hostile to them because their belief in Purgatory and indulgences helped define their very nature. The reformists developed a theology critical of the Roman Catholic Church that was in large measure built around the Holy Spirit, and they were very much to the fore in the sixteenth century.There was Luther, of course, but the Swiss Ulrich Zwingli and the Frenchman Jean Calvin used the Holy Spirit as a weapon with which to attack the Roman Catholic Church. That said, I would like to put forward another idea which may well be challenged, and it is this. The Trinity on its own was insufficient, and so a fourth, female Person, the Virgin Mary, was incorporated during the Middle Ages.The Reformers were in no doubt about it, denouncing the ‘Mariolatry’ of the established Church.

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MARY THE PROTECTRESS. DYING ‘IN THE FAITH’ However, the Catholic Church only affirmed its dogma concerning the Virgin Mary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the Immaculate Conception was promulgated in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950).And in both she was confirmed as subordinate to God. Though they had not been officially promulgated as dogmas, these two theological notions were already firmly entrenched. In the twelfth century, the idea took hold that the mother of the Saviour was incorruptible in death and that she ascended to Heaven (the Assumption) in both body and spirit. There was a passionate debate in the fourteenth century as to whether the Virgin Mary was stained by ‘original sin’ like the rest of humankind or whether she had been preserved from it so that Christ, who was without sin, should not be born of a sinner (the Immaculate Conception). The liturgy and, above all, her devout followers maintained that the Virgin Mary was entirely pure from the moment of her conception. There was a longstanding cult of the Virgin Mary within Christianity which was particularly strong in the Greek Orthodox Church in Byzantium. It developed widely in the eleventh century and from then on there was an endless succession of sermons, hymns, services, works of art, simple images, accounts of miracles, plays . . .The Ave Maria (Hail Mary) also dates from the twelfth century.And at the end of the Divine Comedy Dante encapsulated the paradox which so fascinated people in the Middle Ages: Virgin mother, daughter of thy Son humble and exalted above all creatures fixed goal of the eternal plan, you so ennobled human nature that He who made it did not disdain to be its creature . . .

What we have here, first of all, is a contradiction – apparently overcome and transcended – between equality and inequality (‘mother, daughter of your son’). It represents the contradiction at the heart of the feudal system and of all relationships between higher and lower orders, between Heaven and earth.The divine dominion of the Virgin Mary is best captured in the extraordinary collection of miniatures, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which the King of Castile,Alfonso X the Wise, dedicated to her in the thirteenth century. It is the finest manuscript in the Escorial library.

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People called upon the Virgin Mary to intercede with her son, who was God. It was therefore difficult to resist the temptation of addressing her directly, especially to ask for a miracle.The Church, which sought to avoid the worship of God being transposed to the saints, was less particular so far as theVirgin Mary was concerned. No-one more than Joan of Arc, a simple young girl, could have embodied better in people’s imaginations and often too in their beliefs the idea of Heaven coming down to earth, which was so characteristic of medieval humanism. The idea of a ladder between Heaven and earth, and earth and Heaven, was fulfilled with the Assumption and Immaculate Conception and is described in Jacob’s dream:‘. . . and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to Heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it’(Genesis 28:12).It linked two extremes, the world of the spirit and that of the flesh, with spirits both ascending and descending. Sometimes, of course, devils emerged from the bowels of the earth, but, however much they tried, they could not reach the ladder.At worst, they caused people to fall or delayed their attempts to climb it. The marked separation of Heaven and earth which had persisted until the tenth and eleventh centuries was irreversibly broken down. Scholasticism, which was at one and the same time a quest for a fuller understanding of God and for a greater knowledge of mankind – both theology and philosophy, followed the same path. It is true to say, is it not, that with the rise of religious fraternities towards the end of the Middle Ages, people became painfully aware of death being all around them? People died younger and much more quickly in the Middle Ages and death itself was more unpredictable, more overwhelming and mysterious than it is today. On the other hand, men and women were less fearful of death than of what happened to them afterwards.They were concerned about their salvation which was determined in the closing moments of their life.As Saint Francis de Sales said in the seventeenth century, referring to the suicide of the traitor Judas: ‘in the instant between the rope tightening and the victim being strangled, Christ could still enter in’. That was an entirely medieval idea. Not dying alone, suddenly, unprepared, but receiving the help and prayers of the brethren gave the added assurance that one would die in the faith and be granted forgiveness as one’s life ended. This was a civilisation preoccupied with eschatology, living in anticipation of the Last Judgement, which in fact gave people a reason

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to live, to move forward.The idea of Purgatory simply reinforced their aspirations. Their concern as individuals for their own personal salvation coincided with another larger concern: that of family solidarity or of solidarity with their lineage, from an aristocratic viewpoint.The strong ties which bound together the living were rooted in faithfulness to the dead, as the liturgy for the dead made abundantly clear. The living brought succour to the dead, just as the dead brought succour to the living, which was not necessarily a morbid way of looking at things. In Antiquity, as we have already seen, the dead and any possible source of contamination were cast out of the city and left at the roadside.The living went to pay their respects but did so too as a way of keeping them under control, because the dead represented a threat if they were neglected by the living. But with the advent of Christianity, from the fourth century on, the dead were placed as close as possible to the church, near relics, and then inside the church and within towns. The urbanisation of the dead went hand in hand with a similar process affecting medieval civilisation in general, as Pierre Toubert has described. One only has to remember the furore in the seventeenth century when Molière was denied a Christian burial by the Archbishop of Paris and his body taken outside the city walls. A great change took place, however, in the fourteenth century, as the fear of Hell and of what might happen after death diminished. Instead, fear was concentrated on the moment of death itself with imagery of the corpse, the skeleton, the death’s head becoming more pronounced. People’s sensibility became attuned to the macabre and images proliferated of unrestrained and irrepressible figures winding their way towards the grave in the dance of death. Echoing in some measure the idea of celestial values coming down to earth from Heaven, death seemed to rise up from the depths of Hell at a time when famine, plague and warfare cast their shadow over everything. But music and dance, bringing paradise on earth, gave men some consolation in this hour of general crisis. The medieval world was full of music and song. It invented polyphony and encouraged the use of the organ. But devotion to the dead was surely the means whereby the Church maintained its influence? There is no clear-cut answer to this question. The medieval Church was not an unfeeling institution, coldly calculating how to exercise its

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control over society and coldly determining its political approach. It shared the same beliefs as the faithful, and though it derived power and profit from those beliefs, it saw itself essentially as an educator and a provider of necessary services. There were certainly profiteers and cynics within the Church, as there are in any organisation or public body.The aim of every institution is to make sure that it survives and maintains its influence, which in itself does not cause damage. But questions arise when institutions do more harm than good, which explains why movements for reform are everywhere to be found. One need only look at the things people say today about the State, which has taken over many of the functions performed in earlier times by the Church. The economic power of monasteries weakened in the twelfth century due to a drop in the donations they received as well as to the growth of towns and of commerce.The monasteries therefore introduced a number of special religious offerings that the living could make on behalf of the dead or for their own benefit after they had died, which took the form of alms and of particular donations for prayers and masses to be said.This in turn gave rise to Libri memoriales, books of remembrance,in which were inscribed the names of the dead who were to be remembered in prayer and the dates on which masses or other services were to be held. I have already drawn attention to the establishment of this culture of remembrance which altered the way people behaved. Chronicles also started to appear and they were an even better way of recalling the life of those who had departed. Certain individuals have deduced from this that people in the Middle Ages were therefore beginning to develop a sense of history. I reject this on the grounds that they had neither the technique nor the desire to write history. They made a simple distinction between a chronicle which described events and a story, an explanatory narrative with a thread running through it.There was nothing historical, in the modern sense of the word, about this second type of chronicle, l’estoire (story). Such stories invariably used conventional devices such as providence, fortune or man’s stupidity to explain a particular person’s fate. On the other hand, chronicles were undoubtedly a way of remembering. History as a branch of knowledge which presented its material rationally did not develop until the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. The question of lineage was of the utmost importance within the aristocracy, since any claim one might have to a fief was legitimised by

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one’s ancestry.The dead were therefore doubly important.They were shown respect in a religious sense, but equally they were the guarantors of a person’s inheritance. Books of remembrance reinforced the respect people had for their ancestors, and this, in turn, increased their prestige, which was all the greater because it was granted posthumously. And the living too derived greater authority from this. The great vogue for inventing ancestors which developed as a consequence meant that people looked back beyond Christianity to ancient times. Thus, as Colette Beaune has shown, the French monarchy was endowed by certain clerics with a heroic Trojan forebear, Francion, a friend of Aeneas. The prestige of Virgil’s Aeneid was not in any way incompatible with Christianity. After all, it was Virgil who guided Dante through Hell and Purgatory in The Divine Comedy. Remembrance of the dead was reinforced by growing religious observance relating to Purgatory, which gave the aristocracy ‘an additional biography’, as Pierre Chaunu neatly put it. Gradually, the whole social elite shared the same concern, and this was particularly true of merchant-bankers.Towards the end of the Middle Ages, it even spread in a more modest form to the lower orders, including artisans. Here again, the role of the brotherhoods was not inconsiderable. Through memory, mankind’s sense of itself was enriched. Humanism was definitely not a product of the Renaissance.

6 EPILOGUE 1 At the end of these conversations and in the autumn of my life,I would like to say a few words about the way I have undertaken my research on the Middle Ages and where that research has led me. I do this both for myself and for other lovers of history. My quest for knowledge and my reflections about this period, which have not yet come to an end, form the backbone of my career as a historian. Though it expresses well my own experience, to say that history is a fine yet difficult discipline is somewhat banal. I have tried to reconstitute a large fragment of the civilisation into which I was born and in which I have lived, to shed light upon it and to explain it. I would also like to elucidate the circumstances in which it faces the future, which I cannot foretell as the historian is not a soothsayer. But I would like that future to be European, as I belong to that part of humanity which lives and is evolving within a set of concentric circles: local or regional, national, European, international. We are living at a point in history when the European dimension should be made to emerge more fully, taking the Middle Ages as an essential point of reference, not out of nostalgia but as a springboard into the future. History is written, as I have pointed out, on the basis of documents which historians use as their source material. If they shape that source material, they do so rationally and ‘scientifically’, showing respect for their documentary sources.They should therefore have a sense of humility, knowing how much they depend on that material. This was the spirit and professional approach I adopted in building up a picture of the Middle Ages, using the greatest number of sources possible. I like to think I have enlarged the range of texts available by looking in particular at literary sources as well as more widely distributed forms of literature such as manuals for confessors and exempla. The work of the historian is also fundamentally one of interpretation, of bringing source material to life and of imagination.What we have here are my Middle Ages.

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However, I think that every true historian, like any other scholar, should be concerned with the truth. Even if I do not think that there is a unique historical truth, I believe the historian should strive to produce something that is true. He must be totally different from a novelist. A good historical novel exists within the margins of ‘real’ history, but does not form part of historical knowledge. And even if works of the imagination are a form of prey for the historian, they cannot be a source of inspiration. History, as I have come to realise, only becomes clear in the long term. I have also realised that a historian only understands a period in the past if he takes account of the present. I have lived both in the Middle Ages and the present simultaneously and had a more intense sense of the present as a medievalist.The past in general lives on in the present, but the Middle Ages are especially alive and inherently part of today’s world and will, I am sure, affect it profoundly in the future. My Middle Ages are born out of a process of reflection on the past, the present and the future. Even if medieval exoticism was at times a refuge for me, my unfinished quest was a precious source of nourishment in relation to the present. It was a rich and powerful source enabling me to achieve a better understanding of the present. Alain Guerreau has severely criticised any attempt to trace the origins of what is happening today back to the Middle Ages1. In my own quest for the Middle Ages, I have had a strong sense of its exotic difference, or to use Guerreau’s own term, its otherness. He is seeking total coherence in his quest for the Middle Ages. I too have looked for a similar coherence in a lifetime’s reflection and have used the word civilisation to describe it. I continue to think that a certain sort of society and a system of values developed between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries which constituted ‘medieval civilisation’. For some years, I have been increasingly struck by tensions existing within the medieval world (between man and God, reason and faith, the soul and the body, war and peace, pain and pleasure) and by the limits of the power of the Church, of monarchies, seigneuries and universities. But I still believe it possible to think of the history of the West (or of Europe) in Christian times over the whole span of the ‘long 1

A. Guerreau, ‘A la recherche de la cohérence globale et de la logique dominante de l’Europe féodale’, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet and O. G. Oexle (eds) Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus, Présence du féodalisme et présent de la féodalité,The Presence of Feudalism (2002), see particularly p. 206.

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Middle Ages’, without resorting to clichés or to flights of historical fantasy involving periods of growth, stagnation or decline. Even less does one need to break it up into little chunks. Looked at in such a way, the Middle Ages disintegrate into nothing more than a succession of legacies. Guerreau’s error, in my view, is that he does not explain the relationship between continuity and change, or even a complete break. His model does not include the long timeframe. How do two worlds exist side by side? A civilisation is always changing.When does one civilisation give birth to another and what does it pass on? I am currently trying to trace and to define this long process of gestation as I think about the part played by the Middle Ages in the construction of Europe. The question has been raised as to whether the future European constitution should contain some acknowledgement of what presentday Europe owes to medieval Christianity, or at least some mention of the contribution it made. My own position is clear. I do not think that a constitution is the right place to refer to such things. It should simply reaffirm two principles: the secular – that is to say the neutral – status of the institutions and respect for religious freedom. On the other hand, books describing the way Europe has been and continues to be shaped, especially text books, should I think state what our civilisation owes to Christianity. Although, in referring simply to Catholicism, one is not taking into account the whole of Christianity, as the Christianity of Antiquity had existed at an earlier date and the impressive Eastern tradition developed alongside Catholicism. Subsequently, there was the Reformation, followed by the Revolution which set things in motion on the bumpy road to democracy which is only marginally Christian. People are not sufficiently aware, what is more, that Europe is no longer the centre of gravity so far as Christianity is concerned. And this was equally true at the beginning of the Middle Ages. What Norbert Elias calls the ‘civilisation of manners’, which is reflected in our daily lives, is a legacy of medieval Europe, just as the originality of our intellectual life and the direction it has taken are equally a product of the medieval world. Saint Anselm (1033–1109) described ‘faith seeking intellectual justification’ (fides quaerens intellectum), thus expressing the way in which the civilisation as a whole aspired to rationalism. Scholasticism represented the flowering of this aspiration, which gave rise in turn to

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modern philosophy, though it no longer makes any reference to God or Christianity. I am still struck by the contrast which exists between the horror expressed by people of the early Middle Ages for anything new and their great capacity for innovation.This was particularly true of Churchmen. Far from recognising their work as in any way progressive, as we saw, they put forward various theories about the Ages of Humanity, maintaining we had reached the lowest point and that history was waning, etc.Yet at the same time, the Church and most lay people, following the example of Augustine, opposed Messianism, millenarianism and other great apocalyptic movements. The existence of such men and women shows that, in the main, they did not believe that the End of Time was nigh. Only a noisy, flamboyant and destabilising minority regularly highlighted these things. What better examples could one choose to illustrate this than the superb works inspired by the Apocalypse! When I look at the eighthcentury miniatures by the Spaniard Beatus of Liebana illustrating the Commentary on the Apocalypse or the fourteenth-century tapestry in the cathedral at Angers, I see reflected in them great fears, but I also see artistic dynamism rather more than existential anxiety. The Middle Ages remained untouched by any idea of progress, and I would not wish to suggest otherwise. Yet I do recognise that popes, emperors and even peasants all acted as if they both believed in and wanted progress. The rural economy ‘took off’ through the efforts of nobles and peasants.And in towns, nobles, middle-class and other townspeople wanted greater hygiene, more orderliness, harmony and beauty. As we have also already said,where medieval society is open to most criticism and where its civilising action failed, there one discovers the darker side of achievement and perhaps of progress. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, long-lasting structures of persecution appeared on the scene.They were the counterpart of those structures which contributed positively to the organisation of society.These were the darkest days of this whole period with pogroms, the confinement of lepers, the accusation and burning to death of ‘sodomites’, the inhuman repression of heretics, and the generalised use of torture by tribunals of the Inquisition. Indeed, medieval people thought that Christianity had achieved unquestionable successes, but not without difficulties and hardships. They sought to defend its purity and to protect it against anything which threatened its stability. But the end does not justify the means.

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The Western World, still all-powerful in the twenty-first century, should remember this bitter lesson. When one has the sense, perhaps justifiably, that things have reached a peak, that ultimate power has been achieved, then the absolute need to feel secure gives rise to certain consequences of which we are only too aware.We have here that tension I referred to which occurs in all cultures.The weaknesses and errors of medieval civilisation are the obverse of its enlightened views.This was also the time of hospitals, despite the slender means they had at their disposal, of benevolent money lending, of charity, which was constantly evoked and preserved its original meaning of love. Although I am an agnostic, I recognise in their search for salvation a longing or a call to hope, which medieval Churchmen endlessly inculcated. The theological ‘virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Charity are well-known. A Franciscan, Jacques-Guy Bougerol, has spoken quite rightly of a ‘theology of hope’.This is what he said: Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas appeared simultaneously at the high point of the Latin Middle Ages. For Bonaventure, the certainty of hope was personal: if I persevere to the very end, I hope to achieve God’s bliss, and the certainty of my hope is personal. His goal was difficult,‘arduous’ and great. It was God Himself. Thomas Aquinas proceeded differently. He studied the passion of hope and showed how man transcended his own nature through magnanimity, which was the highest form of human hope and self-reliance. Through grace, hope became a theological virtue, the object of which was God.

This was the most fundamental aspiration of all. In spite of poverty, the ravages of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war, famine and pestilence and all the violence, which at least equalled that of our own time, hope remained the principal legacy of the Middle Ages. I often think of the usurer of Liège who was referred to by the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach (1180–c. 1240) in his book On Miracles. He was the subject of one of the 800 or so exempla in this collection of brief accounts which were said to be true and which preachers used as salutary lessons to convince their listeners. After his death, the usurer appeared to his wife and set her a test, asking her to demonstrate how much she loved him. She had to do a penance which would be sufficient to get him out of Purgatory as quickly as possible. His wife therefore took up residence as a recluse in the graveyard. After seven years, the usurer appeared to her again, wearing a robe with horizontal stripes of two colours, half white and

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half black.Thanks to her, he said, he was now half way to paradise. If she continued for another seven years, he would appear once more as he was about to achieve eternal life, clothed all in white. This was indeed what came to pass. We find in this physical arithmetic some of the most telling characteristics of medieval civilisation: the use of symbolism and of imagery, control over time, the couple as established by Adam and Eve, and the effort of achieving salvation.Above all, people aspired to hope, on earth as in Heaven. And I still find astonishing the phrase which Caesarius of Heisterbach added: ‘Purgatory represents hope’. I am tempted to say: the Middle Ages represent hope.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JACQUES LE GOFF’S WORK

SOLE WORKS Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age (Paris: PUF, 1956) Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1957, 1985); as Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993) Le Moyen Age (Paris: Bordas, 1962) La Civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Arthaud, 1964; revised edition, Paris: Flammarion, 1982); as Medieval Civilization 400–1500 (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988) Das Hochmittelalter (Frankfurt: Fischerweltgeschichte, 1965) Pour un autre Moyen Age.Temps, travail et culture en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1977, 1991); as Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981, 1991); as The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) Intervista sulla Storia (Bari: Laterza, 1982) I’Imaginaire Médiéval: Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1985, 1991); as The Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) La Bourse et la vie. Economie et religion au Moyen Age (Paris: Hachette, 1986); as Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 1988) Histoire et mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); as History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) La Vieille Europe et la nôtre (Paris: Seuil, 1994) Saint-Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) L’Europe raconté aux jeunes (Paris: Seuil, 1996) Une Vie pour l’histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 1996) Pour l’Amour des villes, interview with Jean Lebrun (Paris:Textuel, 1997) Saint-François d’Assise (Paris: Gallimard, 1999); as Saint Francis of Assisi (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) Un autre Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1999) Un Moyen Age en images (Paris: Hazan, 2000)

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Cinq Personnages d’hier pour aujourd’hui: Bouddha, Abelard, Saint-François, Michelet, Marc Bloch (Paris: Fabrique, 2001) L’Europe est-elle née au moyen âge? (Paris: Seuil, 2003) Le Dieu du Moyen Age (Paris: Bayard, 2003)

WITH CO-AUTHORS AND BOOK SERIES With Pierre Nora (eds), Faire de l’Histoire, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1974, 1986); 10 essays translated as Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) With Roger Chartier and Jacques Revel (eds), La Nouvelle Histoire (Paris: Retz, 1978; new abridged edition, Brussels: Complexe, 1988) With Claude Bremond and Jean-Claude Schmitt, L’Exemplum. In Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age, 40 (Turnhout: Brépols, 1982) With André Chédeville and Jacques Rossiaud, La Ville en France au Moyen Age, vol. 2 in L’Histoire de la France urbaine (dir. Georges Duby), (Paris: Seuil, 1988) With Réné Rémond (eds), Historie de la France religiouse, 4 vols (vol. 1, Des Origines au XIVe siècle, edited by Jacques Le Goff), (Paris: Seuil, 1988) L’Etat et les pouvoirs, vol. 2, in A. Burgière and J. Revel (eds) L’Histoire de France (Paris: Seuil, 1989); new edition as La longue durée de l’Etat (Paris: Seuil, 2002) (ed.), L’Homme médiéval (Paris: Seuil, 1989, 1994); as The Medieval World (London: Collins and Brown, 1990) With Guy Lobrichon, Le Moyen Age aujourd’hui: trois regards contemporains sur le Moyen Age: histoire, théologie, cinéma (Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1997) With Jean-Claude Schmitt, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Fayard, 1999) With Eric Palazzo, Jean-Claude Bonne and Marie-Noël Colette, Le Sacre royal à l’époque de Saint Louis d’après le manuscrit latin 1246 de la BNF (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)

BIOGRAPHIES AND REVIEWS Joachim Heinzle (ed.), Modernes Mittelalter (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1994) Miri Rubin (ed.), The Works of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenge of Medieval History (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997) Jacques Revel and Jean-Claude Schmitt (eds), L’Ogre historien. Autour de Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) Peter Lineham and Janet Nelson (eds), The Medieval World (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)

Bibliography

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Alain Guerreau, L’Avenir d’un passé incertain. Quelle histoire du Moyen Age au XXIe siècle? (Paris: Seuil, 2001) Jacques Dalarun (ed.), Le Moyen Age en lumière (Paris: Fayard, 2002) Nathalie Fryde, Pierre Monnet, Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus, Présence du Féodalisme et présent de la féodalité. The Presence of Feudalism, (Gottingen:Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, 2002)

INDEX

Abelard, 16, 58, 59, 96, 97 Albert, Michel, 52 All Souls’ Day, 74 Ampère, Jean-Jacques, 33 Annales, 1, 14, 18, 19, 20, 65, 97 Anselm, St, 98, 123 Antiquity, 11, 12, 13, 14, 25–6, 27, 28, 29, 30, 40,41, 49, 57, 69, 83, 84, 88, 96, 112, 117, 123 late, 23, 24, 40, 73 Antoninus, St, 61, 63 Aquinas, St Thomas, 13, 33, 57, 59, 62, 76–7, 96, 108, 112, 125 archaeology, 10, 11, 14–15, 66 Aristotle, 26, 35, 52, 57, 59, 69, 108 Assisi, St Francis of, 59–61, 63, 95, 96, 97, 101, 108, 109 Augustine, St, 25, 26, 62, 76, 77, 100, 101, 103, 124 Augustulus, Romulus, 23, 40, 41 Averroes, 57 Beatus of Liebana, 124 Bernard, St, 56, 97 Bloch, Marc, 19, 46, 66, 87, 97 Boethius, 100 Bonaventure, St, 125 Boniface, Pope, 75 Books of Hours, 75 Bougerol, Jacques-Guy, 125 Braudel, Fernand, 18, 19 Brien,Abbé, 47, 55 Brunelleschi, 31 Burckhardt, Jacob, 28–9, 39 Byzantine Empire, 33, 40 Byzantium, 23, 30, 34, 70, 82, 115 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 125–6 calendars, 69, 71–2, 73, 74, 75 Calvin, Jean, 100, 114

Carné, Marcel, 4n, 5 Caroline minuscule, 12–13, 23, 25 Cathars, 92, 102 Chalcedon, Council of, 99 Charlemagne, 12, 13, 23, 25, 32, 33, 34, 36, 41, 56, 72, 80, 85, 100 Chateaubriand, 5, 16, 27 Chenu, Father Marie-Dominique, 58 Chrétien de Troyes, 36, 98 Cicero, 26, 30 codex, 12, 23, 89 Columbanus, St, 83 Comestor, Peter, 58 confession, 37, 38, 55, 58 Constantine, Emperor, 24 Constantinople, Council of, 99 Corpus Christi, festival of, 69, 70–1, 75 Creed, 99–100 Crusades, 43–4, 82, 86, 102–3, 105, 106 Dante, 39, 54, 61, 115, 119 Dionysius Exiguus, 72 documents, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 65, 121 Dominicans see Mendicants Duby, Georges, 2, 35, 43, 86, 87 Du Cange, Charles, 26 Dury,Victor, 18–19 Ecole des Chartes, 16, 17 Ecole Normale Supérieure, 10, 46 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 18–19, 51 Enlightenment, 5, 16, 17, 26, 27, 52 epigraphy, 10, 11 Eucharist, 69, 70, 71, 74, 113; see also Corpus Christi exempla, 51, 121, 125 Febvre, Lucien, 10, 18, 19, 66 Feudalism, 10, 17, 68, 86–7, 103

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Flandrin, Jean-Louis, 107 Franciscans see mendicants Francis de Sales, St, 116 Frugoni, Chiara, 54 Giotto, 39, 54 Gothic, 5, 17, 27, 39 Gramsci,Antonio, 59 Gratian, 89–90 Gregory the Great, Pope, 34, 98–9 Gregory VII, Pope, 36–7, 85 Gregory IX, Pope, 91 Guerreau,Alain, 122, 123 Gutenberg, Johann, 31 Haskins, Charles Homer, 35 heresy, 37, 59, 91–2, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 124 Holy Roman Empire, 29, 36 Holy Spirit, 99, 100, 112–14 Honorius of Autun, 109 Hugo,Victor, 3, 16 humanism, 13, 25, 26, 93, 96, 98, 100, 102, 105, 106, 108, 113, 116, 119 Hundred Years War, 83–4, 103 images, 15–16, 33–4, 65, 70, 71, 75, 101, 115, 117, 124 Inquisition, 37, 91, 92, 124 intellectuals, 54, 55–6, 59, 63, 86 Irene, Empress, 34 Islam, 34, 40, 41, 56, 70, 82, 83, 102, 103, 104 Ivanhoe see Scott,Walter Jerusalem, 35, 82, 105–6 Jesuits, 62 Jews, 2, 37, 43, 49, 53, 57, 105–6 Joachim of Fiore, 76, 100 Joan of Arc, 29, 84, 92, 116 Job, 98–9 Joinville, Jean, sire de, 95–6, 97, 107 Jubilee, 75 Judaism, 34, 70, 75, 84 Keller, Christopher, 26 Koran see Islam Lateran Council, Fourth, 37–8, 55, 70, 106 laughter, 95, 107–8, 109 law, 89–90, 91

Le Bras, Gabriel, 89 Le Goff, Jacques, published works, 46, 47, 49, 51, 54, 55, 63, 96, 97, 98 Lenoir,Alexandre, 16 Lombard, Maurice, 11, 18–19 Lombard, Pierre, 57, 58 Lopez, Robert Sabbatino, 35 Louis IX, St, 43, 52, 68, 90–1, 95–6, 97, 101, 103, 106–7, 108 Luther, Martin, 29, 31, 32, 34, 77, 80, 100, 114 Machiavelli, 40 Manicheism, 92, 101, 111 Marseilles, 9, 10 Mediterranean Sea, 31, 40, 82, 83 mendicants, 33, 51, 58, 60, 61, 63, 108, 109, 113 mentality/mentalité, 7, 16, 20, 46 Michel, Henri, 3, 4, 6, 11 Michelet, Jules, 16, 20, 29 millenarianism, 21, 61, 75–6, 124 modernity, 28 Mollat du Jourdain, Michel, 11, 48, 81 Mont Saint-Michel, 6 Musée des Monuments Français, 16 Nicaea, Council of, 34, 39 Nora, Pierre, 46 Notre Dame de Paris see Hugo,Victor Odoacer, 23, 40 Olivi, Peter John, 61, 63 Otto III, Emperor, 85 palaeography, 11, 17 Panofsky, Erwin, 32, 33 Pastoureau movement, 43 Péguy, Charles, 5 Perrin, Charles Edmond, 11, 48 Pétain, Philippe, 5–6, 9 Peter the Chanter, 58 Petrarch, 5, 25, 27, 31 Pisano, Nicola, 31 Pizard, Henri, 10 Polanyi, Karl, 39, 52, 62 Popular Front, 3 Purgatory, 62, 78–9, 80, 90, 93, 114, 117, 119, 125, 126 Rabelais, 5, 29, 108 Reconquest/Reconquista, 23, 31, 82, 104

Index relics, 84–5, 95, 107, 117 Richard the Lion Heart, 104 Rienzi, Cola di, 27 Rienzi,Wagner opera, 27 Sainte Chapelle, 107 scholastics, 57, 62, 116, 123 Scott,Walter, 1, 2, 3, 6, 27, 104 scriptoria, 12, 56, 57 scrolls, 12 seigneury, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 103, 122 sermons, 21, 51, 59, 66, 115 Sorbonne, 10, 11,18, 46, 47, 48 Tacitus, 30 Tavernier, Bertrand, 97 Tempier, Stephen/Etienne, 59 Thomas à Kempis, 101 Toubert, Pierre, 86, 97, 117 Toulon, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10 Toulouse, 6 tournament, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9

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travel, 31, 63, 81, 85 troubadour, 4, 16 Truce of God, 104 universities, 13, 36, 44, 47, 50, 56–8, 63, 122 Urban II, Pope, 102, 104 Urban IV, Pope, 70, usury, 37, 50, 52, 53 Verlaine, Paul, 5 Vichy regime, 5 Viollet-le-Duc, 17 Virgil, 119 Virgin Mary, 34, 101, 110, 114, 115–16 Visiteurs du Soir, Les see Carné, Marcel Voltaire, 27 Wallenstein, Gen., 31 Zeno, 23