The Historical Present: Medievalism and Modernity 9781472599230, 9781441110572, 9781441109491

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Preface

Medievalism is an established part of cultural studies, and an area of central concern for those studying and teaching medieval history. Medievalism can nevertheless be distinguished from traditional medieval history because it is not directly concerned with the study of the Middle Ages themselves. Rather, in line with a wider move from facts to representation, it is a genre of academic discourse that looks at how the Middle Ages have been portrayed in subsequent eras. Medievalism thus conceived began in the 1970s. At that stage it mainly dealt with depictions of the Middle Ages in the art and literature of the Romantic movement. More recently, popular culture including movies such as Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf has become a particular focus. This book will, however, go in the opposite direction and interpret modern academic attitudes towards the Middle Ages as forms of medievalism. Examining the varieties of academic understandings of the Middle Ages presents us with potentialities that are different from those associated with analyses of medievalism as expressed through art, literature, or popular culture. The main argument of this work is that focusing on historians’ and intellectuals’ attitudes towards the Middle Ages is not only interesting per se, but also a means of coming to grips with modernity itself. In other words, academic understandings of the Middle Ages are particularly useful indicators of wider modern intellectual and cultural developments. This sense that ideas about the past in general and the Middle Ages in particular might have a special significance within modernity is based on the proposition that the relationship between historiography and philosophy in our epoch is closer than has been the case at any other time in Western history. This main argument carries with it a number of broad proposals, all of which are developed throughout the work. Perhaps the most fundamental of these proposals is that modernity’s sense of the past is the product of the historical consciousness of the nineteenth century and is therefore inseparable from the philosophical culture of that time. Along these lines, it will be suggested that medieval history as we know it today developed within a tension between Romanticism and Idealism, the dominant intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, and that nineteenth-century thinking has continued to inform recent and current attitudes towards history, historiography and the Middle Ages. A loose definition of modernity might be useful at this early stage. The

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arguments and proposals of this book fall in with the idea that we may speak of a modern intellectual epoch – namely modernity – that began around 1800. The beginning of modernity is a much discussed question. If there is a traditional view, it would be that a new and more dynamic outlook emerged in association with, or perhaps as a result of, the French Revolution. This interpretation can be seen, for example, in John Grumley’s History and Totality (1989). An alternative viewpoint encapsulated in John McGowan’s Postmodernism and its Critics (1991) has, however, had more influence on this book. McGowan drew attention to the significance of the philosophical works of Immanuel Kant, which were written in the 1780s and 1790s. McGowan suggested that elements in Kant’s system played a part in the formation of certain important ideas in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that the core ideas of Postmodernism can be traced back through Romanticism to specific Kantian concepts. Despite its name, Postmodernism therefore lies within modernity, not after it. McGowan’s thinking has been supported in various ways by more recent scholarship on Kant. Ian Hunter’s Rival Enlightenments (2001), for example, points to a tension between a metaphysical tradition that stretched back from Kant to Leibnitz and beyond on the one hand, and a school of civic or political philosophies on the other. The ultimate ascendency of the former within the German Enlightenment – a process Hunter describes – adds weight to the idea that Kant-inspired metaphysics played an important role in the formation and persistence of what we call modernity. Kant’s influence on modern thought has also been discussed in detail by Karl Ameriks in works such as Kant and the Historical Turn (2006). These recent approaches to Kant dovetail with the aim of this book, which is to further our understanding of modernity, and of how we moderns see ourselves. As part of this aim, it will be suggested that Kant’s sense of the potential historicity of reason was the foundation of the defining relationship between historiography and philosophy as conceived within modernity. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge those who have influenced the development of my ideas. Here I must begin with John O Ward. I was lucky enough to have John as my main undergraduate teacher of medieval history at Sydney University, and as my honours-year and doctoral supervisor. When I was at Sydney University John Prior introduced me to Annales history and the crusades, Martin Stone allowed me to glimpse the rigours and the delights of ancient history and Stephen Gaukroger and Udo Thiel brought early-modern philosophy to life. I would also like to thank Alan Stephens of the University of New South Wales at ADFA for indulging my attempts to see airpower doctrines as cultural artefacts, and for his continued assistance. In connection with this project I owe thanks to Christina Spittel, John O Ward, Stephen Gaukroger and Guy Hansen, as well as Michael Greenwood and Rhodri Mogford at Continuum.

Introduction

Ancient Greek historians and philosophers, seeking to distinguish histories from fable, rumour and gossip, were the first to define the genre of historiography as being writing about real, verifiable events that took place in the past. Despite this empirical move, the Greeks also acknowledged the literary and rhetorical nature of historiography, and saw historical events as possessing metaphysical significance. While concern with real past events has continued to define historiography as a genre, questions about the status of historiography and the meaning of history have been debated down the ages. When various forms of Postmodernism began to exert an influence on the humanities in the last quarter of the twentieth century, these history debates reached a crescendo. In academic circles during that time an unprecedented emphasis came to be placed on the formal and literary characteristics of historiography. Interpreting historiography in this way proved highly controversial, not least because some felt that the connection between the historian and historical reality was being ignored or even denied. This in turn threatened to undermine the historian’s ability to make moral judgements about the past. It is probably fair to say that these fears have now subsided to some degree, and that the end-of-the-century history debates and culture wars resulted in a general increase in historiographical self-awareness. This raising of consciousness among writers and readers of history has included an acceptance of the idea that understandings of the past are themselves historically determined. Attitudes towards the past can now be seen not only as susceptible to many different forms of analysis, but also as suitable subjects in their own right for historiography. The writing of these (meta-) histories of historical attitudes has also opened up new opportunities, the most important of which is the possibility of increasing awareness of ourselves and of our own environment. This book is based on the idea that by looking at changing perceptions of the past, we moderns might better understand the ways in which we think of ourselves in relation to both the past and the present. The main focus will be on changing attitudes towards the Middle Ages, and it will be suggested that various understandings of those times are especially sensitive indicators of modern intellectual and cultural developments. This project will therefore be relevant to anyone studying or teaching either medieval history itself or the phenomenon of medievalism, and to those interested in history in general and

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in historiography. The discussions involved will also raise issues pertinent to the philosophy of history, the history of ideas, and pre-modern and modern philosophy. But because some readers, especially medievalists, may well not be familiar with all of these areas, it is probably best to begin by pointing out where the arguments and methods of this work are based on the ideas of others, and where they will depart from them. Two individuals need to be mentioned at this stage: Hayden V White and Norman F Cantor. Hayden V White has either directly or indirectly influenced all historiographical studies since the mid 1970s. White came to prominence with his monumental and, to many, forbiddingly dense Metahistory (1973), which analysed nineteenth-century historiography as though it were literature.1 Relying principally on Northrop Frye’s categories of narrative emplotment, White revealed that while nineteenth-century historians often claimed to be revealing the past ‘as it really was’, they actually arranged historical facts in various highly contrived ways. He also argued that how these historians understood both historical causation and the historical process as a whole did not pertain to any historical reality, but relied, rather, on the (frequently unselfconscious) employment of metaphors. Nineteenth-century historiography was in a deep sense poetic, and the seemingly vast differences in the approaches of various historians really consisted of different poetic strategies. White subsequently sought to bring some of his revolutionary insights and techniques to discussions of historiography in general.2 Metahistory nevertheless leaves one with the impression that the nineteenth-century historiographical and philosophical landscape might have been something of a closed environment. For, although White’s formalist approach is able to be translated to some twentieth-century narrative histories, it does seem less appropriate in the case of modern and recent analytical historiography. Norman F Cantor’s widely read Inventing the Middle Ages deals with more recent historiography than Metahistory. It is also particularly important in the genesis of this book because it is in the main a history of ideas about the Middle Ages. Cantor’s starting point is his belief that the ‘invention’ of the Middle Ages as we know them is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Nothing written about the Middle Ages before 1895 is, he states, any longer worth reading because it would be the product of an alien and distorted historical consciousness. Cantor believes that nineteenth-century historians ‘misconstructed’ the Middle Ages.3 1 Hayden V White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, 1973. 2 Hayden V White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, London, 1982. 3 Norman F Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: the Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century, New York, 1991, esp. pp. 29, 52.

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As the reader will already be aware, however, this book is based on the idea of a modern intellectual epoch – namely modernity – and a modern historical consciousness lasting from around 1800 to the present. Indeed, many of its arguments are meant to show that there are fewer divisions or disconnections between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century environments than is sometimes claimed. In other words, although our modern intellectual environment is seemingly heterogeneous, basic characteristics shared by, say, Romanticism, Hegelian Idealism and current ‘radical’ approaches can be discerned within it. Taking a cue from John McGowan and others, it will be suggested that these characteristics common to both nineteenth-century and more recent intellectual endeavour are most conveniently understood in terms of the direct and indirect influence of the metaphysics of Kant, whose works represent the purest expression of a shift from ‘Enlightenment’ to recognisably modern thinking.4 Perhaps, because he often thought in dichotomies, Kant foreshadowed both modern ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ thinking. Understanding our own intellectual epoch as being essentially Kantian will therefore not only account for its complexity, but also propose some unifying principles that lie beneath its apparent disorder. The most significant feature of this post-Kantian environment for our purposes is a far firmer relationship between historiography and philosophy than is evident in previous epochs. In Hegel’s influential system, for example, ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’ are really the same thing, while in the more radical approaches of Nietzsche and Foucault ‘philosophical’ arguments coexist with both (anti-) historical propositions and with examples of relatively straightforward historical scholarship. The backdrop to this work will be the question of the relationship between historiography and philosophy in the modern era. Exploring this aspect of our intellectual landscape will reveal some of the basic characteristics of how we think. Being important and perhaps defining features of modernity in their own right as well as sensitive barometers of intellectual conflict and change, attitudes towards the Middle Ages will be involved in all of these discussions. It will be argued that modern and current attitudes towards the Middle Ages are the products of the historical consciousness of the nineteenth century, and that they are therefore inseparable from the philosophical culture of that era. The most straightforward premise of this line of thought is to note that Romanticism was the first intellectual movement to look upon the medieval past with unalloyed approval. The medieval world was seen by the Romantics as a golden age – an 4 John McGowan, Postmodernism and its Critics, Ithaca, 1991, esp. pp. 31–43. See also Karl Ameriks, ‘The Critique of Metaphysics: the Structure and Fate of Kant’s Dialectic’, in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, 2006, and Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation, Oxford, 2006.

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age without the perceived social and metaphysical ills of the nineteenth century. The other major intellectual movement of the nineteenth century, the Idealist system of Hegel, was based on the idea that freedom and reason have increasingly manifested themselves in the historical process. In Hegel’s present-centred system, the Middle Ages marked both an advance on the ancient world, and a decisive step in the attainment of modernity. There is nevertheless a certain tension evident between Romanticism and Idealism regarding precisely how the Middle Ages should be understood. This tension, it will be suggested, is the very dynamic within which modern medieval studies have developed. Establishing and discussing all of these arguments will bring the reader into contact with many different ideas found over a considerable period of time. The potential complexities of this process will, however, be simplified by the use of a specific methodology, which should now be explained. Although he is perhaps best known for having come up with the idea of a protestant work ethic, Max Weber’s most important contribution to the methodology of the social sciences is the so called ‘ideal type’, a device for dealing with complex phenomena by isolating common or typical elements.5 The ideal type is a hypothetical yardstick with which real cases may be compared and evaluated. Weber was seeking to provide a provisional objectivity or ‘discussability’ in the social sciences, which he believed were suffering severe methodological difficulties. The ideal type attempts to span the gap between interpretation and reality, a gap that had become particularly apparent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in association with what we call ‘the Crisis of Historicism’. As is evident in the case of the recent tendency to treat historiography as literature, since Weber’s day the question of access to empirical and historical reality has become even more problematical. It is therefore no surprise that the use of ideal-typical categories has proliferated, most notably in Hayden V White’s use of categories drawn largely from literature in Metahistory. This book is indebted to both Weber and White insofar as it is an historiographical study that uses ideal-typical interpretative categories. The approach to be used will nevertheless differ from White’s in two main ways. First, in attempting to come to grips with the modern epoch understood as including both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book will concentrate more on historians’ epistemological and metaphysical assumptions, and less on the formal qualities of their works. Secondly, it will also use fewer ideal types. In assessing the nineteenth-century historical consciousness, Hayden V White used four categories – emplotment, argument, ideological orientation and types of metaphor – each with four further subdivisions, thus leading to many possible 5 Max Weber, ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy’, in E Shils and H Finch (eds), The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Glencoe, 1949, esp. pp. 90, 101.

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combinations. In contrast, only two ideal-typical categories have been devised for this work. Although possessing some potential pitfalls,6 the use of many categories does ensure a close alignment between the ideal types in question and whatever is being examined. This technique is also particularly suitable for the highly detailed formal analyses that characterize Metahistory. But using fewer ideal types is easier on the reader. And as well as being simpler, having fewer categories is arguably more appropriate in a work such as this because, although it is often less exhaustive than Metahistory, it attempts to encompass a wider and more varied range of material. The two ideal-typical categories devised for this work will be called ‘aesthetic’ and ‘progressive’ thinking.7 As the term suggests, belief in progress is the defining feature of progressive thinking. This belief in progress has an epistemological and an historical dimension. Within progressive thinking the present may be seen as a position from which we can continue to know more and more about the world and about the past. An extreme progressive view will, however, regard the present as the only point from which anything meaningful can be known. In this sort of thinking the present may be seen as the culmination of the entire historical process. Progressive historiography can in principal arrive at historical causes and even laws that will amount to an explanation of events. Methodological rigour and a conscious laying aside of personal prejudices will typically assist in this goal. Another way of looking at progressive thinking would therefore be to say that it is a metaphysics of historical, epistemological and historiographical optimism. In this study the paradigmatic examples of progressive thinking will be the works of the philosopher Hegel and the historian Ranke. Hegel’s extreme progressive beliefs encompassed both epistemology and his understanding of the historical process. Hegel is, of course, vastly significant in the shaping of the modern intellectual environment on account of the influence of his ideas, not least in connection with the development of Marxism. Understanding the ways in which Ranke followed and, occasionally, departed from Hegel will be part of the argument of this work. Their apparent divergences of opinion will be interpreted as having arisen from different emphases within a shared set of progressive beliefs. Ranke is sometimes seen as a ‘scientific’ historian. This view probably arises from the idea that his famous methodological innovations were

6 See ibid., pp. 94, 98, 101f., for the potential of ideal types to become ‘reified.’ 7 The terms ‘progressive’ and ‘aesthetic’ will be used (without quotation marks) to designate the ideal types described. If these terms are ever intended to convey their commonly accepted meanings, the text will point out this change to the reader in order to avoid confusion. In these circumstances a phrase such as ‘in the general sense’ will be used. The word ‘aesthetics’ will retain its usual meaning and not pertain to the ideal type.

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influenced by early nineteenth-century positivism. He is also often unfairly thought of as a mere assembler of historical data. Understanding Ranke in terms of the ideal-typical category of progressive thinking will aim to bring about a fuller appreciation of his overall importance. And it will be suggested that the professionalization of the study of history in the nineteenth century, which was a process shaped by the adoption of Ranke’s methods, consisted of an increasing ascendancy of progressive thinking. The ideal-typical category of aesthetic thinking consists of ideas that are in fundamental opposition to the progressive attitudes just outlined. An aesthetic approach implicitly or explicitly denies that progress can be discerned in history. If the historical process is assigned any shape or pattern, it will be one of peaks and troughs, recurrence, or even decline. Pessimism and irony therefore often feature prominently in aesthetic histories. Mirroring the progressive category, the aesthetic denial of progress has both historical and epistemological dimensions. Aesthetic historiography and philosophy do not attempt to convey general truths. They are self-consciously aware of their own constructedness. Extreme aesthetic thinking can go even further and regard reality itself as some sort of artifice. In contrast with progressive thinking, which claims the status of objectivity and is by nature unifying and corporate, an aesthetic outlook tends towards a creative subjectivity and so gives rise to the issue of individuality. This tendency is particularly evident in the case of the philosopher Neitzsche and the nineteenthcentury historian Burckhardt, the founder of the genre of kulturgeschichte, both of whom will be seen as paradigmatic aesthetic thinkers. It will, for example, be suggested that Burckhardt’s treatment of historical individuals in his profoundly influential vision of the Italian Renaissance may be understood as the aesthetic counterpart of Hegel’s and Ranke’s progressive emphasis on the history of nation-states. Some readers may be tempted to see the categories of aesthetic and progressive thinking as a variation of long-standing oppositions such as rhetoric and philosophy, art and truth, literature and fact and so on. This view might be helpful, so it will not be discouraged. It is also likely that readers will sometimes slip back into thinking of the words ‘aesthetic’ and ‘progressive’ in terms of their usual meanings. There is no harm in this either. Aesthetic historiography and philosophy could indeed be thought of as being artistic, for example. The word ‘progressive’ is nowadays more or less interchangeable with ‘enlightened’, as in the case of a person with ‘progressive’ views on moral and social issues. Here, too, there is an overlap with the ideal-typical category of progressive thinking because in both cases there is a suggestion that established or previous approaches to the matter at hand are being improved upon – at least in the opinion of the person with the ‘progressive’ views. But it should be emphasized that the categories of aesthetic and progressive

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thinking have been devised specifically in order to make sense of the modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) intellectual environment and to help understand how it differs from its immediate predecessor. This is because the core concept in progressive thinking, the idea of progress, did not exist in any recognisable form before the seventeenth century, and its emergence signals a fundamental change in the intellectual landscape. This emergence of the idea of progress has been associated both with the dynamism in the natural sciences in the seventeenth century, and with the philosophical quest for certainty found in the influential works of Descartes.8 The important point for us, however, is that in the seventeenth century the idea of progress, while clearly containing the potential to provoke thinking about history, had only been formulated in epistemological, rather than historical, terms. It will be suggested that growing perceptions of a gulf between epistemological and historical progress contributed to the failure of the Enlightenment project, such as it was. And it will be suggested that the close relationship between history and philosophy in the nineteenth century brought forth a cluster of new ideas about the relationship between epistemological and historical progress. The category of aesthetic thought, being opposed to progressive thinking, is also relevant principally to the modern or current intellectual environment and its immediate predecessor, rather than to previous epochs. Cyclic understandings of the historical process certainly existed in antiquity and in the Renaissance period. But when they are found in the eighteenth century and beyond, they can be interpreted as functioning in an aesthetic way, that is to say in specific opposition to ideas of progress. In other words, the emergence of the idea of progress also brought about the formation and development of opposing aesthetic beliefs. And yet it is not surprising that, being anti-progressive, aesthetic thinking should permit some re-use of already existing concepts such as cyclic visions of history. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, as progressive thinking achieved greater coherence, aesthetic attitudes became more radical and, at the same time, recognisably modern. Nietzsche’s sense of Eternal Return and his idiosyncratic use of the concept of genealogy both show how existing ideas were recast and used in new, radical ways that militated against notions of progress. Some discussion of what might be seen as the pre-history of modern attitudes is therefore necessary in order to understand our own environment better, and to appreciate how our attitudes differ from those of previous epochs. For this reason it seems appropriate to begin with a chapter discussing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It will be suggested that, taken together, these two centuries in fact constitute one epoch, which we may characterize as pre-modern. 8 For example, JB Bury, The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into its Origin and Growth, London, 1920.

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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were bound together into one epoch by the existence of certain continuities evident amid the different positions that were adopted in response to the new idea of progress. In such matters attitudes towards history and historiography were obviously of central importance, and so, foreshadowing later chapters, the discussions will be illustrated by referring to ideas about the Middle Ages. The pre-modern era is also significant for this study because, as we shall see, some of the key concepts through which we moderns think about the Middle Ages formed during that time. In some senses, then, the Middle Ages themselves might be seen as a pre-modern discovery or invention. The second chapter will concentrate on the thought of Kant and on Pre-Romanticism. It will describe how the conceptual structures that have determined the course of modern medieval studies were set in place. The next chapters will deal with the main intellectual and cultural movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing especially on Romanticism and Hegelian Idealism, and on how new and recognisably modern understandings of the Middle Ages were formed within the relationship between these two movements. This relationship will be presented as consisting of dynamics between aesthetic and progressive sensibilities. Haskins’ The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1920) will be seen as one notable product of these dynamics. The trajectories of anti-Hegelian, aesthetic tendencies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiographical and philosophical works will then be discussed. Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) will be seen as a highpoint of these aesthetic ideas. The overarching theme of all these chapters will, however, be the process by which progressive attitudes towards history and historiography came to the fore in the newly professionalised academic environment. The remaining chapters will show how ‘nineteenth-century’ attitudes have continued to inform modern and current understandings of the Middle Ages. Modern academic medievalism has consisted largely of progressive thinking, the two most important components of which have been a Hegelian grand sweep and Ranke-inspired particularism. But in more recent progressive historiography varieties of particularism have become more prominent than neo-Hegelian emphases on big historical themes such as continuity and progress. Another way of expressing this change would be to say that as historical optimism seemed less tenable, especially in Europe after the Great War, progressive historiography moved away from looking at history as a process, and began to concentrate on the study of historical structures. But this interest in structure led to a return of a Hegelianism of sorts because it involved new and especially strident forms of epistemological optimism. The most striking example of these developments is the emergence in France of the Annales school. By the 1970s, moreover, Annales methods had become fashionable in America, rendering obsolete the liberal/

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Hegelian-inspired medievalism of the immensely influential Joseph Strayer, a student and follower of Haskins. These changes of emphasis within modern progressive historical thinking have nevertheless taken place within a broader relationship between progressive and aesthetic attitudes. Modern and current aesthetic attitudes towards the Middle Ages have emerged in association with an increasing centrality being assigned to the study of medieval culture and literature, and as a result of the influence that modern (aesthetic) Continental philosophy has exerted on historiography in general. From the mid-twentieth century examinations of medieval culture – rather than, say, events or institutions – have formed the basis of various attempts to describe both the essence of the Middle Ages, and the place of those times in the overall scheme of things. The works of Richard Southern, who is arguably the most imaginative modern medievalist, perhaps best illustrate this phenomenon. Southern, who published high-profile works in each decade of the second half of the twentieth century, reveals the tensions between aesthetic and progressive tendencies in modern historiography. And despite the apparent novelty of his ideas, Southern, it will be suggested, was really a neo-Romantic. Not surprisingly, however, Southern’s Romanticism did not achieve mainstream status, and failed to leave a lasting impression. Instead, as the final chapter will describe, current professional historiography is characterized by a new particularism resulting, rather ironically, from the absorption of recent (aesthetic) Continental philosophy into the progressive academic mainstream. But the reader is urged to leave this work’s arguments and analyses to one side from time to time. For the writer has tried not to lose sight of Quintilian’s historia scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum. In other words, history must tell a story. As well, Enlightenment-period historians thought that their main task was to entertain their readers by presenting the past in all its colour and variety. While not, of course, presuming to approach the efforts of the pre-modern giants, the writer of this work hopes that the reader will enjoy the spectacle of a passing cavalcade of ideas about the Middle Ages. And in the space behind this cavalcade the reader may wish to observe the formation and development of a series of concepts – perhaps a procession of meta-allegories – that have enabled us moderns to think about the Middle Ages in the first place. The reader is also encouraged to add form and meaning to the cavalcade of ideas by imbuing it with his or her own narrative structure. Without wishing to over-determine the reader’s responses, it strikes the writer that this book can be seen as two stories. Appropriately enough, the first of these is like a medieval romance; it is the story of a journey, and its protagonist is the idea of the Middle Ages, which undergoes transformations as it moves through different environments, some of which are enchantingly favourable while others are less so, and encounters the occasional opponent. The second story is a struggle between two figurative antagonists – the

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aesthetic and the progressive – with dominion over the intellectual environment and the academy as the prize. The outlook and disposition of the reader will determine which, if either, of the antagonists is the hero, and whether the story of their struggle, continuing into the present, is read as an epic, a satire, or a comedy.

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Progress, Decline and Fall: Historiography and the Middle Ages in the Age of Reason In the seventeenth century, the relative merits of the past and the present were discussed in a series of imaginary contests between ancient and modern authors known as the Querelle or the ‘Battle of the Books’.1 In the course of these discussions certain ‘moderns’ proposed that, unlike in the arts, the disciplines associated with the natural sciences worked by a process of accumulation. The ‘moderns’ argued that an advance beyond all previous epochs was now evident in the sciences; even the prodigious achievements of classical antiquity had finally been surpassed. The views of the ‘moderns’ reveal that a reorientation in thinking about the past was occurring. And their ideas were new. Among the first examples of this ‘modern’ outlook was Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who became critical of cyclical understandings of history because he thought that their persistence was harmful to the potential advance of knowledge.2 Cyclical understandings of the historical process had predominated in Antiquity. During the Christian Middle Ages these classical notions were replaced by a view of the past that was informed by the Augustinian doctrines of Divine Providence and Original Sin. Within medieval Christianity the past and the present formed a continuum that preceded some sort of final Judgment. The classical idea of historical cycles and the medieval sense of continuity between the past and present both suggested that on a basic level humanity always remained the same. And the revival of the classical model of historical cycles that occurred in connection with the fifteenthcentury Italian Renaissance again included a belief in this ultimate sameness of human nature. In contrast, the outlook of the ‘moderns’ was potentially at odds with any sense of human nature as a constant. In fact, tensions between ideas of progress and of continuity lie beneath much of the intellectual activity of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To reintroduce the interpretative ideal types discussed in the introduction to 1 Hans Baron, ‘The Querelle of Ancients and Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXIV, 1959, pp. 3–22, Joseph M Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age, Ithaca, 1991, and JB Bury, The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into its Origin and Growth, London, 1920, pp. 49–60. 2 Baron, op. cit., p. 7. Bury op. cit. is still the most thorough and most stimulating work on the emergence of the idea of progress. See also AM Melzer, J Weinberger, and NR Zinman (eds), History and the Idea of Progress, Ithaca, 1996.

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this volume, the ‘moderns’ of the Querelle mark the appearance of progressive thinking. Many ‘moderns’ were, moreover, as individuals closely associated with the developments in philosophy and in the natural sciences that were taking place at the time. This progressive thinking was as yet couched only in epistemological terms. Knowledge had increased, but human nature apparently remained the same. In other words, belief in epistemological progress existed alongside a view of the past that was influenced by classical, medieval, and renaissance modes of thought, and which therefore emphasized historical continuities. Naturally, this divided and potentially problematical historical vision came to be expressed in the historiography of the time. And in turn historiography began to develop new forms and to occupy a more central position in the intellectual landscape, in the process becoming a recognized battleground for conflicting intellectual and ideological agendas. This chapter will begin by discussing the main forms of seventeenth-century historiography – Antiquarian History, the Annalist movement, and Whig History – and the different understandings of the Middle Ages evident within each of these approaches. It will describe how the emergence of progressive attitudes affected thinking about the past, and how the genre of historiography reveals the problems and tensions caused by these new attitudes. A few introductory words about developments in philosophy and the natural sciences in the seventeenth century might serve to clarify both the nature of these new ideas, and the roles that they would play in pre-modern historical thinking. Philosophical Rationalism was the most significant intellectual movement in the seventeenth century. Concern over the status of knowledge underpinned the Rationalist enterprise. The question of certainty had become a particularly pressing issue because of the emergence of a revitalized form of ancient scepticism known as Pyrrhonism. This scepticism not only represented a challenge to philosophical thinking, but had also figured in a succession of intense and, as was thought, harmful post-Reformation debates about religious doctrine.3 As well, it questioned the status of historical knowledge. In a series of famous and far-reaching arguments, the Rationalist René Descartes (1596–1650) countered scepticism by deductively demonstrating certain knowledge of the self, certainty that our perceptions do not deceive us in any fundamental way, and certain knowledge of the existence of God.4 Other Rationalist philosophers such as Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715) and even the British ‘empiricist’ George

3 This early seventeenth-century scepticism arose from the rediscovery of the works of Sextus Empiricus by Montaigne (1533–1592) and his circle. See Richard H Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, Assen, 1964, esp. pp. 67–88, and Craig B Brush, Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Scepticism, The Hague, 1966, esp. p. 163. 4 Descartes did not attempt to counter scepticism in regard to historical knowledge; in fact, as we shall see shortly, he largely agreed with it.

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Berkeley (1685–1753) followed Descartes in assigning central, defining roles to anti-sceptical arguments.5 On account of this emphasis on certainty, Rationalism is the most striking example of the sense of the epistemological progress that characterized the outlook of the ‘moderns’. But a strong sense of epistemological progress is also evident in other seventeenth-century movements that were willing to make do with a foundation of reasonable belief rather than certainty, and which therefore reveal a more empirical tendency.6 ‘Mechanist’ philosophers of science such as Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) felt that although scepticism posed a threat on a purely philosophical level, it did not necessarily hinder the work of sciences. In other words, the advances being made in the natural sciences at the time were so self-evidently secure that they would continue without the support of deductive reasoning.7 Gassendi proposed an ‘Epicurean’ atomism, and concerned himself with reasonable inferences pertaining to matters of experience. And even Descartes himself was an averred ‘mechanist’ when considering issues such as causal relationships in the physical world. Seventeenth-century historiography was closely related to the intellectual movements of the day and therefore reveals the same ‘modern’ sense of epistemological progress. Historians moved away from literariness and the humanist idea of history as providing an example for moral and political behaviour. Instead, they now strove to extend the boundaries of historical knowledge and to improve historiographical techniques. As part of a general desire to widen the data available to historians, seventeenth-century Antiquarian History included methodical considerations of physical remains for the first time: throughout Europe Roman inscriptions were systematically recorded, and numismatics developed as a subject in its own right in connection with the Antiquarian movement.8 The distinction between original or primary historical sources and secondary material was also formulated in recognizably modern terms during the seventeenth century.9 As with ‘mechanism’, seventeenth-century historiography began to exhibit an emphasis on probable knowledge and reasonable belief, and an interest in causation.10 A marked tendency to search for historical causes characterized Politic or Perfect History, which flourished until about 1630 when Antiquarian historiography became more fashionable. Following prominent natural scientists 5 The standard work on Descartes and his environment is Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: an Intellectual Biography, Oxford, 1995. 6 Barbara J Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England, Princeton, 1983, esp. pp. 119f. 7 Popkin, op. cit., p. 139. 8 Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chicago, 1983, p. 193. 9 Levine, op. cit., pp. 337–42. 10 Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 151ff.

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of the day, Politic and Antiquarian historians, while not denying the existence of God or Providence, assigned supernatural entities a secondary or indirect role in causation and historical change.11 Many Antiquarian historians, moreover, were themselves involved with the natural sciences to such an extent that it is at times difficult to distinguish between the two fields of endeavour.12 One illustration of the widening of historical knowledge that characterized seventeenth-century historiography is the ‘discovery’ of the Anglo-Saxons. Before this ‘discovery’, King Arthur, who was thought to be an historical figure, was the main focus of attention for the period prior to the Norman Conquest. The conquest itself, moreover, was universally regarded as a good thing. The AngloSaxons were seen, in the words of Richard Harvey, writing as late as 1593, as a ‘tributary to the Britons’. The seventeenth-century ‘discovery’ of the Anglo-Saxons began with Richard Rowlands’ A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities Concerning the Most Noble and Renowned English Nation (1605). Rowlands sought to elevate the historical status of figures like King Alfred, and his investigations into the origins of the Anglo-Saxons influenced the formation of the controversial idea of an Ancient or Gothic Constitution of England. Seventeenthcentury ecclesiastical scholars such as James Ussher (1581–1656) also began to study Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Ussher was the Anglican Archbishop at Armagh in what is now Northern Ireland. He is remembered for the ‘Ussher Chronology’ which, as a result of extensive comparative research across all known ancient and biblical sources, set the date for the creation of the world as 4004 bc. Ussher’s interest in the Anglo-Saxons emerged while he was preparing his Britannicorum ecclesiarum antiquitates (1639). Perhaps the most significant result of Ussher’s interest was an emphasis on the Anglo-Saxon language. In 1640, as a result of his urgings, a lectureship devoted to Anglo-Saxon studies was created at Cambridge. The first printed edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and an Anglo-Saxon version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England were subsequently published at Cambridge, as was, in 1659, the first comprehensive dictionary of Old English.13 The Antiquarian interest in languages of the past led to another ‘discovery’ that has determined the course of modern medieval studies: the idea of feudalism as an important and perhaps defining feature of the Middle Ages. In a paper 11 Ibid., pp. 130f., 154. See also George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France, Chicago, 1970. Huppert argues that late sixteenth-century French historians had begun to ‘pay only lip service’ to notions of Providence and Fortuna. 12 For examples of connections between Antiquarian historiography and the natural sciences see A Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 54–8; Schapiro, op. cit., p. 136; and Breisach, op. cit., p. 191. 13 John Kenyon, The History Men: the Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance, London, 1993, pp. 6f., 14f. See also Levine, op. cit., pp. 327–36, 352f., 368–75.

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delivered to the Society of Antiquaries in 1614, Henry Spelman (c.1562–1641) discussed the word feudum, which describes the granting of land in connection with the expectation of reciprocal obligations.14 Spelman expanded this theme in his Archeologus (1626). He argued that the practice of feudum was Germanic in origin, but that it did not go as far back as Tacitus’ primitive Germanic tribes. Rather, it had its beginnings in the ‘barbarian’ law codes of the Dark Ages, and was fully developed by around the year 1000. Use of the term in connection with Hugh Capet (r. 987–996), the first king of the ‘French’ Capetian dynasty, and the Emperor Conrad II (r. 1024–1039) suggested that by then it was an accepted practice across the former Frankish territories in Europe including Lombardy. Spelman believed that although the practice of feudum was therefore in this sense pan-European, it was unknown among the Anglo-Saxons. It was, he argued, brought to England by the Normans in a form that closely resembled the pattern in Lombardy. Spelman’s ideas of feudalism brought a European perspective to the history of medieval Britain. As well, they imparted on English history a sense of both the importance of the Norman Conquest, and, as a corollary, the existence of distinct pre- and post-conquest periods. These ideas were highly controversial because they brought Spelman and those who followed him such as Robert Brady (1627–1700) into conflict with the emerging Whig view of history.15 In his Complete History (1685, 1700) Brady raised the ire of the Whigs by going even further than Spelman in asserting the Norman nature of post-conquest England; he argued that no land was held by any Saxon without a Norman overlord. Although these conflicts were important in themselves, Spelman’s significance lies far beyond them. In the early twentieth century, the legal and institutional historian Frederic Maitland believed that Spelman had in fact come up with the term ‘feudal system’. Maitland was incorrect; as we shall see, it was an eighteenth-century invention. Yet, even in Maitland’s day Spelman’s thoughts on the subject were still considered the starting-point for any enquiry. In other words, Spelman’s concept of feudalism entered the canon of ideas through which we think about the Middle Ages. The Whig view of history with which Spelman and especially Brady contended was also supported by Antiquarian scholarship.16 Sir Walter Raleigh is traditionally seen as the first Whig historian, not least in recognition of his own experiences as a victim of arbitrary royal authority. Although Raleigh’s History

14 For an excellent discussion of Spelman and his environment, see JGA Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in The Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, 1957, pp. 91–123. 15 Ibid., pp. 196–228. 16 For the connections between Whig thinking and Antiquarian historiography see Levine, op. cit., pp. 327–36, 352f., 368–75.

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of the World, which was left incomplete by his execution in 1614, only in theory covered the period to 130 bc, it included many observations on subsequent issues and events in British history. As well as containing vehement criticisms of specific kings such as Henry VIII, Raleigh’s History of the World highlighted the contingent and transient nature of royal authority in general, thus countering the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.17 Opposition to arbitrary royal authority and an attendant emphasis on the rights of parliament were the defining features of Whig thinking. The prominent Whig legal and political theorist Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) elaborated these themes. Coke was primarily interested in the English common-law tradition and in the history of parliamentary authority, which he saw as arguments against spurious claims for royal privileges and prerogatives.18 Although always an argument about history, Whig thinking only really entered the English historiographical mainstream towards the end of the seventeenth century in association with the ‘Whig ascendancy’ in politics, and as a result of the ‘Huguenot diaspora’ caused by Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.19 Undermined in the eighteenth century by David Hume’s more conservative view of English history,20 Whig attitudes would return to occupy a significant place in the intellectual life of the nineteenth century both in Britain, where they were presented in reinvigorated form by the New Whigs, and on the Continent, where they were closely related to Liberalism. The core concept of the seventeenth-century Whig view of history was the idea of an Ancient Constitution. Using the ‘discovery’ of the Anglo-Saxons and the latest Antiquarian approaches, Coke and others argued that the origins of the English parliamentary tradition lay in the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot assemblies. They believed that the principles of the Witenagemot survived the Norman Conquest insofar as they could be discerned in both the feudal assemblies that the Anglo-Norman kings sometimes held, and in the workings of the Norman curia regis. The Norman Conquest was not thought to be a rupture in the historical process because William, it was argued, had possessed the most legitimate claim to the English throne. It was even suggested that William’s coronation had been preceded by an election of sorts. Whig polemicists also countered Spelman’s belief in the intrinsically Norman and feudal nature of the post-conquest government of England with the idea of the leges confessoris.21 Accordingly, they argued that 17 Kenyon, op. cit., p. 19. 18 Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, London, 1965, pp. 225–33, 250–59, 263ff. 19 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Our First Whig Historian: Paul de Rapin-Thoyras’, From CounterReformation to Glorious Revolution, London, 1992, pp. 249–65. 20 Hume has also been seen as a ‘scientific’ rather than a ‘vulgar’ Whig. See Pocock, op. cit., 1987 edition, p. 376. 21 Ibid., p. 107.

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the primary sources of the time prove that William and the succeeding Norman kings all agreed to confirm the laws of Edward the Confessor, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ king who ruled before William, as part of their respective acceptances of the crown. Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort’s parliament of 1265 were seen as further outstanding examples of the spirit of freedom and representation of the Witenagemot. In the face of opposition to this view of history, the idea of an Ancient Constitution was buttressed by being given an antecedent of its own. It was now argued that the Anglo-Saxons already possessed a tradition of political equality and representation when they arrived in England. This idea of a Gothic Constitution was based on the belief that in the late-Roman period the wandering Teutonic tribes had elected their generals, and that this practice had continued when the tribes settled and kings were chosen. The Ancient Constitution received its most comprehensive treatment in a ten-volume history of England by the émigré Huguenot Paul de Rapin (1661–1725), who was also styled Thoyras de Rapin because he had been sieur of Thoyras.22 Rapin crossed to England with William of Orange, the future King William III, in 1688 and was wounded during the Glorious Revolution, which was also known wrongly as the Bloodless Revolution. In 1717, Rapin wrote a polemical Dissertation sur le Whigs et les Torys. His history of England was also written in French and was initially published at The Hague in 1724 as L’Histoire d’Angleterre. Rapin was the first historian to describe the reign of King Stephen (1135–1141) and Stephen’s struggle with the empress Matilda as ‘the anarchy’. But Stephen’s reign was an anomaly. Rapin’s history was dedicated to King George I. In the dedication, he outlines how he will describe both ‘the origin and progression of the English monarchy’ and the ‘constant union of the sovereign and parliament’. Developing and expanding the idea of an Ancient Constitution suggested a sense of epistemological optimism. It was felt that much more was now known about the attitudes and practices of the past, and that these could, at last, be properly understood. Ecclesiastical scholars on the Continent were also involved in widening both the scope of the study of history, and the limits of historical knowledge. The Annalist movement in France is best known today on account of its innovative methodologies. Annalist historians developed palaeography and ‘diplomatic’ or ‘diplomatics’, the close analysis of documents and charters. The Annalists’ task, as they saw it, was to present the achievements of the medieval church to the world. Annalist history began with the Maurists and the 22 Trevor-Roper, op. cit., esp. pp. 262, 264. Trevor-Roper links Rapin’s approach to wider seventeenth-century historiographical developments such as the Annalist methods of Mabillon. He also demonstrates the influence on Rapin of Thomas Rymer’s Foedera. Rymer was a Whig, but his approach again reveals the influence of the Antiquarian movement. See esp. pp. 258f.

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Bollandists. In 1629, Nicholas-Hughes Ménard (1585–1644) of the Abbey of St Maur produced the Martyrologium Sanctorum ordinis St Benedicti. Ménard’s work was continued by other Maurists including Luc d’Archery (1609–1685), who also edited and published the interesting writings of Abbot Gilbert of Nogent (d. 1124) for the first time in 1661. Meanwhile the Jesuit scholar Jean Bolland (1596–1665) had begun the Acta Sanctorum (from 1643), which was continued by various collaborators and successors. In preparing this work, Bolland collected a multitude of sources and categorized them according to specific criteria such as age and authenticity. This method allowed him to determine what he took to be the true facts that lay beneath miracle stories. Conversely, he was able by the same method to reject many purported miracles and biographical details formerly held to be true.23 The best known Annalist historian is, however, the Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), who edited the works of St Bernard (d. 1153) and was involved in the Acta ordinis St Benedicti (1668–1701). Mabillon’s methodology, which was known as ‘la critique’, aimed to get as much information as possible from written sources. Even some of Mabillon’s religious colleagues felt that his methodological exactness and his exclusion of unsubstantiated stories meant that his histories would not appeal to readers. And Mabillon himself refused to pander to popular sensibilities by endorsing the veneration of the saints and their relics. The methodological rigour of the Annalists parallels the epistemological optimism of the ‘moderns’ as found in the philosophy and the natural sciences of the day. Yet, a more extreme form of epistemological optimism also lies within Annalist historiography. A sense of the insecure and second-hand nature of historical knowledge was common to both Pyrrhonist scepticism and Cartesian Rationalism’s response to this scepticism.24 But the Annalist historians countered this challenge with their up-to-the-minute methodologies, and by believing in the potential absolute truth of historical representation. At the same time, they adduced direct continuities between themselves and the medieval world that they were describing. The religious beliefs of the Annalist historians, moreover, compelled them to see the influence of God in the world. The worldly microcosm therefore exhibited historical continuities that were regarded as being the work of God.25 Within this view, both Annalist epistemology and the ‘objects’ under consideration were manifestations of God in the world. The methodological

23 David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises and Problems in Monastic History, London, 1967, esp. pp. 38, 47. 24 See JGA Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols, Cambridge, 1999, vol. 2, p. 22 for a short but incisive discussion on scepticism, Rationalism, Mabillon’s method, and the question of historical knowledge. 25 Knowles, op. cit., p. 12.

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rigour of the Annalist historians was really based not so much on an interest in facts per se, but on their belief that they were dealing with (religious) truth. On this point, Annalist historiography went further than other more mainstream progressive attitudes of the day, which, as we saw, tended towards a more probabilistic epistemology and a more empirical attitude to the world. The relationship between the Annalist approach and other forms of seventeenth-century historiography was therefore very like that between Rationalism and the other philosophical movements of the day. And in Annalist historiography this extreme epistemological optimism therefore sits rather uneasily – at least to us – alongside a sense of historical continuity. Knowing more about the past therefore meant that the differences between the past and the present were elided. The Whigs, too, studied the past because it was directly relevant to the present, thereby also adducing long-term historical continuities.26 It should, though, be stressed that these historical continuities were not as yet understood as part of a pattern of historical progress. The Antiquarians, Annalists, and Whigs all thought that although they now knew more about the past than ever before, the present was not necessarily better than the past. In the seventeenth century, perceived epistemological progress thus coexisted not with historical progress, but with historical continuities. This juxtaposition of ‘modern’ epistemological optimism and a sense of historical continuity was most clearly expressed towards the end of the seventeenth century in the works of Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle (1657–1757). In his Dialogues with the Dead (1683) and Digression on the Ancient and Moderns (1688) Fontenelle sided with the ‘moderns’ in the ongoing Querelle. A typical ‘modern’, Fontenelle was closely concerned with the advances in the natural sciences occurring at the time. His Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) was written in order to make the most recent discoveries accessible to a wider audience. Fontenelle was also a follower of Descartes, and he disseminated Cartesian ideas in his various works. In fact, he believed that the very existence of Cartesian ideas and methods demonstrated that a new era in the history of thought had begun. Fontenelle himself used Cartesian methods to arrive at a ‘proof ’ that natural forces were permanent and unchanging. And because of this invariability of nature, Fontenelle concluded that, despite his own strong sense of the progress of knowledge, no progress in society was either discernible or, for that matter, possible.27 But this ‘modern’ sense of epistemological progress did not influence all forms 26 Pocock, The Ancient Constitution. Pocock’s classic study of the Ancient Constitution highlights the importance of historical continuities in Whig thinking. For another treatment of this issue see Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: an Introduction to English Political Thought 1603–1642, Pennsylvania, 1992, esp. pp. 4–18. 27 For a good discussion of Fontenelle see Bury, op. cit., pp. 60–66.

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of seventeenth-century historiography equally. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), the author of Dictionaire historique et critique (1697) is a case in point. Bayle was a persistent critic of Rationalism, and his technique of ‘Historical Pyrrhonism’ consciously invoked pre-Rationalist scepticism.28 Finding no discernible purpose in history, Bayle delighted in historical facts for their own sake. His emphasis on the rich texture of history, moreover, included a strong sense of its injustices and ironies. In addition, Bayle realized that if there were no evident meaning or pattern in history, the historian’s task might well be to arrange self-consciously the facts for various purposes.29 Seventeenth-century ‘galante’ historiography went even further. ‘Galante’ histories such as the Abbé de Saint-Real’s Dom Carlos (1672) and La Conjuration que les Espagnols formèrent en 1618 contra Venise (1674) aimed primarily to entertain the reader. In fact, modern commentators are sometimes unsure whether to regard Saint-Real as an historian or an early historical novelist.30 Saint-Real’s sense of history as the raw material for good stories also parallels René Rapin’s Instructions for History (translated into English in 1680). Rapin believed that because the facts of history were now available in so much quantity and detail, the historian’s main challenge was what might be done with them. His solution was to suggest that more emphasis should be placed on the literary and rhetorical aspects of historiography.31 Bayle, Saint-Real and Rapin mark the first appearance of aesthetic thinking as outlined in the introduction to this work. As the reader may remember, it was suggested that before the nineteenth century, aesthetic thinking was essentially backward looking. Bayle harks back to pre-Rationalist scepticism, while Saint-Real and Rapin seem to draw their main inspiration from classical and renaissance approaches. There is also an element of self-consciousness in the ways in which seventeenth-century aesthetic historiography was old fashioned. In different ways, Bayle, Saint-Real and Rapin seem to be defining themselves as being in opposition to ‘modern’ modes of thought. But, as we have seen, the ‘modern’, progressive thinking that emerged in the seventeenth century tended to influence historiography more directly. Close relationships are evident between the natural sciences, philosophy and historiography, with ‘modern’ attitudes both invigorating the study of history and underpinning the formation of new kinds 28 Pierre Bayle, Dictionaire Historique et Critique, trans. as The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, 5 vols, New York, 1984, [Facsimile of 1734 ed.] esp. art. ‘Manichees, D’, vol. 4, pp. 94ff. See also Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove, Princeton, 1951, p. 203+fns. 29 For Bayle’s methodology see Brush, op. cit., p. 256 and Eduard Feuter, Geschichte der neuren Historiographie, Munich and Berlin, 1911, p. 333. 30 Feuter op. cit., p. 333, Hayden V White, Metahistory, p. 60. White characterizes the ‘galante’ form as ‘purely aestheticist historiography’. 31 Levine, op. cit., pp. 269ff.

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of historiography. We also saw that on account of the influence of these new progressive attitudes, the seventeenth-century historical vision was somewhat fractured. As progressive thinking was as yet only couched in epistemological terms, seventeenth-century historiography reveals the existence of a possible contradiction between belief in epistemological progress on the one hand, and a sense of historical continuity on the other. This issue would become much more important during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment period. The Enlightenment was once seen as an intellectual epoch characterized by optimism and a belief in progress.32 In the second half of the twentieth century, however, this traditional view was subject to various forms of revision. While still retaining optimism as a unifying principle, Charles Vereker, for example, divided the Enlightenment into separate segments,33 and Peter Gay’s well-known analysis concentrated on the disparate, though not necessarily disconnected, nature of various elements within Enlightenment thought.34 Meanwhile, another strand of revisionism had begun to highlight various apparent tensions and contradictions within the Enlightenment. Henry Vyverberg in particular focused on what he took to be a seam of (historical) pessimism in the works of some philosophes.35 Vyverberg’s approach owed much to Bury, Willey and Collingwood, all of whom had pointed out that eighteenth-century conceptions of nature were potentially at odds with any theory of historical progress.36 Willey went on to suggest that this inconsistency underpinned Voltaire’s bouts of cynicism and pessimism. Such emphases on the tensions and problems within Enlightenment thinking seem quite uncontroversial now, with more recent commentators generally concentrating either on the apparent failure of the Enlightenment project as a whole, or on individuals such as Vico and Hamann, who were in some ways outside the main intellectual currents of those times.37 While the Enlightenment has traditionally been seen as an essentially French phenomenon, an important aspect of this emphasis on conflict and outsiders has been an interest in developments in the German-speaking world. Ian Hunter’s Rival Enlightenments (2001) encapsulates

32 For example Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Yale, 1932; and RV Sampson, Progress in the Age of Reason, London, 1956. 33 Charles Vereker, Eighteenth-Century Optimism. A Study of the Interrelations of Moral and Social Theory in English and French Thought between 1689 and 1789, Liverpool, 1967. 34 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an Interpretation, 2 vols, London, 1967. 35 Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA, 1958. 36 Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946, pp. 82ff.; Basil Willey, The EighteenthCentury Background: Studies in the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period, London, 1940, esp. p. 100. 37 White, Metahistory, pp. 45–60, and esp. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas, London, 1976.

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these tendencies.38 Hunter regards Kant as an Enlightenment figure, and he describes a tension between the overtly metaphysical approaches of Leibnitz and Kant on the one hand, and a school of civic philosophies as represented by the works of Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694) on the other. Perhaps the last – though surely not the final – word on the nature of the Enlightenment is JGA Pocock’s denial that it can be seen as ‘a unified phenomenon with a single history and definition’. Pocock nevertheless feels that we may ‘think of a family of Enlightenments, displaying both family resemblances and family quarrels (some of them bitter and even bloody)’.39 With these interpretative changes and new emphases in mind, one relatively straightforward way of coming to grips with the Enlightenment is to follow Bury and understand it as having featured an attempt to augment the seventeenthcentury sense of intellectual progress with social and historical considerations. Bury saw the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743) and Charles de Montesquieu (1689–1755) as pivotal figures in this process. Although he was an admirer of Descartes, Saint-Pierre pointed out that Cartesian philosophy had not resulted in any improvements in politics or ethics. Montesquieu went further and tried to use Cartesian methods to come up with social (and, by extension, historical) laws that were designed to exclude Providence and Fortune. This process continued with ARJ Turgot (1727–1781), the Encyclopédists, and the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), in whose works the first real doctrine of historical progress was elaborated. Condorcet believed that history could be divided into ten stages, the last of which was still in the future. The ninth stage had begun with Descartes.40 But why did this attempt to translate ‘modern’ epistemological optimism into social and historical propositions not work? We saw that in the seventeenth century belief in epistemological progress had coalesced with a sense of historical continuity. This dynamic continued into the Enlightenment period, which saw a sustained assault on Cartesian attitudes towards Reason, and an increasing emphasis on Nature. The embryonic sense of progress evident in the works of Turgot, the Encyclopédists, and Condorcet, and even the very idea of epistemological progress, were vulnerable to this undermining of Reason. Moreover, Nature was perhaps no more conducive to the idea of historical progress than Reason had been. As these key issues were really about history, they were worked out in the

38 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany, Cambridge, 2001. 39 JGA Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols, Cambridge, 1999, vol. 1 (The Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764), p. 9. 40 For a lively survey of the idea of progress in the eighteenth century see Bury, op. cit., pp. 76–120.

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historiography of the day. Accordingly, history achieved a new centrality, and concern over the nature and status of historical knowledge intensified to the extent that some modern commentators have suggested that a distinct and recognizably modern ‘philosophy of history’ emerged for the first time.41 Another way of understanding these developments would be to suggest that during the Enlightenment, such as it was, people began to think of themselves and their own period in specifically historical terms. Building on the ideas of Arnaldo Momigliano, JGA Pocock, notably, has suggested that there was an ‘Enlightened narrative’ describing a descent from classical antiquity into the darkness of ‘barbarism and religion,’ and the emergence from the latter set of conditions of a ‘Europe’ in which civil society could defend itself against disruption by either. This history had two themes: the emergence of a system of sovereign states . . . and the emergence of a shared civilisation of manners and commerce . . .42

Although Pocock offers the histories of Voltaire (1694–1778) and William Robertson (1721–1793) as paradigmatic examples of this ‘Enlightened narrative’, he seems to be suggesting that it was a common element within the various members of his Enlightenment ‘family’. As well as being an historical vision, the ‘Enlightened narrative’, is an argument about what we now refer to as the long Middle Ages, that is the period roughly from the fall of Rome to the Reformation era. The ‘Enlightened narrative’ presents the relationship between the long Middle Ages and modernity in progressive terms. The ‘Enlightenment narrative’ also suggests that the Enlightenment itself may largely be defined – and defined itself – as progressive. And yet the fractured and disparate nature of the Enlightenment as a movement arguably reveals the existence of tensions within this progressive vision. Accordingly, Eighteenth-century historiography might be seen either as an expression of the ‘Enlightened narrative’, or as a dialogue between the ‘Enlightened narrative’ and other possible positions, that is to say as a site of tension and perhaps conflict between progressive and aesthetic attitudes. The rest of this chapter will take the latter view. It will discuss Hume and Gibbon, and will suggest that both occupied rather ambivalent positions in regard to the ‘Enlightened narrative’ and the attitudes surrounding it. In addition, both also conceived of – and used – the Middle Ages in ways that undermined aspects of ‘modern’ optimism. David Hume (1711–1776) is nowadays probably the best known and most highly respected of all British philosophers. His essays and especially his historiography were, however, better known than his philosophical works in 41 See for example Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, Chicago, 1947, p. 104. 42 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2 (Narratives of Civil Government), p. 20.

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his own day and long after. Hume’s six-volume History of England (1754–1762) immediately became the standard work on the subject and held this position despite the appearance of Macaulay’s similarly titled effort a century later. By the twentieth century Hume’s history had run to over 50 editions. And in a last hurrah of popularity, in 1894 an abridged version called The Student’s Hume appeared. This, too, was reprinted many times. In contrast, Hume’s reputation as a philosopher began more slowly, and did not really peak until after his history was no longer read. A perceived lack of any connection between Hume’s philosophy and history has therefore characterized attempts to assess his achievement. Moreover, the manner in which Hume’s philosophy has been understood has widened this gap. Thomas Reid’s early but influential Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) emphasized the radically sceptical nature of Hume’s philosophy. In retrospect, Reid’s interpretation arguably placed undue emphasis on Hume’s first philosophical work, the Treatise on Human Nature (1739–1740). Reid’s view of Hume’s philosophy underpinned a Humean renaissance in the early twentieth century, when the Logical Positivist philosophers and Edmund Husserl (1854–1938) found that Hume’s apparent sceptical empiricism was relevant to their own agendas. Bertrand Russell continued this trajectory of thought in his widely read History of Western Philosophy (1946). Russell saw Hume as a philosophical enfant terrible who had dared to take empiricism, and by implication epistemology in general, to its ‘logical’, that is to say sceptical, conclusion. Yet understanding Hume simply as a sceptic means ignoring large parts of the Treatise and almost all of the later and more polished Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758). It also contradicts Hume’s own stated aim of formulating a ‘science of human nature’, which is found, of all places, at the beginning of the Treatise. As well, seeing Hume as a sceptic cannot account for the existence of his other works. Simply put, if no reasonable or useful knowledge were possible, how and why would Hume have written on matters such as politics, morals and history? These other efforts by Hume are not, in addition, manifestos of scepticism in any obvious sense. Over-emphasising Hume’s scepticism therefore separates his philosophy from the rest of his oeuvre and diminishes the significance of his non-philosophical efforts. These tendencies are especially clear in the case of Russell, who can only mention Hume’s history with contempt. Some more nuanced views of Hume’s philosophy did, however, emerge during the twentieth century. In particular, Norman Kemp Smith’s The Philosophy of David Hume (1941) sought to return to Hume’s intellectual environment in order to understand him better. Drawing on his own earlier works, Smith focused on what has become known as Hume’s ‘doctrine of natural belief ’, which deals with our non-rational tendencies to retain certain fundamental

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ideas about the world.43 Although controversy persists over the details and the implications of Hume’s naturalism, it is becoming clear that in Hume’s philosophy naturalism in fact functions as an antidote to the sort of extreme scepticism that would force us to abandon all beliefs. Edward Craig’s The Mind of God and the Works of Man (1987) also sought to contextualize Hume’s philosophy. Craig argued that much of Hume’s scepticism was both relatively mild, and directed specifically at notions of reason and reasoning that had been held by Rationalist philosophers.44 The traditional view of Hume as a philosophical sceptic, and its corollary that his history and philosophy are unrelated, were further questioned in Nicholas Phillipson’s Hume (1989). Noting the ‘science of human nature’ remark in the Treatise, Phillipson suggested that Hume’s philosophy, essays, and history might all be different aspects of a single goal: a complete study of ‘human nature’.45 Phillipson in effect narrowed the perceived distances between Hume’s various works. He pointed out, for example, that Hume’s early and most radical philosophical work, the Treatise, actually contains a good deal of philosophising about history, including discussions of the reliability of both textual evidence and eye-witness accounts. The interpretation of Hume about to be offered aims to build on Phillipson’s approach, and on understandings of Hume that emphasize the importance of his philosophical naturalism. It will be suggested that Hume possessed a sense of historical naturalism that parallels the naturalism evident in his philosophy, and that basic naturalistic tenets unite his various works. It will also be suggested that, as with his philosophical naturalism, Hume’s historical naturalism functioned in ways that undermined ‘modern’ progressive attitudes. In addition, we shall see that Hume’s historical naturalism called into question aspects of the dominant ‘Enlightened narrative’. Hume’s philosophical naturalism proceeded from what he took to be the ultimate inability of both reason and experience to endorse basic beliefs such as the existence of the self, and the reality of cause and effect. Although he felt that these beliefs should not – and cannot – be abandoned, Hume’s point is that in these crucial areas we fall a long way short of the sort of certainty that Rationalist philosophers thought they had successfully demonstrated.46 Hume argued that the ‘custom and habit’ associated with the reception of repeated sense impressions give rise to these (non-rational) beliefs or ‘feelings’. This process is driven by the workings of natural instinct, the aim of which is simply to safeguard 43 44 45 46

Norman Kemp Smith, ‘The Naturalism of David Hume’, Mind, 14, 1905. Craig, op. cit., p. 81. Nicolas Phillipson, Hume, London, 1989, esp. pp. 35–52. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. LA Selby-Bigge, Oxford, 1888, esp., Sect. IV, Part 1 [20–30], pp. 25–32.

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our existence.47 While arising from a sort of scepticism, Hume’s naturalism therefore defeats naive or extreme scepticism by showing why we must retain certain beliefs. Despite countering extreme scepticism, however, theories of naturalism do not allow us knowledge of the real nature of things; the naturalistic beliefs we hold, although obviously useful, might well be ultimately incorrect. On a certain level naturalism is therefore a doctrine of epistemological pessimism. And in militating against epistemological progress, Hume’s doctrine of ‘philosophical’ naturalism includes the historical proposition that ‘it is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same in its principles and operations’.48 The Enquiry even describes the historical task that Hume’s ‘philosophical’ naturalism appears to call forth: [T]o discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with the materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour.49

Hume seems to be saying that in each basic aspect of the human experience there exists a specific and appropriate set of naturalistic impulses that function in a similar way to the natural instinct described in his philosophy. For example, in an essay entitled ‘On the Standard of Taste’,50 published in 1757 while he was engaged in writing his History, Hume suggests that ‘the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature’. The literature of classical antiquity is used to support this thesis. Hume argues that we are able to appreciate the true poetic worth of classical literature despite its repugnant morality and the ‘absurdities of the pagan system of theology’. As with the belief-engendering instinct of his philosophical naturalism, Hume regards this transhistorical taste as non-rational. His understanding of taste can therefore be positioned within an anti-Rationalist polemic. Hume mischievously brackets Descartes and ‘abstract’ philosophy with ancient philosophies and religions in order to demonstrate that Rationalist attitudes are in fact historically contingent.51 In his view, Rationalism is therefore no better than any (other) ‘superstition’. These contingent ‘superstitions’ are, then, of a different status than the various transhistorical instincts. 47 Ibid., Sect. V, Part 2 [39–45], pp. 47–55, esp. [45], p. 55. 48 Ibid., Sect. VII, Part 1 [65], p. 83. See also Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, ed. LA SelbyBigge, Oxford, 1888, Bk. II, Part 3, Section 1, pp. 399–407, esp. pp. 402f. 49 Enquiries, VII, 1 [65], p. 83. 50 David Hume, Essays. Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, Indianapolis, 1985, pp. 226–252. 51 Ibid., pp. 242ff.

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In an early essay called ‘That Politics may be reduced to a Science’ (1741), Hume speaks of ‘eternal political truths, which no time nor accidents can vary’.52 This early essay is an historical survey that features considerations of the political systems of various parts of the ancient world, fifteenth-century Italy, seventeenthcentury France, and of Hume’s own day. He concludes that ‘. . . the best civil constitution [is where] every man [is] restrained by the most rigid laws.’53 In the 1741 edition of Hume’s essays, ‘That Politics may be reduced to a Science’ is followed by another essay entitled ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, which describes a natural political instinct conceived as a tendency to obey stable, lawful government.54 In yet another essay, ‘Of the Origin of Government’,55 published posthumously in 1777, Hume goes even further in elaborating a doctrine of political naturalism: The love of dominion is . . . strong in the breast of man . . . Habit soon consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded; and men, once accustomed to obedience, never think of departing from that path . . . But though this progress of human affairs may appear certain and inevitable, and though the support which allegiance brings to justice be founded on obvious principles of human nature, it cannot be expected that men should beforehand be able to discover them, or foresee their operation.56

As with Hume’s philosophical naturalism, political beliefs and, by extension, behaviour, are formed by habit and supported by a natural instinct, rather than determined by reason. Hume’s History of England can be understood as an historical exploration of this political naturalism. Like other forms of naturalism, doctrines of historical naturalism suggest epistemological pessimism. As we just saw, the players on the stage of history do not really understand their lines or their roles. Moreover, the real significance of history – if there is one – cannot be perceived, and historical explanations can never be complete or compelling. In the History of England Hume often attributes historical change simply to chance. When he does offer historical ‘explanations’, these tend to consist, as with his philosophy, of psychological proposals. He is especially interested in the non-rational motives and 52 Ibid., pp. 14–31, esp. p. 21. See also p. 18, where Hume says he intends ‘to prove . . . that politics admit of general truths, which are invariable by the humour or education either of subject or sovereign’. 53 Ibid., p. 31. 54 Ibid., pp. 32–6. 55 Ibid., pp. 37–41. 56 Ibid., p. 39. It is significant that when Hume uses the word ‘progress’ it does not by itself imply improvement. For example, he speaks of the ‘progress of superstition’ and even the ‘progress of improvement’ (ibid. p. 40).

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dispositions that lie beneath conventional behaviour including ‘often pretended’ avowals of virtue and honour. Hume’s naturalistic epistemological pessimism is also responsible for what has been taken to be his ‘incapacity to recognize the great forces [of history]’.57 For Hume, the deepest force in history seems to be a non-rational and ultimately unintelligible changelessness. Hume’s historical naturalism therefore fits best with a ‘peaks-and-troughs’ model of the historical process. At certain times there will exist states of affairs that correspond more closely than usual to the realisation of his timeless, naturalistic impulses. Hume believes that the age of Augustus, the Antonine period, and the reign of Elizabeth I were such times. Conversely, in the Middle Ages rivalry between kings and barons, and the destabilising presence of the Christian ‘superstition’ in its most pernicious institutional form, combined to thwart people’s naturalistic need to obey stable, lawful government. Hume’s view of the Middle Ages specifically counters ‘vulgar’ Whig interpretations of history. Although he thinks that there is evidence of something like a common-law vision in the time of Alfred the Great, Hume argues against suggestions of an Ancient or Gothic Constitution. His overall point is that the English constitution, like all others – and, for that matter, like history itself – ‘has been in a state of continual fluctuation.’ And so the freedoms, such as they were, of Hume’s own day were not ancient at all. Rather, they were modern and, indeed, contingent. Moreover, the events of the Middle Ages themselves severed the putative continuities of Whig history. Hume agrees with Spelman and Brady in seeing the Norman Conquest as a termination of Anglo-Saxon government and an imposition of Continental feudalism.58 Although Hume has an ‘enlightened’ distaste for the Middle Ages in general, he rather likes the Normans. He suggests that when relatively felicitous political situations have occurred in English history, they have often enough been the work of foreign conquerors such as the Romans and the Normans. And, ironically, the perversely ‘stupid’ natives tended to resist these conquerors. While the Whigs saw Magna Carta as a milestone of representative freedom, Hume regards it as an erosion of the political and institutional achievements of the Normans. In analysing Magna Carta, he goes into considerable detail to show that it was really an expression of the interests of the baronial class. Hume’s historical naturalism does, however, prevent him from being entirely critical of Magna Carta. He believes that it did at least make government in England more stable, so that people at the time could feel less threatened by both the erratic King John and his opponents the barons. Hume 57 Leslie Stephen, The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1962, vol. 1, p. 57. 58 David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols, Indianapolis, 1983, esp. vol. 1, pp. 460f.

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nevertheless points out that the vast majority of the population scarcely rates a mention in the document itself.59 Hume regards the social and political fabric of the Middle Ages as being very different from that of either the preceding eras, or the succeeding Tudor period. Discontinuities are a feature of Hume’s vision of history with its movement towards and away from naturalistic norms. Although the time of Queen Elizabeth was better than the Middle Ages, it was followed by a return of ‘superstition’ and disorder. Hume’s own time, featuring a hereditary monarch ruling in conjunction with a constitution, seemed ideal to him because it represented the fullest possible realisation of everyone’s natural political instinct. Nevertheless the relatively fortunate political situation in which Hume finds himself had been virtually inconceivable only a short time beforehand. But how does this sense of difference and discontinuity as expressed in the History of England fit with the ‘Enlightened narrative’? In some ways it does: both Hume’s history and the ‘Enlightened narrative’ agree that the present is a good time to live in; and both suggest that aspects of the Middle Ages were the antithesis of this felicitous present; both also agree that pan-Europeanism, rather than insularity, is a good thing. But Hume’s sense of discontinuities suggests that the transition from the medieval period to modernity was neither smooth nor unproblematic. Moreover, the deep ahistoricism within any doctrine of naturalism potentially works against believing in sustained or sustainable progress. Therefore, while Hume’s history is in general an expression of the ‘Enlightened narrative’, the procession of the narrative into the present is rather halting. And Hume’s history and philosophy taken together suggest that the achievements of the present – the goal of the narrative – rest on historical and epistemological ground that is by no means firm.60 It is, then, possible to see Hume as having called into question some key Enlightenment concepts. Hume’s critique of ‘modern’ ideas was taken further by Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), the outstanding historiographical achievement of the era, and probably of all time. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is a history of late antiquity, the Dark Ages, and the Middle Ages in both Europe and the Mediterranean world. Its subject matter therefore coincides perfectly with the long Middle Ages of the ‘Enlightened narrative’. But, as Pocock points out, the Decline and Fall is the story of the descent into the ‘Christian millennium’, rather than the ascent out of it.61 Moreover, the last volumes of Gibbon’s history ostentatiously depart from the main narrative of Western history in order to concentrate on the Byzantine 59 For Magna Carta see ibid., pp. 442–50. See also Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, pp. 259f. 60 Cf. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, p. 260. 61 Ibid., p. 3.

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Empire down to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, where the story ends. Gibbon therefore disrupts ‘Enlightened’ expectations by avoiding the question of the transition to the present. And while the Decline and Fall is broadly consistent with the ‘Enlightened narrative’ insofar as it describes a world that is clearly the antithesis of the Enlightenment present, Gibbon’s approach to historiography placed him at odds with some of the prevailing Enlightenment attitudes. In his early ‘Essai sur l’étude de la litterature’ (1761), for example, Gibbon disagreed with the co-editor of the Encyclopédie, Jean le Rond D’Alembert (1717–1783), over the status of historical knowledge.62 D’Alembert and the Encyclopédists preferred conceptual or philosophical history – histories involving reason and the mind – to stories about mere events. Gibbon, however, countered their distinction between histoire philosophique and histoire chronologique with a new emphasis on the relationship between history and literature. As part of this reorientation he sought to subsume philosophical history within a narrative structure. But Gibbon’s new approach was in some ways backwards looking: although his ideas about narrative were grander than anything previously imaginable, the Decline and Fall often strikes one as a work in the erudite or ‘aestheticist’ tradition; and in his research Gibbon also relied heavily on what by his day had become traditions of scholarship on the part of Antiquarian and Annalist historians. Gibbon therefore had a rather distant, and perhaps even strained, relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. And it is likely that this distance had increased by the time he began work on Decline and Fall. Simply put, he was more interested in literature, particularly the Latin classics, the extent of his immersion in which was remarkable even for the time. It is also significant that Gibbon departed from the ‘family’ of Enlightenment ideas by not having a developed sense of Nature or naturalism. Although his historiography has much in common with Hume’s, Gibbon lays no stress on the purportedly timeless principles of human nature. Instead, while the events of history often seem to repeat themselves, within this overall pattern Gibbon seeks primarily to convey a sense of social and cultural variety. Moreover, as we saw, even though naturalism is on a deep level a doctrine of epistemological pessimism, Nature as understood remains objective. Yet a combination of Gibbon’s lack of any doctrine of naturalism and his own extreme literariness leads to an ostentatious historiographical subjectivism. Gibbon’s meta-textual awareness of himself as an arranger of historical data is, notably, far more overt than Hume’s. Frequent use of the personal pronoun emphasizes Gibbon’s own presence in the Decline and Fall,63 and this personal 62 See ibid., vol. 1, pp. 208–39. 63 See JW Burrow, Gibbon, Oxford, 1985, pp. 68, 102; and David P. Jordan, Gibbon and his Roman Empire, Chicago, 1971, p. 103 for discussions of Gibbon’s use of the personal pronoun.

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presence in turn undermines the idea of any objectively valid historical explanation. Celebrated Gibbonian doublets such as ‘whether by accident or design’, ‘real or imaginary’ and ‘through sincerity or duplicity’ possess an obvious anti-epistemological function. In using these doublets, Gibbon actually seems to be sporting with the idea of arriving at valid historical explanations. Similarly, although Gibbon is extremely interested in prominent historical individuals, he is unwilling to offer even the sorts of psychological explanations associated with Hume’s historical naturalism. For example, in describing Julian the Apostate, one of the heroes of the Decline and Fall, Gibbon suggests that: [H]is lively and active mind was susceptible of the various impressions of hope and fear, of gratitude and revenge, of duty and of ambition, of the love of fame and of the fear of reproach. But it is impossible for us to calculate the respective weight and operation of these sentiments; or to ascertain the principles of action which might escape the observation, while they guided or rather impelled the steps, of Julian himself.64

Sometimes, however, Gibbon does advance what have been taken to be historical explanations. It was, for example, widely believed that he proposes a ‘thesis’ that Christianity was responsible for the fall of Rome, while more recent commentators such as Pocock have drawn attention to Gibbon’s statements about the decline of Roman republican virtue and simplicity.65 Luxury, excessive taxation, and even peace also seem at times to function as causes for the fall of Rome. Yet it is in fact rather difficult to distinguish these ‘causes’ from results, or from the effects of cyclic decay. For example, Gibbon speaks of ‘the progress of luxury amid the misfortunes of a sinking nation’.66 It is also very difficult to believe that Gibbon did not recognize that the idea of a loss of republican virtue was really a classical literary topos, rather than an historical reality. In any case, Gibbon himself undermines the validity not only of his own ‘thesis’, but also of any ‘causes’ found in the Decline and Fall. While discussing the relationship between barbarism and religion, an essential feature of the putative Gibbonian ‘thesis’, he refers to its ‘real or imaginary connection with the ruin of ancient Rome’.67 Gibbon’s apparently definitive pronouncement on the ‘cause’ of Rome’s decline – that it is the ‘natural and inevitable result of immoderate greatness’68 – is hardly an explanation at all. And it is not meant to be one. In sophisticated, literary 64 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols, ed. David Womersley, Penguin, 1995, ch. xxii, vol. 1, p. 836. 65 For a discussion of this question see JB Black, ‘Gibbon’, in The Art of History: a Study of Four Great Historians of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1926, pp. 143–83, esp. pp. 170f. 66 Ibid., pp. 166–70. 67 Ch. lxxi, Womersley ed., vol. 3, p. 1068. See also xxxviii, 2, p. 511. 68 Ibid., xxxviii, 2, p. 509.

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historiography like Gibbon’s, a characteristic lack of any absolute distinction between history itself and how it is portrayed works against the need for, and the possibility of, conventional historical explanations. The literariness of Gibbon’s history does not, however, prevent him from advancing a description of the pattern of history. Gibbon’s vision of the historical process is most clearly elaborated in a section entitled ‘General Observations on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, which is found towards the end of the thirty-eighth chapter of the Decline and Fall, and which originally represented the conclusion to the third volume of the work.69 Gibbon considers the kinds of ‘improvements’ conceivable in ‘the arts’, which are understood in the widest possible sense and include law and technology. He uses different aspects of ‘the arts’ to propose a three-tiered model of the historical process. In his first level Gibbon places the products of ‘superior powers of reason or forces’ such as the works of Homer, Cicero and Newton. These efforts seem to pertain only indirectly to particular times and places; they would ‘excite less admiration if they could be created by the will of a prince or the lessons of a preceptor.’ While Gibbon’s first, and apparently highest, level consists of ‘arts’ produced by creative individuals, his second tier contains ‘improvements’ which pertain to whole societies. Here Gibbon has in mind ‘arts’ such as laws, as well as social and economic relationships. These ‘arts’ are ‘more solid and permanent’ than those of the first level, but they ‘may be decayed by time or injured by violence’. Gibbon’s second level is therefore historical in a real sense. The ‘arts’ Gibbon has in mind for his third level are merely those that allow for survival on what seems to be a village scale: the use of fire, the forging and casting of metals and the ‘simple practice of the mechanical trades.’ Gibbon believes that these ‘arts’ would persist through a dark age. Humankind, in other words, will not again fall beneath this basic level of achievement. ‘Improvement’ is therefore secure in respect of these third-level ‘arts’. The first level of Gibbon’s model is a timeless realm of ‘arts’, existing above the mundane course of events. Access to this level occurs either by producing or by contemplating the ‘arts’ in question, and so takes place on an individual level. While Hume’s more historical understanding of the Middle Ages meant that the ‘arts’ of that period were primarily relevant in terms of their own context, Gibbon is able to see the creative thought of an individual such as St Bernard as being in some ways above the manifest limitations of his superstitious times.70 Gibbon’s second, more historical level is characterized by change. 69 Ibid., xxxviii, 2, pp. 508–16. Gibbon has traditionally been taken to be advancing a theory of progress in this discussion, although even within such interpretations his manifest irony has not gone unnoticed. See Peter Gay, Style in History, p. 25. 70 Decline and Fall, lix, 3, pp. 624ff.; lxix, 3, pp. 986f.

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Throughout Decline and Fall historical change is presented in terms of cycles. Gibbon sometimes even conceives of a cycles-within-cycles view of historical change, in which short-term cycles function as microcosms of larger processes. Successive conquerors – Romans, Germans, Goths, Franks, Arabs, Northmen and Turks – are all portrayed as repeating the same process of ascendancy and decline, vigour and enervation. And when discussing the reliance of the effete Caliphate on Turkish mercenaries, Gibbon observes that ‘so uniform are the mischiefs of military despotism that I seem to repeat the story of the praetorians of Rome.’71 While the apparently chance-driven oscillations of Hume’s model of the historical process do at least allow for sudden improvements, Gibbon’s rigid pattern of cycles is more fatalistic. For Gibbon, the future is necessarily bleak, and his eventual hostility towards the French Revolution perhaps reveals that he had already perceived the onset of another decline.72 This pattern of historical cycles does not, however, extend to the third level of Gibbon’s model, the only level that he seems to associate with progress as such. Yet this progress is understood only in terms of very basic achievements, which Gibbon believes occurred at an apparently prehistoric point. Gibbon’s third level therefore possesses an historical quality as well. It exists beneath the cycles of recorded history and represents a depth below which these cycles do not pass. Gibbon’s overall impression of the historical process is thus reminiscent of a classical frieze, consisting of a pattern of cycles enclosed by an upper and lower border. We are therefore left with the feeling that although Gibbon’s trademark hostility to Christianity is indeed typically ‘Enlightened’, aspects of his historical vision are rather at odds with the ‘Enlightened narrative’. While Hume targets specific ‘modern’ schools of thought such as Rationalism and ‘vulgar’ Whig thinking, Gibbon’s approach is less polemically focused. Yet his critique of progressive thinking is all the more powerful for precisely that reason. Hume attacks belief in historical continuity and historical or epistemological progress. But Gibbon convinces the reader that such beliefs are risible. Gibbon’s mature approach as expressed in the Decline and Fall is so literary and playful that it really defies rebuttal. In contrast, Hume’s more focused arguments were, at least in principle, able to be countered. This is what Kant would attempt to do. And in the process, the conceptual structures within which medieval studies as we know them have developed would emerge. But before that could happen, the Middle Ages had to exist in the first place. This is, for us, the real significance of the pre-modern period. In order for nineteenth-century Romantics to admire the Middle Ages, for Idealists to position them in a scheme of historical progress, and for modern professional historians to believe that we can know more and more about those 71 Ibid., lii, 3, p. 366. 72 Jordan, op. cit., pp. 77–80 has a good discussion of Gibbon’s view of the present.

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times, there needed to be a formed idea of the Middle Ages – if only to have something for the moderns to disagree with and to define themselves against. Moreover, some of the key elements in the canon of concepts through which we think about the Middle Ages began to take shape within the pre-modern intellectual and ideological debates about the past. These include feudalism, the relationship between Christianity and ‘barbarism’, the question of continuity between the Middle Ages and the present, and alterity or the idea of the Middle Ages as a radical and antithetical ‘other’ vis-à-vis the present.

2

A New Order of Things: Kant, Pre-Romanticism and the Emergence of the Modern Medievalism Within the ‘Enlightened narrative’ the Middle Ages were a significant but largely alien and unlikeable period – a trough between the ancients and the moderns. But in the early nineteenth century different understandings of the Middle Ages and the place of those times in the historical process had appeared as part of the emergence of new worldviews. One of the overarching arguments of this book is that modern academic understandings of the Middle Ages developed within a relationship between Romanticism and Idealism, the dominant intellectual movements of the nineteenth century. This chapter will show that the outlines of these developments were discernible for the first time amid the shifting attitudes towards the Middle Ages evident in the works of the prominent ‘pre-Romantic’ figures Herder and Schiller. The chapter will, however, begin by discussing the works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), with a view to showing how the conceptual structures that have determined the development of modern medieval studies, and that underpin modernity itself, were set in place. Kant’s wide-ranging and complex works have been seen in various different ways; the process of interpreting and re-interpreting Kant began in his own lifetime and continues today. There have been two major traditions in interpreting Kant.1 The first is essentially backward looking. It began with Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) even before the Kantian oeuvre was complete, and was continued by Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856). Mendelssohn and Hamilton saw Kant as having ‘annihilated the older metaphysic’. Kant, in other words, had finished off Rationalism as well as Human empiricism. The second tradition of interpreting Kant has stressed the roles of his ideas in the formation of a new metaphysics. This tradition began with Karl Leonard Reinhold (1757–1853), who made interpreting, disseminating and popularizing Kant his life’s work. In the 1790s, Reinhold was at the centre of the first major ‘interpretive conflict’ over Kant’s ideas. He was also the principle conduit through which Kant’s ideas reached the next generation of Romantic and Idealist philosophers. The importance 1 For an overview of Kant’s influence and the ways in which he has been understood see Karl Ameriks, ‘The Critique of Metaphysics: the Structure and Fate of Kant’s Dialectic’, Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 269–302.

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of Reinhold and the wider influence of Kant’s ideas on subsequent intellectual movements have been discussed in detail in the recent works by the American Kant specialist Karl Ameriks.2 As the reader is already aware, this book will follow the second interpretive tradition by highlighting the importance of Kantian ideas in modern aesthetic and progressive attitudes. Over the next chapters we shall see how varieties of Kant-style metaphysics underpinned Romanticism and Idealism, and informed the emergence and development of modern academic historiography. The first half of this chapter will prepare the way by discussing Kant’s own ideas. It will be suggested that Kant’s sense of the potential historicity of reason was the foundation of the relationship between historiography and philosophy within modernity, and of the historical metaphysics that has determined our ideas about the Middle Ages. Kant’s philosophical programme was intended to bring about a reorientation in the relationship between humanity and nature in order to safeguard both knowledge and freedom or autonomy. On this point he departed from the eighteenth-century philosophical orthodoxy that placed ‘man’ and sometimes, as with Hume, even beliefs and reason, within nature. This new direction on Kant’s part involved increased concern with how we understand nature, and with the status of any knowledge derived from this process. Kant ultimately conceived of reason as being universal and constructed. His conception of reason therefore moved beyond the relatively crude sense of certainty evident from the seventeenthcentury. The first stage of Kant’s programme was an attempt to formulate a coherent metaphysics of experience. As part of this aim Kant wanted to dispense with the ‘uncritical’ metaphysics of Rationalism, and to safeguard the natural sciences against empirical scepticism.3 He realized that the ‘principles of judgement’ that are associated with human cognition, and that form the basis of work in the natural sciences, are not simply empirical. Similarly, he pointed out that the laws suggested by observation include a priori elements. He therefore asked himself how synthetic judgements are possible a priori.4 In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781; revised edition 1787) Kant answers this question by proposing the (pre-) existence of his famous Categories, which are basic concepts of space, time and change, through which ‘intuitions’ or experiences are understood and further concepts and judgements formed.5 The principles arising from a combination of the Categories and various ‘intuitions’ are in fact the laws of nature. These

2 For the importance of Reinhold as a disseminator of Kant see Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation, Oxford, 2006, esp. pp. 6–11. 3 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London, 1956, A xvii. 4 Ibid., B 19. For Kant, ‘synthetic’ means that which pertains to, or is based on, the empirical. 5 See esp. B 89/A 64, B 109, B 128, B 219/A 177.

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principles are transcendental: they contain both synthetic and a priori elements, and they pertain to the phenomenal world. Kant does, however, retain a transcendent, ‘noumenal’ or ‘supersensible’ realm that includes his famous ‘thing-in-itself ’ as well as ideas of God and morality. We can think about these things but, at this stage in his programme, we cannot really know about them. The Critique of Pure Reason thus proposes a secure, if somewhat circumscribed, metaphysics that uses reason to validate certain quasi-universal principles, and to provide a foundation for the natural sciences. Yet on the strength of its dichotomy between noumen and phaenoumen, and because of the doctrine of the Categories, the Critique of Pure Reason foreshadows a great deal of modern radical thinking. Kant’s account of the Categories suggests that our experience and understanding of the world are, on a deep level, our own work. Although Kant himself felt he had successfully demonstrated that we all in fact construct things in the same way, and that reality therefore appears to us in a form that we can know and understand, his ideas on these matters were eroded as more radical approaches including Romanticism appeared. The aims and methods of the Critique of Pure Reason nevertheless mean that it is principally progressive in character. This is no real surprise given its overt anti-Human thrust as well as a residual indebtedness to both empiricist and rationalist sensibilities. The implicit historicity within Kant’s understanding of reason is also directly significant in regard to the formation of modern progressive thinking. Kant takes pains to distinguish reason from logic, the employment of which has not involved progress.6 Unlike logic, Kantian reason can deal not only with itself, but also with things in the world. Kant’s distinction between noumen and phaenoumen is an important component in the potential historicity of reason. Kant believes that this distinction underpins and validates both science and morality.7 In the Critique of Pure Reason the sciences are transcendental, that is to say they represent a combination of the a priori and the synthetic. Morality, however, is transcendent insofar as thinking about it consists, at this stage, of thought alone. Such transcendent thinking shows, Kant believes, that reason, while capable of a relationship with things, is also driven by its own nature to go beyond experience and to conceive of morality and a sense of a final purpose.8 As well as being intrinsically historical, Kant’s understanding of reason gives rise to the possibility of two different kinds of history: one transcendental and the other transcendent.9 Kant himself appears to oscillate between these two historical visions in the final chapters of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled 6 7 8 9

See esp. B 89/A 64, B 109, B 128, B 219/A 177. B xxix. For example, B 348/A 292. Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, Princeton, 1980.

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‘The Canon of Reason’ and ‘The Architectonic of Reason’. These chapters include discussions of various approaches in the sciences, philosophy and religion. Kant suggests that at certain times significant progress has occurred in these areas, although his greater concern is with present and future developments. The past, the present, and the future of intellectual endeavour are understood in terms of the very nature of reason itself, which Kant, raising many issues covered in the next two Critiques and in his essays on history, elaborates quite carefully. Kant believes an apparent ‘teleological unity’ in nature accounts for the existence of reason as well as its teleological characteristics. Reason is driven to act teleologically, imposing on us a ‘transcendental enlargement of our rational cognition’. Increasingly complete conceptions of the Divine Being, the moral good, freedom and so on, occur as manifestations of this ‘teleological unity’, which also ensures that reason is driven to form a system like Kant’s, whose elements are connected ‘architectonically’. Kant’s own systematic metaphysics thus marks the most recent point in a (transcendent and transcendental) ‘history of ideas’ that consists of both the unfolding of reason’s own qualities, and the manifestations of this process. In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant began detailed considerations of the matters that the previous Critique had relegated to the realm of the ‘supersensible’ or merely thinkable. The main focus of the work is morals, especially the status of moral imperatives. Kant believes that we know, by reason, that we possess an a priori moral consciousness, the dictates of which must be absolute.10 The moral consciousness provides us with moral laws and shapes the (synthetic) moral ‘maxims’ by which we make particular moral choices. The moral laws themselves are synthetic a priori propositions rather like the laws of nature. Nevertheless assigning objectivity to morals in this way arguably sits rather uneasily alongside what is perhaps the best known feature of the Critique of Practical Reason: its emphasis on moral freedom. Yet the existence of this freedom is simply deduced from the moral consciousness itself, for without freedom there can be no morals.11 According to Kant, we freely ascribe to moral imperatives, which he refers to as ‘categorical’ in order to distinguish them from everyday ‘hypothetical’ imperatives. And yet categorical imperatives are objectively valid, not least because their ‘categorical’ status depends on their ability to be universalized. Kant’s validation of practical knowledge, that is to say of morality, is predicated on a distinction between moral freedom and nature. This emphasis on moral freedom is, again, an important aspect of Kant’s departure from Enlightenment thinking, which had tended to equate freedom and the good with the realization of natural impulses. Kantian freedom – the acquiescence to 10 Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, London, 1889, esp. pp. 71f. [86f.]. 11 Ibid., pp. 65–72 [78–88].

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moral laws – may well require us to act in opposition to ‘natural’ desires. As Kant’s reason broke free of nature it went some way towards replacing it as a perceived source of universality. In the works of Kant and other anti-Enlightenment figures such as Hamann and Herder, Enlightenment notions of a universality based on nature can be seen to be breaking down. Yet, as mentioned, a breakdown of Kant’s own version of universality would entail the formation of recognizably modern and genuinely radical attitudes towards the individual, the substrate for which was already provided by Kant’s first Critique. Kant’s moral philosophy illustrates these developments particularly well as it tends to emphasize the moral choices of individuals. In this sense, Kant’s understanding of moral freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason can be seen as the basis, for example, of the quintessentially Romantic notion of the moral freedom and superiority of the creative individual. On the other hand, Hegel’s Idealism, which was virtually brought into existence by the Critique of Pure Reason, also bears the stamp of Kant’s second Critique insofar as the idea of teleological historico-philosophical progress could now be augmented by the notion of the (increasing) attainment or realization of freedom. Kant himself enlarged on the relationship between freedom and teleology in the Critique of Judgment (1790), his third and last major work. The Critique of Judgment principally deals with how beauty and taste are determined.12 The fundamental proposition of Kant’s third Critique is that judgements of beauty ipso facto demand universal assent.13 Essential to this universality is Kant’s belief that beauty is not a property of something in the world, but a shared ‘feeling’. Empirical ‘intuitions’ do, however, clearly play a role, so that we are again faced with the question of whether synthetic judgements are possible a priori. Kant’s ‘Deduction of Judgments of Taste’ shows that they are.14 This combination of the particular and the universal, however, differs significantly from that of the previous Critiques. In judgements concerning pure and practical knowledge ‘intuitions’ are received through an already existing and specific (determinate) concept, which shapes the ways in which things are perceived and judgements formed. Judgements of taste and beauty are not determinative in this sense because there is no particular and determinate concept available. Kant believes that ‘free play’ occurs as intuitions attempt to locate what must be an indeterminate concept. ‘Free play’ causes the pleasure associated with these judgements. It also means that such judgements do not actually amount to knowledge, which can only follow from the pre-existence of a determinate concept.15 But ‘free play’ is not really free. The search for an appropriate concept proceeds 12 13 14 15

Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, 1987. Ibid., pp. 57–60 [213–16]. Ibid., pp. 152f. [288f]. Ibid.

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in an orderly fashion because it is circumscribed by the very nature of the (indeterminate) concept in question. The indeterminate concept at the heart of judgements of beauty and taste is the ‘purposiveness’ of nature. Kant feels that nature seems to allow itself to be judged by us and, in the course of being judged, manifests a harmonious lawfulness.16 In perceiving this felicitous ‘purposiveness’ we find harmony and meaning in how nature appears, and we feel pleasure as a result. Precisely because it is indeterminate, the concept of nature’s ‘purposiveness’ allows ‘free play’ to take place and, at the same time, ensures ‘free play’ not only proceeds in a reasonable, regular fashion, but also ends up in the correct place. The pleasure we feel when we perceive beauty is therefore universally valid. Kant, moreover, is able to equate the beautiful, the moral good, and freedom. The ‘free play’ in judgements of beauty functions rather like the freedom associated with moral decisions. In a sustained ‘analogy’ between beauty and morality, Kant compares the freedom of the will – the will’s harmonious ‘free play’ with itself according to the laws of reason – with the ‘free play’ of reflective judgements.17 Although these judgements cannot amount to ‘pure’ or ‘practical’ knowledge, the Critique of Judgment validates the idea of moral freedom based on reason that Kant had elaborated in his second Critique. Judgements about beauty also seem to mediate between the realms of pure and practical knowledge insofar as nature’s ‘purposiveness’ enables the phenomenal, natural world to be understood in moral and teleological terms. Using the idea of nature’s ‘purposiveness’, the Critique of Judgment emphasizes that moral freedom can be reconciled with the (otherwise) apparently deterministic natural world. The Critique of Judgment therefore ensures that the first two critiques do not contradict each other in any way.18 The nature of ‘free play’ nevertheless means that judgements of beauty are not matters of knowledge per se, but of pleasurable feelings. Kant is therefore opening up the possibility that these sorts of judgements might lie beyond ratiocination. Drawing connections between these judgements and morality, moreover, potentially reduces (or raises) both to the level of feelings. As a result, the aesthetic extremity of Romanticism seems only a short step away from the Critique of Judgement. And yet the Critique of Judgment also contains a lengthy discussion of teleology, which, Kant believes, may be comprehended in a similar way to beauty. In this sense the Critique of Judgment represents an important stage in the development of Kant’s own essentially progressive attitude towards history. The concept of nature’s ‘purposiveness’ enables Kant to believe that nature is a 16 Ibid., pp. 18ff. [179ff.]. 17 Ibid., pp. 225–30 [351–5]. 18 The idea that the Critique of Judgment represents a reconciliation between nature and freedom – or, in other words, between the subject-matter of the first and the second critiques respectively – is stressed heavily in Paul Guyer, Kant, 2006.

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collection of teleological systems, the ultimate purpose of which is humanity.19 Reflective judgements and the concept of nature’s ‘purposiveness’ allow ideas such as nature, morality and final purpose to coalesce. Kant’s discussions of reflective judgement and nature’s purposiveness serve to unite – or close – his system. And this unity is achieved by a transcendental teleology, that is to say a history. Kant had foreshadowed this transcendental historical vision in an earlier essay. Kant’s writings on history,20 the best known of which are probably his responses to the proto-Romantic history of his pupil Herder, strike one as being surprisingly unsystematic. Nevertheless one of his essays, entitled ‘An Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (1784), stands out as being both broader and more polished than the others, and even includes considerations on the historian’s task. In this essay, Kant attempts to balance the facts of history against his own requirement that history be a rational process with a moral end. The central problem in interpreting history is therefore the issue of moral freedom. Although people’s actions in the past must, Kant believes, have been free, from the historian’s perspective they appear to have been determined: Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it . . .21

The concept of nature solves this difficulty because it cannot be understood by us as being anything other than progressive and teleological. History must also be regarded as progressive and teleological otherwise it too would be a ‘planless conglomeration’.22 And so ‘human actions’ as seen in history are like the natural world insofar as both can be – or allow themselves to be – understood systematically. The doing of history is therefore, at least in principle, a science like the natural sciences. In fact, human history seems to take up where nature leaves off in an overall process in which reason and moral freedom are increasingly evident. Reason and freedom, moreover, are more fully realized on a social and political level, so European history exhibits a ‘regular progress in the constitution

19 20 21 22

Critique of Judgment, pp. 317ff. [429ff.]. Immanuel Kant, On History, LW Beck (ed.), Indianapolis, 1963. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 24.

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of states since the time of the ancient Greeks’.23 The present is better than the past and the future should mark a further improvement. Kant is not, however, certain when or even if this idyllic future will come about because it can only be achieved by the exercise of free and rational choices which, strictly speaking, cannot be determined. Kant’s unwillingness to believe unequivocally in the very future that his own arguments call forth can perhaps be explained in terms of a gap between transcendent and transcendental history. In the former, the attainment of the future, consisting of the unfolding of reason’s latent paradigm according to its own characteristics, would be unhindered. In contrast, transcendental history includes the particular and the concrete. Kant believes that in his essay he is supplying the a priori framework for a transcendental history.24 We are, however, left with the daunting task of detecting this a priori component amid historical phenomena. ‘An Idea for a Universal History’ marks a pivotal point in the development of Kant’s thinking. Published shortly after the first version of the Critique of Pure Reason, it appears to respond to the apparently valueless nature, the potentially historical nature of reason, and the as yet ‘supersensible’ status of ideas such as final purpose, found in that Critique. It also deals with the problem of moral freedom in relation to the dictates of nature, an issue that would be covered more fully in the later Critiques. Most strikingly of all, the key idea in the essay on history seems a direct anticipation of the notion of nature’s ‘purposiveness’ later found in the Critique of Judgment, where it is clearly meant to function as a link between the first two Critiques.25 It is therefore tempting to suggest that the ‘architectonic’ cement of Kant’s system – the link between all his Critiques – is the transcendental, teleological history first described in his essay on history, and later fully elaborated in the third Critique. It is also likely that Kant’s belief in the transcendental nature of history, which he expressed most clearly in ‘An Idea for a Universal History’, provided the metaphysical framework for all subsequent progressive historiography. This idea that history is the meeting place of the particular and the general – that there is, in other words, meaning in history – is fundamental to the outlook of Hegel and of those he influenced, such as Ranke. It is also the basis of the view that historical phenomena are subject to generalizations. Almost all modern historians have held this view. Kant’s apparent equation of the historian’s task with that of the scientist also marks the beginning of real concern about whether and in what sense doing history can be compared with the natural sciences. This issue achieved particular prominence from the late nineteenth century. And, although it dominated discussions about the status 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 38. 25 Ibid., esp. p. 20.

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and methods of historiography that took place in the English-speaking world in the mid-twentieth century, it had by then already received its fullest and most sophisticated treatment in the works of Max Weber, who was a product of the neo-Kantian tradition. But beyond these particular issues and lines of influence, Kant’s greater significance in respect of modern historical thinking is found in the concepts and language that we moderns have used when thinking about the past. Kant’s attempt to historicise reason itself meant that modernity’s historical vision has not only featured overtly metaphysical understandings of the historical process, but also included a metaphysics of knowledge about the past. In contrast with the cutting-edge ideas in the preceding era, then, Kant’s thought and the ideas derived from it are intrinsically historical. The first signs of Kant’s influence, and evidence of a wider move from Enlightenment to modern modes of thought including a dynamic historical vision, are discernible in what is known as Pre-Romanticism. Unlike Idealism or ‘mature’ Romanticism, Pre-Romanticism was not really an intellectual movement per se. It is, rather, a label given by modern commentators to various developments that signal the dissolution of the Enlightenment paradigm and the emergence of new approaches. Despite not being in any sense systematic, Pre-Romantic thinking nevertheless intersected with Kant’s programme on a number of levels. Kant and prominent Pre-Romantics such as Herder and Hamann all, for example, demonstrate the influence of a German Christian Pietist tradition. Pre-Romanticism thus marks the beginnings of a great eastward shift in the European intellectual centre of gravity. An important factor in the early stages of this shift was a feeling that the spiritually barren (French) Enlightenment had unfairly neglected authentic ‘low’ or folk culture, and had been unnecessarily hostile towards Christianity. An examination of Pre-Romanticism also reveals that significant reorientations in how history was being thought about were taking place. Notably, and in a complete departure from all pre-Kantian approaches, the historical process was now often seen as a developing, organic whole. Recent discussions of Pre-Romantic and anti-Enlightenment thinking have tended to highlight the contribution of Johan Hamann (1730–1788).26 Having begun as a somewhat idiosyncratic ‘Enlightenment’ thinker, Hamann approved of Hume’s attack on Reason, but proceeded towards the sort of anti-intellectual stance that would figure prominently in English Romantic poetry. In overall terms, however, and notwithstanding his recent ‘discovery’, Hamman’s notoriously opaque writings were arguably less significant and influential than the works of Herder and Schiller, both of whom also changed the direction of medieval studies. 26 For example, Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Irrationalism, London, 1993.

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Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) studied theology at Königsberg, where he befriended both Kant and Hamman. Although he was a prolific writer on a number of matters, Herder’s two works of lasting significance are about history: Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte (1774) and Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1789). Both works propose organic models of the historical process. In addition, Auch eine Philosophie features the incipient historical relativism that is usually taken to be the most important aspect of Herder’s thinking.27 This historical relativism arose primarily out of Herder’s interest in poetry and language. Like the earlier but largely unheeded anti-Enlightenment figure Vico, Herder believed in the incommensurability of different languages, and in the interconnectedness of language and thought.28 According to such views, no genuine or correct translation of a text is possible. The historical relativism of Auch eine Philosophie led to the sort of unalloyed approval of the Middle Ages on Herder’s part that would characterize mature Romanticism. And in Auch eine Philosophie this admiration of the Middle Ages possessed real intellectual and philosophical relevance for the first time. Herder’s later Ideen zur Philosophie, featuring a providential pantheism that seems a precursor of nineteenth-century Idealism, nevertheless contained some interesting equivocations on the Middle Ages and their place in the overall scheme of things. In Auch eine Philosophie and Ideen zur Philosophie Herder therefore not only anticipates Romanticism and Idealism respectively and their differing attitudes towards the Middle Ages, but also foreshadows the future development of medieval studies amid the tensions between these two approaches. The historical relativism of Auch eine Philosophie includes the idea that every culture possesses its own unique centre of gravity (Mittelpunckt).29 Herder acknowledges that this belief entails epistemological difficulties in two areas: comparing different epochs; and perceiving overall meaning in history. Resorting to mysticism in order to solve these difficulties, Herder introduces the idea that empathy should play an important role in historiographical methodology. He suggests that in certain circumstances one should ‘feel oneself ’ (sich einfühlen) into the history and culture of a people.30 This belief in the efficacy of empathy underpinned the methodology of Romantic historians and came to be an important, albeit little acknowledged, element in the progressive historiography of Ranke and his followers. It would, in addition, find a place in the later 27 For example, Ernest A Menz, ‘Königsberg and Riga: The Genesis and Significance of Herder’s Historical Thought’, Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (ed.), Herder Today, New York, 1990, pp. 97–107. 28 Ibid., p. 99. 29 Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte, in Johann Gottfried von Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, Bernhard Suphan, Berlin (ed.), 1877–1913, pp. 475–594. 30 Ibid., p. 558.

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approaches of Weber and Collingwood. The organic model of the historical process that Herder proposes in Auch eine Philosophie – the feeling that history might be seen as a living entity such as a tree – ensures that meaning in history, including an understanding of historical change, cannot be grasped other than by mysticism. Historical relativism is thus balanced by an essentially religious perception of overall connectedness. This idea of connectedness includes a sense of providential purpose similar to that in Kant’s view of history and which, accordingly, anticipates Idealism.31 Perhaps surprisingly, the apparent tension between historical relativism and an organic understanding of history in Auch eine Philosophie is the basis of the high repute in which the work has been held, for it has traditionally been seen as providing a good balance between the particular and general in history. Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit32 is regarded as a more consistent but less satisfactory work than Auch eine Philosphie.33 In Ideen zur Philosophie the historical relativism of the earlier work is largely replaced by a more developed sense of history as an organism, and by a commensurate emphasis on the historical process as a whole. The interesting mixture of attitudes towards history in Auch eine Philosophie has thus given way to a more coherent progressive vision. And as would be expected, an increased sense of epistemological optimism is associated with this change. Modern commentators have noted that in Ideen zur Philosophie, Herder presents us with a world whose workings are determined by ‘eternal laws’, which we are in principle capable of understanding.34 It is, however, important to note that these ‘eternal laws’ are juxtaposed with historical dynamism. Herder emphasizes becoming rather than being, and he believes that the historical process is driven by the mystical concept of Kraft. This sense of dynamism is, within a progressive framework, better able to incorporate notions of progress and teleology, and a sense of history as a process involving moral development.35 In Auch eine Philosophie Herder suggests that the Germanic tribes were responsible for the vitality of the medieval world. Unlike Gibbon, he felt that this Germanic, barbarian vigour both improved, and had been improved by, Christianity. By the time of Ideen zur Philosophie, however, Herder was beginning 31 Ibid., p. 502. 32 Ibid., vol. 14. 33 For surveys and criticisms of various views of the merits of Auch eine Philosophie and Ideen zur Philosophie see GA Wells, ‘Herder’s Determinism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 19, 1958, pp. 105–18, and ‘Herder’s Two Philosophies of History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 21, 1960, pp. 527–37. 34 Wells, ‘Herder’s Two Philosophies’, p. 528. 35 For Herder’s sense of morality in history see Suphan (ed.), vol. 12, p. 256; 16, p. 587; 18, pp. 283, 321.

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to show signs of an antipathy towards medieval Christianity. This about-face may be related to a more favourable view of Protestantism evident in the work. In Ideen zur Philosophie Herder still stresses the vigour of the early Middle Ages, but he now sees the cultural achievements of the central and later Middle Ages as being the result of Germanic and Islamic influences being combined. The high point and fullest expression of this combination is medieval Provençal culture with its troubadour poetry. Herder believes that contact with the East in the course of the crusades precipitated a revival of learning, and that the influence of Eastern culture held in check the more distasteful aspects of medieval religiosity including scholastic philosophy. Herder’s more Gibbonian attitude towards Medieval Christianity in Ideen zur Philosophie does include some ‘eighteenth-century’ aesthetic elements, particularly a marked, and yet in some respects qualified, admiration for the ancient Greeks.36 Nevertheless progressive and proto-Idealist attitudes dominate the work. In an overall scheme of growth and development, epochs are surpassed or transcended in an almost dialectical fashion. This process is, Herder suggests, most apparent in literature, where a combination of Arab culture and Western (and essentially Germanic) chivalric sensibilities lead first to the Provençal Gaia Scienza, and from there to modernity. Herder’s change of heart regarding medieval religion should be seen as a consequence of an increasing emphasis on an organic understanding of the historical process. This developmental view of history includes a ‘Kantian’ sense of a world-historical teleology that involves increasingly higher states of reason. Just as Hegel would see the Reformation as the surpassing of a form of Christianity that had outlived its usefulness, Herder ultimately devalued medieval religiosity in order to valorize an overall process of spiritual and rational development. Whether or not WH Walsh is correct in suggesting that Kant’s early influence on Herder made itself felt more fully in Ideen zur Philosophie,37 Herder’s thoughts on history ended up in much the same place as Kant’s. Despite Kant’s criticism of the work and Herder’s resentment of that criticism, Ideen zur Philosophie proposes an historical vision that is consistent both with Kant’s first Critique, and with the notion of teleology elaborated in the third Critique. Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie is also remarkably similar to Kant’s ‘An Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, which was published at almost the same time. Herder saw that history was becoming increasingly important, and he came up with an interesting historical vision of his own. Kant nevertheless went further than Herder by expressing the emerging post-Enlightenment historical vision as a coherent and systematic metaphysics that allowed for objective knowledge. In 36 Suphan (ed.), vol. 14, p. 105 37 WH Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, London, 1970, pp. 132f., takes this line of argument.

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contrast, Herder relied on mysticism. And yet Herder’s mysticism, only partially concealed by the forbidding logic of Kant and Hegel, would continue to inform historiography influenced by both Romanticism and Idealism. Like Herder, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) played a key role in the genesis of both Romanticism and Idealism. Although Schiller is nowadays probably best known as a dramatist, in his own day he was at the forefront of developments in both philosophy and historiography. After some early dramas including The Robbers (1781–1782) and Don Carlos (1786), his first historical tragedy, Schiller was appointed to the Chair of History at Jena in 1789. Having just completed his History of the Revolt of the Netherlands (1788), he now embarked on the equally monumental History of the Thirty Years War (1791–1793). This interest in history would resurface later in the historical dramas written between 1797 and his death. Before these later dramas, Schiller spent some time working in the areas of philosophy and literary criticism. In 1793 he began to study Kant rigorously. Studying Kant gave rise to his two most significant works: Aesthetic Letters on the Education of Mankind (1794–1795), and On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795–1796). Both works were attempts to integrate or to transcend certain Kantian dichotomies. Both, moreover, drew heavily on Kant’s own thinking, especially the Critique of Judgment. While Herder’s anti-Enlightenment thinking paralleled or perhaps prefigured Kant’s system in certain important areas, Schiller’s philosophical works can therefore be seen as clear and conscious continuations of Kant. Schiller does, however, share with Herder a tendency, typical of this liminal period, to move between (pre-) Romantic and (proto-) Idealist positions. And as with Herder, this tendency is reflected in significant changes in Schiller’s attitudes towards the Middle Ages. Schiller’s mature ideas as found in his Aesthetic Letters and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry were formed through a series of departures from an earlier set of beliefs that were largely progressive and proto-Idealist. These earlier beliefs are most clearly set out in Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte (1789), his inaugural lecture as professor of history at Jena.38 In this lecture Schiller maintains that Universal History requires a philosophical approach in order to vanquish pedantry and to achieve both unity and a sense of overview.39 This philosophical approach to history turns what would otherwise be a mere aggregation of fragments into a system held together by reason.40 Schiller argues that his philosophical approach to history calls into existence a new drive (trieb) that, seeking harmony, is capable of raising historical data

38 Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, Munich, 1958, vol. 5, pp. 749–67. 39 Ibid., pp. 752ff. 40 Ibid., p. 763.

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to the level of thought.41 Although this drive combines things and reason, the resultant harmonious whole is present only in the mind of the historian, who imposes a ‘rational purpose’ or ‘teleological principle’ onto history. This teleological principle, confirmed by known facts and conforming to reason, creates happiness (glückseligkeit).42 Schiller also adds a moral dimension to the historian’s task: philosophical history involves moral edification because perceiving – or creating – the totality and harmony of history is inconsistent with ill-conceived judgements and, interestingly, with petty careerism.43 Philosophical history overcomes one’s finite perspective, leading the individual into the infinite.44 As with Schiller’s mature works, Was heisst bears the stamp of Kant. Although it is known that the later Aesthetic Letters and On Naive and Sentimental Poetry arose from Schiller’s study of Kant’s Critiques, it is tempting to suggest that Was heisst was a response to Kant’s early essay, ‘An Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (1784), which proclaimed the need for Universal History but remained silent on how an historian might actually approach such a task. Was heisst seems closer to Kant than Schiller’s later efforts, some of which were conceived and presented as departures from Kant’s ideas. In fact, Was heisst even contains some of the concepts that would appear in Kant’s Critiques. Fundamental Kantian doctrines such as the Categories and the synthetic a priori are, for example, suggested by Schiller’s belief that in philosophical history reason arranges and completes historical data – that on a deep level we create meaning in history. Similarly, the idea that the real nature of history must, in Schiller’s scheme, remain unknowable is arguably reminiscent of Kant’s sense of a supersensible realm. More specifically, Schiller’s notion of a drive (trieb) that, seeking harmony, combines thoughts and things is a striking anticipation not only of Kant’s concept of play found in the third Critique, but also of Schiller’s own concept of a spieltrieb elaborated in the Aesthetic Letters. The Kantian characteristics of Was heisst ensure that, as with Kant’s Critiques, the work consists largely of progressive aims and assumptions.45 Was heisst proposes a pattern of overall progress, with images of childhood underscoring ideas of growth and continuity. Alluding to a perceived state of barbarism, that is to say childishness, that existed in Europe only a relatively short while ago and which persists, he believes, in his own day in the New World, Schiller asks how the (European) present came about. He answers this question with concepts and

41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., p. 764. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 749ff., 763. Ibid., p. 765. Cf. Collingwood, op. cit., p. 104f. Although Collingwood notes Kantian elements in Was heist, he believes that the work proposes an essentially Romantic view of history.

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terms that would later form the very foundations of Hegel’s historical vision, namely a relationship between Spirit (Geist) and matter that gives rise to, and is perceived in, an increasing realization of freedom.46 Schiller understands the present as having been attained by a release of Spirit from sacred and secular bondage. Although the improvements he describes seem to pertain only to the last two millennia, the whole of history is necessary for this continuous process to have occurred. When it is actually discernible in (European) history, the process sustains both development and continuity. Each civilization is largely a mixture of influences from previous epochs. The Germanic peoples, for example, benefited from literary and political examples from the ancient world so that medieval civilization was formed. In Was heisst the Middle Ages feature improvements on previous periods as well as indications of future developments. By the same token, Shiller’s developmental view of history also requires the Middle Ages to exhibit characteristics that needed to be abandoned or transcended. Schiller’s notions of Spirit, its relationship with matter, and the increasing historical attainment of freedom all serve to bring medieval religion into sharp focus. Schiller maintains that the worst aspect of the Middle Ages was the presence of Christianity in its most worldly and hierarchical form ever. Gregory VII (1073–1085) and Innocent III (1198–1216), who have at times been the most admired of the medieval popes, receive particular censure from Schiller for (unspecified) crimes against humanity, and for having weakened the German Emperors.47 Within a developmental view of history such as Schiller’s, however, fundamental or defining aspects of an epoch cannot be criticized to the extent that the period in question begins to appear worse than the preceding period. For this reason Schiller qualifies his own trenchant criticism of the medieval popes. Although the actions of Gregory VII are repugnant on the surface, they still play a significant part in the overall scheme of things as revealed to the philosophical historian. Freedom’s historical path seems haphazard, but it is actually a ‘ribbon of necessity’ that we can now perceive, and which Gregory VII, consciously following his own purposes, will have inadvertently caused to proceed.48 In what is another striking anticipation of future ideas, this time of Hegel’s famous ‘cunning of reason’ argument, Schiller adduces rational and moral purposes working behind the thoughts and actions of historical individuals. In a combination of historical and epistemological progress, the ‘philosophical’ historian can now see that previous ages must have striven unknowingly to bring about the present.49 46 47 48 49

Was heisst, p. 760. Ibid., p. 759. Ibid., p. 766. Ibid.

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And so Schiller argues in Was heisst that the Reformation ended what he saw as the worldly, political religiosity of the Middle Ages, thus preparing the way for the present. He also argues that in the Middle Ages developments such as urbanization, the breakdown of feudalism, and the emergence of a middle class are signs of an increase in freedom that prefigured modernity itself.50 But Schiller’s thinking did not remain static. In the Aesthetic Letters on the Education of Mankind he attempted to use artistic experience – the perception of beauty – as a means of reconciling opposing tendencies in society and within individuals.51 Having explained certain perceived political problems in terms of a dichotomy between nature and reason, Schiller, expressing a belief that the ancient Greeks had not experienced such a division, seeks a principle of unity. In the Twelfth Letter he begins to concentrate on the alienation that he sees as dividing ‘person’ and ‘condition’. This dichotomy sustains several others: the infinite and the finite; permanence and change; form and reality; the rational and the sensual. Schiller goes on to identify a dichotomy between the sensuous instinct (Stofftrieb) and the formal instinct (Formtrieb) that underpins the other divisions. He wants to harmonize these two opposing drives in order to bring about completeness or perfection. This attempted attainment of perfection involves a third instinct, that of play (Spieltrieb), which is an intuition of completeness that emerges in artistic experience. Art might therefore serve to harmonize the rational or the formal with the sensuous. As with Kant, Schiller’s ‘play’ is a pleasure-giving balance predicated on internal freedom. Nevertheless Schiller does not stress the issue of objectivity. His perceived relationship between the perception of beauty and moral freedom, moreover, remains much more tentative than Kant’s. Although Schiller’s use of a third term that resolves contradiction may well look forward to Hegel’s dialectic, the Aesthetic Letters are obviously more significant in connection with the formation of what we can recognize as aesthetic attitudes – both within Romanticism, and in an aesthetic manifestation of early Idealism that had not yet distanced itself from Romanticism. As is evident in the Earliest Systematic Program of German Idealism, perhaps partly written by the young Hegel, those who read Schiller began to feel that art, being higher than mere reason, was actually a source of truth. According to such a view, philosophy should itself become artistic. This belief would receive further elaboration at the hands of Schlegel and would eventually, via Nietzsche, become a key concept in late twentieth-century ‘radical’ philosophy.52 50 Ibid. 51 Published as On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. EM Wilkinson and LA Willoughby, Oxford, 1967. 52 See Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley, 1987, esp. pp. 15f.

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Schiller’s next work, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry53 also contributed decisively to the formation of ‘radical’ attitudes. In fact, Schlegel’s attempt to harmonize Schiller’s opposition between naive and sentimental poetry is often seen as the starting point of Romanticism itself.54 In On Naive and Sentimental Poetry Schiller characterizes ancient poetry as naive and that of the modern world as sentimental. A series of further contrasts supports this classification: an ideal of limitation in the ancients, and an ideal of infinity in modern poetry; beauty as opposed to the sublime; and a sense of being in ancient poetry in contrast with a modern interest in the idea of becoming. On account of these contrasts Schiller believes that modern poetry is not only valid per se, but also superior to that of the Ancients. In a marked shift even from the Aesthetic Letters, the idea of the Greeks representing an ideal or an example to be followed has therefore been abandoned. As with Herder, Schiller’s dynamic historical vision has relativized the achievements of the Ancients. This erosion of the idea of the classical world as the golden age paved the way for the medievalism associated with Romanticism. And although Schiller did not evince the degree of overt admiration for the medieval world found in the mature Romanticism of, say, Schlegel’s circle, two of his last plays, The Maid of Orleans (1801) and Willhelm Tell (1804), are set in the Middle Ages. Some of the attitudes and strategies that would become central to the medievalism of mature Romanticism are, moreover, already evident in these works. All of the plays Schiller wrote after On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, including the well-known Wallenstein (1797–1798), are historical. Although this interest in historical dramas was evident in the earlier Don Carlos, it was revived by Schiller’s time spent as a professional historian and by his study of Kant. The later historical plays seek to explore the problematical relationship between the individual and the forces of history or, to be more overtly Kantian, between freedom and necessity. In Schiller’s medieval plays these Kantian concerns begin to be cast in terms that would become the basic currency of Romanticism. Similarly, Schiller’s medieval plays adopt the quintessentially Romantic tactic of using the Middle Ages to throw modern social and metaphysical ills into sharper relief. Most notably, in The Maid of Orleans, the heroine, Johanna [Joan of Arc], embodies modern alienation. 55 Wilhelm Tell, Schiller’s last completed work, is somewhat more positive on these matters. It is his only play

53 In HB Nisbett (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Haman, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 180–232. 54 See, for example, Leonard P Wessell, ‘Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 10, 3 1971, pp. 176–98. 55 Ilse Graham, Schiller’s Drama: Talent and Integrity, London, 1974, p. 179. Graham suggests that Johanna speaks with ‘the strident voice of one who is divided’.

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in which both ‘internal’ alienation – a self divided from itself – and an estrangement of an individual from society and history are resolved. Essential to these reconciliations are a quasi-mystical bond between the Swiss and their homeland, and a related sense of virtuous (Germanic) primitivism, both of which notions seem reminiscent of Herder. Schiller’s historical dramas also suggest the emergence of Romantic attitudes towards history and historiography. In these works Schiller deliberately cast aside conventions of form, style and even strict historical accuracy, in order to privilege inspiration. Before he wrote The Maid of Orleans, for example, Schiller read widely in order to immerse himself in the medieval world. And yet he ostentatiously departed from the facts by not having Johanna die at the stake. Instead, with divine assistance she escapes her bonds and dies gloriously, having won a final victory over the English and Burgundian forces, after which she is seen entering heaven. In contrast with the progressive and Idealist attitudes that would flourish in professional contexts and be seen in academic works of history, the historical vision of Romanticism moved between – and created – literary genres. Having been a professional historian and, at that time, a writer of impressive but traditional historiography, Schiller ended up using drama to express his sense of history. This aesthetic and increasingly literary confluence of history and drama seems to derive in part from Goethe (1749–1832), particularly his widely read Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a work completed with Herder’s approval and regarded as a starting point of the (PreRomantic) Sturm und Drang movement.56 Götz von Berlichingen is less classical in style than many of Goethe’s plays, and its hero is a knight-errant. Historical dramas, however, represent a preliminary stage in the quest to find a form that best expressed the Romantic historical vision. Having been given direction by both Herder and Schlegel, this quest ultimately led to an embracing of the historical novel. Schiller’s works are united by a sense of the importance of history. It is difficult not to be struck by the prescience and the force of Schiller’s own call for a philosophical history – a union of philosophy and historiography – that he made the theme of Was heisst. This new emphasis on history is perhaps the most interesting feature of Pre-Romanticism (which, as will now be clear to the reader, could also be known as pre-Idealism). The organic and developmental models of the historical process that emerged with Kant, Herder and Schiller mark a radical departure from Enlightenment and Rationalist approaches, which, because of the presence of essentially an historical understanding of nature and reason, had demonstrated difficulties in coping with the idea of progress. Pre-Romanticism 56 For the influence of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen see Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Lincoln, NE, 1970, pp. 28f.

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therefore anticipated – and to a degree actually represents – genuine and recognizably modern historical thinking in both its aesthetic and progressive forms. And medieval history as we know it has developed within a relationship between these two ways of understanding the past.

3

Golden Ages and Perfect Presents: Romanticism, Idealism and the Middle Ages In 1798 Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) used the term ‘Romantic’ to describe the new intellectual and cultural approaches that were taking shape. This was the first use of the term in its modern sense, and it occurred in the first issue of the journal Athenaeum. The journal was published in Jena and was intended as the flagship and disseminator of the new approaches. The term was not merely a clever or convenient label. Rather, it originated from the very centre of the movement it referred to. Schlegel, moreover, consciously took the term from medieval culture. Medieval romances typically depict an individual knight-errant journeying through a mysterious and hostile environment in what is really a process of self-discovery and transformation. The term ‘Romantic’ was therefore an encapsulation of the new movement’s most fundamental concerns and beliefs, as well as an embracing of the medieval world. The first half of this chapter will discuss Romanticism and explore the place of ideas about the Middle Ages within that movement. The rest of the chapter will discuss Idealism, which was a relative of Romanticism but, as we shall see, featured a rather different view of the Middle Ages. It is perhaps best to begin by briefly comparing the Pre-Romanticism of Herder and Schiller with mature Romanticism in order to understand what Romanticism was, and to appreciate why it went so far as to define itself by its admiration for the Middle Ages.1 This will be followed by some analysis of particular figures associated with Romantic medievalism. Although many individuals could be selected, it is difficult not to single out Friedrich Schlegel for particular attention. Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments represent the most sophisticated and influential statements of what might be termed the creed of Romanticism, and his developments of Schiller’s theories of poetry are often seen as the starting point of the movement itself. Schlegel’s medievalism has attracted rather less attention than that of the Romantic poets, or even of other members of his circle. It will nevertheless be suggested that Schlegel should be seen not only as the most significant Romantic, but also, and appropriately enough, as the most significant figure in terms of Romantic attitudes towards the Middle Ages. Some consideration of English 1 Schlegel’s circle actually called themselves ‘Early Romantics’ in order, one suspects, to highlight the novelty of their ideas.

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Romanticism is also required. The intellectual stimulus for English Romanticism was provided by German thought, which, to a large degree, reached Britain in two distinct stages: first, via Coleridge; and second, through Carlyle, whose wide ranging literary endeavour reveals the influence of German ideas and the specific trajectories of English medievalism. It is, however, probably more useful to focus on Walter Scott on account of the immense influence of his medieval novels and the importance of the novel form as an expression of both the Romantic historical outlook and Romantic medievalism. We saw that pre- Romanticism was based on dissatisfaction with Enlightenment attitudes and concerns, and that it featured signs of new approaches in intellectual and cultural matters, including fundamental changes in thinking about the past. One consequence of these anti-Enlightenment sentiments was a feeling that certain epochs and cultures had hitherto been unfairly treated, and that they might be more praiseworthy or more relevant than had been allowed. Such thinking involved admiration of what was seen as a state of virtuous primitivism, especially in the Germanic tribes, including the (Anglo-) Saxons. The anti-Enlightenment thrust of pre-Romanticism is also apparent in a lack of hostility towards religion in general, and a marked tendency actually to approve of Christianity. Moreover, Pre-Romanticism, relying principally on Kant’s third Critique, began to look to artistic experience as a means of resolving various perceived difficulties. This new emphasis on artistic experience was associated with the reorientation in the fine arts themselves that was based on a waning of Neo-Classical paradigms. All of these characteristics of pre- Romantic, anti- Enlightenment thinking were not only capable of underpinning new and increasingly aesthetic attitudes, but also consistent with an approving reappraisal of the Middle Ages. This Pre-Romantic reappraisal of the Middle Ages assigned to those times both an intrinsic worth, and a relevance to then current concerns. As a result, works such as Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) – works that the persistence of Enlightenment values would have marginalized as antiquarian or idiosyncratic – were attributed with a certain importance and so began to become influential in their own right.2 Mature Romanticism took these anti-Enlightenment sentiments further. Romantic criticism of Enlightenment assumptions and procedures assumed two main forms. The first of these was an opposition to the remnants of Rationalism that had persisted throughout the eighteenth century. Here Romanticism might 2 For Hurd and the development and influence of medievalism in the late eighteenth century, particularly in Britain, see Chandler, op. cit., pp. 16–25. For other examples of this (essentially antiquarian) eighteenth-century interest in the Middle Ages see Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment, esp. pp. 327ff., 334.

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well be seen as a continuation of the efforts of Hume. Importantly, however, Romanticism’s cult of unreason also included hostility towards what would now probably be known as rationality, which is to say that even the work of the natural sciences came to be regarded in some circles as misguided and intrinsically destructive. The second form of anti-Enlightenment feeling among Romantics was an antipathy towards empiricism and scepticism, which were believed to be closely connected. The ‘impotent scepticism’ that the young Carlyle, for example, encountered at Edinburgh University was felt to be inconsistent with belief, authenticity and creativity. Both of these forms of Romantic anti-Enlightenment sentiment are related to a heightened approval of religious belief, especially an earnestly held Christianity. And, as will be seen with Schlegel’s influential Berlin-Jena Group, even Protestantism could now be passed over in favour of Catholicism. Romanticism also attached various Kantian concerns and concepts to this anti-Enlightenment sentiment in ways that strengthened the aesthetic orientation of the movement as a whole. The Romantics accepted Kantian metaphysics but rejected the idea that it provided the foundations for secure knowledge.3 As well, although they saw the significance of Kant’s reorientation of the relationship between reason and nature, they did not see direction, or even purpose, as being an intrinsic part of the process suggested by Kant’s view of reason. In other words, history might not result in a unity or closure of Kantian oppositions in the present, or even at any time. The important idea of alienation was a corollary to this lack of metaphysical closure. Romanticism also announced new, potentially redemptive roles for the arts. This vision included a belief in the efficacy of instinct and inspiration rather than the rational faculties, a desire to surpass previously prevailing structures and forms, a new emphasis on the use of symbols as a vehicle for expressing relationships such as that between the finite and the infinite, and a feeling that the true artist should be accorded a privileged status similar to that of a visionary or priest. The point to be made here is that all the characteristics of Romanticism just mentioned – whether ‘anti-Enlightenment’ or more overtly ‘Kantian’ – contributed to that movement’s medievalism. Within Romanticism the Middle Ages came to be seen as a period of unity, a time free of alienation. This rather sanguine notion included two principle areas of focus, one religious and the other social. The first of these pertained to Christianity. Even the medieval institutional church now received praise because 3 For a recent discussion of the relationship between Kant and Romanticism see Karl Ameriks, ‘The Critique of Metaphysics: the Structure and Fate of Kant’s Dialectic’, Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 269–302, esp. pp. 292–7. Ameriks argues that notwithstanding certain departures, Schlegel’s circle were the ‘closest interesting heirs’ of Kant’s philosophy.

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it was seen as having been an agent for spiritual and, by extension, social unity. This favourable view of medieval Christianity is specific to mature Romanticism; it distinguishes that movement from Pre-Romanticism and Idealism, both of which tended to prefer Protestantism. The Middle Ages being characterized by a naive but authentic and satisfying Christianity also served as a powerful alternative to Enlightenment scepticism, and to the transcendent God of Rationalism. The second way in which the Middle Ages were seen as a period of unity revolved around the idea of chivalry. Romantic notions of medieval chivalry originated in eighteenth-century ‘Germanism’ and Primitivism, and were fully developed in the works of Walter Scott. Chivalry was understood as having been produced by a mixture of late-Roman culture and barbarian vigour. Medieval chivalric values acted as social cement. They were seen as complementing feudal obligations in the maintenance of a unified and harmonious society. Equally, a debasement or erosion of chivalric values came to epitomize the decline of the medieval world and the onset of modern ways. In the realm of the arts, literature about the Middle Ages seemed, moreover, to provide the ideal means of expressing the Romantic sense of alienation. As we have just seen, the narrative structure and the subject matter of medieval chivalric romances in particular summed up the explorations of problematical relationships between individuals and their environment that underpinned Romantic literary endeavour, including historiography. There also emerged a sense of the intrinsic superiority of an era characterized by an emphasis on the symbolic, especially in relation to religiosity. This idea was probably best expressed by Thomas Carlyle: It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognise symbolic worth, and prize it the highest. For is not a Symbol ever to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the Godlike?4

It was felt that in the Middle Ages this ideal was most fully realized. Symbols, moreover, not only seemed as essential to the (artistic) outlook of the Middle Ages as to Romanticism itself, but also appeared to function similarly in both environments. And finally, a belief in historical empathy meant that, as well as being admirable, the Middle Ages were intelligible and accessible to the Romantics. All of the attributes of Romanticism that led to an admiration of the Middle Ages either originated with Friedrich Schlegel, or received significant development in his hands. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Schlegel was the most important member of the seminal Berlin-Jena Group of Romantics, which included his 4 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, London, 1956, iii, 3, p. 167.

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brother Wilhelm, as well as Novalis, Tieck and Wackenroder. Studying the works of Kant, Fichte and Schiller inspired Schlegel to abandon Neoclassicism. Following Kant, he became increasingly concerned with the relationship between the finite and the infinite. Schlegel thought that this relationship was dynamic. He also thought that it was best perceived in artistic experience and that it should therefore be able to be described poetically. These beliefs led Schlegel to regard traditional philosophical approaches as inadequate; his works call for – and at times consisted of – a new poetic philosophy. His use of the fragment form was an important part of this new approach. He felt that literary, philosophical, and historiographical fragments might well capture both the dynamic relationship between the finite and the infinite, and the apparently chaotic nature of phenomenal reality. In contrast, traditional forms were too long, too systematic, and too static, for these tasks. The key concept in Schlegel’s attempt to grasp the relationship between the finite and the infinite is irony.5 Schlegel’s irony consists of the simultaneous affirmation and rejection of an object or concept, and clearly owes a great deal to the idea of (free) play found in Kant and Schiller. For Schlegel, this ironic ‘hovering’ (schweben) is the essential ingredient in artistic contemplation and creation; only through ‘hovering’ can the infinite be grasped. Perceptions of the infinite must, in addition, be expressed symbolically because the finite world represents an allegory of the infinite. This is why philosophy and science need to become artistic or poetic. The activity of ‘hovering’ is ongoing; irony transcends various forms without its hovering ever reaching, or even possessing, an ultimate goal. Schlegel suggests that the distinctive feature of Romanticism is the ability to express this ironic ‘hovering’ as continual becoming.6 Although based on some of the same Kantian concepts that would also constitute Hegel’s progressive Idealism, Schlegel’s dynamic worldview is thoroughly aesthetic. Schlegel describes a process that lacks telos or direction, and his works are dominated by images of cycles, spirals, endlessness and return. Schlegel’s aesthetic metaphysics also involves religion itself. In the Ideas Fragments (1799–1800) he argues that religion should be able to bring about his desired synthesis between philosophy and poetry, and that in the process religion itself will become more poetic.7 In addition, the Ideas Fragments mark an increasing emphasis on history. While this development is foreshadowed in the Athenaeum Fragments (1798), which seem to suggest a transcendental (in the Kantian sense) historical vision,8 the 5 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Dialogue on Poetry’ and ‘Literary Aphorisms’, ed. and trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, Pennsylvania, 1968, Athenaeum Fragments [= A] 121. 6 A 116. 7 Ideas Fragments [= I ] 2, 12, 16, 46, 96, 149. 8 A 22.

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Ideas Fragments virtually conflate history and religion.9 Art, artistic philosophy, religion, and the doing of history, are in fact all similar and related aspects of the same central endeavour: a striving to grasp and to describe the relationship between the finite and the infinite. As well as providing the foundations of mature Romanticism, Schlegel’s Fragments therefore marks the appearance of one of Romanticism’s most significant Romantic social anti-roles: the historian.10 In assigning this privileged status to the historian, Schlegel is, however, as careful as Schiller had been to distinguish such an historian from the everyday scholar. Schlegel is especially concerned to identify the religious and artistic aspects of the historian’s task. The historian is a ‘prophet facing backwards’. The historian, in other words, is someone possessed of the religious insight that allows the relationship between the finite and the infinite in history to become apparent.11 As well, the historian must be able to empathize with the religious and other sensibilities evident in the period under consideration.12 Within Schlegel’s (anti-) system historiography itself is also required to be artistic. Like artistic experience, historiography should seek to create a harmonious balance of opposites, and to express the dynamism involved in these oppositions by means of images and symbols. Such sentiments entailed a particular admiration for the Roman historian Tacitus, whose approach struck Schlegel as being based on a desire to ‘poetise’ raw historical data.13 But in thinking about how best to ‘poetise’ history in his own day, Schlegel began to wonder whether the very genre of historiography might be too limiting. He therefore announced his approval of the novel form, in the process validating a growing belief in the potential of the historical novel for expressing the Romantic historical vision.14 As with the Romantic historical vision as a whole, admiration for the Middle Ages is an important, unifying theme in Schlegel’s works. In the Fragments Schlegel begins by arguing that despite the obvious achievements of antiquity, imitation of the ancients is no longer appropriate.15 He goes on to suggest that while the Middle Ages were not cultivated in a classical sense, they possessed both an intrinsic authenticity, and a special relevance to the concerns of his own day. The Athenaeum Fragments reveal special enthusiasm for Dante (d. 9 I 70. 10 Peckham, Romanticism, esp. pp. 19–22. Peckham sees the ongoing creation of these antiroles as a series of responses to the problem of alienation, and as an essential feature of Romanticism. 11 A 22, 80, 249. 12 Critical Fragments [= C] 46. 13 A 217. 14 C 26. Schlegel’s own (later) historical works did not, however, assume the novel form. 15 A 229.

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1321), whom Schlegel regards as a modern poet because The Divine Comedy successfully positions the poetic and the heavily symbolic within a religious framework. In Descriptions of Paintings from Paris and the Netherlands (1802–4), moreover, Schlegel compares medieval and Renaissance art, favouring the former on account of its pious authenticity.16 Schlegel’s Descriptions of Paintings also develops the idea of a decline and loss of the artistic achievement of the Middle Ages, a process in which classically inspired technical advances resulted in a loss of a ‘poetic view of things’. Schlegel’s belief that Raphael’s mature works represent the beginning of both Renaissance and modern approaches would, via Rio, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, dominate nineteenth-century aesthetics and even persist within artistic Modernism. Although the medievalism of Schlegel’s later Philosophy of History (1828) is centred on the social ramifications of Christianity, this later work also features further developments of the idea of a late medieval artistic decline.17 Schlegel suggests that classical and southern influences resulted in a decline of a Dutch and German artistic movement that included Van Eyck. On this point Schlegel anticipates Huizinga’s celebrated The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) by regarding the ‘Northern Renaissance’ as the swan song of medieval sensibilities. Schlegel’s Philosophy of History uses religion as the basis of a comparison between the Middle Ages and the present.18 By this stage Schlegel had abandoned Herder’s interest in ‘low’ culture. He had come to believe that, on account of the unique position occupied by the church in the Middle Ages, the essence of medieval religion and society might be revealed by examining the ecclesiastical politics of those times. The religious statecraft of the Middle Ages, guided by ‘principle’ and seeking harmony, is contrasted with its amoral and atheistic modern equivalent. Schlegel feels that in the Middle Ages those people possessed of the vision required to direct society were actually able to do so through the institutional church and, especially, the office of the papacy. In contrast to the proto-Hegelian vision of Schiller’s Was heisst, the medieval popes are Schlegel’s heroes, and he is especially keen to restore Gregory VII’s reputation.19 Emphasising the importance of medieval religious statecraft, moreover, leads Schlegel to conceive of a ‘variety of epochs’ within the Middle Ages themselves. Each of these mini epochs is in fact an incremental stage in a process of overall decline because Schlegel argues that the waning fortunes of the medieval papacy

16 For a good discussion of this work see Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 139f. 17 Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of History in a Course of Lectures, trans. JA Robertson, London, 1846. 18 Ibid., pp. 360f., 365. 19 Ibid., pp. 359ff.

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caused wider social instability.20 The struggles between the empire and the papacy are, accordingly, seen as a vast and protracted tragedy that destroyed the integrity of the age.21 And perhaps surprisingly for a German, Schlegel reserves particular opprobrium for the emperor Barbarossa, and for Frederick II, whom he calls a ‘secret friend of the Saracens’. Schlegel’s Philosophy of History shifts the idea of a decline of the Middle Ages away from the arts and towards ecclesiastico-political matters. Although these aspects of Schlegel’s medievalism are variations on his own theme of religion as a force for unity and harmony, this change of emphasis also reflects wider developments. Like Romanticism itself, Romantic medievalism can be thought of in terms of two stages, with the year 1810 serving as an approximate dividing line. ‘Second-generation’ Romantic medievalism featured a proliferation of foci such as an incipient nationalistic bias, increasing concern with the medieval secular world, including chivalry, and a slightly different approach to the medieval arts, including the idea that Gothic architecture best epitomized the qualities of the age. The greater popularity and accessibility of this later medievalism also meant that recognizably Romantic attitudes now appeared among those who were not really cutting-edge intellectuals, a group that naturally included many historians. In these circumstances the historical novel and certain more or less conventional histories attained a special status as examples of Romantic medievalism. Arguably surpassing drama and even poetry, histories and historical novels came to be seen as instantiations of the very spirit of Romanticism. This process of popularization and proliferation nevertheless included a lessening of some of the more obviously aesthetic characteristics of Romantic medievalism. The incipient nationalism evident in second-generation Romantic medievalism, for example, perhaps shows some signs of progressive and Idealist thinking. Second-generation Romantic medievalism therefore reveals something of a tension between aesthetic and progressive attitudes – the dynamic within which modern medieval history would develop. As we shall see, while this tension would become increasingly apparent in nineteenth-century historiography, the unified, religion-centred and highly aesthetic medievalism of Schlegel’s circle would nevertheless continue to flourish in areas closer to literature and the fine arts. An important early example of second-generation Romantic medievalism is Madame de Stael’s De l’Allemagne (1813). This work, which was widely read at the time, helped spread German Romanticism westwards. It also featured a clear nationalistic bias.22 De l’Allemagne virtually conflated medieval culture and German culture, and presented the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance as 20 Ibid., p. 364. 21 Ibid., p. 363ff. 22 See Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 124ff.

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a regrettable triumph of sterile and imitative Latin forms. This sort of nationalism had not been a significant component in the medievalism of the Berlin-Jena Romantics, whose approval of Catholicism had led to the essentially panEuropean vision that underpinned Schlegel’s fondness for the medieval papacy. French Romantics responded to Madame de Stael’s Germanism with a Romantic medievalism informed by their own regional particularism. Chateaubriand’s earlier Le génie du christianisme (1802) had paralleled Berlin-Jena medievalism in its religion centeredness and its emphasis on the arts. In Charles Nodier’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (1820), however, an interest in architecture, evident to a degree in Chateaubriand, was combined with a nationalistic interest in France as a geographical region. Nodier’s sense of geographical integrity was in turn related to his notion of the Middle Ages being the most important period in the history of the French monarchy.23 And his concern with the medieval architecture of France culminated in the works and deeds of Viollet-le-Duc and, in Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. As in France, Romantic medievalism in Britain assumed its second-generation form rather quickly. Despite the reliance of English Romanticism on German ideas, the approval of Catholicism and the pan-European perspective of BerlinJena medievalism did not take hold in Britain. Perhaps the closest parallel in Britain to Schlegel’s medievalism was the religious historical vision of Sharon Turner (1768–1847), a friend of Walter Scott. Turner is generally regarded, along with Southey, as a member of a ‘conservative Romanticist group in historiography’.24 His History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799–1805) and History of England from the Norman Conquest to 1509 (1814–1823) nevertheless feature the social and nationalistic emphases of Coleridge, Carlyle and Scott, all of whom were, in slightly different ways, anti-Catholic.25 A sense of chivalry as the defining feature of the Middle Ages was a particularly significant component of Romantic medievalism in Britain, where it largely took the place of religion as the perceived agent of medieval social unity, and as the principal focus of medievalism itself. The raw material for English Romanticism’s near obsession with chivalry was provided by Letters on Chivalry (1762) written by the previously mentioned Richard Hurd (1720–1808), who was a churchman and a courtier, as well as an antiquarian scholar and literary critic. Hurd had attempted to defend medieval vernacular literature. Part of his defence was to argue that in order to appreciate

23 See JB Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing, Oxford, 1994, pp. 66–71. 24 For an appraisal of Turner see Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: the Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Lincoln, NE, 1970, pp. 85–8. Chandler’s analysis of Turner stresses his Toryism. 25 Ibid., pp. 59–82, 85–8, 96.

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this literature one had to understand what it described and what had produced it, namely chivalry. Hurd’s literature-based interest in chivalry was placed within a recognizably Romantic framework by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem ‘Love’ (1799), which anticipates John Keats’ better known ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1819). At the time he wrote ‘Love’, Coleridge had just returned from Germany, where he had become a devotee of Kantian Idealism. Scott’s prose works nevertheless took the theme of literary chivalry further than the Romantic poets. Within Scott’s medievalism, chivalric customs and perceptions as presented not only epitomized the medieval world, but also allowed his readers to assess the social and metaphysical health of particular environments and times within the Middle Ages as a whole. Chivalry therefore became a yardstick for assessing that period’s decline as well. Walter Scott (1771–1832) is not generally thought of today as an intellectual or literary figure of the highest order. This is largely the result of a tradition of hostility towards him that began with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and continued with EM Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) and FR Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1948). Scott was nevertheless in tune with the literary and philosophical developments of his day; he had read Goethe and Schiller, for example. More importantly, many prominent nineteenth-century figures felt that reading Scott’s novels had been a crucial, formative experience in their own intellectual lives.26 Scott’s first novel was Waverley (1814), which is often seen as the first ever historical novel in the modern sense. The huge success of Waverley led to a series of works set in the same environment – early modern Scotland – known as the Waverley novels. By the time he wrote Waverley Scott was already a well-known poet: his poems such as ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ (1805), ‘Marmion’ (1808), and ‘The Lady of the Lake’ (1810) had been well received by key figures in English Romanticism including Coleridge and Byron; and in 1813 he was offered the poet laureateship, which he declined. The main significance of Scott’s poems lies, however, not in their literary qualities, but in their sense of history. Admired at the time for their ‘realistic’ depictions of the past, Scott’s poems convey a sense of there being substantial differences between the past and the present. Depicting contrasts between – and conflicts within – historical periods became an important feature of Scott’s Scottish and medieval novels. And this approach, which arguably began with Scott himself, is said to define the genre of the Romantic historical novel.27 Scott’s prose medievalism began with his ‘Essay on Chivalry’ (1807), which 26 See AN Wilson, The Laird of Abbotsford: a View of Sir Walter Scott, Oxford, 1989, pp. 4f., for some examples. 27 See for example Richard Humphrey, The Historical Novel as Philosophy of History: Three German Contributions: Alexis, Fontane, Döblin. London, 1986, p. 21.

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was written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The ‘Essay on Chivalry’ intersects with the Pre-Romanticism of Herder and Schiller insofar as Scott sees chivalry itself as a continuation of an essentially Germanic vigour. Chivalry, moreover, serves both to define the Middle Ages themselves, and to distinguish those times from the present. Not surprisingly, the ‘Essay on Chivalry’ also contains concepts and attitudes that seem to derive from Gibbon, notably a sense of historical rise and fall, and an ironic attitude towards medieval religion. These Pre-Romantic and Gibbonian elements came together in the idea of a decline of the Middle Ages, in which process, Scott suggests, chivalry itself ‘degenerated into superstition’. There are also signs in Scott’s essay that the idea of chivalry was beginning to assume a relevance to certain post-Kantian and Romantic concerns – especially when chivalry is mentioned as a possible means of reconciling freedom and order.28 Scott’s ‘Essay on Chivalry’ anticipates the principal theme of his later medieval novels: Ivanhoe: a Romance (1819), the most popular of all his works; Quentin Durward (1823), his darkest and most complex novel; and The Talisman (1825), an adventure set during the Third Crusade. While Ivanhoe continues to explore the nature and significance of chivalry, this theme is now cast in terms of a more recognizably Romantic concern with the problem of alienation versus integration. This concern had emerged in Scott’s slightly earlier poem ‘Harold the Dauntless’ (1817), which is about a Viking outlaw. In his well-known book on the historical novel Georg Lukacs suggested that Ivanhoe depicts a process of racial or cultural integration between the Normans and Saxons.29 Yet Scott seems more concerned to explore various problematics – and to use them for dramatic purposes – rather than to advance solutions or suggest reconciliations. In one sense, the events of the story actually suggest a victory for the forces of insularity and parochialism, rather than integration, because the heroine Rebecca’s family and other Jews are forced to leave the country. The Saxon Ivanhoe’s eventual marriage to Rowena, another Saxon, also requires his rejection of the more appealing Rebecca.30 In Ivanhoe, there are two characters who represent a drive towards unity and integration: Ivanhoe himself and, in a wider sense, King Richard the Lionheart. Ivanhoe does defeat a Norman, the Templar priest-knight Bois-Guilbert, in single combat, thereby overcoming a chivalry debased by ‘superstition’ and selfishness. Overall unity or harmony between the Saxons and

28 See Chandler, A Dream of Order, p. 38. 29 Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Harmondsworth, 1962. For Lukacs’ assessment of Scott see esp. pp. 30, 33, 37, 47, 52, 66. The Historical Novel was first published in 1937. 30 See Wilson, op. cit., pp. 155–8 for the popularity of the character Rebecca and for Scott’s attitude toward the Jews.

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Normans seems, however, to depend entirely on the personal presence of King Richard. But Richard has a rather late entry into the events of the novel, and the eleventh-hour revealing of his true identity functions as a deus ex machina. In addition, Scott’s contemporary readers would have been aware of King Richard’s rather dismal subsequent historical career and, more importantly, of the ultimate accession to the throne of his brother John. In Ivanhoe, Prince John is unequivocally on the side of the Normans. In fact, he is their leader and figurehead. There is also an irony here because Scott’s readers would have taken themselves forward in time once more, this time to 1215 and Magna Carta, when the barons curbed John’s power. In Ivanhoe Prince John’s character works against King Richard on both a literal and metaphorical level. While Richard represents unity and, by extension, the Middle Ages themselves, John is a focus for disunity and an instantiation of Machiavellian, that is to say modern, qualities. And the reader is left with the impression that the aspects of Ivanhoe’s world that did not survive the Middle Ages are precisely those that worked in the direction of integration, namely chivalry and (positive) feudal relationships. This idea is taken up again in Quentin Durward, which is set in the fifteenth century and therefore deals more directly with the issue of the transition from medieval to modern times. The eponymous hero of Quentin Durward is a member of King Louis XI of France’s Scottish bodyguard. On account of this position, the hero is privy to the king’s dealings with well-known historical figures such as the Duke of Burgundy Charles the Bold, Philippe de Commines, who left Charles’ entourage for Louis’ service, and Cardinal Balue, whose treachery towards the king resulted in imprisonment in a suspended cage. Quentin Durward blurs the distinction between historical fiction and historiography more than any other of Scott’s works. The author’s introduction and the first chapter of the novel are really ‘history’. They describe the historical circumstances, and offer an assessment of the qualities and ability of King Louis. The parlous state of affairs in which France found herself in the fifteenth century is, Scott suggests, the result not only of war with England, but also of internal weakness. These internal factors are associated with a breakdown of feudal relationships and obligations: The princes who possessed the grand fiefs of the crown, and, in particular, the Dukes of Burgundy and Bretagne, had come to wear their feudal bonds so lightly, that that they had no scruples in lifting the standard against their liege and sovereign lord, the King of France, on the slightest pretence. When at peace, they reigned as absolute princes in their own provinces . . .31

31 Quentin Durward, ch. 1.

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Moreover, the princes’ ‘inferior vassals’ followed the example of their own lords: [Each of them] assumed as much independence as his distance from the sovereign power, the extent of his fief, or the strength of his chateau, enabled him to maintain; and these petty tyrants, no longer amenable to the exercise of the law, perpetrated with impunity the wildest excesses of fantastic oppression and cruelty.32

These anti-feudal centrifugal forces are opposed by the king. But Louis is no Richard the Lionheart: [T]he tottering throne was ascended by Louis XI, whose character, evil as it was in itself, met, combated, and in a great degree neutralised, the mischiefs of the time – as poisons of opposing qualities are said, in the ancient books of medicine, to have the power of contradicting each other.33

In fact, Louis, although standing for order and central authority, is less chivalrous than his opponents the Burgundians: The spirit of chivalry had in it this point of excellence, that, however overstrained and fantastic many of its doctrines may appear to us, they were all founded on generosity and self-denial, of which, if the earth were deprived, it would be difficult to conceive the existence of virtue among the human race . . . Among those who were the first to ridicule and abandon the self-denying principles in which [Durward] was instructed and to which he was so carefully trained up, Louis XI of France was the chief. That sovereign was of a character so purely selfish – so guiltless of entertaining any purpose unconnected with his ambition, covetousness, and desire of selfish enjoyment – that he almost seems an incarnation of the devil himself, permitted to do his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honour in its very source.34

Although Durward is the only principal character in the novel who consistently displays chivalric qualities, his naive chivalric loyalty is so alien and unintelligible to Louis that it threatens to overturn his plans; the king’s schemes are threatened because Durward succeeds in a mission on which Louis had callously figured the hero would be killed. In this complex novel the principal characters represent whole eras and the very process of historical change, rather than standing for elements within certain periods or societies, as is largely the case in Ivanhoe. Louis exhibits all the lamentable tendencies of the modern world: he is cynical, 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., ‘Author’s Introduction’.

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suspicious, amoral and bourgeois; he ridicules rank and breeding; and he actively encourages division and insurrection.35 Scott’s characterization of Louis sparked exceptional interest in this particular monarch. French historians Francois Guizot and Prosper de Barante conducted a vigorous exchange of letters on the subject,36 while Louis appeared virtually as Scott had painted him in Victor Hugo’s novel Notre dame de Paris (1831). Hugo deals with many of the same issues as Quentin Durward but uses Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral, which is really the main character in the novel, to embody the aspects of the medieval world – unity, harmony, and an understanding of symbols, that is to say of meaning beneath what is visible – that he feels were lost in the succeeding epoch. Unity and harmony in the medieval world, and the relationship between these qualities and chivalry, is the main subject matter of The Talisman. The background for The Talisman is the Third Crusade, which is perhaps the best known of all the crusades because it involved Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. As in Ivanhoe, King Richard represents cohesion. But once again Richard is unable to exert any influence on the events of the novel for a significant period. Struck down by a fever, he is bed ridden. Without Richard as its leader, the crusade is in danger of falling apart. Other would-be leaders, King Phillip of France and Duke Leopold of Austria, lack both Richard’s martial qualities and his commitment to the crusade. Dissention and intrigue run through the crusaders’ camp. Phillip and Leopold are the foci of a dissention. But this dissention is relatively benign; it ceases when Richard is cured. Intrigue is more pernicious. The principal intriguers are Conrad of Montferrat and the Grand Master of the Templars. Both will do anything – even plot the murder of Richard – to ensure that the crusade fails because the presence of newly arrived Western crusaders goes against their plans for the Holy Land. Conrad wants to be the ruler of the crusader states. And as ruler, he would abandon feudal relationships: Grand Master, I would confess to you that I have caught some attachment to the Eastern form of government: a pure and simple monarchy should consist but of kings and subjects. Such is the simple structure – a shepherd and his flock. All this internal chain of feudal dependence is artificial and sophisticated . . . A king should tread freely, Grand Master, and should not be controlled by here a ditch, there a mail-clad baron, with his sword in hand to maintain it.37 35 There is some discussion of Quentin Durward in Anne Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction?, Sydney, 2006, pp. 62–6. 36 For these letters and other reactions to Quentin Durward see Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: a Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France, Cambridge, 1984, p. 23. When Quentin Durward was published Barante was working on his History of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1364–1477. The events of Scott’s novel were within the period and subject matter covered by Barante’s history. Barante is discussed in Chapter 4. 37 The Talisman, ch. 10.

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Scott is suggesting that the more structured feudal system is a far better and fairer – indeed the ideal – form of government, not least because it allowed the qualities of those within it to be expressed in the form of chivalrous behaviour. Throughout the novel chivalric qualities define and determine the merits of the various characters. Conrad and the Grand Master have consciously abrogated their feudal and chivalric responsibilities, while the hero, Sir Kenneth of Scotland, naturally displays the purest chivalric actions and intentions. Richard and, perhaps surprisingly, Saladin are equal second to Kenneth. The Talisman contains an ambivalent series of attitudes towards east-west relations. Although the crusade certainly seems to be a good thing, Scott has no obvious sympathy for its religious motivations or, for that matter, for religion in general. Consequently, the reader is left with the impression that the crusade is a good thing because it is a huge chivalric adventure. Both sides appear to enjoy this aspect of the struggle. Scott believes that during the crusades and the Spanish Reconquista Eastern warriors absorbed something of Western chivalry.38 The Talisman is therefore rather like the eleventh-century epic The Song of Roland, set three centuries earlier in Spain, insofar as the (good) warriors of both sides understand and even admire each other despite their vast religious and cultural differences. Saladin is, however, unable to understand Western attitudes towards love. In The Talisman Scott deals for the first time with what we now know of as courtly love.39 Sir Kenneth loves King Richard’s cousin Edith, a lady far above his station. Though not requited in any obvious or tangible way, Kenneth’s feelings for Edith inspire him to act virtuously and to perform admirable martial deeds. Courtly love is thought to have originated within the troubadour culture of Provence in the late eleventh century. As we saw, Herder considered this Provencal culture to have been the result of a mixture of Germanic vigour on the one hand, and Mediterranean and Eastern influences on the other. What was largely missing from this mixture, of course, was Christianity. Scott seems to have liked this view of things. In The Talisman Kenneth’s and Edith’s courtly-love relationship is the purest expression of the chivalric values of the time. Scott, moreover, inserts King Richard’s troubadour-style minstrel Blondel de Nesle into the novel as an admirable character and even composes a song for him. On several occasions Scott also refers to the gay science or joyeuse science of the troubadours, which was their art of composing and performing their songs.40 Although The Talisman ends happily, the reader is again left with the feeling that the admirable attributes of the period in question – chivalry and, this time, 38 Ibid., ch. 2. 39 The term was first used by the historian of literature Gaston Paris in 1883. See Chapter 8. 40 The Talisman, ch. 25. The terms come from the Old Provencal gai saber. Scott uses both the English and French versions.

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courtly love – did not last beyond it. Scott’s sense of historicity always carries with it the proposition that the past was not only different from the present, but also better than it. And within the Middle Ages themselves, the twelfth century, though not perfect, seems to represent the best of times. During that period Scott believes that chivalric impulses were so strong that they even informed the age-old struggle between England and Scotland: The period . . . preceded that when the grasping ambition of Edward I [1239–1307] gave a deadly and envenomed character to the wars between the two nations . . . As yet wars betwixt the two nations, though fierce and frequent, had been conducted on principles of fair hostility, and admitted of those softening shades by which courtesy, and the respect for open and generous foemen, qualify and mitigate the horrors of war.41

Like Schlegel’s nostalgic reflections on the virtues of papal government, Ivanhoe and The Talisman convey the feeling that even at their best, the Middle Ages still exhibited certain unresolved tensions that foreshadow the failure of the medieval ideal of unity, and which function as harbingers of modernity. Irony, pessimism and nostalgia therefore lie within Romantic medievalism. Scott’s novels played a huge role in disseminating Romantic medievalism. But just as the Romantic historical vision was becoming established, it was challenged by a different view of history and of the place of the Middle Ages. The Romantics understood the historical process as being open-ended: it may well, they thought, lack any discernible shape or pattern. History was dynamic, but perhaps ultimately meaningless. In contrast, within Idealism, which was more overtly indebted to Kant on this point, history was seen as both a dynamic and a rational process. History was meaningful, and this meaning could be grasped by the use of reason. Mature Idealism as evident in Hegel’s system was, accordingly, a complex but very coherent doctrine of historical and epistemological progress. It was in fact the most extreme and most comprehensive statement of progressive beliefs ever formulated. The Idealist sense of progress was based on the concept of metaphysical unity or closure, and included notions of both continuity and historical periodization. This balance between continuity and historicity within a scheme of overall progress is perhaps the most significant element in the dissemination of Idealism into modern historiography. It seems in the long run to have been far more important and influential than the mechanics of the Idealist system. Although these mechanics – Hegel’s dialectic – actually underpinned the concept of periodization, they were seldom retained in the thinking of those influenced by Idealism. And even when they were, as in the case of Marx, they were changed 41 Ibid., ch. 7.

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and simplified. Within this balance of continuity and historicity the Middle Ages were not unequivocally praised; the Idealist sense of overall progress suggested that improvements on those times were necessary for the ultimate attainment of modernity. Equally, however, in the Idealist vision the Middle Ages featured anticipations of modernity as well as improvements on previous epochs. Despite their differences, both Idealism and Romanticism therefore represent significant departures from Rationalist and Enlightenment a historicism, and from antipathy towards the Middle Ages at the heart of the ‘enlightened narrative’. Naturally, Idealism is not the only belief system to have included ideas of historical periods. A sense of ‘ages of the world’ was, for example, a fundamental aspect of the medieval Christian worldview. Yet for Hegel, the end of ‘history’ – the meaning of life – is not salvation but history itself. Moreover, in his system Christianity, regarded as a significant but ultimately superseded form of thinking, is actually rendered historical. Hegel was able to place certain heightened notions of progress and historical periodization within a philosophical and logical framework. As we saw, although belief in progress had arisen in the seventeenth century, attempts to assign philosophical coherence to these beliefs, or to validate them with reference to history, had failed in the case of both Rationalist and Enlightenment approaches. Building principally on the work of Kant and early Idealist philosophers such as Fichte and Schelling, Hegel was able to solve these difficulties by conflating them – by making ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’ the same thing. While Hegel’s indebtedness to these early Idealists is often noted, his departures from them, and from early Romanticism, are arguably more important. When comparing the approaches of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the ‘history’ of Idealism can be understood as a process of departure from Romanticism. As part of this process Kant-style metaphysics were assigned a ‘methodological primacy’ to the extent that reality itself assumed a rational and teleological structure.42 It is perhaps worth discussing this process in a little more detail in order to help understand the nature and significance of Hegel’s own system, and the reasons for its vast influence on modern thinking about the past. Hegel’s more specific attitudes to the writing of history and to the Middle Ages are also worthy of discussion. Hegel complemented his own highly speculative model of world history with surprisingly detailed and nuanced historiographical work. And in addition to being an interesting and revealing aspect of his overall thinking, Hegel’s understanding of the Middle Ages specifically influenced the course of modern medieval studies. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) came to prominence with his Critique of all Revelation (1792), which was written in order to impress Kant. But it was published anonymously, and was at first widely taken to be Kant’s own work. The celebrity Fichte earned when the real identity of the author was revealed 42 See Ameriks, ‘The Critique of Metaphysics’, esp. p. 295.

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enabled him to become only the second Professor of Critical Philosophy at Jena. Fichte’s ‘ego philosophy’ strove to close various gaps that Kant’s ideas had appeared to open up. Fichte conceived of this closure in dynamic terms.43 In a significant development of the potential historicity of reason in Kant, Fichte understood consciousness itself as being involved in a process of increasingly achieved integrity – a ‘history’ of the attainment of self-consciousness. In his Wissenschaftslehre (1794) Fichte suggests that self-reflection could not arise from a divided subject/object structure. A third entity is needed: an uncaused ‘I’. This lack of causal anchoring allows an element of freedom to be introduced into the ‘history’ of self-consciousness. Fichte’s dynamic and unifying self-consciousness is the most apparent in the realm of artistic perception. Yet even at this stage recognizably progressive tendencies began to predominate in Fichte’s thinking. The most fundamental of these, and the characteristic that actually distinguishes him from Romanticism, is Fichte’s belief that a process leading to metaphysical closure – a resolution of the problem(s) of alienation – is already occurring and will at some stage be completed. In On the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy (1794),44 which was written in the context of a dispute with Schiller, Fichte elaborates concepts such as drives (Trieben), force (Kraft), and Spirit (Geist), all of which bring about closure. Although dealing with the status and the history of artistic experience, Fichte is keen to oppose certain tendencies in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters that seem to amount to a cyclical view of things. Fichte follows Kantian orthodoxy in associating artistic experience with freedom, but he brings in Spirit at this point. Spirit is absolutely free on account of being unencumbered by matter or reality, and artistic experience – a perception of unity – raises mere taste to the level of Spirit. In contrast, tastelessness is equated with a lack of freedom. Fichte even speaks of regions and historical periods of relative serfdom, that is to say tastelessness. Fichte’s The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806) further develops these themes.45 In one sense The Characteristics of the Present Age represents a synthesis of Kantian theories of artistic experience and history insofar as Fichte places the concept of hovering (Schweben) within a scheme of unequivocal progress. But unlike Kant, Fichte associates hovering with determinate knowledge. In The Characteristics of the Present Age Fichte continues Kant’s idea of history as an unfolding of a rational plan, but he explores the conceptual or logical necessity of the process. Using the notion of rational freedom, and introducing the notion of 43 See Daniel Breazeale (ed. and trans.), Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, Ithaca, 1988, esp. pp. 71f. 44 David Simpson (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 75–93. 45 For a good discussion of this work see Collingwood, op. cit., pp. 106ff.

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a dialectical movement, he advances a mechanics of development. History moves through a (logical) sequence of related concepts, which are aspects or degrees of an overall concept. Nevertheless the end of the process, namely the complete attainment of rational freedom – still, significantly, seen in terms of artistic experience – is not yet at hand. Lacking the present-centeredness of Hegel, Fichte’s present is merely a stage in the increase of knowledge and (rational) freedom. Fichte’s idea of closure being achieved in logically determined stages informed the Idealist philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854). Schelling was a theology student at Tübingen with Hegel. He became Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy at Jena in 1798, having published several works of Idealist philosophy that were indebted to Kant and Fichte, but which also contained traces of Spinoza’s pantheism. Schelling’s long and varied intellectual life can for convenience be divided into two broad phases.46 The first, ending around 1809, consisted of an essentially Fichtean transcendental Idealism, within which Schelling developed his ‘nature philosophy’. Schelling’s second intellectual period featured interest in a number of themes including existence, religion and mythology. Although this second period included sophisticated criticisms of Hegel, as well as what have been seen as anticipations of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger, the first period is of more interest to us on account of its place in the development of Idealism. Using Kant’s idea of nature’s ‘purposiveness’, Schelling’s nature philosophy subsumes the mind-matter dichotomy within a totality that allows us to conceive of ourselves as being within nature, but also free and conscious. Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) largely abandons this pantheism and emphasizes a sense of unity that is perceived in artistic experience.47 The System of Transcendental Idealism elaborates a ‘history’ of self-consciousness. This history begins with a division of the absolute from itself – a division that not only entails the very formation of the material world, but also, once consciousness is (logically) achieved, accounts for contradictions between freedom and necessity. In the historical process unity and objectivity are gradually (re-) achieved, and freedom is reconciled with necessity. And as with Fichte, the logically predetermined stages in the achievement of metaphysical closure are understood as a series of advances in consciousness. Although the ingredients and even the very workings of Hegel’s system can therefore be found within German Idealist philosophy, Hegel’s own influence and perceived importance rest on more than having simply combined these already existing concepts into one system. Hegel’s achievement is perhaps best understood as a shifting of Idealism into the overtly progressive sphere. This move involved 46 FWJ Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. and intro., F. de Wolfe Bolman, New York, 1942. See pp. 4f., for a discussion of the stages of Schelling’s thinking. 47 Simpson (ed.). pp. 119–32.

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the adoption of an extreme epistemological optimism, and included an emphasis on philosophy rather than art or religion. The historiographical consequences of these changes should also be acknowledged. Despite his reputation as a (mere) speculative thinker, Hegel not only added philosophical coherence to Idealism, but also fleshed out its developmental but highly abstract historical vision with some interesting theorizing about historiography, and with a great deal of historical research. In short, Idealism could now accommodate ‘real’ history, thereby becoming genuinely transcendental in the Kantian sense. Hegel felt that Fichte and Schelling had placed insufficient emphasis on the process of the ascent of consciousness. His Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) rectified this deficiency.48 The Phenomenology is a history not of ideas but of thought itself. In this history mind or Spirit moves in a dialectical advance through stages of consciousness and self-consciousness towards Reason, with each stage being a synthesis of the previous two stages. This whole process, beginning with apprehension by mere sensation and ending with conceptual thought, consists of Spirit’s logically determined urge to overcome self-alienation. Since the essence of Spirit is, on account of a (logical) contradiction with matter, freedom, each stage in the process represents an increase in both freedom and (self-) consciousness. The dynamics of the whole system and the mechanics of each particular transition are matters of logic. They must therefore become apparent once the system advances to the appropriate stage. This epistemological advance is in fact the main emphasis of the work. The last chapter of the Phenomenology, entitled ‘Absolute Knowledge’, describes a transition from religion to philosophy and suggests that knowledge will not – and cannot – advance any further. Although all things are not yet actually known, Hegel believes he has shown how and why genuine knowledge is obtainable. In this sense the Phenomenology, advancing the most extreme epistemological optimism imaginable, is itself the culmination of the historical advance of knowledge. Consciousness of God marks a crucial stage in Hegel’s history of consciousness. Here lies the meaning of the medieval Christian world. Even in the Phenomenology, his arguably most speculative and rarefied work, Hegel makes a point of discussing the Middle Ages.49 Hegel sees in medieval thinking a struggle to advance from what he calls an ‘unhappy consciousness’ or a ‘double self-consciousness’. In the Middle Ages unity was perceived, but could not yet be

48 This work was formerly known in the Anglophone world as The Phenomenology of Mind. The standard English translation is GWF Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. JB Baillie, London, 1910. 49 For some discussions of the place of the Middle Ages in the Phenomenology see GRG Mure, The Philosophy of Hegel, Oxford, 1965, pp. 79ff., 94f., and Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth, and History: an Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy, London, 1991, pp. 228ff.

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accomplished. The medieval world recognized God, but laid too much emphasis on the notion of physicality because of the strength of the idea of the incarnation of Christ. The crusades, for example, demonstrate too much concern with the Holy Land itself, while miracles pertain to the sensuous rather than to the spiritual. Equally, the ‘medieval’ need for a confessor places someone else in contact with God. Yet these problems within medieval religiosity are the very elements whose synthesis would lead to the beginning of the modern world. Most notably, medieval other-worldliness foreshadows the new level of self-consciousness seen in modern conceptual thought. The unhappiness of the Christian medieval consciousness is therefore only relative. It is not only an advance on previous religious sensibilities such as Judaism, which Hegel regards as a particularly abject cul-de-sac, but also a necessary prelude to the confident and increasingly secular consciousness of unity that began with the Reformation. Medieval secular thought is therefore also significant. While feudalism included conceptions of both nobility and baseness, the concept of noblesse oblige synthesized these two ideas and anticipated the modern, post-Reformation consciousness. Meanwhile chivalry would debase itself by greed, ending in the corruption and mannered emptiness of ancien-régime France. In some ways Hegel’s view of chivalry therefore agrees with that of the Romantics. But in Hegel’s system the ‘tragic’ aspects of the Middle Ages are incorporated within a pattern of overall progress. Hegel elaborated his historical vision further in The Philosophy of History (based on lectures delivered at Berlin in the 1820s).50 The introduction to The Philosophy of History augments the central theme of the Phenomenology – the ascent to absolute knowledge – by describing a history of historiography.51 Hegel says there are three kinds of historiography: original, reflective and philosophical. Original history lacks sophisticated reflection and includes most ancient and medieval historiography. Reflective history is divided into four subdivisions, each of which approaches but fails to reach the level of philosophical history, which consists of the study of world history. Thinking about world history can only be done with the assistance of philosophy, that is to say Reason. Philosophical history describes Hegel’s own approach, of course. The different kinds of historiography represent increasing levels of awareness, in which process ‘the poetic’ is increasingly eliminated, replaced by ‘the prosaic’. While Hegel acknowledges the existence of artistic elements in historiography, he takes pains to distinguish historiography from the arts. He does believe that art, which strives to reveal the absolute, possesses a history of its own that also has discernible stages.52 50 GWF Hegel, Reason in History: a General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman, New York, 1989. 51 Ibid., pp. 3–10. 52 GWF Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. B Bosanquet, Penguin, 1993, p. 29.

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Art becomes more intellectually satisfying and more truthful as it develops, and so Christian art is superior to that of the ancients. But art is overtaken by philosophy, with the ‘philosophy of art’ serving as an intermediate stage. As art falls away, conceptual thought, which is better able to convey truth, replaces it. Historiography has a far more meaningful history than art because it is absorbed within philosophy, rather than being replaced by it. In other words, as historiography develops, it becomes more philosophical. In the introduction to The Philosophy of History Hegel also accounts for some potential objections to historical vision. For example, he specifically denies the existence of any (past) golden age. He argues that Spirit, having ‘acted against itself ’ dialectically in each period, must emerge transformed and improved.53 Another potential objection is the belief that individuals can influence the course of history. This objection is overcome by the famous cunning-of-reason argument. Hegel maintains that Spirit works through or ‘behind’ these (unknowing) individuals during times of particular historical significance, thus maintaining its own logic of development leading to the present.54 Both of these arguments point towards Hegel’s belief in the virtues of the modern nation-state. On this point he is clearly at odds with Romantic social and political theorizing. Hegel feels that the modern state represents the most objectified form of freedom possible, and so provides the perfect (political) locus for the universal and the particular to be reconciled.55 A final potential objection to Hegel’s view of things is that there seems to be a great deal of futility and waste associated with the march of progress, especially when, with Spirit having moved on, whole civilizations are left to stagnate and to die. Hegel nevertheless explains that although the process of transcendence – ‘Minerva’s flight’ – necessarily means that something must be left behind at each stage, there remain traces of all previous epochs in the present.56 Hegel’s dialectical historical process thus not only balances progress and historicity, but also involves a substantial degree of continuity with the past. The main body of The Philosophy of History consists of substantiations and elaborations of these reflections by means of detailed discussions and historical examples. Hegel seems to be demonstrating what a philosophical consideration of history is, and what it might achieve. As we saw, he believed that the historical process consists of increases in the consciousness of freedom. In The Philosophy of History he suggests that the ancient Near East possessed the consciousness that

53 54 55 56

See also William Desmond, ‘Art as “Aesthetic” and as “Religious” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Absolute Spirit’, Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, ed. Peter G Stillman, New York, 1987, pp. 170–96. Hartman (trans.), pp. 12, 89. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 94f.

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one person – the ruler – is free, while in the Greek and Roman civilizations it was realized that some are free. In the ‘German world’, however, all were finally understood as being free.57 The East, characterized by ‘unreflected consciousness’, represents the childhood of history, while Greece and Rome are respectively the adolescence and maturity of history. The German world is its old age. The Spirit of world history is at its strongest in its old age because it is conscious of unity (with itself). The German world begins with Christianity, which contains the ‘principle of mediation’ between Spirit and nature that allowed people to recognize themselves as being spiritual beings. In contrast with Byzantine Christianity, which Minerva left behind, it was the Germanic peoples who ‘advanced’ this vital principle of Christianity. Although Hegel’s German world features a general antithesis between the sacred and the secular, it is divided into three periods. The first of these lasted until Charlemagne. It featured the appearance of both Christianity and the Germanic ‘nations’ within the Roman World. This first period therefore marks the formation of the elements of the ‘German’ dialectic.58 In the second German period, that is to say the Middle Ages proper, tensions within and between each side of this German antithesis developed and deepened. Theocracy opposed feudal monarchy, but the church, which should have been the repository of spirituality, became worldly, and so set in place the elements of the third German period, which lasted from the Reformation to the French Revolution. Hegel believes that the Reformation restored to Christianity its essential freedom, and that the resulting combination of truth and freedom gave rise to the formation of a modern secular consciousness. This modern consciousness is aware of its own intrinsic worth – a level of awareness that finally enabled states to be constituted according to rational principles.59 For Hegel, the medieval period is therefore neither a lacuna between the ancients and moderns as with the ‘enlightened narrative’, nor a Romantic golden age. It is the central stage in the development of the German, that is to say the almost-modern, world. In Hegel’s historical scheme ‘enlightened’ distaste for aspects of the Middle Ages is kept in check by a process of overall development, and any apparently lamentable characteristics or tendencies of those times are understood as (necessary) antithetical elements in a dynamic of progress. It is difficult not to be struck by how many aspects of Hegel’s view of the Middle Ages seem familiar and modern. His sense of distinct periods and discernible transitions within what we call ‘the long Middle Ages’ would, for example, excite little protest from an average modern medievalist. Hegel sees 57 GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York, 1956, pp. 103ff. 58 Ibid., pp. 341ff. 59 Ibid., pp. 411f.

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every historical period or ‘world’ in terms of contrasts that involve a series of ‘reactions’. Three of these ‘reactions’ characterize and divide up the Middle Ages: the breakdown of Charlemagne’s empire; the formation of the Feudal System; and the struggles between the sacred and secular worlds, in which process the church became secularized thereby bringing about the Reformation. Virtually every modern medievalist would also share both Hegel’s perception that the medieval church increasingly consisted of a ‘manifold self-contradiction’, and his belief that exploring this contradiction is important in attempting to come to grips with the social and spiritual makeup of the Middle Ages themselves. Hegel is able to support his views on these questions by detailed and wide-ranging discussions of scholastic philosophy, the chivalric orders, the worship of relics, the church reform movements, and so on, all of which can still be read with interest. Hegel in fact seems most modern and (therefore) most convincing when discussing medieval religiosity, and in these discussions he manages to include both ecclesiastico-political and spiritual considerations. For example, bishoprics are characterized as having been essentially secular and therefore antithetical to the church reform programme,60 while the veneration of the saints and the worship of Mary are seen as naive forms of Christianity that involve ‘external’ mediation between individuals and God.61 Hegel, moreover, regards the mass not only as the focal point of medieval religiosity itself, but also as fundamental to any interpretation of the spiritual life of those times. Although he believes that in the Middle Ages the celebration of the mass synthesized the actual and the eternal aspects of Christ’s sacrifice, he suggests that the sensuous and the physical were in general overemphasized during the ceremony. As with saints’ relics, Hegel contrasts these medieval and Catholic ‘externalities’ with what is presented as a proto-Protestant emphasis on the faith of the receiver.62 The apparent familiarity and soundness of much of Hegel’s thinking about the Middle Ages can in part be attributed to his enormous influence on modern intellectual life in general. Hegel’s system as practised by the ‘orthodox’ Right Hegelians dominated the German-speaking world until the mid-nineteenth century when the Young Hegelians, a group lead by Feuerbach and which included the biblical scholar and historian David Strauss as well as Marx, came to prominence. The Young Hegelian movement was principally responsible for the dissemination of Hegelian thinking into modern European intellectual life. The Young Hegelians retained most of Hegel’s system, but tended not to take up his present-centeredness or his sense of absolute epistemological optimism. ‘Orthodox’ Hegelianism also entered Britain, where it built on the earlier efforts 60 Ibid., pp. 374f. 61 Ibid., p. 378. 62 Ibid., p. 377.

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of figures such as Coleridge and Carlyle to introduce German Idealism. The resultant ‘Neo-Hegelian’ movement, which included the philosophers Green, Bosanquet and Bradley, was prominent in British and American philosophical circles until the early twentieth century, by which time Dilthey and, especially, Croce had revived interest in Hegel himself on the Continent. But Hegel’s influence extended far beyond philosophy; the core beliefs of Hegelian Idealism translated so well into so many different areas. For example, when liberal and ‘new Whig’ attitudes emerged respectively in Britain and France in the early nineteenth century, they resembled Hegelianism in several fundamental areas. Both Hegelian Idealism and this Whig/liberal thinking conceived of the past in terms of progress, continuity and increasing freedom. Both, moreover, understood the present as the culmination of the historical process. And both tended to see Protestantism as a significant advance on Catholicism. Nineteenth-century ‘new’ Whig thinking was a far more confident and cohesive set of beliefs than its seventeenth-century antecedent. It is tempting to account for this newfound confidence and cohesion by pointing to Hegel’s achievement in having made history, progress, continuity and knowledge coexist without contradictions or inconsistencies. But the apparent familiarity of Hegel’s understanding of the Middle Ages is perhaps more directly the result of various Hegelian ideas having informed the establishment and growth of professional academic historiography as we know it and, within this, modern medieval studies. The following chapters will deal with these developments.

4

Professors and Professionals: Medieval History and the Nineteenth-Century Academic Environment In the nineteenth century the study of the Middle Ages developed within – and as a result of – tensions between Romanticism and Idealism. These tensions existed at the time when the study of history began to assume its modern, professional form. But being coherent and optimistic, Idealism fitted the process of professionalization better than Romanticism. And so Idealism provided the metaphysical framework for modern academic historiography. As with the formation of Idealism itself, the rise of professional, institutionalized historiography is therefore a history of the expulsion of overtly Romantic sensibilities. The clearest signs of this change of emphasis were a lessening of the unequivocal admiration for the Middle Ages associated with Romanticism, and an increasing tendency to see those times as a (significant) stage in a scheme of overall historical progress. There were, however, regional variations within these general developments. Medieval history in Germany was not only practiced by individuals with close personal and philosophical connections with the Romantic movement, but also featured a very unified and culture-centred interpretation of the Middle Ages. And yet the influence of Idealism on historical thinking was also particularly pronounced in Germany. Idealist attitudes began to dominate the study of history in Germany during the second quarter of the century, after which they spread abroad. This chapter will examine medieval history in Germany, England and France, before ending with a discussion of Leopold von Ranke, who is widely regarded as the originator of modern historiographical practice. It will show that Ranke’s ‘revolution’ should be seen as part of a wider shift in early nineteenth-century historiography towards the progressive vision that we may associate with modern and current professional approaches. This move from Romantic to Idealist sensibilities is evident in historians’ use of sources, and in the meanings they assigned to the writing and reading of histories. This is not to suggest that Romantic historians were less interested in primary-source research than historians of subsequent generations. As we shall see, Romantic historians were admirably thorough in their research. Indeed, one of their favourite techniques was to immerse themselves completely in whatever primary sources were available. Their research nevertheless often featured a greater reliance on literature, as opposed to archival material, than was fashionable among later historians. On this point, the principal aim of Romantic historians was to get as much out of the

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sources as possible and make them ‘speak’ to modern readers. Among Romantic historians, moreover, there was usually a higher level of concern with the artistic or literary qualities of historiography than was the case with the fully professional historians of later generations. This concern meant that the Romantic historians were more sympathetic towards the works of previous historians, notably the ancients and Gibbon, than would soon be the case. Romantic historians also wrote history with the avowed intention of stimulating the imaginations of their readers. Their openness on this matter again contrasted significantly with later historians, who began to feel – and to suggest – that the Romantics had been cavalier with the facts. This was not so. The Romantics did, however, fail to claim that their histories were necessarily or significantly better than those of the past. Claiming such an improvement has in fact been the cornerstone of mainstream, professional historiography since the time of Ranke. And this claim has typically been associated with methodological innovation and, more broadly, with the idea that more has been – or can be – revealed about the past itself. The first Continental historian to demonstrate a recognizably Romantic sympathy for the Middle Ages was Johannes von Müller (1752–1809). Although born in Switzerland, Müller spent most of his later life in various German states. Müller’s histories included the Geschichte der Schweizer (1780) and Reisen der Päpste (1782). The Geschichte der Schweizer featured the William Tell legend and was used by Schiller for his well-known drama on the subject. Müller treated the legend as history. Müller also wrote a ‘universal’ history of Germany, which was largely finished by 1780 but only published after his death, by which stage his earlier works were being republished. From 1810 Müller’s brother, who was a pupil of Herder, oversaw the publication of Müller’s complete works in 27 volumes, the first three of which consisted of the ‘universal’ history. Müller’s histories exerted an enormous influence on German Romantic medieval historians. A case in point is the multi-volume History of the Crusades (1807–1832) by Müller’s friend and follower Friedrich Wilken (1777–1840). Wilken had close personal connections with leading German Romantics. When his history began to appear he was a professor at Heidelberg. In 1817 he became Professor of History and Oriental Studies at Berlin. Familiar with Eastern languages, he was the first Western historian to use Arab sources in connection with the crusades. Although Wilken’s history was later criticized for what was deemed to be excessive use of literature as historical evidence, at the time it was seen as an impressive, comprehensive history of the crusades; it was not eclipsed until the appearance of the works of von Sybel, a disciple of Ranke, two generations of historians later.1 1 For discussions of Müller and Wilken see GP Gooch, History and Historians of the Nineteenth Century, London, 1913, esp. pp. 54, 67, 71ff., 410, and Gordon A. Craig, ‘Johannes von Müller: The Historian in Search of a Hero’, The American Historical Review, 74, 1969.

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Müller was also responsible for a growth of interest in medieval German literature. Müller’s belief in the importance of German literature was shared by the prominent Romantic JL Tieck (1773–1853), a member of Schlegel’s circle, and by Jacob Grimm (1785–1863). Grimm brought rigorous philological scholarship to Romantic medievalism in his Mährchen (1812), and in his German Grammar (1819). Grimm believed that, just like medieval cathedrals, the literature of the Middle Ages expressed the essence or soul of that era, and this incipient Kulturgeschichte approach was taken further in the course of his well-known attraction to myths and folk tales. Yet although German Romantic medieval history featured the unified and culture-centred medievalism typical of Schlegel’s Romanticism, it also possessed a nationalistic bias typical of ‘second-generation’ Romanticism. This nationalism can be associated with the anti-Enlightenment (and therefore anti-French) sentiments fundamental to both Romanticism and to Romantic medievalism. For instance, Heinrich Luden (1780–1847), the author of the massive Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (1825–37), which went as far as the thirteenth century, felt that medieval history was German history. Defining himself and his fellow Romantic historians in opposition to perceived Enlightenment values, Luden said that to previous generations the Middle Ages had ‘seemed to be a starless night’.2 Among the German Romantic historians nationalism was, however, balanced by the approval of Catholicism that was such an important aspect of the medievalism of Schlegel’s circle. An example of this pro-Catholic sentiment was Hildebrand als Papst Gregorius VII und sein Zeitalter (1815) by Johannes Voigt (1786–1863), which actually incurred Protestant criticism. Voigt was a pupil and follower of Luden. Although a Protestant, Voigt wrote approvingly of Pope Gregory VII’s reforming agenda, thus foreshadowing the direction taken a short time later by Schlegel’s history of the Middle Ages. Similarly, Johann Böhmer (1795–1863), who is best known for his involvement in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica source collection, rehearsed Voigt’s and Schlegel’s admiration for a unified Catholic Christendom.3 It was in fact a thirst for primary sources among German Romantic historians that led to the foundation of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1819, an enterprise that also included Grimm and Friedrich von Raumer (1781–1873).4 And one’s sense that Romantic historians anticipated ‘Rankean’ developments in this and other areas is underscored by Raumer’s founding of the first German historical review, the Historische Taschenbuch, in 1830 – nearly thirty years before the now 2 Gooch, op. cit., p. 72. For Luden’s place in the ‘German Romantic School’ see JW Thompson, A History of Historical Writing, New York, 1942, vol. 2, p. 140. 3 JW Thompson, A History of Historical Writing, New York, 1942, p. 141. 4 For the history of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica see David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises, London 1960, pp. 65–97.

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much better known Historische Zeitschrift, which was edited by Ranke’s protégé von Sybel. Raumer’s six-volume Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit (1823–1825) is the outstanding example of medieval history from the German Romantic ‘school’. Raumer turned away from a promising legal and administrative career in order to write histories. In 1810, he produced a monograph on taxation in Britain (Das britische Besteuerungssystem), which was his first published work, and the following year he became a professor at the University of Breslau. In 1819, he was appointed to the higher-status University of Berlin as a professor of history and political science. In the meantime he had written a book on historians from the Middle Ages (Handbuch merkwürdiger Stellen aus den lateinischen Geschichtschreibern des Mittelalters [1813]). But all the while he had been working on his history of the medieval Hohenstaufen kings of Germany. He received the enthusiastic support of Johannes von Müller for this project; as early as 1807 he sent the ageing Müller excerpts from what would ultimately be the first volume of his history for comments. And Raumer’s history begins with a quotation from Müller saying that it is worthy to have a large project as one’s life-work, and that the Hohenstaufen are an excellent choice as subject matter for such a work.5 Although writing about the Hohenstaufen would have been a vast undertaking in itself, Raumer decided to do much more. He discusses this decision in the general foreword to his history.6 Raumer believes that the historian should not proceed as if on a ‘dead-straight street’ because there are often ‘beautiful things to the side’. While Herodotus, Raumer feels, might have gone a bit too far in his wanderings, he at least had the right idea. And Raumer reserves especially high praise for Gibbon, who was able to find connections between historical phenomena, and to convey an impression of overall unity. In addition to telling the story of the Hohenstaufen, Raumer explains that he felt it necessary to include matters such as the crusades (including the Albigensian Crusade) and the Normans because the history of the Hohenstaufen would be incomplete without them. By the same logic, it was also necessary to include something about the culture of the time. Accordingly, in what is really the first example of medieval Kulturgeschichte, the ninth and last book of Raumer’s work ranges through the institutional, doctrinal, and spiritual history of the church, education and the arts, and many aspects of secular life. Raumer aims to construct a complete and coherent picture of the world of the Hohenstaufen; he reassures his readers that once they reach the story of the Hohenstaufen themselves, everything will make 5 Friedrich von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit, 6 vols, Leipzig, 1823–1825, vol. 1, p. x. 6 Ibid., pp. x–xiv.

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more sense and they will see the benefit of having read the first three introductory books on the crusades.7 Raumer believes that the crusades were such a ‘general movement’ that they should be seen as another wave of Germanic migrations (neuer Völkerwanderung). But while the original fifth-century migrations were caused by ‘external circumstances’, the crusaders were driven by ‘inner motivations’. This presents a problem for historians because it is difficult to perceive these motivations directly. Raumer therefore concludes that the crusades cannot necessarily be explained by any specific putative cause or interpretation. He nevertheless suggests that religious fervour and a concomitant hatred of unbelievers were the main general motivations. Yet he does not rule out other factors such as greed, malice, and a desire for novelty. In adducing these possible additional factors Raumer is following certain medieval sources that exhibit distaste for popular enthusiasm of any kind and so attribute the basest of motives for it. Raumer’s depiction of the crusades is based on an admirably wide range of primary sources. For his description of the First Crusade, for example, he uses what have become the standard Western sources such as William of Tyre and Robert the Monk, as well as the memoirs of the Byzantine Empress Anna Comnena and the little known chronicle of Lupus Protospatarius, who was probably a southern Italian of Byzantine extraction. As we shall see, the variety of perspectives in the sources for the First Crusade means that several different interpretations are possible regarding the origin, nature and leadership of the crusade. Having considered the various sources, Raumer suggests that although the crusade was an essentially religious phenomenon, it must have largely occurred outside the authority of the pope. Raumer argues that the pope would have wanted the participants to be knights and other ‘appropriate’ personnel, rather than those who took part in the so-called ‘peoples crusade’, which actually left first.8 The medieval popes were generally fierce opponents of the Hohenstaufen and, for that matter, of medieval German kings and emperors in general. Perhaps surprisingly, however, Raumer does not criticize either individual popes or the institution of the papacy. In fact, throughout his history he manages to lionise both the Hohenstaufen and the papacy. And even from the period before the Hohenstaufen, Raumer, like Voigt and Schlegel, strongly praises Hildebrand or Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085). Gregory is perhaps the most controversial of the medieval popes because his desire to increase the power of the papacy brought about the Investiture Contest, and because he twice excommunicated the German emperor Henry IV in the course of that struggle. As well as 7 Raumer’s history was written in nine books but published in six volumes. The ninth book, which deals with cultural history, takes up the entire sixth volume. 8 Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit, vol. 1, pp. 43–51.

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commending Gregory’s reforming and ecclesiastico-political agenda, Raumer praises his personal qualities. He describes, for example, how Gregory, fearing capture by either imperial troops or the unruly Roman proletariat, was forced to flee and take refuge with the Normans in southern Italy, where he was kept as both prisoner and puppet. Although it was the lowest point of his career and, to make matters worse, he was afflicted with physical ailments as well, Gregory’s optimistic fortitude and spiritual strength meant that he was ‘never so great’ as during this period.9 Raumer’s admiration for Gregory and other popes is based on an approval of medieval institutional Christianity. Raumer believes that the initial expansion of Christianity was the most important change in world history.10 He sees this expansion in organic terms; he uses images of growth, evolution, trees and even blossoms to describe the process by which early Christianity ended up as the hierarchical medieval church. This process is presented as an unequivocally good thing because, as the medieval theologians themselves said, Christianity needs a church like the soul needs a body. And so claims that early Christianity was somehow better or purer than its later institutional instantiation are incorrect.11 Raumer acknowledges that the early church was largely democratic. But the move to more ‘aristocratic’ arrangements such as bishoprics was ‘natural’. Switching to a geographical metaphor, the whole process culminated in a summit or pinnacle represented by the medieval papacy. And under the control of the papacy, the church became the largest and most important institution of the Middle Ages, and of all time.12 The medieval papacy transcended national and political boundaries with the idea of a unity of all countries, and it potentially incorporated all actions and ways of thinking. At this point Raumer introduces post-Kantian metaphysics: the papacy not only connected the finite and the infinite (endliches und unendliches), but also achieved the appropriate balance between the two. The medieval papacy, he concludes, formed an ‘all-encompassing circle’ that included the physical and the spiritual realms. It was therefore incomparably superior to more recent ‘ideas’ such as the secular nation-state and, from Raumer’s own lifetime, Napoleon’s attempted imposition of a Europe-wide Continental System.13 But Raumer’s admiration for the papacy makes one wonder how he will deal with the Hohenstaufen, especially with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1192–1250), who was twice excommunicated, and who led a crusade to the holy 9 10 11 12 13

Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., vol. 6, p. 3 Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid.

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land as an excommunicate. Frederick is one of the figures from the Middle Ages who have continued to fascinate subsequent eras, not least because it has been easy to cast him as a modern man before his time on account of his arguable lack of commitment to Christianity, and his apparent tolerance of non-Western cultures and religions.14 But he has remained an enigmatic, almost protean, figure, defying definitive interpretations of his personality and motivations, or even of his achievements and legacy. In fact, Frederick has been a battleground for historians.15 Raumer rhetorically lays bare his own trepidations in attempting to write about Frederick.16 When dealing with Frederick, he says, the historian not only faces problems of how to understand the events in all their complexity and how to present them coherently, but must also be aware of the many interpretations of Frederick from his own time to the present. For it is possible to argue from the perspective of the pope, the emperor, the towns, the guilds, the church and even the heretics, of Frederick’s day. All of this brings Shakespeare’s As You Like It to Raumer’s mind.17 Nevertheless, Raumer feels, by using specific research and writing techniques the historian might at least avoid being tendentious or simplistic. Raumer’s approach to research is simply to immerse himself in the sources. He describes years of primary-source research, during which he had ‘daily dealings’ with people from the Middle Ages. He therefore came to ‘inhabit’ the period. In researching the relations between Frederick and the papacy, moreover, Raumer sought – and was granted – access to the Vatican’s records, which he used extensively when writing about Frederick. And he warns his readers to expect more direct quotations from sources than was usual, arguing that this will enable them to overcome their preconceptions and judge for themselves. Yet Raumer does not leave everything about Frederick to his readers’ judgement. In particular, he argues strenuously that contrary to certain views expressed both at the time and since, Frederick was both religious and a Christian.18 14 For example, Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London, 2004, pp. 409–13. Russell believed that Frederick was ‘free from the superstitions of his age’. 15 For some examples see Ernst Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, 1927 (English trans. 1931), David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, Oxford, 1992, and Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, New York, 1946. Kantorowicz’s energetic and highly readable biography of Frederick was heavily criticized by Anglophone historians, who thought it romantic, mythical and nationalistic. Abulafia, seeking to place Frederick in historical context, consciously wrote his biography in order to counter Kantorowicz’s perceived excesses. Barraclough, writing in the shadow of the Second World War, argued that Frederick’s concern with Italy and the Mediterranean was ultimately bad for both Germany and Europe. 16 Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit, vol. 3, pp. v–viii. 17 Ibid., p. vi. 18 Ibid., pp. 568ff.

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Raumer acknowledges that Frederick was superstitious, and that he believed in astrology, prophesy and fortune telling. For example, Frederick never went to Florence because of a prophesy that he would die beneath flowers. But these beliefs and fears remained within a recognizably Christian framework, while his employment of astrologers was not unusual for the time. Frederick’s astrologers also performed more practical tasks including researching nature and translating Aristotle’s works on animals, which complemented Frederick’s own treatise on falconry. Raumer sees Frederick’s treatise not only as praiseworthy in itself on account of its variety and thoroughness, but also as an example of an Aristotelian approach. Yet, again, Frederick’s Aristotelian leanings do not mean that he was not a Christian. Neither do his struggles with the papacy. Raumer admits that Frederick was certainly not a Christian in the way that the papacy wanted. But he argues that even during Frederick’s excommunications, he always remained a Christian ‘in a higher sense’. And although he rejected aspects of the papacy’s ‘institutional forms’, this did not take him closer to Islam, Judaism or a ‘spiritless and indifferent unbelief ’. Raumer’s overall point is that beneath their differences, the popes and Frederick really had much in common; they both existed within an ‘all encompassing’ Christian unity. In many ways Frederick’s forceful personality complemented and balanced the power of the papacy, thereby creating an ideal state of affairs. During Frederick’s reign, Raumer argues, the institutional church was respected, but its authority over towns and townspeople was limited so as not to be excessive.19 And within the towns, Frederick saw to it that the rights of individuals and of trade guilds were protected. Frederick’s legislation also made sure that taxes were levied and distributed fairly. But according to Raumer, Frederick was more than an imaginative ruler and legislator. While that would have been rare enough in the Middle Ages, even rarer was Frederick’s support of the natural sciences and the arts ‘for their own sake’.20 He himself was at the forefront of the investigations and discoveries of the day. He was, moreover, a poet of the highest order. As well, he was an enthusiastic ‘venerator’ (verehrer) of women. On this point Raumer is responding to accusations made by Frederick’s enemies that he ruled in the manner of an Eastern potentate and kept a harem. Rather, Raumer seems to be associating Frederick’s ‘veneration’ of women with courtly love, which would be entirely appropriate for a noble and a Christian. The balance between the spiritual and the temporal achieved by the force of Frederick’s own example is associated with a cultural high point that Raumer describes in a manner that brings to mind Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). In an environment that was ‘unprecedented in history’, Frederick ‘transformed everyone’ and ‘led them in the 19 Ibid., p. 577. 20 Ibid., p. 578.

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highest dance of life’, allowing them to express fully both seriousness and gaiety. And, as with the papacy, Raumer uses a botanical metaphor to capture the beauty and transience of Frederick’s achievement: ‘who would not have wanted this appearance, the highest flower and fruit of the time, to have been permanent?’ In the last volume of his history Raumer attempts to convey a sense of the cultural achievement of Frederick’s day, and to place art and culture in the context of medieval life in general. Coming to grips with Raumer’s last volume is surprisingly challenging. Much of the volume consists of almost picayune items of information presented without any obvious structure or argument, so the reader is left wondering what exactly Raumer was trying to do. At times, however, Raumer uses a broader brush and proposes both a pan-Europeanism based on his favourable view of medieval Christianity, and the sort of nationalism sometimes found in second-generation Romanticism. Raumer’s discussion of gothic architecture is a case in point.21 Although Raumer acknowledges the influence of classical architecture, especially in Italy, he suggests that the slavish imitation of classical forms had already begun to wane in Western Europe by the sixth century. From that time on architectural developments in the west were autochthonous. Raumer makes a point of denying Eastern influence in the development of the gothic style. After a description of different kinds of arches and a review of the scholarship on the matter, he concludes that Western architects did not draw upon Moorish styles.22 A vehement condemnation of Byzantine art and culture rounds off the arguments for seeing gothic architecture as an intrinsically Western form.23 Raumer proposes the existence of a pre-gothic stage in Europe beginning in the tenth century and lasting until the twelfth, when a ‘new spirit and new movement’ (neuer geist und neuer bewegung) emerged during the reign of the Emperor Frederick I (d. 1190). Surprisingly, the mature gothic style is ‘Germanic’. Today’s art historians generally regard Abbot Suger’s twelfth-century remodelling of the abbey of St Denis in Paris as the beginnings of gothic architecture. But Raumer labels development in France and even England as Germanic. He believes that the Germanic architectural style, which is most evident in the cathedrals of Freiburg, Strasbourg and Cologne, represented the highest and most complete art form of the Middle Ages.24 Raumer’s descriptions of medieval life do not, however, attempt to combine pan-Europeanism and Germanism in this way. Rather, in using a myriad of historical examples from a variety of regions, and in assigning no particular 21 Ibid., vol. 6, pp. 524–33. Unexpectedly, Raumer (p. 527) cautions against the over-use of the term ‘gothic’, especially in connection with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 22 Ibid., p. 525. 23 Ibid., p. 526. 24 Ibid., p. 527.

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priority to any, he in effect abandons nationalism while retaining a European perspective. Raumer ranges through almost all conceivable aspects of medieval life, including childhood, festivals, clothing, living arrangements, diet, divorce and superstition. Most surprisingly, he even discusses aspects of medieval sexuality, such as adultery and prostitution. His approach consists wherever possible of examining the treatment of a particular issue in canon law or an equivalent legal context, and then to list all the examples known from primary sources. Only rarely will a generalization be offered. For example, Raumer suggests that prostitution was just as common in the Middle Ages as at other times.25 But he is largely content to provide the reader with minute details, such as prostitutes being required to wear distinctive clothing in Bologna, and the street where they worked in Toulouse being known as la rue chaud. Raumer also argues that superstition, within which he includes the veneration of saints’ relics, declined in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But again, this is only an overture to a highly enjoyable succession of colourful historical examples such as a con-man priest in Halle who performed bogus miracles, and an Italian girl who liked pretending to be a witch, but who was undone because she refused to allow her hair to be cut.26 It is tempting to suggest that Raumer is immersing the reader in medieval life, just as he, the historian, ‘lived’ within his primary sources. He is revelling in the details of medieval life in all their alterity, and for their own sake. Raumer’s sections on medieval life are strange because they are so familiar. There is surprisingly little difference between reading Raumer and reading recent works on medieval daily life or popular religion. Raumer even has the sort of caveats concerning possible exaggerations and sensationalisms in medieval sources that one encounters in these modern works.27 In fact, notwithstanding his Romanticism, Raumer’s treatment of medieval popular culture anticipates the particularism and the specialization of post-Rankean academic historians by virtue of its immense detail and its avoidance of narrative. By the time he wrote on medieval culture and daily life, though, Raumer had five weighty yet readable volumes of narrative history behind him. Raumer’s volume on culture is, however, easily substantial enough to be seen as an important work in its own right. And it appears all the more significant when one realizes that it was the first of its kind: it was the first modern example of medieval cultural history, with culture understood as including, but also extending beyond, the arts. Although Raumer began as a lawyer and civil servant, before his history of the Hohenstaufen was published he was, as we saw, a Professor of Political 25 Ibid., pp. 555f. 26 Ibid., p. 579. 27 Ibid., p. 559.

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Science and History at Berlin. In contrast with developments on the Continent,28 however, early nineteenth-century British historians of the Middle Ages were all still amateurs. In Britain Romantic medievalism was most apparent in poetry – significantly, the literary genre where German thought exerted most direct influence – and in Scott’s novels. Britain was by no means at the intellectual vanguard during this period. Early nineteenth-century medieval histories in Britain nevertheless reveal the same anti-Enlightenment sentiments that characterized German scholarship. Anti-Enlightenment historical thinking emerged in Britain in association with a late eighteenth-century movement now known as Primitivism, which featured an interest in the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts.29 During this period anti-Enlightenment sentiment in English medieval history also began to show some signs of the quintessentially Romantic approval of medieval Catholicism that characterized German medievalism. An example of this trend is Joseph Berington, author of The History of the Lives of Abeillard and Heloisa (1784, 1793) and The History of the Reign of Henry the Second, and of Richard, and of John . . . (1790). Barrington attempted to overturn perceived Enlightenment prejudice and ignorance concerning the Middle Ages, and to reveal the advantages that Catholicism had brought to England in those times. Robert Southey (1774–1843) was perhaps the most overtly Romantic historian of the Middle Ages in Britain during this period. Expressing his medievalism either in poems such as ‘Harold’ (1791) and ‘Joan of Arc’ (1795), or through the well-researched ‘history’, Sir Thomas More; or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (begun in 1817, but not published until 1829), Southey constantly compared the past with the present to the disadvantage of the latter. Southey’s medievalism shares with that of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) two related foci that were at this stage exclusively insular: a concern for the plight of those who suffered dislocation and hardship as a result of the Industrial Revolution; and, in an anticipation of what we now call ‘green’ thinking, an awareness of the ruin caused by industrial ‘progress’. While Carlyle imagined the waterways of northern England as they would have been in the twelfth century, Southey contrasted the modern mill with the medieval cathedral. Southey’s medievalism thus includes a sense of a decline of and from the Middle Ages. In an interesting inversion of Hegel’s view of the Reformation as the real beginning of modernity, the Reformation in British history seems, for Southey, to function as a sign of a descent into an increasingly materialistic modernity. On this point Southey’s Romantic medievalism parallels that of William Cobbett (1763–1835), a well-known champion of the poor. Cobbett’s History of the 28 Chairs in history were founded in Berlin in 1810 and at the Sorbonne in 1812. 29 Thomas P Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing, New York, 1933, pp. 103–26.

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Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (1824–6) lays particular emphasis on the social advantages of medieval economic practices.30 In early nineteenth-century British historiography Romantic understandings of the Middle Ages sometimes coexisted with Whig attitudes, the existence of which was related to the local political ascendancy of the ‘New Whigs’. The works of Henry Hallam (1777–1859) are a good illustration of this mixture, and also foreshadow the increasingly progressive orientation of nineteenth-century historiography. Hallam’s A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818) is consistent with Southey’s medievalism in some areas. Hallam suggests that medieval workers had been better off than their modern counterparts because they had existed within a feudal system that included notions of honour, loyalty and even affection. Hallam nevertheless understands English political history in Whig terms, regarding Magna Carta as the ‘key-stone of English liberty’. Moreover, he sees continuities between Magna Carta and the laws of Edward the Confessor and, accordingly, dislikes the Normans. Hallam believes that society gradually improved during ‘the last four centuries of the Middle Ages’, and that a combination of the invention of printing and a fifteenth-century classical revival meant that in terms of culture and the arts ‘the sun was now fully above the horizon’.31 Hallam’s later Constitutional History of England (1827) continues this trajectory of Whig thinking, reprising the theme of the Ancient Constitution: The government of England, in all times recorded by history, has been one of those mixed and limited monarchies which the Celtic and Gothic tribes appear universally to have established in preference to the coarse despotism of eastern nations, or the more artificial tyranny of Rome and Constantinople . . .32

Nevertheless Hallam departs from a traditional (seventeenth-century) Whig sense of continuity insofar as his sense of progress is supported by an organic metaphor: England, more fortunate than the rest, had acquired in the fifteenth century a just reputation for the goodness of its laws and the security of its citizens from oppression. This liberty had been the slow fruit of ages, still waiting a happier season for its perfect ripeness.33

30 For Southey and Cobbett see ibid., pp. 64–74, 102–13. 31 Henry Hallam, A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, 2 vols, London, 1834, esp. vol. 2, pp. 529, 536ff., 871. 32 Henry Hallam, The Constitutional History of England, 2 vols, London, 1834, vol. 1, p. 17. 33 Ibid.

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The best-known example of Whig history from this period is TB Macaulay’s History of England, the first volumes of which were published in 1848. Although the History of England ostensibly begins in 1688, Macaulay’s first chapter discusses developments up to that time. Attempting to counter the widely known views of Hume, Macaulay minimises the significance of Norman-French influence on English history. He suggests, instead, that the ‘history of the English nation’ began in the thirteenth century with Magna Carta, which was in essence a check to ‘foreign’ rule. Macaulay argues that the Protestant Reformation, which he understands as an essentially German phenomenon, hastened an overall process of increasing freedom and prosperity. Macaulay’s view of the Middle Ages anticipates developments in Britain. Professional historians would only emerge in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time genuinely modern (Continental) progressive thinking would come to dominate British historiography as Idealism and Rankean methodology dovetailed with this reinvigorated Whiggism to produce the medieval histories of Stubbs and Maitland. Although the process of professionalization occurred more rapidly in France than in Britain, French historians associated with Romanticism were still in some senses semi-professionals; key French Romantic historians such as Michaud and Barante only entered academia after they had written at least some of their histories. French Romantic historiography began with Le génie du christianisme (1802) by Francois-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848). Chateaubriand had fought in the émigré forces against the French Revolutionary armies before returning to France after the amnesty offered by the Consulate. Le génie du christianisme arose from his desire to understand the causes of the French Revolution. Having recently reconverted to Catholicism, Chateaubriand laid much of the blame for the revolution on French Enlightenment hostility towards religion. Le génie du christianisme is a thorough attempt to rehabilitate Christianity, and especially Catholicism, in a way that brings to mind Schlegel’s religion- and culture-centred historical vision. It is divided into four parts, the first of which discusses Christian doctrinal beliefs. The remaining parts are more obviously historical; they deal mainly with medieval Christian art and literature, but also include sections on subjects as diverse as the military orders and medieval music. Perhaps the most important and influential aspects of Le génie du christianisme were, however, Chateaubriand’s belief in the social advantages of medieval Christianity, and his sense of gothic architecture being an expression of the spirit of the Middle Ages. Chateaubriand’s influence extended throughout the French cultural environment and beyond. But in the context of historiography, as with Johannes Muller and the German historians of the time, French Romantic historians looked upon Chateaubriand as their leader and source of inspiration. Medievalists Joseph Francois Michaud (1767–1839) and Prosper de Barante (1782–1866) were prominent among the French Romantic ‘school’ of historians

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inspired by Chateaubriand. Michaud shared Chateaubriand’s royalist leanings and his sympathy with medieval religion. Michaud’s major work was the Histoire des croisades (1811–1822), which was so well received that it was reprinted several times and translated into English, German, Italian and Russian.34 Some aspects of the Histoire des croisades might, however, surprise current readers. Recent historians of the crusades tend to view the events in question with irony. In Stephen Runciman’s widely read works, for instance, the crusades are a terrible, tragic waste, and the Western crusaders are generally presented as violent lunatics.35 Michaud, in contrast, sees the crusades as an imposing spectacle. He suggests that within the confusion of events we can discern ‘the sublimest virtues mixed with all the disorders of the wildest passions’.36 In the case of the First Crusade, which was really the only successful crusade, Michaud emphasizes the courage, perseverance and religious motivations of those who took part. Michaud’s approval of medieval Christianity underpins these judgements, of course. Although it goes against some current expectations and sensibilities, Michaud’s desire to bring the crusaders’ religiosity to the fore is at times quite stimulating, and it calls into question the ways in which recent historians and readers understand the crusades. According to Michaud, Peter the Hermit was the prime mover and spiritual leader of the First Crusade. The question of the crusade’s origin and leadership had been dealt with by Gibbon in a characteristically vigorous manner: About twenty years after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Turks, the holy sepulchre was visited by a hermit of the name of Peter, a native of Amiens, in the province of Picardy in France. His resentment and sympathy were excited by his own injuries and the oppression of the Christian name; he mingled his tears with those of the patriarch, and earnestly enquired if no hopes of relief could be entertained from the Greek emperors of the East. The patriarch exposed the vices and weakness of the successors of Constantine. ‘I will rouse,’ explained the hermit, ‘the martial nations of Europe in your cause;’ and Europe was obedient to the call of the hermit.37

Although Michaud does not see medieval religion in Gibbon’s terms as a ‘prevailing popular superstition’, he agrees with him about Peter the Hermit’s role. Michaud describes how Peter’s charismatic personality and deep religious

34 Michaud’s history appeared in English as The History of the Crusades, trans. W. Robson, 3 vols, New York, 1853. 35 Stephen Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols, 1951–1954. Runciman’s highly readable history is still in print and remains the standard narrative treatment of the subject. 36 Robson (trans.), p. ix. 37 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 58.

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convictions were expressed through his preaching of the crusade. In Michaud’s narrative Peter’s preaching, which causes widespread crusading fervour, occurs before Pope Urban’s speech at the Council of Clermont, and even before the pope received a request for assistance from the Byzantine emperor.38 As we shall see, later Rankean historians overturned this sequence of events by concentrating on Urban’s speech, thereby adducing papal control over the crusade. This view dominated subsequent histories of the crusades.39 Today we are, however, in a position to see that different opinions on this and other similar matters are the result of changing fashions in historical interpretation and definition. For example, recent and current histories usually refer to those who immediately left for the east with Peter the Hermit as ‘the Peoples Crusade’, thereby distinguishing this movement from the (more organized) First Crusade itself. For Michaud, however, it is all one emotionally inspired phenomenon, and Peter is its leader. Michaud’s interpretation is in fact supported by some recent revisionist scholarship that emphasizes the role of Peter, and the popular, essentially apocalyptic, religiosity of the crusaders.40 And despite his approval of Christianity, Michaud seems admirably modern and familiar insofar as he ultimately sees the beliefs and motivations of the crusaders as products of their own time.41 Michaud’s attitude to his sources also strikes the reader as being rather modern and familiar. Michaud possessed the same drive towards the consultation and collection of primary sources that was becoming evident among German Romantic medieval historians. In Michaud’s case this led to his Bibliothèque des Croisades (1829), which followed Wilken’s lead by including Eastern sources. Michaud believed that the nature of medieval primary sources raises questions of historiographical style and technique. Writers of histories about the ancient world have, he suggests, the classical historians themselves as models. But the relative literary crudeness of medieval sources means that the modern historian has to work harder to make those times ‘speak’ to readers in a compelling narrative. And yet, while previous generations of historians have criticized the ‘ignorance and credulity’ of medieval writers, the ‘unaffected’ simplicity of medieval sources can also help the historian to get closer to medieval people and to understand them, while at the same time retaining a sense of historicity and irreducible difference:

38 Robson (trans.), pp. 40–4. 39 See Chapter 5. Robson, the translator of the 1853 English edition of Michaud’s history, is anxious to contradict Michaud and Gibbon, and to assert papal control over the crusade. 40 John O Ward, ‘Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century’, Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, Ernst Breisach (ed.), Kalamazoo, 1985, pp. 103–166. See also EO Blake and CA Morris, ‘A Hermit Goes to War: Peter the Hemit and the Origins of the First Crusade’, Studies in Church History, 22, 1985, pp. 79–107. 41 For example, Robson (trans.), p. xxiii.

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Without yielding faith to all they say, I have not disdained from the fables they relate to us, and which were believed by contemporaries; for that which was thought worthy of credit then serves to picture to us the manners of our ancestors, and forms an essential part of the history of past ages.42

Prosper de Barante was even more concerned than Michaud with matters of style and narrative technique, and with the challenges posed by medieval primary sources. Barante gives his readers a lengthy discussion of these matters in the preface to his Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois, 1364–1477 (1824–1826). Barante’s Histoire deals with the struggles between the French kings and their cousins the Dukes of Burgundy that began during the Hundred Years War. The later volumes of the Histoire cover the same period as Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward. Barante read a French translation of Scott’s novel while he was writing the Histoire. We saw that although Barante was taken by Scott’s depiction of Louis XI, he thought he could do better.43 It is also likely that reading Scott stimulated Barante to think more deeply about the relationship between historiography and historical fiction, and about the nature of narrative. The preface to the Histoire is a sustained call for literary historiography. Barante begins by suggesting that national characteristics may be discerned in various styles of narrative. He believes that common traits are evident in French literature from the time of the medieval fabliaux to the comedies of Moliere, and that historians in his own day should try to understand and emulate these characteristics. Accordingly, historians should ‘take pleasure in all that has life and movement’, and leave questions of blame and approval to their readers. Barante complains that recent histories lack ‘movement in language’, and fail to stimulate the reader’s imagination. Moreover, historians think that they can come up with definitive conclusions. They are therefore too opinionated.44 The author, Barante strikingly suggests, has taken the place of the narrative.45 As a result, it is the opinions of the historian, rather than the historical events and personalities, that will remain with the reader. This is why historical novels and dramas have often provided a better sense of characters and events than conventional histories.46 Barante’s call for historiography to be literary also involves a special relationship between the historian and medieval primary sources. Immersion in the relevant sources is, naturally enough, the historian’s starting point; but there is

42 Ibid. 43 See, Chapter 3, fn. 23. 44 Prosper de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois, 1364–1477, 12 vols, 1824–1826, vol. 1, pp. iiiff., xxivf. 45 Ibid., pp. ixf. 46 Ibid., pp. xiif. In 1821 Barante translated Schiller’s historical dramas into French.

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much more to be done. Barante explains that the perspective of particular sources is rather like the experience of an individual soldier in a battle: it is limited, episodic and incomplete. An ‘external’, that is to say modern, perspective is needed to perceive what is important, and to draw everything together. Modern approaches to the conventions of composition are, moreover, required in order to smooth over gaps and repetitions in the sources. In addition, although the language of the original sources has some appeal, it is an obstacle to modern readers. The historian must empathise with the sources and appreciate their historical nature, and then use them to build up ‘complete’ narratives that incorporate details and facts within a ‘unity of composition’.47 These ‘complete’ narratives will provide the modern reader with a sense of the past in all its colour, complexity and historicity. And within a ‘complete’ narrative, historical personalities will be brought to life, while retaining their irreducible alterity. Barante’s own historical narrative lives up to the high expectations created by these discussions. Barante chose his subject wisely because the period has several lengthy primary sources including Philippe de Commines’ memoirs. He is therefore able to write in immense detail. The narrative does not, however, become bogged by this detail. The flow of events is broken only by barely noticeable structural divisions created by the deaths of the Dukes of Burgundy and the accessions of their heirs. The author’s voice in the form of any comment, analysis or recapitulation that would disturb the narrative flow is also absent. Above all, though, the narrative is kept moving by Barante’s writing style. Today’s English-speaking readers might expect Barante and other Continental Romantic historians to have written in the florid and convoluted style of, say, Thomas Carlyle. But Barante confounds such expectations with an elegantly simple style. This simplicity imparts a great energy to the narrative, and gives the reader a slight and rather agreeable sense of distance from the events of the story. It also helps present the events in all their complexity. This in turn prevents both the historian from being opinionated, and the reader from being judgemental. Barante also prevents judgements being formed by providing a range of perspectives on controversial events, and by examining all the likely motivations on the part of those involved. In the dramatic story of Cardinal Balue’s betrayal of Louis XI, for example, Barante begins by taking the reader through the cardinal’s own stated reasons for his actions: he and his co-conspirator the Bishop of Verdun had found common ground and become friends because they both felt that they had been slighted by the capricious and ungrateful king, who apparently no longer found them useful.48 But the details of the betrayal and its discovery, which are set forth in a spirited account, begin to turn the reader against the 47 Ibid., p. xi. 48 Ibid., vol. 9, p. 221.

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conspirators. And at this point Barante introduces touches of humour that are delivered splendidly with deadpan neutrality. For instance, while under interrogation, one of the Bishop of Verdun’s underlings is shown an intercepted message sent to the king’s enemy the Duke of Burgundy. The interrogators initially believe that the message came from the bishop, but the frightened underling points out that this could not be the case because the message is grammatically correct and has fully formed sentences – qualities beyond the powers of his master. The highly cultured Cardinal Balue is therefore more deeply implicated. Meanwhile the cardinal has made matters worse by writing to the king and confessing ‘only what he was unable to deny’, and by failing to come clean in an interview with Louis.49 Finally, the reader is made aware of the cardinal’s enormous wealth and opulent lifestyle, as well as his unpopularity with the commoners.50 Nevertheless the cardinal’s punishment by Louis – he was imprisoned in a tiny suspended cage for eleven years – does not reflect well on the king either. Louis is really the main character in the later volumes of Barante’s history. As we saw, Walter Scott’s depiction of Louis in Quentin Durward greatly interested French historians, and Barante and Francois Guizot exchanged letters on the subject. During this exchange Guizot objected that ‘Scott has conceived a type, rather than painting an individual’.51 Barante’s characterization of Louis was, however, very well received in France. A critic writing for the Journal des Débats in 1826 opined that Barante’s Louis ‘speaks and acts as if he were on the very theatre where his lofty destiny was accomplished’.52 While French criticism of Scott was perhaps informed by nationalism, it is fair to say that Barante’s Louis seems more of a person than Scott’s. Barante’s detailed history places the reader alongside Louis throughout many hundreds of decisions and actions. But although the reader therefore begins to build up a strong sense of Louis as a person, the weight of the evidence presented nevertheless militates against admiring him. For example, at the time of Louis’ coronation the Duke of Burgundy and the king were friends. At the coronation feast, which is described vividly, the duke asked Louis for a favour to mark the occasion. There had been strife between Louis and his father King Charles VII in the last years of the old king’s life, and so Louis regarded some of Charles’ former advisors as enemies. At the feast the Duke of Burgundy announced that he wanted peace with Louis, and then thoughtfully asked him to forgive the old king’s advisors. Louis said that he would, but ‘no-one believed he would forgive them because 49 Ibid., pp. 221f. 50 Ibid., pp. 224f. The cardinal, moreover, had lodged most of his financial wealth not with the crown, but with Florentine bankers in Lyon. 51 Quoted in Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio, New York, 1984, p. 23. 52 Ibid.

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he hated them’.53 Barante’s Louis is an able ruler and an effective agent for the destruction of Burgundy and, by implication, the formation of modern France. But he possesses an undeniable meanness of spirit that, significantly, is not a quality evident to any extent in the Burgundian dukes. In line with his own stated precepts for historiography, Barante is, then, less overtly judgemental than Scott on the question of Louis’ character. Barante’s Louis is also much more solidly grounded in historical evidence than Scott’s. Barante’s characterization of Louis is nevertheless broadly in agreement with that presented to the Englishspeaking world in Quentin Durward. Although he initially harboured royalist sympathies, Barante held administrative positions during the Empire, and ended his career in public life in the liberal administration of Louis-Philippe. Liberalism in France had much in common with (New) Whiggism in Britain. Within the two countries’ respective cultural environments, Liberalism and Whiggism were associated with departures from overtly Romantic thinking. As will be suggested shortly, in France a move away from Romanticism is evident in the attitudes towards the Middle Ages of two of that country’s most famous historians: Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), and the even better known Jules Michelet (1798–1874). The discussions of Thierry and Michelet that follow will, however, concentrate not so much on liberalism, but on the role that German metaphysics, especially Idealism, played in the departures from Romanticism that occurred at the time. It will be suggested that this German metaphysics provided the conceptual structure for a reorientation of French historiography in general that took place in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Reading Chateaubriand’s Les martyrs (1809) made Thierry want to be an historian. This enthusiasm for Romanticism included the mandatory admiration for Walter Scott, whose novels struck Thierry as containing ‘more true history’ than conventional historiography. Even in his relatively early Preface to the Letters on the History of France (1820), however, Thierry advanced a discernibly liberal view of the Middle Ages by suggesting that ‘our distant predecessors in our quest for political freedom were the medieval townsmen’.54 There are, however, also some hints of the influence of German Idealism in this work. Thierry’s rather welldeveloped sense of historical periodization, for example, includes a conscious search for what he takes to be important transition points in French history. Thierry also announces a doctrine of epistemological optimism. Asserting that modern historians can and should be better than those of all previous ages, he criticizes those who try to surpass their immediate predecessors merely in terms 53 Barante, Histoire, vol. 8, pp. 280f. 54 Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History: from Voltaire to the Present, London, 1970, pp. 63–70.

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of style. The Middle Ages figure prominently in this argument. Thierry suggests that although recent historians have portrayed those times in a ‘wholly false light’, a ‘new road’ is being taken by his own generation of medieval historians, who may now, in other words, begin to interpret the past correctly.55 Thierry’s History of the Conquest of England by the Normans (1825) is generally regarded as an example of Romantic historiography – perhaps simply because it is about the Middle Ages. In fact, it contains a core of liberal beliefs. As with English Whig history, and in opposition to Hume and Gibbon, Thierry sympathises with the Anglo-Saxons and sees their resistance to the Normans as the key element in a continuing struggle for political freedom. In an almost Idealist structure, this struggle forms part of what has been called a ‘dynamic explanatory scheme’ for the historical development of both England and France.56 In his Lettres sur l’histoire de France (1827) Thierry extends his sympathy for the guerrillas anglosaxonnes to the communards of twelfth-century Laon. He depicts the communal uprising in Laon as a striving for justice, and suggests that such outbreaks of violence should be seen as part of a perennial struggle between the weak and the strong that reached a new level of resolution in the formation of a middle class or third estate. Virtually all of Thierry’s historiography elaborates this theme in one way or another. In his Formation et progrès du tiers etat (1853), for example, he regards contemporary political struggles as continuations of earlier ones, and suggests that the third estate will reconcile previous and current oppositions within a single whole. Hints of this strongly Idealist vision are already evident in Thierry’s earlier Des nations (1817), in which he describes a medieval reaction against a ‘spirit of conquest’ that had characterized the ancient world. Within this view the Middle Ages represent both an overall improvement on antiquity, and the beginnings of modernity. And in his Introduction to Universal History (1831) Thierry goes so far as to describe the historical process itself as consisting of an opposition between freedom and matter or freedom and necessity. Like Thierry, Michelet is often seen as a member of the French ‘Romantic school’ of historians.57 Notwithstanding his deserved reputation as a highly literary historian, aspects of Michelet’s historical vision nevertheless closely resemble Hegelian Idealism. Michelet’s understanding of the Middle Ages also changed markedly during his career; it moved, broadly, from a Romantic to an Idealist attitude to those times. Michelet’s mature intellectual life began in 1827 when he translated Vico’s New Science. This project had been suggested to him by Victor Cousin (1792–1867). Famous as being a prominent liberal and the inspiration 55 Ibid., p. 68. 56 Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chicago, 1983, p. 240. 57 For example, Gooch, op. cit., London, 1913, p. 165, which does, to be fair, include a caveat against accepting this classification unreservedly.

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behind Guizot’s educational reforms, Cousin was France’s leading philosopher at the time. In 1817, he had made a prolonged visit to Germany in order to acquaint himself with recent intellectual developments there. He studied Schelling and Hegel, and befriended them both. In Germany Cousin had also sought out the ageing Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), whose anti-Enlightenment philosophy resembled that of Hamann insofar as it emphasized emotional and spiritual ‘truths’. These two approaches – Idealism and a ‘philosophy of the heart’ – would inform Michelet’s ‘philosophy’ of history. At the instigation of Cousin and Edgar Quinet (1803–1875), who had recently translated Herder’s Ideen, Michelet learned German in order to read Herder, Kant and Hegel. Michelet himself visited Germany briefly in 1828. When he returned he stated that ‘Germany is the bread of life for strong minds’. At the time he was teaching philosophy courses at the Ecole Préparatoire. Michelet’s early Introduction to Universal History (1831) reveals these philosophical influences and foreshadows his own mature historical vision. In this work Michelet portrays history as a drama of liberty, the progress of freedom amid a struggle between the spirit and the world. The Hegelian nature of these ideas is reinforced by Michelet’s understanding of the ‘movement’ of history being from east to west, and from the sacred to the profane. But this early work also reveals the influence of Romanticism insofar as the modern individual, rather than the nation-state, is seen as the culmination of the historical process. Michelet’s more famous later works such as the Histoire de France (1833–1844 and 1855–1867) are also highly speculative and philosophical. Although Michelet’s mature historical vision, which has been described as ‘philosophy expressed by history’,58 is both complex and diverse, it contains two clearly discernible understandings of the historical process: a ‘drama of liberation’; and a sense of organic growth and development.59 The first of these understandings again concerns the attainment of freedom in a dualistic framework, and in a process consisting of clearly defined stages and abrupt transitions. This process has been seen as a romance.60 A (spiritual) journey of self-awareness taken in opposition to the forces of darkness is, as we saw, the defining feature of any romance. Michelet does claim that France ‘saw herself for the first time’ in the late Middle Ages,61 and his tendency to see institutions and even some states as inimical to freedom is also arguably a Romantic position. Yet even if the historical drama-of-liberation may be emplotted as a romance, the narrative takes place

58 Ibid. 59 Cf. John Atherton, ‘Michelet: Three Conceptions of Historical Becoming’, Studies in Romanticism, 4, 1964–1965, pp. 220–39. I have condensed Atherton’s three conceptions into two. 60 For example, Hayden V White, Metahistory, pp. 135–162. 61 Histoire de France, Le Vasseur (ed.), vol. 5, pp. 65, 276 [quoted in Atherton, op. cit., p. 235].

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within an overtly Idealist metaphysics. And so Michelet’s drama of liberation is no more or less a romance than Hegel’s historical vision. As with Hegel, Michelet’s historical process reveals – and consists of – increasing unity and a resolution of oppositions. There is also a feeling that this process is either at, or is approaching, its completion; Michelet believes that in the French Revolution the French people finally conceived of themselves as a single nation.62 And while Hegel’s doctrine of historical dialectics was not specifically taken up by Michelet, it is clearly hinted at by the latter’s emphasis on class conflict as a motor of historical change – an insight that impressed Marx. Like Hegel, Michelet believes, moreover, that increasing self-consciousness is historical progress. On this point, Michelet not only demonstrates a rather well-developed sense of the Marxist notion of false consciousness, but also possesses an equivalent of Hegel’s famous cunning-of-reason argument. For example, various prominent historical figures associated with the French Revolution fail to perceive the full significance of their actions.63 Finally, Michelet’s sense of historical increases in self-consciousness also provides the historian with a privileged vantage point. Flouting Barante’s precepts, Michelet’s own interpretations and personality dominate his works. Even here, though, Michelet remains something of a Romantic insofar as he follows what could be seen as a poetic path to historiographical truth, and he makes empathetic leaps into the past. He nevertheless believes that he is providing the reader with a ‘true impression’ of the past. Michelet’s drama-of-liberation interpretation of history therefore suggests both historical and epistemological progress. In Michelet’s ‘natural’ or organic model of history progress occurs as stages of growth. Each stage or epoch is, moreover, a microcosm of the whole historical process. As with the drama of liberation, dualism underpins this biological model; history develops amid, and as a result of, a struggle between nature, which is dynamic, and the forces of decay. Michelet also frequently uses the more specific idea of human growth in connection with both the historical process as a whole, and particular epochs. Ideas of growth and maturity explain both inter- and intra-epochal dynamism. They are, moreover, supported by related dualistic analogies such as health and vigour as opposed to weakness. It is tempting to suggest that in these areas Michelet is filling a gap created because he did not explicitly adopt Hegel’s dialectic, and so needed other means of explaining historical change. Birth and death feature prominently in this biological model, and are sometimes augmented by the idea of resurrection. Bringing to mind Hegel’s flight of Minerva, Michelet wonders why, for 62 Michelet, The People, in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, London, 1970, pp. 108–19, esp. p. 118. 63 For a discussion of this point see Atherton, op. cit., p. 234.

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example, the Middle Ages persisted until the French Revolution, which was three centuries after their ‘death’. Michelet’s view of the Italian Renaissance – the first modern formulation of this concept – also arises from this birth-and-death model of history. When used in connection with the Renaissance, ideas of birth and resurrection imply much more than a rediscovery or revival of the classics. Michelet’s Renaissance takes place within a pattern of historicity and progress. His understanding of the Renaissance in relation to the present is also important because an infirm present would suggest a sense of historical cycles or decline. But like Hegel, Michelet sees the maturity or even old age of the present in terms of spiritual strength and unique vitality.64 While Michelet’s drama- of- liberation model of the historical process contains elements of Romanticism, his biological model therefore seems wholly Idealist. The biological model of history is, however, more than a bowdlerized version of Hegel; it strikes one as an interesting and idiosyncratic amalgam of, on the one hand, the proto-Idealism evident in Herder’s Ideen, and, on the other, Hegel’s more developed Idealism. Taken together, Michelet’s two understandings of the historical process therefore suggest both a tension between Romanticism and Idealism, and an overall – and increasing – predominance of Idealism. These dynamics are evident in Michelet’s attitude towards the Middle Ages in his major work, the Histoire de France. The first six volumes of the Histoire de France suggest a medievalism that is sometimes reminiscent of Chateaubriand. In particular, the medieval church is treated with what has been called ‘conspicuous sympathy’.65 Michelet also elaborates a sense of a medieval decline that occurs, rather surprisingly, in the thirteenth century. This idea of decline is saturated with images of old age and death. All of this seems quintessentially Romantic, of course. Yet medieval decay and death bring forth new life; in the fourteenth century ‘a new world is born’, and the ‘first spark’ of French national self-consciousness is evident. Michelet’s sense of a medieval decline is therefore expressed through Idealist motifs. Michelet’s narrative, moreover, concentrates on various tensions and struggles – Pope Gregory VII against the Emperor Henry IV, the destruction of the Templars by Phillip the Fair, and so on – that are presented as specifically medieval instantiations of eternal conflicts. And even as early as the very first volume of the Histoire de France, Michelet advances recognizably Idealist speculations concerning the place of the Middle Ages in the overall scheme of things: It was necessary that the middle ages pass, that the traces of the completed middle ages vanish, that we see in the death of all that we have loved, that which has suckled us when

64 Ibid., p. 222, plus fn. 65 Gooch, op. cit., p. 179.

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small, that which was our father and our mother . . . the condemned world was to go the way of the Roman world, the Greek world, the Oriental world.66

This manifestly Hegelian vision not only includes images of childhood and growth, and a balance between continuity and historicity, but also attempts to subsume the apparent tragedies of history – the loss of entire civilizations – within a developmental scheme. And like Hegel, Michelet manages to convey a sense that the Middle Ages were especially significant in respect of the formation of the modern world. It is nevertheless difficult to escape the overall feeling that Michelet’s heartfelt and rather endearing fondness for the Middle Ages exceeds the requirements of any Idealist outlook, and is more in tune with Romantic sensibilities. In 1843, Michelet set aside his Histoire de France, having covered the period up to the reign of Louis XI (1461–1483) in six already published volumes. He did not return to the work for eleven years. In the intervening period he wrote his well-known history of the French Revolution. During this period he was also involved in a bitter struggle with the Jesuits, who were granted control over French education in return for supporting the July Monarchy. Returning to the Histoire de France in 1855, Michelet entitled the seventh volume La renaissance. He now regarded the Middle Ages as ‘bizarre and monstrous, prodigiously artificial’. The medieval church bore the brunt of this new hostility. Why had Michelet turned against the Middle Ages? The conventional explanation is that while Professor of History and Morals at the Collège de France, a position he assumed in 1838, Michelet’s ‘liberal and progressive views for the first time brought him into conflict with the power of the church and the growing strength of the Catholic revival’.67 In the course of this conflict Michelet lost his position. His resulting ‘personal bitterness’ is said to have involved an anti-clericalism of such strength that he could now only detest the Middle Ages. This view obviously makes much sense, although Thompson, relying on Monod’s classic study of Michelet, points out that on a personal level Michelet had never actually been pro-Catholic.68 But it is also important to note that Michelet’s change in thinking concerning the Middle Ages coincided with the increasing influence of Idealism on contemporary historiography, and to remember that Idealism itself had always been part of Michelet’s historical vision. In other words, Michelet’s change of heart about the Middle Ages did not contradict the principal philosophical orientation of his 66 Quoted in Atherton, op, cit., p. 235. 67 JB Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing, Oxford, 1984, p. 158. See also Wallace K Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Cambridge, MA, 1948, p. 175. 68 Thompson, op. cit., p. 235.

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earlier thinking or, indeed, of his entire intellectual life. Michelet’s later attitudes towards the Middle Ages are, moreover, particularly close to Hegel’s. Neither Hegel nor Michelet at his most critical go so far as to suggest that the Middle Ages do not represent an improvement on antiquity. But both seem to be saying that medieval Christianity had to be transcended in order for the confident and essentially secular modern world to be ‘born’. And the worldly, indeed monarchical, pretensions of the medieval institutional church figure prominently in both Hegel’s and Michelet’s view of why and how this form of Christianity had to be transcended. Hegel and Michelet differ slightly on the issue of what replaced the medieval world. As we saw, Hegel assigns a special prominence to the Protestant Reformation. Michelet, however, stresses the importance of the Renaissance, which, for him, includes the Reformation. Nevertheless, Michelet and Hegel seem to agree on the place of the Middle Ages and the role of medieval religion in the overall scheme of things. In his journal entry of 21 November 1846, for example, Michelet rehearses the Hegelian notion that further progress required the destruction of Christianity.69 Although arguably related to his personal circumstances, Michelet’s change of heart regarding the Middle Ages is, then, also intelligible in terms of a dropping away of residual Romantic admiration for those times, and the assumption of a more straightforward and more coherent Idealist metaphysics. Michelet’s emphasis on a fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance can be seen, moreover, as both a corollary to his change in thinking about the Middle Ages, and as another consequence of the increasingly Idealist orientation of his thinking. Michelet’s Renaissance takes place within an historical process that features progress, clearly defined periods, and even continuities insofar as the problems and tensions of one epoch are resolved in (the formation of) the next. In these respects, and notwithstanding Hegel’s interest in the Reformation, the Idealist twist applied by Michelet to the idea of an Italian Renaissance might also be regarded as typically ‘Hegelian’. Assessing the nature and the significance of Hegel’s influence is an important part of coming to grips with Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). Nowadays Ranke is seen as having left a largely ambivalent legacy: he is generally regarded as the originator of modern historiographical methodology, yet his influence is often thought to have been unfortunate, even baleful.70 A tradition of criticism of Ranke on the part of ‘radical’ historians and commentators began in the late nineteenth century. As part of this tradition, which is still very much in force today, various conceptual and methodological innovations have been presented 69 Quoted in Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature, Harvard, 1990, p. 388. 70 These two understandings of Ranke are found in Anne Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction?, Sydney, 2006.

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as departures from Rankean orthodoxy. Arguably the most important modern analysis of Ranke is in Hayden V White’s Metahistory.71 White suggests that although Ranke defined his own approach in terms of ostensible rejections of other approaches – Romanticism, early Positivism and Idealism – these persisted within his attitudes to both historiography and history itself. But in a change of emphasis from White’s analysis, and notwithstanding Ranke’s well-known ‘dispute’ with Hegel and his supporters, the following discussion will suggest that the cornerstone of Ranke’s influential historical vision was an embracing of Idealism. Ranke’s works were therefore part of a move towards Idealism that was already occurring among historians, and that we have just seen in the case of Michelet. Ranke’s early fascination with Walter Scott’s novels, and his subsequent repudiation of both Scott and the historical novel in general, also fit in with this wider move away from Romanticism towards Idealism. Ranke entered Leipzig University in 1814 to study classics and theology. At university he read widely in the works of Kant and the leading Romantic and Idealist philosophers of the day. From 1817 until 1825 he taught classics and history at a gymnasium high school in Frankfurt. During this period he decided to be an historian and wrote The History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514 (1824), which was an instant success. In many ways the subject matter of The History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations conformed to the tastes and expectations of the day. Even more than Raumer’s history of the Hohenstaufen, parts of which had only just been published, Ranke’s work deals with the connections between history, ethnicity, culture, nationhood and nationalism. Although the dates of the title suggest that only a narrow (though interesting) period of time is being considered, Ranke’s introduction provides the reader with an historical overview that leads to the events covered in the main body of the work, and offers an interpretation of European history up to and including the period in question. Ranke’s basic argument is that the Latin and Teutonic ‘nations’ possess a single history, and that this history is European history. With echoes of both Gibbon and Hegel, the starting-point of this argument is the ‘great combination’ of the Roman Empire and the barbarian migrations. Ultimately, Ranke suggests, a unity was achieved when ‘the purple of Caesar passed to the Teutonic races in the form of Charlemagne’. Within this Carolingian unity ‘six great nations were formed – three in which the Latin element predominated, viz. the French, the Spanish, and the Italian; and three in which the Teutonic element was conspicuous, viz. the German, the English, and the Scandinavian’.72 Although they have never 71 White, Metahistory, pp. 163–90. For a more recent and much more straightforward discussion of Ranke see Curthoys and Docker, op. cit., pp. 50–68. 72 Leopold von Ranke, The History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (1494–1514), trans. GR Dennis, London, 1909, pp. 1f.

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formed one political entity, and have frequently been at war among themselves, these nations are all sprung from the same or closely allied stock; are all alike in manners, and similar in many of their institutions; their internal histories precisely coincide, and certain great enterprises are common to all . . . [These] external enterprises . . . are the migration of nations, the crusades, and the colonisation of foreign countries.73

Like Raumer, Ranke thus sees the crusades as a continuation of the Germanic migrations. For Ranke, the migrations came to an end of sorts in the eleventh century with the Norman conquests. The eleventh century is therefore an important transition period in European history. But alongside a discernibly Idealist sense of origins there is some Romantic nostalgia for a medieval golden age: [In the eleventh century] the foundations of all modern kingdoms and their constitutions had been laid. Empire and Papacy were held in universal regard; the former represented the Teutonic, and the latter the Latin principal of the great union of nations, the one supported the other.74

But Idealist tropes of synthesis and continuity predominate; the crusades, which occur because the original migratory impulse now ‘coincided with a complete devotion to Christianity’, were the ‘unaided expression of the whole body of the Latin and Teutonic nations’, while the Normans, who were the last of the barbarian wanderers, played ‘the most vigorous part’ in the First Crusade. The crusades were also important culturally – not, as one might expect, on account of any Eastern influences, but because crusading energy informed Western institutional and even intellectual developments as in the case of the holy orders of knighthood, chivalry, the idea of ‘the elevating influence of women’ and epic poetry. And as with the crusading impulse itself, all of these phenomena were exclusively associated with the unified Germanic and Latin peoples.75 Unity is, however, predicated on exclusions. In line with the Idealist tropes of negation and incorporation, the Slavs, for example, only really take part in mainstream European history by virtue of being conquered and colonized by the Teutonic Knights, and the antagonistic spirit of the crusades continues in the form of late-medieval conversion and colonization. But Ranke’s nationalism is not a crude German racism.76 Although the idea that the Drang nach Osten might have been a good thing is repellent 73 74 75 76

Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 11. Cf. Curthoys and Docker, p. 60.

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today, current readers will be surprised by the extent of Ranke’s interest in events outside Germany. Ranke seems to take pleasure in incorporating the histories of Spain, Sicily, Scandinavia, England and Ireland within his sweep; if anything, he devotes more attention to these geographically peripheral areas than to Germany itself. Notwithstanding its exclusions, Ranke’s nationalism is therefore in some senses pan-European. Here, again, there are suggestions of a Romantic view of the Middle Ages as having been, at their best, a European community. And there are also hints of a quintessentially Romantic sense of a decline from this ideal state. Ranke argues that from the fourteenth century, with both the Empire and the Papacy having in effect lost out in the course of their struggles, and with the crusading impetus (therefore) in abeyance, there arose what was virtually a war of all against everyone else, and that this strife was particularly serious on the edges of the former unity, in places such as Spain and Portugal.77 Although there are some suggestions of Romanticism in Ranke’s view of the historical process in The History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, in an appendix to the work entitled Zur Kritik neuerer Geschictschreiber (a critique of modern historical writing) Ranke appears to be striving consciously to eliminate Romanticism from historiographical method.78 He agrees with Romantic historians Raumer and Michaud that the historian should not judge the past in any obvious sense. Rather, historiography should only ‘show what actually happened’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen). But Ranke radically departs from the Romantics on the issue of how what actually happened should be presented; there are no elevated discussions of narrative technique or, for that matter, of the challenges involved in bringing primary sources to modern readers. In fact, the historian may well not even attempt to construct a coherent narrative as one might find in a novel. Instead, in contrast with ‘works of literature’, the historical facts set out in a ‘colourless’ manner will speak for themselves. Ranke acknowledges that some readers may find this form of historiography ‘unattractive’. But this is a risk that the honest, conscientious historian will run because it would be wrong to add greater coherence to the flow of history than the facts themselves suggest. Despite its apparent straightforwardness, Ranke’s sober historiographical neutrality therefore involves a claimed epistemological advance typical of Idealist metaphysics. And as with Hegel, the abandonment of artistic elements is part of the ascent of knowledge.

77 von Ranke, The History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, p. 14. 78 Surprisingly, this well-known piece was not retained in the ‘authorized’ 1887 English translation by Ashworth, or in subsequent ‘revised’ English translations. Yet Ashworth refers to it in his own introduction. It is in Leopold von Ranke, The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History, Roger Wines (ed.), New York, 1981, pp. 56–95.

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Ranke was ideally placed to act on his optimism in these matters because The History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations was so well received that he was immediately offered a professorial position at the prestigious University of Berlin. His position at Berlin enabled him to undertake research trips to Italy. As a strongly Lutheran Protestant, he was not allowed to use the Vatican’s resources, but he made extensive use of the Venetian archives. Although, as we saw, Raumer had recently carried out research at the Vatican, Ranke’s well-publicized work in Venice placed archival research at the very centre of academic historiographical practice, where it has remained. Ranke’s views on archival research and other issues were disseminated through seminars, which he himself introduced at Berlin. Although Ranke’s seminars were at first largely informal, the seminar system not only became an important part of a professional historian’s training, but also set in place systems of lineage and succession among academic historians. At Berlin Ranke moved in exalted social and intellectual circles. Among the outstanding intellectual figures at the University were Hegel and Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861), a legal historian who had specialized in Roman law. Ranke was impressed by Savigny’s idea of the cultural and historical specificity of legal forms and practices. And Ranke’s ‘dispute’ with Hegel at Berlin is sometimes said to have arisen because he preferred Savigny’s sense of the particular over Hegel’s sense of the general.79 But, as Hayden White points out, Ranke’s ‘criticism’ of Hegel seems largely to have taken place within – and, one might add, because of – a set of shared assumptions.80 It is likely that Ranke was trying to leave as much room as possible for the work of the historian within an Idealist metaphysical framework. Ranke used two tactics in order to achieve this goal. First, he sought to limit some perceived excesses of Hegelian Idealism. The problem for Ranke was that Hegel perhaps went rather close to suggesting that the historian’s work was already done. Second, Ranke attempted to show why and how Hegel’s insights may be shared – or reached independently – by historians. This second tactic, which again signifies fundamental agreement with Hegel, can be regarded as the thrust of Ranke’s methodological ‘reorientation’. In both of these areas Ranke, like Michelet, used elements of an organic model of history seemingly derived from Herder in order to counterbalance Hegel’s more extreme Idealism. Ranke thought that Hegel’s idea of history as the meeting-point of the particular and the general placed undue weight on the latter element. Ranke’s emphasis on the particular is the basis of his idea that ‘every epoch is immediate to God’, which he proposed in opposition to his own insightful characterization of Hegel’s

79 For example, Curthoys and Docker, p. 52. 80 White, Metahistory, pp. 188f.

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system as a ‘history of a developing God’.81 For Ranke, the status and the role of historiography depend on the correct balance between the particular and the general. In The Pitfalls of a Philosophy of History, for example, after a sensitive one-paragraph summary of Hegel’s thinking, Ranke concludes that ‘it cannot be said that this [Hegelian] conception is adequate for historical research’.82 In The Role of the Particular and the General in the Study of History Ranke argues that the historian’s task is, rather, ‘comprehending the whole and yet doing justice to the requirements of research’.83 Given the correct balance in this matter, Ranke believes that historiography is ‘able to lift itself in its own fashion from the investigation and observation of particulars to a universal view of events, to a knowledge of objectively existing relatedness’.84 Because it does this essentially philosophical work historiography, no less than philosophy, must involve epistemological optimism. But although Ranke thought that his own works and those of his followers were superior to the efforts of previous generations of historians, he was unwilling or unable to justify this epistemological optimism in Hegelian terms. In carrying out his rather Hegelian aim of not only collecting facts, but also understanding them, Ranke resorted to a mysticism that seems reminiscent of Herder and Romanticism. The understanding needed in moving from contemplating the particular to recognizing ‘the course which . . . the world in general has taken’ is in fact intuition (anshaung or ahnen), which also provides an appreciation of the individuality and the unity of specific cultures and epochs.85 The meaning of history is therefore not really knowable in any strictly demonstrable sense. History remains in some ways a ‘holy hieroglyph’. Ranke’s drawing back from the extremes of Hegel’s claimed epistemological optimism raises the value of the particular and increases the status of historical research. Yet Ranke’s crucial step of placing a religious or empathetic insight within a framework of Idealist aims and assumptions serves not only to suppress the perceived danger of Romantic flights of fancy, but also to ensure that such insights are, in the right circumstances, genuinely possible. And if Ranke’s historical vision seems more religious and mystical than many current readers might have expected, it is significant that Ranke’s religiosity, such as it is, is still expressed in the language of Kantian and Idealist metaphysics, and with reference to the relationship between the finite and the infinite.

81 GG Iggers and JM Powell (eds), Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse, 1990, p. 54. 82 Ibid., p. 49. 83 Ibid., p. 59. 84 Leopold Ranke, ‘A Fragment from the 1830s’, in Stern, op. cit., pp. 58–60. 85 See Iggers and Powell (eds), op. cit., p. 53.

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Aspects of Ranke’s historical vision therefore involve what could be seen as a dilution of Hegelian Idealism. Yet as well as sharing an Idealist vocabulary and a set of Idealist assumptions, Ranke and Hegel do often agree on specific but fundamental issues. Although, when discussing progress and historical continuity, Ranke sometimes uses Herder’s metaphor of history as a river, on other occasions he adopts a model of the historical process that features suggestions of Hegel’s dialectic, and even of Minerva’s flight. For example, he suggests that ‘there is a general historical life that moves progressively from one nation or group of nations to another’, and that ‘in the conflict between the different national groups Universal History comes into being, and the nationalities become conscious of themselves’.86 In addition, Ranke’s general emphasis on the formation of the modern European nation-states immediately brings to mind Hegel’s similar interests. More specifically, in his History of the Popes (1834) Ranke advances a four-stage model of the historical process. Like Hegel’s, this model consists of the Orient, Greece, Rome and the Germanic world. And while he acknowledges that earlier beliefs had contained ‘elements of true religion’, Ranke claims that the advent of Christianity was the most decisive point in history. Christianity’s nature and effects are also understood in Hegelian terms, even to the extent of including a sense of dialectical progression and, again, a hint of Minerva’s flight. Christianity, Ranke argues, ‘exhibited the contrast between the earthly and the spiritual, between freedom and servitude’, while the post-Christian history of Rome was ‘a long struggle between these opposing principles’ in which ‘the essential truth of Christianity’ pushed events ‘forward by great effort of the spirit’. And when Rome finally ‘fulfilled her destiny’, she ‘rendered her existence no longer necessary’.87 Ranke’s history of Christianity consists of a struggle between a spiritual impulse and ‘political elements’. Accordingly, the Middle Ages are marked by stages of conflict and reconciliation between the spiritual and temporal aspects of the medieval church. Within this interpretative structure Ranke considers more or less ecclesiastical matters such as church reform and the question of clerical celibacy, as well as the clashes between the German emperors and the papacy. At the heart of these considerations is Ranke’s idea of a ‘single politico-ecclesiastical state’ in medieval Europe.88 But in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this idea began to break down – as was the case with the Latin-Germanic sense of unity. The single politico-ecclesiastical state was replaced by ‘a new species of partition, 86 Ibid., p. 163. Iggers (p. liii) suggests that Ranke understood history as a ‘meaningful and benevolent process in which spiritual forces assume concrete reality . . . [and] freedom and necessity contend’. 87 Leopold von Ranke, The History of the Popes, trans. GR Dennis, London, 1908, pp. 7f. 88 Ibid., pp. 21–6.

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founded on a higher principle’.89 The incipient European nation-states, Ranke argues, had no need for any external religious authority, and so the consequent ills of the church – the Great Schism, and so on – needed to be remedied by purely secular power. The declining stocks of the late medieval papacy are epitomized by its inability to encourage crusades, now seen as having been ‘the youthful enthusiasm of chivalrous Christendom’.90 The emergence of modern European nation-states is therefore predicated on a change in the balance between ecclesiastical and secular power. According to this view, the Reformation must be seen as an impetus towards secularisation. And in the History of the Popes, which is really the history of the Counter-Reformation popes, Ranke’s main aim is to describe the papacy’s attempted response to this momentous and necessary development. Like Hegel, Ranke not only regards the Reformation as the beginning of the modern religious and political environments, but also sees it as arising out of the tensions and contradictions of the medieval church. Ranke’s attitudes are, then, signs of the reorientations in the relationship between history and philosophy that were occurring in the early nineteenth century. The basic concerns of Ranke’s generation arose out of the (post-) Kantian conflation of philosophy and history that had begun to affect the intellectual context as a whole. The emergence of history as a discipline in its modern and current guise can be seen as the result of a new, philosophical emphasis on history, and of the development of metaphysical philosophies, namely Romanticism and Idealism, that were themselves intrinsically historical. The strong presence of Idealism in Ranke’s outlook, and Ranke’s ongoing dialogue with Hegel, are, above all, indications of this new and especially close relationship between history and metaphysics. Ranke historical vision, and even his methodological innovations, should therefore be seen in their own historical context, that is to say as products of the tensions and changes in the early nineteenth-century intellectual environment. And it was these dynamics that, on a deep level, have constituted modern historiographical approaches. Because it included a significant, indeed defining, sense of both historical and epistemological progress, Idealism proved more appropriate in this increasingly professional historiographical environment; it was the perfect philosophical foundation for the working historian. But when the professionalization of historiography began to take hold in British and American historiographical circles in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was Ranke’s name that was associated with these developments. At the time the significance of Idealism and its place in Ranke’s thinking were not always appreciated, and so the idea of the novelty, originality and indeed uniqueness, of ‘Rankean’ approaches gained momentum in the English-speaking world. 89 Ibid., p. 27. 90 Ibid., p. 29.

5

As it Really Was: Academic Medieval History into the Twentieth Century By the late nineteenth century, distinct streams of progressive and aesthetic historical thinking had emerged in Europe. This separation was the result of the process of professionalization among academic historians, almost all of whom now worked within progressive aims and attitudes. The momentum of this progressive historical thinking is evident in a vast increase in the number of journals and source collections, a greater perceived relevance of the natural sciences to the historian’s task,1 a tendency to search for laws and causes in history and, above all, an increasing specialization among professional historians. Building on the previous chapter, this chapter describes the further development of professional medieval history in Europe, and its beginnings in America. It will start with a discussion of the German academic environment, which was at the forefront of change at the time. Developments in Britain and America will then be considered. Both of these environments lagged behind Continental Europe. Professionalization in America and Britain was, moreover, synonymous with the introduction and influence of German ideas, namely Idealist metaphysics and Rankean particularism. But as in early nineteenth-century Europe, there was an interesting liminal stage in both Britain and America that was characterized by a certain jockeying of ideas. And in both these environments some residual Romantic attitudes persisted alongside the Rankean-Idealist mainstream. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of American historian Charles Homer Haskins’ influential The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), which, as will be suggested, represents a culmination of all these trajectories of ‘nineteenthcentury’ thinking about history and historiography. Later chapters will show that subsequent mainstream historiography has consisted almost entirely of the same amalgam of the Ranke-inspired particularism on the one hand, and elements of the Idealist historical and/or epistemological optimism on the other, that is evident in the works discussed in this chapter. The Ranke School and its close relative the Prussian School were at the cutting edge of European academic historiography in the late-nineteenth century. In the Ranke School ideas and methods were disseminated largely by means of 1 Darwin is mentioned in the preface to the first issue of the English Historical Review in 1886.

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the seminar system introduced by Ranke himself. Having come through this system, historians would go on to conduct seminars of their own, thereby creating a continuity that persisted over generations of historians, and that crossed national barriers. The medievalist Georg Waitz (1813–1886), for example, was a first-generation participant in Ranke’s seminar at Berlin.2 Waitz studied law at Kiel but then went to Berlin, where he came under Ranke’s influence. In 1835, he won a prize for an essay on the founder of the Ottonian dynasty Henry the Fowler (d. 936), who was thought of as the first king of Germany. Waitz completed his doctorate in 1836. He then worked on the Monumenta Germaniae Historica for six years, and was rewarded with professorships at Kiel and, in 1849, at Göttingen, which he made a centre for medieval studies. From 1869 he also began work on what would become the Dahlmann-Waitz, which was a revision of Quellenkunde der deutschen Geschichte (1830) by Friedrich Dahlmann (1785–1860). The Dahlmann-Waitz, which was meant to be a bibliography for all aspects and periods of German history, was published until 1931. In 1875, Waitz returned to Berlin to be president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. In the meantime he had been writing and revising his major work, The Constitutional History of Germany (1844–1878), which covered up to the end of the twelfth century. Waitz’s heavily source-based interest in medieval political and legal history would become almost the essential feature of late nineteenth-century medieval history as practiced in Britain and America amid the process of professionalization in those countries. Waitz also influenced developments in Europe. Among the huge number of his seminar students was French historian Gabriel Monod (1844–1912), who became a medievalist after meeting Waitz.3 Having spent four years in Germany, Monod returned to France in 1868 and began lecturing on both history and Rankean methodology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, a high-status university founded that year in Paris. Monod initially specialised in the history of the Franks, but became increasingly interested in compiling and commentating on collections of primary sources. In 1876, he also founded the Revue historique, which is still being published. As its name suggests, the Prussian or ‘Little German’ (kleindeutch) School of historians was not outward looking and internationalist like the Ranke School.4 2 See Robert L Benson and Loren J Weber, ‘George Waitz’, in Helen Damico and Joseph B Zavadil (eds), Medieval Scholarship. Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, New York, 1995, pp. 63–76. 3 Another of Waitz’s students, Dietrich Schäfer (1845–1929), ‘fathered’ 124 doctors of his own. For an interesting if ‘much simplified’ chart of the personnel associated with the Ranke School see JW Thompson, A History of Historical Writing, New York, 1942, pp. 180f. 4 For the Prussian School see Robert Southard, Droysen and the Prussian School of History, Lexington, 1995; GP Gooch, History and Historians of the Nineteenth Century, London, 1913, pp. 122–51; Thompson, op. cit., pp. 120–50.

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The historians of the Prussian School can be distinguished from the Ranke School on account of their overt interest in German politics, and the relevance of their histories to their politics. Although the Prussian School historians began as political liberals, the events of 1848 and the failure of the Frankfurt Parliament led them to become advocates of the unification of Germany through the ‘Prussian ascendency’. This political orientation was expressed as a metaphysical historical vision that was, if anything, even more overtly Idealist than that of its ‘mother’ movement the Ranke School. The principal focus of the Prussian School was the formation of the modern nation-state, which was understood as the product of an irresistible and seemingly divine historical process consisting of the unfolding of Spirit. But, as with Ranke himself and his ‘school’, this Idealist framework also valorized historical research and assigned to the historian a transcendental perspective arising from methodological soundness. The two most important historians of the Prussian School were JG Droysen (1808–1884) and Heinrich von Sybel (1817–1895). Droysen’s Life of Field Marshal Count York von Wartenberg (1851) is the first work of the Prussian School in its fully developed post-1848 form. At the time Droysen was already a prominent historian; his high-profile History of Alexander the Great (1833) had been followed by the first volume of his History of Hellenism (1836). Both works position classical Greece within an Idealist historical vision. The history of Alexander is one of the first examples of what is now called the ‘great men’ approach to history. Droysen’s Alexander is a powerful individual through whom the forces of history can be seen to be working. This ‘great men’ view of history is really an extension of Hegel’s cunning-of-reason thesis. Droysen was also keen to counter a potentially Romantic view of the Greeks as representing an historical and cultural pinnacle. His main argument was that the history of Greece after the Macedonian conquest was not, as is often supposed, a story of supine political subjection, and of cultural decline. The Hellenistic age was, rather, a period of construction and renewed energy. The question of Athenian democratic freedom is a case in point. Droysen claimed that the loss of various freedoms in Athens up to and after the Macedonian hegemony was necessary because it prepared the way for the more stable and more widespread forms of freedom that were to come.5 In other words, within Droysen’s Idealist historical vision apparent losses and declines are incorporated into a scheme of overall progress. Droysen’s biography of Field Marshal Count York (nowadays usually ‘Yorck’) is also discernibly Idealist. As well, it possessed a direct relevance to the politics of the day.6 Yorck commanded the corps of Prussian soldiers that entered Russia in 1812 as part of Napoleon’s invading grand armeé. The Prussians were rather 5 For a good discussion of Droysen’s ancient histories see Southard, op. cit., pp. 21f. 6 On this point see ibid., p. 196f.

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unwilling allies of the French, and in the later stages of the 1812 campaign, during the retreat from Moscow, Yorck declared his corps ‘neutral’. Even before Droysen’s biography Yorck’s actions were well known and widely discussed in the German-speaking world. Clausewitz, notably, had analysed Yorck’s role in the 1812 campaign in On War (1832). But Clausewitz’s lengthy and rather unengaging analysis concentrates on the military and, especially, diplomatic complexities of Yorck’s position. Droysen, in contrast, saw Yorck’s abandonment of the French as a world-historical moment, and one with particular relevance to the emergence of a united Germany. Droysen, who apparently retained vivid childhood memories of the War of Liberation against the French, believed that this war started with Yorck’s defection. Moreover, the war, which allowed the forces of German nationalism full expression for the first time, was largely led and directed by Prussia, with Yorck himself serving in the Prussian army until the capture of Paris in 1814. Droysen’s interpretation of Yorck’s actions not only explored the themes of unification and nationalism, but also assigned Prussia a special role in German unity. Therefore, despite perhaps not being as ‘great’ a man as, say, Alexander, Droysen’s Yorck is nevertheless both an agent and an illustration of the historical process. Although von Sybel saw the historical process in Idealist terms like Droysen, within this shared metaphysics he at times exhibited particular concern with questions related to the historian’s task.7 For this reason he has probably exerted more influence on historiography in general than Droysen. He is, moreover, a key figure in the development of academic medievalism. Sybel participated in Ranke’s seminar for a record six semesters from 1834. His dissertation Jordanes and the Getae, which was about the Germanic peoples in the Dark Ages, was well received when published in 1838. It was followed by his first major work, the still widely known Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges (History of the First Crusade) (1841), the success of which led to professorial positions at Bonn and, soon after, Marburg. In 1844 he published The Origins of German Kingship, which almost caused a breach with his friend Waitz. Sybel argued that the political institutions of early medieval Germany were largely taken from late-Roman models. Although at first sight anti-nationalistic – this is why the issue was hotly contested – Sybel’s view is perhaps more obviously Idealist because it suggests historical continuity and an almost dialectical relationship between the early Germans and Rome. The events of 1848 and reading Edmund Burke increased Sybel’s interest in contemporary politics, and propelled him towards political conservatism. As a result of these changes he began work on his Geschichte der Revolutionszeit (1853–1879). In 1856 Ranke helped Sybel obtain a chair at Munich. Three years later Sybel founded the Historische Zeitschrift, the model for which was clearly 7 For Sybel see ibid. esp. pp. 97–111.

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Ranke’s shorter-lived journal Historische-politische Zeitschrift (1844–1848). Sybel remained editor of the Historische Zeitschrift until 1893, in the meantime securing the prestigious position of director of archives at Berlin. In the preface to the first issue of the Historische Zeitschrift Sybel maintains that historiography ‘should be progressive’. He speaks of a ‘true method of research’, deviations from which need to be pointed out. There is, in short, a correct way to do history. The core of historical research is a heightened attention to detail. The historian’s task nevertheless includes both this emphasis on the particular, and a sense of the general associated with a grand Idealist historical vision. Sybel suggests that the recognition of ‘the lawfulness and unity of all life and process is the foremost task of historical contemplation’.8 Sybel’s History of the First Crusade reveals the same balance between a general view of history on the one hand, and more specific and largely methodological matters on the other. Idealist generalities are evident, for example, in Sybel’s belief that the course of world history has been determined by certain decisive ‘events’. These are the Persian Wars, the Germanic migrations, the crusades, the Reformation and the French Revolution. In the course of each of these events ‘a universal change takes place in the condition of the nations involved’, and each change marks ‘a new epoch in the state of Europe’. Sybel thus sees the crusades as the Middle Ages’ main contribution to world history. Accordingly, he argues that the Crusades were a ‘struggle between the two great religions of the world’, rather than a mere ‘extension of pilgrimages to Jerusalem’.9 It is hard to disagree with Sybel on this point; the First Crusade in particular strikes one as being an entirely different phenomenon from the armed pilgrimages that occurred earlier in the eleventh century. Within Sybel’s Idealist historical vision the crusade cannot be, as it was with Romantic historians Raumer and Michaud, a product of its own times; it is not explicable in terms of its own historical context. World-historical events such as the crusades can only be understood from the transcendental perspective of the Idealist historian. In line with a methodology informed by Idealism, Sybel’s personality is especially noticeable in the later stages of his history. The structural arrangement of Sybel’s history would seem familiar and pleasing to most professional medievalists today. The first half is a general narrative history, while the second half is devoted to analysis. Although Sybel’s narrative approach amounts to little more than establishing the facts and presenting them in the correct order, the drama and excitement of the events themselves are more than enough to enthral the reader. The analytical second half of Sybel’s history is largely taken up by detailed 8 Quoted in Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History: from Voltaire to the Present, London, 1970, pp. 171f. 9 Von Sybel, The History of the First Crusade, trans. Lady Duff Gordon, London, 1861, p. 1.

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assessment and criticism of the relevant sources. Like the earlier Romantic historians, Sybel realized that the primary sources are capable of supporting different understandings of the crusade, especially on matters such as leadership, the motivations of those involved, and the genesis of the crusading movement. He also knew, as a few recent historians have realized, that these are not ‘surface’ considerations; rather, they point to the very nature of the crusade, namely what it really was and what it meant to those involved. These were, in addition, vitally important issues for Sybel on account of his need to see the crusades in world-historical terms. He therefore attempted to judge the value of the various primary sources. He describes the highly readable versions of events by Gilbert of Nogent and Baudry of Dol respectively as ‘valuable’ and ‘exact and trustworthy’.10 He is, however, deeply critical of the account of Albert of Aix, and of William of Tyre’s massive Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum (1184). Although William was not a participant in the First Crusade and was writing some time after the events, his history is the standard medieval work on the subject. It makes extensive use of earlier accounts, and is given further authority because William actually lived in the holy land. Sybel nevertheless dismisses it as being mythical and too poetic, and argues that it is further vitiated because it relies on Albert of Aix at some points.11 Sybel’s judgements on the sources for the First Crusade were profoundly influential. In fact, his assessments led to an interpretation of the origins of the crusade that is followed in an unselfconscious manner – and taken as fact – by almost all medievalists today. Sybel used the accounts of Gilbert and Baudry to propose what might be called an ‘official’ version of events. This version centres on the idea that the Pope Urban II initiated the First Crusade and, for that matter, the whole crusading movement with his speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095. On this issue Sybel overturned the views of earlier historians including Gibbon and the Romantics who had cast doubt on the idea of a papal-inspired and -led crusade. Sybel also ignored William of Tyre, in whose history Peter the Hermit’s preaching is responsible for creating crusading enthusiasm. Sybel’s views nevertheless predominated, not least, one suspects, because of Sybel’s own standing, and the increasingly high regard in which the methodologies he advocated and practiced were held. Sybel’s view of things was taken up in Peter der Eremite (1879) and other works by Heinrich Hagenmeyer (1834–1915), who dominated European crusading studies into the twentieth century, and whose authoritative editions of crusading primary sources are still used today. Sybel’s view of the origins of the First Crusade reached its apotheosis at the hands of American historian Dana C

10 Ibid., pp. 124, 128f. 11 Ibid., pp. 161, 237f.

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Munro in the early twentieth century.12 In an article of considerable significance in the history of crusading studies, Munro compared the various accounts of Pope Urban’s speech at Clermont and argued that we can know what the pope really said by isolating the points on which the accounts agree. Why did Sybel want to change the way people thought about the origins of the crusade? And what does an answer to this question reveal about his outlook and approach? We saw that Sybel’s Idealist sensibilities led him to see the crusades in world historical terms as a providence-directed clash between two religions or ‘nations’. It is tempting to suggest that he was drawn to the more sophisticated primary sources that presented the crusades in a similar way – though obviously within Christian rather than Idealist metaphysics, if we care entirely to separate these. For instance, Gilbert of Nogent, whom Sybel trusts, describes the unfolding of a providence-directed and divinely ordained series of historical events in his splendidly titled Gesta Dei per Francos (The Deeds of God through the Franks). Sybel may also have felt a greater affinity with Gilbert’s and Baudrey’s sophisticated works than with various ‘primitive’ or ‘mythical’ accounts. Gilbert and Baudry wrote highly polished histories that even include speeches where relevant. Gilbert and Baudry also wrote closer – within ten years – to the events themselves than Albert and William, which may have suggested to Sybel a certain authenticity. But the main point to be made is that in his quest for authenticity Sybel did not see that Gilbert’s and Baudry’s accounts are not only highly sophisticated histories, but also highly sophisticated works of literature. There are clues for this in the accounts themselves. For example, Gilbert freely admits that he is improving, so to speak, an earlier ‘primitive’ account of the crusade. It is also possible that Gilbert and Baudry were consciously rewriting history with a view to presenting the events as having been controlled by the papacy.13 There is no need to suggest cynical mendacity here; from their perspectives, if the events were divinely directed, then the papacy should – indeed must – have been involved. We can nevertheless see that the ‘histories’ Sybel decided to trust above all others might well have been highly elaborate rhetorical exercises, or pro-papal propaganda, or both. The issue is not whether Sybel was right or wrong, of course. But it is interesting that the confidence and sense of certainty provided by his Idealist methodology seems to have caused him to take literature for fact. Perhaps also of relevance is the Idealist downplaying of the importance of art in historical terms, and of the role of artistic and rhetorical elements in the writing of history. 12 Dana C Munro, ‘The Speech of Urban II at Clermont, 1095’, American Historical Review, 11, 1905, pp. 231–42. 13 See John O Ward, ‘Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century’, in Ernst Breisach (ed.), Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, Kalamazoo, 1985, pp. 103–66.

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For it is notable that when Sybel’s interpretation of the origins of the crusade was challenged in the late twentieth century – and it must be remembered that even today it is almost entirely dominant – the challenge came not from a traditional crusades historian, but from John O Ward, a specialist in medieval rhetoric who was not therefore the product of an Idealist and Rankean tradition.14 In the second half of the nineteenth century, this Idealist and Rankean thinking spread beyond Continental Europe and began to influence the developing academic environments in Britain and America. Although Chairs of Modern History were founded at Oxford and Cambridge in 1724, history only became part of the curriculum for a BA degree at Oxford in 1850. Until then all studies at the university had been governed by the Laudian Statutes of 1636, which had sought both to preserve and to modernize the medieval curriculum. But in 1850 a statute passed by Convocation created a combined school of Law and Modern history at Oxford. In the same year a Royal Commission was appointed ‘to assist in the adaptation of these important institutions to the requirements of modern times’. The Commission recommended that a number of fellowships at Oxford should be abolished in order to create two new professorships. As a result, in 1862 Montague Burrows (1819–1905) became the first Chichele Professor of Modern History.15 Burrows was a well-connected former naval officer who had recently received a double first in law and history He was chosen over William Stubbs (1825–1901), Edward Freeman (1823–1892) and James Anthony Froude (1818–1894), all of whom went on to be more renowned historians than Burrows himself. The study of history began to assume its modern professional form in Britain from around this time. The abolition of religious tests at Oxford in 1871 and the separation of the faculties of Law and History at that institution in the following year were important preconditions for this process. The benchmark event in the process as a whole was, however, the founding of the English Historical Review in 1886. The first article in the new journal was Lord Acton’s ‘German Schools of History’, and the journal’s Prefatory Note was also overtly deferential to the methods and achievements of recent German historians. These attitudes had begun to achieve a currency during the previous decade after Stubbs referred to Ranke as ‘the greatest historical scholar alive’, and suggested that the Germans should be emulated in their collecting of sources.16 Stubbs, who is perhaps best known for having been the editor of the Rolls Series (begun in 1857) from 1863 14 Ibid. See also EO Blake and CA Morris, ‘A Hermit Goes to War: Peter the Hermit and the Origins of the First Crusade’, Studies in Church History, 22, 1985, pp. 79–107. 15 For a fuller account of the events leading up to the creation of the Chichele professorships see RW Southern, ‘The Shape and Substance of Academic History’, in RJ Bartlett (ed.), History and Historians: Selected Papers of RW Southern, Oxford, 2004, pp. 87–103. 16 William Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History, Oxford, 1887, pp. 35, 61, 65.

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to 1898, was the prime mover in the professionalization of British medieval history. Nevertheless Stubbs, Freeman, and John Green (1837–1883), who were all members of the ‘Oxford School’ of historians, were still in some ways liminal figures. Stubbs was largely self-taught as an historian, and he oscillated between academia and the church. British historians were not fully professional in the modern sense until the next generation. But many historians of that generation of historians were taught by Stubbs and the other members of the Oxford School.17 Although Stubbs’ historical vision was largely in the Whig tradition, it also reveals the influence of the German ideas that he found so compelling. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford, which he delivered in 1867, Stubbs suggested that the origins of ‘modern institutions and movements’ lie in the Middle Ages, and that modern history is the ‘history of ourselves . . . of the way in which we have come to be what we are.’ Moreover, he felt that the origins of modern government, of modern education, and of the modern mind, can be found in the Middle Ages. But this sense of historical continuity is leavened with inchoate elements of German Idealist thinking. For example, in contrast with the medieval period’s relevance to modernity, classical Greece and Rome are referred to as a ‘dead world’.18 Rather than being any sort of golden age, the classical world is thus irrelevant to modernity. Stubbs’ historical vision was further elaborated in his major work, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (1874–1878), which covers the period from Julius Caesar to the Tudors. Stubbs used Waitz’s similarly titled work as a model for his own Constitutional History, and Stubbs eventually visited Waitz at Göttingen. Ranke’s A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century (1859–1869) also appears in the footnotes of Stubbs’ Constitutional History. Stubbs begins the Constitutional History by discussing the differences between narrative history and institutional histories such as his own. Bringing Ranke to mind, he criticizes narrative histories for being ‘romantic’. Institutional history, in contrast, presents, in every branch, a regularly developed series of causes and consequences, and abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realisation of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. For the roots of the present lie deep in the past . . .19

17 For Stubbs’ influence see James Campbell, ‘William Stubbs’, Damico and Zavadil (eds), pp. 77–88, esp. p. 83. 18 Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures, pp. 16f. 19 William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development, 2 vols, Oxford, 1903, vol. 1, p. iii.

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The roots of Stubbs’ present can be traced back as far as the Anglo Saxons. In a twofold argument, Stubbs suggests that the Anglo Saxon invasions of England obliterated all traces of Roman life, and that even before the invasions, the Continental Anglo Saxons themselves were ‘altogether free from Roman influences’.20 Because the Anglo Saxons were Germanic tribes, developments in England over the next centuries proceeded according to a ‘Germanic principle’. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, it was in the period after the Anglo Saxon invasions that English customs, institutions, and laws and the English character itself, formed on the level of what we would now refer to as a ‘deep structure’. In fact, England developed a ‘sense of unity’ centuries before Germany.21 In England during the Anglo Saxon period an essentially Germanic sense of individual freedom was transformed into a system where freedoms and rights became associated with the possession of land, and the land itself became ‘the sacramental tie of all public relations’. Justice was therefore the prerogative of the great landowners including the king, who in turn developed obligations ‘to all classes of subjects’.22 These deep developments were not disturbed by the Vikings or the Normans: The Danish conquest, and even the Norman, hastens and precipitates events that are already working to completion. But the developments themselves are rather political and dynastic than constitutional or administrative; they are the greatest in the upper ranges of the fabric, and leave the lower, in which we trace the greatest tenacity of primitive institutions, and on which the permanent continuity of the modern with the ancient English life depends for evidence, comparatively untouched.23

Stubbs manages to avoid both a doctrinaire Whig position on the Norman Conquest, according to which the conquest would be a bad thing, and a Tory position such as Hume’s that would lionize the conquerors. His assessment of the effects of the conquest is nevertheless surprisingly positive insofar as it brought Britain into ‘the circle of European interests’. Moreover, the crusades, which Stubbs thinks of as a largely ‘Norman and English enterprise’, prevented a ‘relapse into isolation’.24 Above all, the Normans brought a renewed vigour to the governance of England, which had in the last days of the Anglo Saxons become rather ‘cumbersome’. But because ‘the Norman polity had very little substantial

20 Ibid., p. 44. 21 Ibid., p. 8. Stubbs uses Ranke’s History of England to support this comparison between developments in England and Germany. 22 Ibid., p. 184. 23 Ibid., pp. 74f. 24 Ibid., p. 268.

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organization of its own; and what it brought with it to England was soon worn out or merged in that of the nation with which it united’, the conquest did not sever the continuities that began with the Anglo Saxons.25 Within this long-term continuity, however, there are events of such significance that they virtually amount to paradigm shifts. Magna Carta is one such event: The Great Charter closes one epoch and begins another. On the one hand it is the united act of a nation that has been learning union; the enunciation of rights and liberties, the needs and uses of which have been taught by long years of training and by a short but bitter struggle: on the other hand it is the watchword of a new political party, the starting-point of a new contest.26

This new contest consists of the struggle for freedom as expressed through the parliamentary system. As the origin of the House of Commons, Simon de Montfort’s parliament of 1265 is the key event in this new contest. Simon is the hero of the second volume of Stubbs’ work; he is referred to as ‘the great earl’ and the ‘national deliverer’, and he fought for ‘the great cause’. Stubbs’ assessment of Simon is, however, rather more than a panegyric. Although praising Simon’s piety and love of adventure, Stubbs does not gloss over his ambition. And Stubbs acknowledges that the parliament of 1265 was as not so much an expression of high-mindedness on Simon’s part, but a matter of sheer necessity.27 There is nevertheless something of an Idealist great man of history in Stubbs’ portrayal of Simon, and even a sense of an Hegelian cunning-of-reason argument. Although Simon’s death at the Battle of Evesham is portrayed as a tragedy, yet it may have been best for England that he lived no longer. He was greater as an opponent of tyranny than as a deviser of liberties; the fetters imposed on royal autocracy, cumbrous and entangled as they were, seem to have been an integral part of his policy; the means he took for admitting the nation to self-government wear very much the form of an occasional or party expedient, which a longer tenure of undivided power might have led him either to develop or to discard. The idea of representative government had, however, ripened under his hand . . .28

Simon had facilitated the march of progress and the increase of freedom. But one senses that, as an agent of history, he did not realize the full implications of 25 26 27 28

Ibid., pp. 269f. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1 Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., pp. 103ff.

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his actions. Stubbs sees events such as the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta and Simon’s revolt against King Henry III as almost dialectical struggles involving the forces for and against freedom. This is a recognisably Idealist historical vision. Yet Stubbs also departs from the standard Idealist tropes by using metaphors of water, waves, and the sea to describe the realisation of freedom as part of the historical process: The struggle is continuous; the fortunes of parties alternate; the immediate object of contention varies from time to time; the wave of progress now advances far beyond the point at which it is to be finally arrested, now far below the point at which a new flow seems to be possible. And yet at each distinct epoch something is seen to be gained, something consolidated, something defined, something reorganised on a better principle.29

Stubbs’ wave-like oscillations potentially introduce elements of Romanticism. Within the medieval period the thirteenth century, the age of Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort, has the most appeal for Stubbs. In contrast, he finds the fourteenth century ‘on the whole unattractive, and in England especially so’.30 Surprisingly, in his antipathy to the fourteenth century Stubbs reserves special criticism for the literature, especially historiography, and the architecture of the period: [T]he unmeaning symmetry of the Perpendicular style is an outgrowth but a decline from the graceful and diversity of the Decorated. The change in the penmanship is analogous; the writing of the fourteenth century is coarse and blurred compared with the exquisite elegance of the thirteenth . . .31

And the fifteenth century is even worse on account of disorder and widespread immorality.32 Stubbs therefore approaches the quintessentially Romantic idea of decline from a central-medieval golden age. But this decline is not terminal; from it emerges ‘the truer and brighter day, the season of more general conscious life, higher longings, more forbearing, more sympathetic, purer, riper liberty’.33 Stubbs is thus able successfully to incorporate elements of Idealism, Whiggism and even some residual Romanticism, within a coherent whole. Stubbs’ Constitutional History remains a very appealing work: it is elegantly written and at times quite poetic; it is a stimulating mixture of narrative, analysis and argument; 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., pp. 1f. Ibid., p. 654. Ibid., p. 656. Ibid. Ibid.

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and although its ostensible subject matter is potentially rather dry, it is enlivened by touching on aspects of social and cultural history, and by covering such a vast period of time. As well as Stubbs’ own undoubted talents, it is tempting to suggest that the qualities of the Constitutional History are at least in part the results of the author’s liminal position in the process of professionalization in Britain. Stubbs was – and still could be – read, understood and appreciated by the educated public. This quality would increasingly be lost in the next generations of fully professional historians, most of who succumbed to specialization and therefore only really wrote for – and against – other specialists. Stubbs was unique among British historians; Cambridge did not have an equivalent liminal figure. At Cambridge the process of professionalization was associated largely with John Seeley (1834–1895), who was Regius Professor of Modern History from 1869. Seeley regarded himself as a follower of Ranke and the German method.34 The influence of Continental ideas on the English historiographical environment at this stage can be gauged by criticism of Seeley on the part of Adolphus Ward (1837–1924), a Cambridge graduate who became professor of history at Owens College, Manchester in 1866. Ward seemed to want to go further than Seeley and become an advocate not only of Ranke, but also of the Prussian School. His 1870 lecture entitled ‘On the Classification of History’, for example, was based on Droysen’s Grundriss der Historik. A second generation of Cambridge scholars consisting of Prothero, Creighton and Maitland, all of whom were medievalists, pursued Ward’s ideas. George Prothero (1848–1922) studied in Germany before he lectured at Cambridge. He eventually secured the newly created chair of history at Edinburgh in 1894. While at Cambridge, where he was known for an emphasis on the critical use of primary sources, Prothero wrote his Life of Simon de Montfort (1877), which impressed Stubbs because it revealed an even deeper reliance on documents than the latter’s own interpretation of Simon in the second volume of the Constitutional History. Prothero also translated a volume of Ranke’s Weltgeschichte. Mandell Creighton (1843–1901), the first editor of the English Historical Review, was both an historian and a churchman, like Stubbs. He held the newly created chair of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge from 1884 to 1891. During this time he too wrote a Life of Simon de Montfort (1876). Both these histories of Simon were, in addition to being indebted to Stubbs, heavily reliant on the German historian Reinhold Pauli’s biography of Simon (1867; English trans. 1876). Pauli’s work was dedicated to his former teacher Ranke. 34 For Seeley and his followers see Doris S Goldstein, ‘History at Oxford and Cambridge: Professionalization and the influence of Ranke’, in GG Iggers and JM Powell (eds), Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse, 1990, pp. 141–53, esp. pp. 146ff.

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The best known of these Cambridge medievalists, and among the most admired of all English historians, was Frederic Maitland (1850–1906).35 Maitland won a scholarship to Trinity College in 1869. His main academic interest at this stage was moral philosophy, but when he failed to secure a fellowship in this area at Trinity, he turned to law and was called to the bar in 1876. Maitland became interested in legal history when he read Stubbs’ Constitutional History, and the Geschichte des römischen Rechts by Friedrich von Savigny, who had taught at Berlin from the inception of the university there in 1811. We saw that Savigny’s philological approach to legal history had influenced Ranke himself at Berlin. Maitland was impressed by Savigny’s belief that law was the definitive expression of a people. Having acquired the urge to bring Savigny’s approach to the field of English law, Maitland began serious source-based research. His meeting with Paul Vinogradoff (1854–1925), a Russian-born historian of medieval England, confirmed his decision to devote himself entirely to the study of history. In 1884, Maitland was elected to the newly created position of Reader of English Law at Cambridge, and three years later he became Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the same institution. His inaugural lecture called for a philosophical treatment of English law from its very origins. This approach would not only be based on the rigorous and critical use of legal documents, but would also, echoing Savigny, regard such documents as a basis for inferences regarding economic, social and even moral matters. Maitland’s most significant works were The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I (1895), which was written with some assistance by Frederick Pollock (1845–1937), and Domesday Book and Beyond (1897). In The History of English Law Maitland agreed with Stubbs’ belief that Anglo-Saxon law was essentially Germanic. Maitland showed that Roman elements only entered the English legal system with the Norman Conquest. Maitland disagreed with Stubbs, however, by suggesting that the pre-Reformation English church had been more dependent on Rome than was thought to be the case. Maitland’s History of English Law is also notable for its frequent Savigny-style leaps from the law itself to more general aspects of medieval life. In contrast, Domesday Book and Beyond closely analyses documents and what Maitland called ‘Domesday statistics’. In Domesday Book and Beyond, moreover, Maitland used the ‘retrogressive method’ for the first time. The ‘retrogressive method’ was needed when, as Maitland explains, ‘a result is given to us [and so] the problem is to find cause and process’.36 Although this approach had been pioneered by Frederic Seebohm (1833–1912), Domesday Book and Beyond challenged Seebohm’s The English Village Community (1883) 35 Robert Brentano, ‘Frederic William Maitland’, Damico and Zavadil (eds), pp. 131–52. 36 Frederic William Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England, New York, 1966, p. xi.

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by suggesting that the Manorial System had not existed in England before the twelfth century. Maitland’s works arose from a context that was becoming more professional with each generation of historians. His ideas and approach were therefore closer to the Continental academic mainstream than those of Stubbs. Maitland’s interest in historicity or particularity, rather than the long-term continuities of Stubbs, seems an almost definitively Rankean quality. A paper Maitland delivered at Cambridge in 1900 entitled ‘The Body Politic’ is, however, perhaps the purest expression of the Rankean nature of his thinking.37 Just as Ranke sought to protect the practise of history from a perceived Hegelian emphasis on the general, Maitland attempts to limit the influence of the natural sciences, especially biology, on historiography. He argues that history is not susceptible to the sort of generalizations used in the sciences because it is far more complex. He does, however, suggest that historiography is improving and that historical knowledge is increasing. Both Ranke and Maitland thus proposed an epistemological optimism based on an emphasis on the particular. While overt historical speculation and naive historical optimism would become less fashionable after the First World War, this particularist epistemological optimism continued to be a core concept in modern academic historiography. The emergence of modern academic historiography in America also consisted of an increasing alignment with Continental developments, that is to say with German ideas and approaches. In both Britain and America the process of modernization began around 1870 and can be associated with two generations of scholarship: an initial liminal group of semi-professionals; and a subsequent group of recognizably modern professional academics. In some ways, however, the various conceptual elements in this process stand out more clearly in America than in Britain. In the American environment broad-brush Idealist and even overtly Hegelian ideas are evident alongside a particularist and clearly Rankean form of Idealism. But, as in early nineteenth-century Europe, these forms of Idealism were still jockeying to some extent with elements of Romanticism. Late nineteenth-century American historiography therefore represents both a high point of progressive optimism, and a site where some tensions between aesthetic and progressive attitudes are still discernible. As in Britain, the key developments in late nineteenth-century American historiography occurred at two universities. In the 1870s the process of professionalization began at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. It was marked not only by the introduction of German ideas and approaches, but also by the increasing involvement of scholars who had trained in Europe. At Harvard Henry Adams (1838–1918) taught history with only a relatively short period of study in Europe 37 Goldstein, op. cit., pp. 150f.

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behind him. But Adams was joined at Harvard by Leipzig graduate Ephraim Emerton (1851–1935). Meanwhile Herbert Baxter Adams (1850–1901), who had studied at Göttingen, Berlin, and Heidleberg, introduced the seminar system at Johns Hopkins. The professionalization of American academia, and the commensurate influence – both direct and via Britain – of German ideas and approaches, are evident in changing perceptions of the United States as a nation. Although the works of George Bancroft (1800–1891) and John Motley (1814–1877) are often classified as being Romantic or ‘literary’, they actually seem closer to Whiggism or liberalism. Moreover, in America a Whig or liberal emphasis on the attainment of freedom proved susceptible to a popular form of Hegelianism. Bancroft’s twelve-volume History of the United States (1834–1882), for example, describes a providence-directed struggle for liberty. As in the case of Stubbs, continuities can therefore be perceived between essentially pre-professional American historians like Bancroft and the first generation of professionals. These continuities were encapsulated in what is now called the ‘Germanist thesis’ of the origins of American liberty. Although the Germanist thesis is usually associated with Henry Adams and Herbert Baxter Adams in the 1880s, Bancroft had by then already referred to the Virginians as ‘Anglo-Saxons in the woods again’ and spoken of the ‘vital principal of Teutonic liberty’. Nevertheless changes in perceptions about the United States’ development did occur from the second generation of professionalization. Mirroring the differences between Stubbs and Maitland, this change can be seen as the effect of ‘Rankean’ emphases on methodological rigour and, especially, particularist or historicist interpretations. Broadly, the Germanist thesis was replaced by the beliefs of those in the ‘imperial school’, who felt that America’s development should be seen primarily in terms of the dynamics of British imperialism and colonialism. This particularist interpretative impulse was continued around the turn of the century by the ‘New Historians’, and by Frederick Turner’s well-known ‘frontier thesis’. In American historiographical circles this particularism was, however, balanced by a generalizing and speculative impulse that can be associated with Idealist metaphysics, and with the influence of Hegel himself. The best example of this Idealist and Hegelian tendency is John W Burgess (1844–1931), who was an important figure in the academic environment of the 1870s and 1880s, and who played a key role the formation of the American Historical Association. After studying law at Columbia and history in Germany, Burgess was involved in the founding of the School of Political Science at Columbia in 1880. Having already taken a liking to Idealism in the course of his earlier studies, Burgess went to Germany again and returned a committed Hegelian.38 Burgess believed that 38 For Burgess see Dorothy Ross, ‘On the Misunderstanding of Ranke and the Origins of the Historical Profession in America’, in GG Iggers and JM Powell (eds), op. cit., pp. 154–69.

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reason was progressively realized in history and that the modern nation-state was the culmination of this process. Although especially popular in America, this combination of interest in the state and an embracing of Hegelianism paralleled the direction taken by the Prussian School.39 The many works of Albert B Hart (1854–1943) are a case in point.40 Hart completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at Harvard in 1880. After he had obtained a doctorate at the University of Freiburg in Germany, he returned to Harvard where he taught American history and government from 1883 to 1926. In 1903, he began editing and contributing to the 28-volume The American Nation series, and in 1909, he became president of the American Historical Association. His best known work is The Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1901). Hart’s works exhibit both the particularist and the generalizing forms of Idealism. He relentlessly stressed the importance of research and ascertaining the correct facts, while at the same time arguing that history is ultimately a question of mind, rather than matter. Yet, Hart’s methodology also left room for the use of imagination and empathy, while Hart himself maintained an interest in the history of art. Hart therefore reveals a potential oscillation between progressive and aesthetic attitudes within the overall process of professionalization in America. This dynamic is also evident in the understandings the Middle Ages that emerged in the late nineteenth-century American academic environment. Medieval history began in America with Henry C Lea (1825–1909) and Henry Adams (1838–1918). Lea became interested in the Middle Ages in 1847 when he was recovering from a nervous breakdown resulting from working in his family’s publishing business. During his recovery he read a great deal of medieval literature including Froissart’s chronicles, and he decided that he would become an historian. Although he was highly accomplished in a number of areas ranging from science to poetry, Lea had never received any formal education. He was also entirely self-taught as an historian. His major works on the Middle Ages, Superstition and Force: Essays on the Wager of Law, the Wager of Battle, the Ordeal, Torture (1866), The Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy (1867) and The History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1888), were nevertheless very well received in European academic circles as well as in America. This approval led to the presidency of the American Historical Association in 1902, and to an invitation to contribute to The Cambridge Modern History. Lea’s later interest in the early-modern period culminated in the four-volume History of the Inquisition of Spain (1906–1907). Despite being self-taught, and notwithstanding his own quasi-amateur status, Lea’s works were almost entirely based on original sources 39 For the relevance of the Prussian School to American developments see Wolfgang J Mommsen, ‘Ranke and the Neo-Rankean School in Imperial Germany’, ibid., pp. 170–80. 40 Ibid.

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and archival material, much of which he purchased and had sent from Europe. His first work, Superstition and Force, begins with a rallying cry for a Continentalstyle progressive historiography defined by source-based research: The aim of the following essays is simply to group together facts so that, with a slender thread of commentary, they may present certain phases of human society and progress which are not without interest for the student of history and of man. The authorities for all statements have been scrupulously cited, and it will be seen that, for the most part, they are drawn from the original sources. The conclusions the reader can verify for himself.41 Apart from the exact sciences, there is no subject which more fully repays the student than the history of jurisprudence . . . Thus the history of jurisprudence becomes the history of the life of man, and the society of distant ages is more distinctly presented to us in the crabbed sentences of codes than in the flowing rhetoric of the historian.42

The basis of Lea’s approach was simply to present his readers with all the available information on the subject at hand. In the ‘essays’ in Superstition and Force, for example, he describes legal procedures from Roman to early-modern times in the geographical region from Spain to Poland. Therefore although Superstition and Force remains a valuable resource for students and specialists in legal studies, its mass of information overwhelms most modern readers. There is, moreover, no discernible narrative structure beyond the maintenance of a rough chronological order within the various sections. This approach nevertheless made him popular among academics at the time, not least, one suspects, because in some ways it took Continental methodology even further than the Continentals themselves. Although Lea’s methodology was perhaps the purest example imaginable of Rankean ideas, his wider historical vision did not entirely duplicate the coalface Continental thinking of the time. As with Stubbs, while Lea’s historical vision contains elements of Idealism and traces of Romanticism, it is largely in the Whig-liberal tradition. Like Stubbs, Lea looks to the Germanic origins of a process in which political and legal freedoms were gradually transferred from the few to the many. Along the way, Lea argues, these freedoms were analysed and codified in increasingly less crude ways. Lea’s all-encompassing methodology militates against assigning inordinate prominence to traditional Whig historical milestones such as Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort’s parliament. Lea’s historical milestones are rather more indeterminate, and are perhaps more interesting because of that. For instance, in what may be the first stirrings in 41 Henry C Lea, Superstition and Force: Essays on the Wager of Law, the Wager of Battle, the Ordeal, Torture, Philadelphia, 1866, Preface [not paginated]. 42 Ibid., p. 2.

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America of the idea of a twelfth-century renaissance, he suggests that from the perspective of us moderns, by the twelfth century legal thinking had become intelligible and even admirable. Lea argues that of all the Germanic barbarians, only the Visigoths absorbed Roman law in any direct sense; the descendents of the others had to wait until its rediscovery in the twelfth-century.43 For Lea, the twelfth-century intellectual efflorescence in Western Europe was thus driven by a classical revival. Yet although we moderns are in a position to understand the past, there is no sense that history has achieved closure in the form of the modern nation-state. Lea’s historical vision includes a strong – and even a recognisably Idealist – sense of progress, but it is not present-centred or present-directed: [I]n the general enlightenment which caused and accompanied the Reformation, there passed away gradually the necessity which had created the rigid institutions of the Middle Ages. Those institutions had fulfilled their mission, and the savage tribes that had broken down the worn-out civilization of Rome were at last becoming fitted for a higher civilization than the world had yet seen, wherein the precepts of the Gospel might at length find practical expression and realization. For the first time, in the history of man, the universal love and charity which lie at the foundation of Christianity are recognized as the elements on which human society should be based. Weak and erring as we are, and still far distant from the ideal of the Saviour, yet [we are] approaching it, even if our steps are painful and hesitating. In the slow evolution of the centuries, it may only be by comparing distant periods that we can mark our progress; but progress nevertheless exists, and future generations, perhaps, may be able to emancipate themselves wholly from the cruel and arbitrary domination of superstition and force.44

Lea’s Christian beliefs dovetail nicely with Idealism in general, but prevent him taking up a more obviously Hegelian form of Idealism like Burgess. Lea’s Middle Ages are an important period of transition. In the key area of legal thinking, the period began in the German forests with a sense of the ‘all-pervading first law of brute strength’. Then there was an intermediate stage during which ‘elements of pure justice so strangely intermingled with . . . force, and with the no less misleading appeals to chance, dignified under the forms of Christianized superstition.’ And then, finally, people learnt ‘to cherish the abstract idea of justice as indispensable’.45 But while Lea and doctrinaire Idealism agree on the importance of the Reformation as both an advance on the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern ways, Lea’s own Christianity does not allow him to embrace the modern world in its secularism. Instead, he sees the essence of the Reformation as an 43 Ibid., pp. 14–18. 44 Ibid., pp. 390 f. 45 Ibid., pp. 73f.

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anti-Catholic, yet still ineradicably Christian, impulse. All of Lea’s later histories are variations on the theme of the changing nature of Christianity. Lea’s works therefore consist of a balance between historical particularism on the one hand, and ideas of overall progress or improvement on the other. But within his scheme of overall progress, Lea’s histories, with their mountains of primary-source and archival information, always provide the reader with a sense of historicity, or with what is now often referred to as ‘otherness’. The general does not outweigh the particular. Even huge phenomena such as the Medieval Inquisition remain, as monuments to Rankean particularism, expressions of their own historical circumstances: The Inquisition was not an organization arbitrarily devised and imposed upon the judicial system of Christendom by the ambition or fanaticism of the Church. It was rather a natural – one may almost say an inevitable – evolution of the forces at work in the thirteenth century, and no one can rightly appreciate the process of its development and the results of its activity without a somewhat minute consideration of the factors controlling the minds and souls of men during the ages which laid the foundation of modern civilization.46

During his time as an historian Lea did not, then, change his historical vision, his historiographical approach, or even, in any real sense, his subject matter. The career of the other pioneering American medievalist Henry Adams is, however, marked by dramatic changes in all of these areas. Adams was educated at Harvard and went on to study law and legal history at Berlin and Dresden. Having returned to America, he was surprised by an offer in 1870 to teach medieval history at Harvard. He accepted the offer despite feeling that he was not qualified for the position. Although Adams did not have an extensive knowledge of the Middle Ages, his exposure to German ideas and methods was enough to make him seem suitable for the position. At Harvard Adams was associated with the introduction of both the seminar system and the PhD degree. Only one piece of work arose out of his period at Harvard, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law (1876), which contained a monograph by Adams himself and three doctoral dissertations by his leading students. Adams’ monograph argues that ancient Germanic ideas and practices formed the basis of a democratic tendency. It is therefore an example of the ‘Germanism’ current at the time among American historians. Adams resigned from Harvard in 1877, however, after quickly tiring of what he called the ‘idiocies’ of academic life. He continued a tenuous connection with the American Historical Association, but his terms as vice president and then president were 46 Henry C Lea, The History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 1888, vol. 1, p. iii.

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marked by long absences overseas. Sporadic interest in American history, and an increasing fascination with the arts and architecture were accompanied by disappointments in his personal life and in politics.47 And having abandoned his earlier liberalism, Adams became increasingly pessimistic, believing that his own epoch was degenerating into chaos. Although he had been a key figure in the professionalization of history in America, Adams’ best-known work, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), was therefore not a product of the American academic environment; by the time it was written there was a vast gulf between Adams’ outlook and that associated with professional, academic life. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is in fact an example of Romantic medievalism.48 It deals with medieval architecture, religion and theology, and was deliberately written as an alternative to professional historiography. Adams had, moreover, become influenced by his brother Brooks, whose unpublished The Law of Civilization and Decay advanced a Romantic conception of art as being central to any civilization, and suggested that thirteenth-century European civilization had been ruined by proto-modern economic developments. Other influences had also become important in Adams’ thinking. He had absorbed Goethe, Scott, and English Romantic poetry in his youth. Later, though still in his pre-professional period, Adams read Carlyle, Michelet, and Ruskin, as well as meeting a number of artists, poets and critics on his travels, notably Algernon Charles Swinburne and Thomas Woolner, both of whom were associated with the Ruskin-inspired Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In addition, at college Adams befriended Henry Hobson Richardson, a student of Viollet-le-Duc. After he had removed himself from mainstream academia, these aesthetic influences resurfaced and came to dominate Adams’ historical vision. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres aims to describe the unity and harmony of the Middle Ages, and to contrast those times with the modern world. Although he is mainly concerned with medieval architecture, the worship of Mary and the works of St Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), Adams touches on most aspects of medieval culture in order to demonstrate this perceived unity. Chivalric epics such as the Song of Roland, for example, serve to unite sacred and secular life,49 and a long elaboration of medieval spiritualism, including that of Saint Bernard and Saint Francis, prepares the way for the chapter that deals with Aquinas. Adams’ overall argument is that medieval religion consisted of a balance between the 47 See David R Contosta, Henry Adams and the American Experiment, Boston, 1980 for details of both Adams’ political career and his rather turbulent family life. 48 For a discussion of Adams and Romanticism see Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order, pp. 231–48. 49 Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, London, 1980, p. 29.

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emotionalism and warmth of the worship of Mary on the one hand, and logic and reason as epitomized in the theology of Aquinas on the other. Aquinas is also regarded as having harmonized various conflicting tendencies within medieval theology itself. Adams encapsulates these conflicting tendencies in an imaginatively reconstructed ‘scholastic tournament’ between Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and William of Champeaux (d. 1121).50 He also draws a striking and enduring analogy between Aquinas’ system and the Gothic architecture of medieval cathedrals. But medieval unity as expressed by Aquinas and the Gothic style failed to persist. A comparison with modern approaches reveals this loss most clearly: Compared with [Thomism], all modern systems are complex and chaotic, crowded with self-contradictions, anomalies, impracticable functions and outworn inheritances; but beyond all their practical shortcomings is their fragmentary character. An economic civilisation troubles itself about the universe much as a hive of honey-bees about the ocean, only as a region to be avoided. The hive of Saint Thomas sheltered God and man, mind and matter, the universe and the atom, the one and the multiple, within the walls of an harmonious home.51

Adams suggests that a loss of medieval unity and the onset of modern ways started to become evident as early as the fourteenth century.52 The fragility and transience of the medieval achievement are summed up in the Gothic style. Adams ends Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by re-emphasising the idea of Gothic architecture as both a symbol and an instantiation of medieval thought. Yet it was also an extremely delicate balance of various tensions and forces. Such a precarious equilibrium was, he argues, always close to the point of danger.53 Adams explicitly compares the cathedral of Beauvais with Aquinas’ system.54 Beauvais was the most daringly designed of all the Gothic cathedrals and it, accordingly, collapsed. This sense of a collapse of medieval conceptual unity has exerted considerable influence, forming a central theme in more recent medieval intellectual and cultural histories such as David Knowles’ The Evolution of Medieval Thought (1964), and the works of Richard Southern. Neither Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, nor the works it influenced were, however, of mainstream academic status. It is in fact their non-mainstream qualities that make these works so interesting. But almost all historiography, and even most intellectual and cultural histories of the Middle Ages, produced 50 51 52 53 54

Ibid., pp. 156–60. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 179, 185.

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in late-nineteenth century America proceeded along the progressive trajectory associated with the development of academic professionalism. The works of Henry Osborn Taylor (1856–1941) illustrate this tendency. Taylor studied under Henry Adams at Harvard, completed a law degree at Columbia, and then went to Leipzig for further study. Like Maitland, he became interested in the historical relationship between ideas and the law, and he decided to concentrate on transformations in what he called ‘sensibility’. Taylor’s most significant works are The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages (1901) and The Medieval Mind (1911). A meticulous scholar, Taylor actually resigned from a lectureship at Columbia when he was in the middle of writing The Classical Heritage in order to devote all his energies to his ‘real work’, as he referred to writing. Unlike Henry Adams, however, Taylor’s abandonment of his teaching burden does not represent either a criticism of, or an intellectual departure from, the academic mainstream. Moreover, in contrast to the schematic and imaginative approach of Mont-SaintMichel and Chartres, Taylor’s works involved years of solid research, with The Medieval Mind taking up an entire decade of his life. Taylor’s The Classical Heritage in the Middle Ages is based on an Idealist understanding of the historical process. Taylor’s aim is to describe ‘the freeing of the human spirit – both its intellect and its passion – from the limitations of the antique temperament and modes of thought.’55 As with Hegel, Taylor sees the advent of Christianity as the decisive point in history insofar as it marks the most significant increase in consciousness that has ever taken place.56 The Middle Ages in Western Europe consist of an almost dialectical working out of various tensions. According to Taylor, medieval Christianity was a robust fusion of early Christianity and Germanic elements, and there was a long process of interaction between this medieval Christianity and the lingering influence of antiquity. This process was completed with the advent of Gothic architecture, which Taylor sees as a ‘completely Christian style’. Within this historical vision, various areas of classical influence in the Middle Ages – law, philosophy, aesthetics, and so on – and the transformations in outlook precipitated by their gradual abandonment are understood as ‘links in the chain of eventual progress’.57 Taylor also rehearses Hegel’s position in his understanding of Byzantium. Although the church of Sancta Sophia is seen as a significant Christian achievement, Byzantine culture, bringing to mind Minerva’s flight, demonstrates a tendency towards ‘the formalism of an over-mature civilization in which the culture and principles of a great classical past had become lifeless conventions’.58 55 56 57 58

HO Taylor, The Classical Heritage in the Middle Ages, New York, 1958. p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 307.

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Given that it took ten years of work to produce, it is no surprise that The Medieval Mind is even more detailed and thorough than its predecessor. The two weighty volumes of The Medieval Mind are the result of an accumulative approach that covers the same ground as The Classical Heritage, and explores in impressive detail many other aspects of the medieval world including monasticism, urbanisation, and mysticism. Like its predecessor, The Medieval Mind also possesses an Idealist framework. As with The Classical Heritage, it aims to describe the stages of an overall increase in consciousness. This ascent of consciousness is based on Taylor’s thesis of a developing perception of difference between the classical and Christian heritages that was first evident in the Carolingian Period.59 This ascent of consciousness also involves an increasing realisation of freedom, and a ‘lifting up of the standard of rational investigation’, both of which characteristics suggest continuity into the present.60 The Medieval Mind does, however, reveal the influence of Henry Adams’ Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres in some areas, notably in Taylor’s belief in the importance of Thomas Aquinas. Taylor argues, rather bizarrely, that Thomas’ ethnicity played a role in his achievement. Taylor sees the mixture of Norman, Swabian, and Sicilian ‘races’ in Thomas’ background as having encouraged the creation of his intellectual synthesis.61 Taylor nevertheless suggests that Dante, whom he calls a ‘great scholastic’, came up with an even better intellectual synthesis than Aquinas because he successfully combined classical forms with Christian symbolism. Taylor, then, departs from Adams by placing the idea of a medieval intellectual and cultural synthesis within a recognisably Idealist, rather than Romantic, historical vision. Taylor’s medieval world is a stage in a pattern of overall progress, rather than a lost golden age. Taylor’s view of the intellectual and cultural achievements of the Middle Ages was taken further by Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), who is arguably the most important American medievalist. Haskins graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1887, and then studied in Berlin and in Paris, where he attended the prestigious École des Chartes. He returned to Johns Hopkins and completed his doctorate in history in 1890. As a part of his doctorate he attended the seminars of Herbert Baxter Adams (1850–1901), a Heidelberg graduate who had become secretary of the American Historical Association on its foundation in 1884. After some teaching at Johns Hopkins, Haskins became Professor of Medieval History at the University of Wisconsin in 1892. During this period an article on the Vatican archives, his first published work on the Middle Ages, appeared in the American Historical Review. In 1902, he became a professor of history at Harvard and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the same 59 HO Taylor, The Medieval Mind, Harvard, 1966, vol. 2, pp. 556ff. 60 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 345, vol. 2, p. 562. 61 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 463; cf. Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel, p. 179.

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institution. These positions entailed status and fame. Haskins became an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson, whom he knew from Johns Hopkins, and when Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Haskins accompanied him as one of only three presidential advisors. Haskins’ status and his positions at Harvard meant that he dominated academic medieval history in America. His position as dean was an important aspect of this dominance because it meant that he controlled curricula, and had a say in the placement of graduate students. And appropriately enough, Haskins’ Princeton-based protégé Joseph R Strayer (1904–1987) exercised a similar authority over American academic medievalism in the decades after the Second World War. Haskins also exercised his influence in rigorous but well-attended seminars, in the creation and sponsoring of journals such as Speculum and Isis, and in his own publications. The Normans were the focus of Haskins’ first substantial publications. Haskins liked the Normans; he referred to them as the ‘supermen of the eleventh century’. Although the Normans had received a good deal of attention from nineteenth-century European scholars, Haskins felt that as an American he was in a position to offer a more impartial perspective. He therefore made regular visits to European archives, gathering material for The Normans in European History (1915) and Norman Institutions (1918). Haskins saw the Normans as a distinct race, and he regarded their various conquests as aspects of a single phenomenon. On the one hand, Haskins’ interest in Norman institutions seems a straightforward expression of the mainstream academic concerns of the day; it reminds one of Maitland’s essentially Rankean particularism. On the other hand, Haskins positioned the Norman achievement within the tradition of liberalist-Idealist thinking among American historians. Haskins believed that the Normans introduced stable and efficient government into the areas they conquered, particularly England. In short, they were not only a good thing per se, but also functioned as agents of progress. And because the various Norman conquests were related, there was a pan-European dimension to this progress. The Norman conquests also possessed intellectual and cultural overtones because they played a part in the transmission of Eastern culture, especially the hitherto missing parts of the pagan philosophical tradition, into the west. Haskins’ belief in the importance of the influence of Eastern learning on Western intellectual developments would constitute the main argument of his next two major works, The Rise of the Universities (1923) and Studies in the History of Medieval Science (1924). It also figured prominently in his best-known work, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927). Although The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century is almost universally regarded as a notable work, interpretations of it vary wildly. For example, Sally Vaughn hails it as ‘an exposition on a grand theoretical level’, and a ‘new paradigm [that] totally changed the view of twentieth-century medieval scholars’, while Norman

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Cantor, who is generally sympathetic towards Haskins, regards the work as ‘largely an annotated catalogue’.62 After reading The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and thinking about its effect on subsequent scholarship in the area, it is fair to say that they are both right. How can this be so? At first sight, Haskins’ thesis seems fairly straightforward: [T]he [Italian] Renaissance was not so unique or so decisive as has been supposed. The contrast of culture was not nearly so sharp as it seemed to the humanists and their modern followers, while within the Middle Ages there were intellectual revivals whose influence was not lost to succeeding times and which partook of the same character as the better known movement of the fifteenth century.63

Haskins, moreover, broadens this already rather expansive argument by suggesting that the Middle Ages in general, and the twelfth century in particular, therefore ‘illustrat[e] many processes of historical development and contain . . . the origins of many phases of modern civilization.’64 Despite this straightforward liberal-Idealist argument, which is complemented by an elegantly simple prose style, it is impossible to read The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century today without being struck by its inconsistencies and oversights. Haskins advances opposing views on the most fundamental issue imaginable in respect of his project, namely the question of what the twelfth-century renaissance actually consisted of. Was it a rebirth or revival of the Latin classics? Or was it a ‘new movement’, driven by an internal dynamic as well as by external factors?65 In other words, was it the same sort of thing as the Italian Renaissance, or not? And despite Cantor’s view that The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century is an ‘endless accumulation of every seemingly relevant detail’, it is possible to criticize Haskins for being overly concerned with Latin culture at the expense of vernacular literature, and for failing to consider art and architecture at all. It is tempting to suggest that these problems exist because Haskins did not manage to achieve the right balance between his liberal-Idealist historical vision and his Rankean particularism. These two elements generally went well together, of course; they were the core conceptual components in academic historiography. But, as we saw with Stubbs and Lea in particular, priority was usually assigned to one or the other. Haskins, in contrast, seems to have wanted both at the same time. Although this

62 Sally Vaughan, ‘Charles Homer Haskins’, in Damico and Zavadil (eds), op, cit., pp. 169–84, esp. pp. 178ff; Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 256. 63 Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Harvard, 1927, pp. 5f. 64 Ibid., p. 3. 65 Ibid., pp. 10, 17. To complicate matters further Haskins takes pains to distinguish between the concepts of rebirth and revival.

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approach worked with the Normans, it was less suited to the more varied and more conceptually challenging subject matter of The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. But because the idea of a renaissance, and even the term itself, suggests the importance of a classical revival, it can create difficulties for a liberal-Idealist historical vision. Haskins criticized Henry Osborne Taylor for avoiding the term ‘renaissance’ in the latter’s typically thorough Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century (1920).66 Yet this move allowed Taylor to advance a very coherent historical vision that was able successfully to incorporate notions of both progress and continuity. As we saw, Taylor understood the Middle Ages largely in terms of a waning of the direct influence of the classics. He pursued the same theme in Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century by stressing the independence of ‘Renaissance’ advances in the natural sciences from any classical revival.67 Haskins seems, however, to have wanted to have a say on the ‘Renaissance problem’, which had become an issue in American academia thanks largely to Dana C Munro.68 Haskins may also have wanted to valorize the study of the Middle Ages by assuming a stance against what were by then well-known interpretations of the fifteenth-century Renaissance by Michelet, Symonds, and especially Burckhardt.69 But he squeezed too many different and potentially conflicting ideas into one argument. Within a model of history that incorporates both continuity and overall progress, Haskins wanted to see the twelfth century as an anticipation of the fifteenth century. And trying to come up with such a liberal-Idealist understanding of the twelfth century, he (unwittingly) came to rely on certain aesthetic motifs, not least on account of his attempted dialogue with Burckhardt’s understanding of the Italian Renaissance. Moreover, Haskins, like Taylor, wanted to deliver evidence for his historical vision by means of an accumulative Rankean approach. But the more ground he covered, the more inconsistent his position became. The presence of essentially aesthetic concepts – even insofar as they are being argued against – in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century therefore serves further to destabilize Haskins’ attempt to be both a Rankean and a liberal-idealist at the same time. And it seems likely that if Haskins had included, say, vernacular literature or architecture, it would have placed an even greater strain on things. Haskins’ elaboration of the idea of a twelfth-century renaissance nevertheless caused a considerable stir in academic circles in the second quarter of the 66 Ibid., p. 5. 67 See esp. the preface to the second (1930) edition of Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century. This preface can be read as a riposte to Haskins. 68 Dana C Munro, ‘The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’, Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1906, 1, pp. 45–9. 69 For Symonds see Wallace K Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Cambridge, MA, 1948, pp. 198–205.

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twentieth century as part of a ‘revolt of the medievalists’ that attempted to overthrow prevailing views of the importance of the fifteenth-century Renaissance. And Haskins’ views have continued to be influential. Although the word ‘renaissance’ is perhaps becoming unfashionable today, many historians continue to see the twelfth century as a particularly significant period – both in itself, and in respect of the formation of modern ways. But it remains something of a puzzle as to why The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, a work with such evident inconsistencies, became so important and so influential. Haskins personal standing, and even the very title of the work, may have played a part in this process. The title is simple and arresting. The title itself is also a provocative argument that makes claims about the twelfth century. This argument counters what was – and still is – most people’s opinion about the importance of the Italian Renaissance vis-à-vis both the Middle Ages and modernity. But the answer to the perceived importance of The Renaissance of the Twelfth-Century surely also lies in it being the culmination and meeting point of several trajectories of ‘nineteenth-century’ thinking about history and historiography. This way of looking at The Renaissance of the Twelfth-Century also accounts for its contradictions and inconsistencies. While both The Renaissance of the Twelfth-Century and Haskins himself continued to be influential, it is significant that these two respective streams of influence did not entirely coincide. In the late twentieth century the renaissance debate, such as it was, increasingly became the territory of specialists in the arts and literature. Meanwhile Haskins’ own influence as expressed through his protégé and successor Strayer consisted more of a recognizably Rankean and liberal-Idealist outlook, according to which medieval political and institutional developments were seen as the origins of modernity. This Haskins-Strayer version of progressive historical thinking remained the foundation of academic medieval history in the Anglophone world until the 1970s.

6

The Waning of Progress: Radical Historiography into the Twentieth Century As professional historians embraced Idealist metaphysics and Rankean particularism, aesthetic attitudes were increasingly confined to the realms of artistic and literary endeavour, and to cultural history as opposed to histories of politics and institutions. These areas often featured criticism of the prevailing Idealist metaphysics, and of mainstream historiography. They were also closely aligned to a current of post-Romantic and anti-Idealist philosophical thinking. This chapter will examine examples of this critical discourse in literature, philosophy, and especially historiography. The major histories analysed will be Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). It will be suggested that these seminal works in the area of cultural history functioned as alternatives to the professional historiography of the time. It will also be suggested that Burckhardt’s and Huizinga’s respective positions outside the ideological mainstream were informed by a distaste for Hegelian and Rankean orthodoxy, and by the influence of the critical philosophy just mentioned. In fact, it will be specifically argued that in The Waning of the Middle Ages Huizinga brought Nietzsche’s philosophy to historiography. From around the middle of the nineteenth-century criticism of prevailing intellectual assumptions was increasingly cast in terms that pertained to history – even in the arts and literature, where motifs of return, rebirth and new beginnings often featured, along within an increasingly felt pessimism. A prominent example from literature of this critical discourse involving propositions about history and historians is Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–1869). Tolstoy used War and Peace as a vehicle for a thorough criticism of the then dominant intellectual and historiographical approaches. The essence of this criticism is contained in Tolstoy’s own philosophy of history, which is elaborated in the conclusion to War and Peace, and which underpins the lengthy descriptions of Russia’s role in the Napoleonic Wars that occur in the main narrative of that work.1 Tolstoy attempts to undermine both the Hegelian and the Rankean aspects of mainstream historical thinking. While he retains a sense of the totality of history, Tolstoy entirely rejects Hegel’s metaphysics. His own vision of history includes neither 1 For a discussion of Tolstoy’s historical vision see Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, in Russian Thinkers, New York, 1978, pp. 22–81.

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telos nor even progress as such. More specifically, Tolstoy’s depiction of Napoleon in War and Peace undermines Hegel’s sense of providence, and his notion of the ‘cunning of Reason’. Although a ‘great man’, Tolstoy’s Napoleon is entirely a victim of historical forces. Napoleon’s belief that he actually shapes events is presented as a misplaced personal perception that he, like all ‘great men’, manages somehow to communicate to others. Similarly, the temporary confidence that the brave General Bagration instils into some of the Russian troops during the Battle of Austerlitz has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual course of events, over which he, like everyone else, has no real control. Tolstoy’s criticism of Rankean thinking is evident in his condemnation of anyone who pretends to be in command of the facts. He also stridently denounces attempts to infer laws and causes in history. The characters in War and Peace who embody these tendencies most clearly are the German – their nationality is obviously significant – military experts who accompany the Russian army, and who believe that they are capable of analysing its victories and defeats in a scientific manner. Their equivalent in the French army is Napoleon’s Chief of Staff General Marshal Berthier, who is depicted as a man overwhelmed by the mass of information at his disposal. Tolstoy’s point is that the historical process is so complex that it resists meaningful analysis and explanation. This belief led him to a quasi-Christian and essentially Romantic emphasis on the authenticity of one’s own finite experience in coming to grips with history. Henrik Ibsen’s controversial play Hedda Gabler (1890) builds on Tolstoy’s criticisms by raising issues that pertain to the professionalization of the study of history, particularly medieval history. In Hedda Gabler, the eponymous heroine is married to Jörgen Tesman, a professional historian engaged in sorting out an ‘extensive collection of material’ that will result in a book. The pathetically trivial subject matter of this proposed work – it is to be on animal husbandry in medieval Brabant – reveals the narrow-mindedness and meaningless specialization of Rankean historiography. The slipper-clad Tesman is contrasted with another historian, Ejlert Lövborg, a rival for Hedda’s affections who has written ‘a big new book, dealing with cultural development . . . sort of altogether.’ Lövborg’s book, moreover, ‘sold so many copies . . . and caused such an enormous stir.’2 And to complete the contrast with Tesman, Lövborg’s book was written rather quickly and apparently without much ‘serious’ research. Tesman’s inability even to deal adequately with his own material and his chosen subject is reminiscent of the pedantic historian Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872). Eliot’s Casaubon is unable to come to a conclusion on anything. Instead, he continues to acquire more and more facts through manic research. Tesman’s project also 2 Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays. A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Oxford, 1981, p. 83. The gaps in these quotations are original.

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brings to mind Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), in which the hero’s shoddily written and utterly inconsequential article on medieval shipbuilding is stolen and published by another academic. Ibsen’s contrast between Tesman and Lövborg, however, contains a deeper comment on the professional and institutional aspects of being an historian at the time. Tesman is already on the professional gravy train. He has received some sort of fellowship endowment and hopes to become a full professor on the strength of his forthcoming book. This position will bring him comfort, status, and not insignificant wealth. In contrast, Lövborg, a far better though entirely different historian as well as a more interesting person, has chosen to distance himself from the professional and institutional mainstream. As both a sign and a result of this distance from the professional environment, Lövborg’s book is capable of interesting and even exciting the general public. It is difficult to resist the feeling that Lövborg’s book might be an example of cultural history after the fashion of, say, Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The philosophical underpinnings for this critical thinking were provided largely by the works of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Although they were formulated in the early nineteenth century, Schopenhauer’s ideas only really became influential in the last half of the century. Schopenhauer was essentially a Romantic and an anti-Idealist. And this thinking perhaps became more attractive and appeared more outré as Hegelian Idealism assumed a position of dominance. Schopenhauer also found favour among literary figures because he assigned a particular prominence to the arts. Unlike many philosophers, moreover, Schopenhauer gave his original ideas additional cache by retaining them for his whole life. In addition to the well-known cases of Wagner and Nietzsche, among those influenced by Schopenhauer were Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Tolstoy and Burckhardt, who referred to him as ‘the philosopher’. Schopenhauer’s ideas were expressed most fully in The World as Will and Representation (1818), which features Romantic developments of certain basic Kantian concepts.3 Having accepted Kant’s distinction between phenomenon and noumen, Schopenhauer suggests that reality is divided between representation (Vorstellung) and will (Wille). The will is understood in terms of striving. Schopenhauer has made Kant’s thing-in-itself dynamic. But this striving dynamism is non-rational and purposeless. As a microcosm of the world, the individual’s mind is also divided. Ordinary consciousness is largely a function of the ‘blind’, striving will. In certain circumstances, however, the mind achieves a ‘better’ consciousness and grasps a higher reality, namely a world of ideas that lies beyond appearances. The ‘better’ consciousness, which Schopenhauer associates 3 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. RB Haldane and J Kemp, 3 vols, London, 1883, also known as The World as Will and Representation, trans. EFJ Payne, 2 vols, New York, 1969.

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with being a ‘saint’ or a ‘genius’, opens up an awareness of the relentless will, and this awareness can lead to freedom. Schopenhauer believes that artistic contemplation is a path to this ‘better’ consciousness. Through art the will may be suspended and a timeless reality glimpsed. Schopenhauer’s aesthetics are, again, essentially Kantian. For example, he uses some recognizably Kantian concepts such as a juxtaposition of ‘disinterestedness’ and the idea of pleasure in artistic experience. But Schopenhauer also simplified Kant’s aesthetics. In particular, he abandoned the central but rather intricate Kantian notion of ‘hovering’. This simplification no doubt assisted in the dissemination of his ideas. Like the early Romantics, Schopenhauer brought out of Kant’s ideas the potential for the formation of aesthetic attitudes. Schopenhauer’s sense of an artistic or religious means of grasping a ‘higher’ reality is very reminiscent of Schlegel. In both cases, these avenues are only open to certain individuals. Only a genius or a saint can transcend Schopenhauer’s everyday will-driven world. And both Schlegel and Schopenhauer thought that genuine knowledge is available through artistic contemplation.4 Schopenhauer’s treatment of the quintessentially Romantic truth-of-art motif prepared the way for a renewed interest in this theme towards the end of the nineteenth century, most notably in Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying (1889), and in the works of Nietzsche. Schopenhauer’s emphasis on art fundamentally opposes Hegel’s sense of the superiority of philosophy to art. In fact, Schopenhauer’s entire ‘system’ is anti-Idealist. Schopenhauer thought that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were philosopher-charlatans. But he also personally disliked Hegel, with whom he worked briefly at Berlin University; he was particularly repelled by Hegel’s embracing of an academic career with such apparent gusto. On a more intellectual level, we can see that Schopenhauer’s metaphysics presents a challenge to Hegel’s view of the historical process, and to Idealist attitudes towards historiography. Schopenhauer’s notion of will amounts to a dynamic understanding of both phenomenal reality and its hidden essence. In this Hegel would agree. But the ‘blind’ striving of Schopenhauer’s will militates against any sense of progress or meaning being attributed to history. Schopenhauer believes that a cyclical endlessness imprisons both natural and human endeavour: The existence of the plant is just such a restless, never satisfied striving, a ceaseless tendency through ever-ascending forms, till the end, the seed, becomes a new starting point; and this is repeated ad infinitum – nowhere an end, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a resting-place.5

4 For a discussion of this point in regard to Schopenhauer see Christopher Janaway, Schopenhauer, Oxford, 1994, p. 60. 5 Trans. Haldane and Kemp, vol. 1, pp. 398f.

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For all [human] effort springs from defect – from discontent with one’s estate – is thus suffering so long as it is not satisfied; but no satisfaction is lasting, rather it is always merely the starting-point of a new effort . . . Thus, if there is no final end of striving, there is no measure and end of suffering.6

In some ways Schopenhauer’s worldview is like Gibbon’s model of history, in which cyclical patterns of events exist below a timeless realm of art and ideas. But unlike Gibbon, Schopenhauer offers a deep ‘explanation’ for both the cycles themselves, and for the apparent meaninglessness of empirical or phenomenal reality, by using a dynamic and intrinsically historical metaphysics based on the idea of will. Schopenhauer is therefore, if anything, more pessimistic than Gibbon. Similarly, while both stress the artistic aspects of historiography, Schopenhauer’s ideas in this area are also more developed and more recognizably modern. One might expect Schopenhauer’s notion of the ‘cognitive value’ of the arts to have informed his attitude towards historiography. It is, however, usually pointed out that Schopenhauer thought historiography deals with ‘surface’ events, while poetry, in contrast, and is capable of providing deeper insights.7 He did indeed conclude that ‘however paradoxical it may sound, far more genuine inner truth is to be attributed to poetry than to history’.8 But Schopenhauer also suggests that whatever their respective levels of effectiveness, poetry and historiography are similar insofar as ‘our own experience is the indispensable condition of understanding poetry as of understanding history; for it is, so to speak, the dictionary of the language that both speak’.9 Schopenhauer’s basic proposition is the recognizably Romantic idea that historiography should be more poetic. This line of thought is underscored by his criticisms of modern historiography, which is contrasted with the efforts of the ancients: The great ancient historians are therefore poets in the particulars where data forsake them, for example in the speeches of their heroes; indeed, the whole way in which they handle their material approaches the epic. But this gives their presentations unity, and enables them to retain inner truth, even where outer truth was not accessible to them, or was in fact falsified . . . On the other hand, modern historians, with few exceptions, generally give us only an ‘offal-barrel and a lumber garret, or at best a Punch-and-Judy play.’10

6 7 8 9 10

Ibid., p. 399. For example, Janaway, op. cit., pp. 67f. Trans. Haldane and Kemp, vol. 1, p. 316. Ibid., p. 315. Ibid., p. 318; trans. Payne, vol. 1, p. 246. The section in quotation marks is from Goethe’s Faust.

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In line with his criticism of modern historians, Schopenhauer makes a point of specifically refuting Hegel’s historical vision. After dismissing ‘certain mythological notions’ that enable Hegel to conceive of history as a ‘planned whole’, he lampoons Hegelian histories that, ‘guided by a positive optimism, always end in a comfortable, rich, fat State, with a well-regulated constitution, good justice and police, useful arts and industries, and . . . in intellectual perfection’.11 While Schopenhauer’s belief in a timeless realm of ideas perhaps prevents absolute priority being assigned to history, significant elements in his apparent hostility to history therefore consist of reactions against the dominant Idealist historical vision. And Schopenhauer’s criticisms of the historiography of his own day are really a subset of this wider condemnation of Idealism. Schopenhauer’s criticisms of Hegelian Idealism, and his call for poetic historiography, were taken even further by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). As with his twentieth-century followers such as Foucault, it is difficult and perhaps inappropriate to ascribe specific propositions to Nietzsche. His varied philosophical and historical works are nevertheless generally divided into three rather distinct stages. Nietzsche’s first period was the most overtly historical of the three and featured deep criticisms of modern culture, especially its historiography. The best known work from this early, critical period is The Birth of Tragedy (1872), in which Nietzsche elaborated his idea of a relationship between the Apollonian and Dionysian spirits – respectively representing reason and instinct – in Ancient Greek culture. He used this idea as the basis for a controversial but influential interpretation of the Greek achievement. Nietzsche argued that the loss of an early classical-period balance between these opposing principles resulted in a hegemony of anti-mythical rationalism within an ‘Alexandrine’ culture that resembled modernity. In his second, ‘positivistic’ period, including Human, All Too Human (1878) and The Gay Science (1882),12 Nietzsche, while remaining critical and anti-rationalist, advanced a doctrine of naturalism and pursued the Romantic idea of a unification of art and science. Thus Spake Zarathustra (Parts 1–3, 1883–1884; Part 4, 1891) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887) are the most prominent works of Nietzsche’s third period. At this stage his thinking was marked by an emphasis on the creative and potentially redemptive use of myth. Modern interpretations have emphasized either a ‘positivistic’ Nietzsche, or a Nietzsche primarily concerned with myth, culture and artistic sensibilities. The former approach is particularly evident in Walter Kaufmann’s widely read postSecond World War translations and commentaries, while the latter view, now dominant in the English-speaking world, is a product of stream of more radical Continental commentators including Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man. The 11 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 225. 12 Nietzsche wrote an additional section for the 1887 edition of The Gay Science.

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‘positivistic’ Nietzsche was concerned with the inability of logic and metaphysics to describe reality, and advanced a naturalistic account of the ‘reasons’ for beliefs. Despite his general emphasis on ‘science’ at this stage, Nietzsche’s ‘positivism’ is therefore a doctrine of epistemological pessimism. This ‘positivism’ coheres with a sense of the arbitrary nature of all knowledge, and with the idea that ‘truths’ are created. This idea of created ‘truths’ is at the centre of what we can regard as Nietzsche’s widening of aesthetics to include everything. Nietzsche understood the world as ‘a work of art that gives birth to itself ’. In other words, beliefs and even perceptions are constructs, interpretations, or representations. The Birth of Tragedy, for example, defines the Apollonian spirit in terms of the construction of necessary illusions. Nietzsche, though, is careful to distinguish mere fictions from myths, the latter being self-conscious, positive, life-sustaining illusions. On this point Nietzsche’s early writings have much in common with those of his ‘mature’ period. For example, an early essay entitled ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1871) elaborates the need for a ‘mythos for the future’, which is ultimately formulated in Thus Spake Zarathustra as the rather gnomic notion of eternal return. Perhaps the most striking example of Nietzsche’s broadening of aesthetics is, however, found in The Genealogy of Morals, another ‘mature’ work arguably anticipated by his early essay on history. The Genealogy of Morals suggests that ‘the beginnings of human polity’ might be found in the efforts of conquering, aristocratic warriors who use their ‘artist’s violence’ to create societies. Imposing their will on the world, and creating form from nothing, they are ‘the most spontaneous, most unconscious artists that exist’.13 In one sense Nietzsche’s widening of the artistic sphere to include the world can be seen as an extension of Kant’s vastly influential understanding of artistic experience in his third Critique. It is, however, also possible to see this move on Nietzsche’s part as a reaction to Kant’ first Critique. While Nietzsche is critical of naive belief in transcendent (in the Kantian sense) knowledge, his aesthetics represent an extreme and subjectivist development of Kant’s notion of the constructedness of the phenomenal world. Nietzsche’s widening of aesthetics includes the idea that the practise of history should involve creative use of ‘the past’ in order to achieve certain present aims. This imperative not only calls for (deeply) artistic historiography, but also assigns history a particular importance. Nevertheless it is not clear whether the historical worldview that underpins Nietzsche’s belief in the need for the creation of new illusions or myths is itself meant to be taken as mythical. A comparison between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is instructive on this point. Nietzsche’s contrast between the Apollonian and Dionysian spirits corresponds broadly to 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing, New York, 1956, p. 219.

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Schopenhauer’s distinction between representation and will. Schopenhauer’s idea of will was, however, turned by Nietzsche into his famous ‘will-to-power’. Nietzsche did not adopt Schopenhauer’s idea of a timeless realm of ideas and so did not exhibit any residual ‘eighteenth-century’ ahistoricism. Even Nietzsche’s naturalism seems dynamic. While Schopenhauer’s aesthetics were connected to his timeless realm of ideas, Nietzsche’s (broadened) aesthetics, that is to say his worldview, were dynamic. Everything is in a state of flux. Whatever its precise status or accessibility might be, the historical process is driven by the will-topower, and is therefore directionless and non-rational. Conventional, optimistic historical visions are, accordingly, fictions. While all historiography is fictional in some sense or other, self-consciously artistic historical works seem better able to function rhetorically and creatively. Nietzsche’s essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ argues that historiography should be artistic so that it might thereby perform the higher, more creative function of affirming or ‘serving’ life.14 As well as being conceptually perhaps the furthest point imaginable from a progressive approach to history, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History’ contains trenchant criticism of mainstream academic historical thinking. This criticism on Nietzsche’s part usually refers specifically to Hegel’s system, which is characterized as ‘disguised theology’, and lambasted for its overweening and complacent epistemological optimism: This history, understood in an Hegelian way, has contemptuously been called the sojourn of God on Earth, which, however, is himself first produced by history. But this God became transparent and intelligible to himself inside the Hegelian craniums and has already ascended all possible dialectical steps of his becoming up to that self-revelation: so that for Hegel the apex and terminus of world history coincided in his own Berlin existence.15

In criticizing late nineteenth-century progressive historical thinking, Nietzsche also singles out recognizably Rankean practices. Most historians, he feels, merely cart, heap up and sift because it is certain that they cannot become great historians . . . These workers should gradually become great scholars, but can never be masters for all that. A great scholar and a great shallow pate – that will more easily go together under one hat.16

14 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss, Indianapolis, 1980; also known as ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. RJ Hollingdale, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 57–124. 15 Trans. Preuss, p. 47. 16 Ibid., pp. 36f.

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In order to overcome the ‘analytical and inartistic trend’ of the time, the ‘great’ or ‘genuine’ historian must possess ‘the strength to recast the well known into something never heard before’. The great historian is, in short, ‘artistic’.17 To emphasize this point, artistic historiography is specifically likened to painting, with neither, of course, pretending to capture any ‘empirical essence of . . . things.’18 These ideas fall in with Nietzsche’s feeling that (artistic) historiography should ‘serve life’. For ‘only if history can bear being transformed into a work of art, that is, to become a pure art form, may it perhaps preserve instincts or even rouse them.’19 Whether or not historiography can – or should – function in the way Nietzsche envisages, the principal significance of ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History’ lies in this clear, and at times even blunt, call for artistic historiography. Nietzsche’s forceful restatement of this quintessentially Romantic motif represents a highwater mark in nineteenth-century aesthetic historical thinking. It is therefore possible to see Nietzsche as a culmination of a trajectory of post-Kantian thinking that included both Romanticism and the works of Schopenhauer.20 Even more than Schopenhauer, Nietzsche revelled in the Romantic sense of the alienation of individuals from society. In his hands this idea became something genuinely positive, functioning as a prerequisite for creativity, rather than merely as a cause for a retreat into the contemplation of the arts. Nietzsche also demonstrates a seemingly Romantic nostalgia for certain historical periods that struck him as combining the individualism and aestheticism that he valued so highly. For instance, we saw that in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche described the demise of a classical golden-age intellectual and cultural achievement that was predicated on a unity of oppositions. Although Nietzsche claimed a positive function for his works, in one sense his characterization of Ancient Greek culture is even more pessimistic than Romantic Medievalism because he seems to be suggesting that virtually nothing since the very beginning of Western civilization has been of any real value. Yet, clearly influenced by his friend Burckhardt, Nietzsche was also drawn to the Italian Renaissance for two reasons. First, he understood the Renaissance as a revival of classicism. On this point he quotes from Burckhardt, who is mentioned approvingly in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History’, and characterizes Renaissance culture as a ‘wondrous reverberation of the ancient lyre’.21 Second, Nietzsche saw the Renaissance period as having been dominated by creative and amoral individuals 17 18 19 20

Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 39. Because Nietzsche ostensibly presented his approach as an alternative to that of the Romantics and of Schopenhauer, the precise nature of his relationship with Romanticism has remained a matter of some debate. 21 Trans. Preuss, p. 19.

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whose artistic impulses not only encouraged the arts themselves, but also fashioned whole societies. Nietzsche’s approval of the Italian Renaissance and his wider antipathy toward Christianity militated against a wholehearted embracing of the Middle Ages. He was nevertheless especially drawn to one aspect of the Middle Ages, namely Provençal literary culture. Admiration for Provençal culture was an established element of Romantic medievalism, as we saw with Herder and Walter Scott. Nietzsche’s interpretation – and use – of Provençal literature formed the basis of The Gay Science, an important work from his middle or ‘positivist’ period.22 The gay science or gai saber was the art of composition as practiced in Provence by the troubadour knight-poets from the eleventh century. Nietzsche thought of it as ‘that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençals from all equivocal cultures’.23 During his ‘positivist’ period Nietzsche was concerned with the nature of knowledge and truth. He felt that knowledge is based on an ‘instinct to preserve the species’, and that truth and falsehood consist ultimately of feelings. But although knowledge is instinctual, superior forms of knowledge recognize the role of instinct, and make use of it. These superior forms of knowledge are associated with a poetic outlook. For Nietzsche, therefore, knowledge itself should be self-consciously poetic. Indeed, it should dance: Dance on myriad backs a season Billows’ backs and billows’ treason– we need dances that are new! Let us dance in myriad manners, freedom write on our art’s banners, our science shall be gay! Let us break from every flower one fine blossom for our power and two leaves to wind a wreath! Let us dance like troubadours between holy men and whores, between god and world beneath.24 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, 1974. Nietzsche himself entitled this work Die fröliche Wissenschaft (‘la gaya scienza’). For a discussion of The Gay Science see Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, London, 2002, pp. 223–44. 23 The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, p. 6. This quotation is from Ecce Homo, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, 1968, p. 750. 24 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘To the Mistral: A Dancing Song’, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, p. 375. Original emphasis.

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Nietzsche’s idea that knowledge might be joyful and poetic represented another element in his wide-ranging criticism of modern ways. Nietzsche was antimodern, anti-academic and even anti-German – not in a racist sense, of course, but insofar as he felt that the German intellectual and cultural environment was the epitome of all that was wrong. Nietzsche felt that the cultural achievements of Athens, Provence and Florence possessed an instinctual and poetic vigour, while the Germany of his day was dominated by a stodgy Idealism that had the effrontery to present itself as the pinnacle of achievements. Nietzsche’s criticisms of Idealism, and of what he saw as the intellectual complacency of mainstream academic historians, anticipated the series of debates among historians and philosophers that came to be called the ‘Crisis of Historicism’. This crisis, such as it was, initially centred on the historian Karl Lamprecht (1865–1915), who advocated early forms of what we now know as sociology and psycho-history. As such, he was seen to be questioning Rankean orthodoxy and criticizing political histories. Lamprecht expressed his ideas in his multi-volume History of Germany (1891–1909), which was ridiculed by Rankean historians, resulting in the ‘Lamprecht controversy’. These disputes about Lamprecht evolved into a series of debates concerning historiographical methodology and, especially, the status of historical knowledge. Philosophers of the Neo-Kantian movement dominated these wider debates. Prominent among these philosophers was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), who is mainly known today for his role in the development of philosophical hermeneutics.25 As a critic of Hegelian and Rankean approaches, Dilthey emphasized the historical specificity of interpretations of the past and the historicity of the past itself, while maintaining that genuine understanding (verstehen) of the past is possible, albeit in a largely intuitive sense. Dilthey saw history as a human science. He was, however, keen to maintain a distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences, and, like Max Weber, to establish a viable methodology for work in the human sciences. Dilthey’s approach – like that of the other Neo-Kantians and, for that matter, Kant himself – was a balancing act. Dilthey’s attempts to create a coherent and viable method from seemingly disparate elements resulted in tortuously complicated philosophical pieces. Perhaps surprisingly, however, his reflections on intellectual history are among the most accessible of his works. Dilthey’s historical vision combined an awareness of cultural totalities with a sense of overall development. This combination led to an emphasis on the Renaissance period.26 25 See Charles R Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, Ithaca, 1995. For an incisive short discussion of Dilthey see Elizabeth A Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, Harvard, 2004, pp. 12ff. 26 For Dilthey’s understanding of the Renaissance see Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 214–18.

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Dilthey’s Intuition and Analysis of Man in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1891–1892) was one of the few parts of a projected history of European intellectual life that he managed to complete. In this work the Italian Renaissance is portrayed as a breakdown of a ‘European metaphysic’, which is understood as a synthesis of Christian and classical elements that was underpinned by the idea of a rational cosmos. Dilthey suggests that the breakdown of this synthesis began in the fourteenth century with Petrarch, and led to a classically inspired but heterogeneous Renaissance environment in which ‘the Epicurean, the Stoic, the nature-intoxicated Pantheist, the sceptic, and the atheist made their appearance once more’.27 Although Dilthey reveals the influence of Idealism by suggesting that freedom arose out of this new environment, he sees Renaissance freedom largely in terms of a quasi-Romantic individualism, rather than as an overcoming of alienation or as part of a process of integration. His descriptions of the Renaissance itself, moreover, feature motifs of return, revival and loss of integrity. Dilthey’s use of both Idealist and Romantic elements in his historical vision is summed up in his attempt to combine the ideas of the Reformation and the Renaissance. Accordingly, Luther marks an important point in the attainment of freedom, but he is understood as possessing medieval antecedents, as well as representing a revival of classical Stoicism. Dilthey’s view of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century intellectual life therefore encapsulates the tensions within the Crisis of Historicism, and reveals why the ‘Renaissance debate’ was becoming so important. Interpreting ‘the Renaissance’ involved questions of the transition to modernity and of the relationship between the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. It called into question one’s idea of the historical process. And it had become an area in which aesthetic and progressive historical thinking intersected. Dilthey’s understanding of the Italian Renaissance, and the ‘Renaissance debate’ itself, took shape in response to Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), a work of such power that it influenced all subsequent Renaissance scholarship. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) initially studied theology in Switzerland before moving to Berlin to study history. In 1841 he left Berlin briefly for Bonn University, where he attended courses on Greek art history by Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868), and medieval philosophy by Christian August Brandis (1790–1867). The subject-matter of these courses, and the outlook of the teachers, presented a contrast with Berlin, where Hegel and Ranke held sway. At Bonn Burckhardt also attended lectures on history by Ranke’s protégé Heinrich von Sybel, who had recently qualified and was working as a Privatdozent. Burckhardt did not enjoy Sybel’s lectures. When he returned to Berlin to take part in Ranke’s graduate seminar, 27 Quoted in ibid., p. 218.

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he prepared an essay contradicting a piece by Sybel on medieval Cologne.28 Sybel’s work, Erzbishof Cult und die Bürgerschaft von Koln (1843), mainly deals with the Bishop of Cologne Conrad von Hochstaden (d. 1261). Conrad was a controversial figure in German history because he had sided with the pope against the Emperor Frederick II. Sybel made the case of Conrad relevant to contemporary politics by arguing that the bishop and his allies among the nobility had been responsible for the fragmentation of a German ‘natural or historical solidarity’. Burckhardt rejected both Sybel’s argument, and his emphasis on politics. Instead, Burckhardt concentrated on Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), a Dominican friar who, in addition to teaching Thomas Aquinas and contributing to theological debate on the question of free will, is thought to have designed Cologne Cathedral. Albertus was also responsible for settling disturbances that had broken out in Cologne between the townspeople and the supporters of the bishop. But for Burckhardt, Albertus was more than an agent for political harmony; he represented cultural unity. The symbol of this harmony was the cathedral itself, which was ‘the garden where the most beautiful blossoms of that great age opened up’. Burckhardt was repelled by the violence of the Middle Ages, but he felt that the corollary to this violence was an extraordinary creativity that anticipated the Renaissance. When Burckhardt returned home to Basel after completing Ranke’s graduate seminar, his interest in culture was already taking him in the opposite direction to the Rankean approaches and the Idealist metaphysics that were becoming dominant in the European academic world. He had also come to dislike Ranke on a personal level. It seems, though, that the feeling was not entirely mutual because he received offers, some of which were prompted by Ranke himself, to join high-status institutions. In 1872 he was even offered Ranke’s chair at Berlin. But, apparently preferring to remain an outsider, he declined these offers. From the time he began lecturing at the local university at Basel in 1843, he never taught outside Switzerland. In the late 1840s he began planning a series of works on ‘cultural history’ (kulturgeschichte), the first of which was The Age of Constantine the Great (1852).29 Burckhardt saw Constantine much as Gibbon had, that is as an opportunist whose adoption of Christianity was pragmatic rather than the result of any real conviction or even, for that matter, approval. Departing from Gibbon by analysing culture, however, he saw the age of Constantine as a period of crisis and transition. He argued that classical ideals were abandoned in the arts, and that in the process individualism and the classical sense of freedom were lost. The issue of individualism was also dealt with in Burckhardt’s next work, the 28 For a good discussion of Burckhardt and Sybel see John R Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity, Montreal, 2000, pp. 180–8. 29 Ibid., pp. 188–98.

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Cicerone (1855), which was an examination of Renaissance art. In the Cicerone Burckhardt inferred the existence of individualism by analysing the paintings of the time. The Cicerone thus marks Burckhardt’s first elaboration of the important idea of Renaissance individualism, which is one of the themes of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Although it is of much wider scope than the Cicerone, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is sometimes seen as a companion-piece to the earlier work because it does not deal directly with art. Instead, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy begins with a description of the political environment in a section dramatically – but perhaps rather gnomically – entitled ‘The State as a Work of Art’, before moving on to further sections dealing with the two key ideas in Burckhardt’s understanding of the Renaissance: individualism and classical revival. Burckhardt’s overarching argument is that in certain fifteenth-century Italian states the classical revival combined with the Italian ‘spirit’ to produce Renaissance individualism. And although stirrings of Renaissance individualism existed in Italian literature from the late thirteenth century, the Renaissance itself is quite different from the Middle Ages: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within and that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation – only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air . . .30

Burckhardt’s apparent sense of a development of consciousness led several commentators to suggest that he was proposing a pattern of historical progress. Some have even attempted to see him as a Hegelian.31 Burckhardt’s emphasis on individualism is, however, a Romantic, rather than an Idealist, motif. And although Burckhardt thought the veil of illusion and sense of corporate identity had disappeared during the Renaissance, he also felt that a ‘new veil’ had fallen since the French Revolution. The current standard view of Burckhardt, which is based on close readings of his entire oeuvre, presents him as a deep pessimist and a thorough critic of modernity. One aspect of this growing view of Burckhardt as a pessimist was the realisation that he had 30 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. SCG Middlemore, London, 1990, p. 98. 31 Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 189f; EH Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, Oxford, 1969, esp. pp. 6–32; William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance, Baltimore, 1989, pp. 12f.

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been an admirer of Schopenhauer.32 Thinking about the possible influence of Schopenhauer enables one to make sense of what has become the traditional criticism of Burckhardt’s approach, namely that his analysis of the Renaissance has diachronic failings. By taking ‘cross-sections’ (querdurchschnitte) of an era, and by emphasising ‘the constant, the recurrent, and the typical’ (das sich wiederholende, konstante, typische), Burckhardt sought to downplay the significance of the sequence of historical events, and to move to what he felt was timeless and eternally valid. Burckhardt and Schopenhauer therefore both reveal an ahistoricism that arises from the latter’s belief in a timeless realm of ideas. And like Schopenhauer, Burckhardt escaped from a repugnant present by embracing (high) culture. It is also tempting to suggest that Burckhardt’s historiographical approach was informed by Schopenhauer’s belief that historiography would be better if it were more poetic. For in his Reflections on History Burckhardt refers to Schopenhauer’s treatment of the relationship between history and poetry. Burckhardt concludes that Schopenhauer had ‘finally settled’ this question.33 It is, however, difficult to escape the feeling that there is still something missing in the recent interpretations of Burckhardt that stress his indebtedness to Schopenhauer’s art-centred worldview. The lack of any substantial consideration of the fine arts in The Civilization of the Renaissance is, for example, arguably a cause for concern. And it is probably fair to say that recent readings of Burckhardt have not fully come to grips with his idea of the state as a work of art. A way forward might be to suggest that the modern interpretations of Burckhardt have not gone far enough, and that Burckhardt should be credited with a Nietzsche-style widening of aesthetics itself. Indeed, perhaps an expanded sense of aesthetics – a move from art to life – lies at the centre of Burckhardt’s idea of the Renaissance. If this is the case, then Burckhardt went even further than Schopenhauer and began to anticipate Nietzsche, whom he knew. Burckhardt’s concept of the state as a work of art makes much more sense in the light of this ‘Nietzschean’ tendency; it is, after all, impossible not to be reminded of Nietzsche’s idea of the world as a work of art that gives birth to itself. After beginning The Civilization of the Renaissance with some remarks on the subjective nature of his ‘essay’, Burckhardt announces that the theme of his first chapter is the appearance of ‘a new fact . . . in history – the state as the outcome of reflection and calculation, the state as a 32 White, Metahistory, pp. 237–43; E. Heller, The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought, Harmondsworth, 1961, pp. 59–76; Peter Gay, Style in History, New York, 1974, pp. 141–82; Jörn Rüsen, ‘Political Standpoint and Historical Insight on the Border of Post-Modernism’, History and Theory, XXIV, 3, pp. 235–46. Heller and White drew attention to Burckhardt’s indebtedness to Schopenhauer. 33 Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History, trans. MD Hottinger, Indianapolis, 1979, p. 107.

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work of art’.34 This insight provides the framework for the descriptions of Italian political life that take up the bulk of the chapter. The descriptions are based on literary primary sources and on occasional references to well-known paintings, rather than archival material. Towards the end of the first chapter these discussions of politics are, moreover, augmented by a short treatment of Renaissance warfare, which is also said to have ‘assumed the character of a product of reflection’.35 In other words, and in contrast to the circumstances that prevailed in previous epochs, the Renaissance political and military environments were shaped – indeed created – by certain individuals for their own ends. A widening of aesthetics on Burckhardt’s part also enables us to make more sense of both his idea of Renaissance individualism, and his impression of the role played by the classical revival. As we saw, Burckhardt felt that individualism distinguished the Renaissance from the Middle Ages. Renaissance individualism, moreover, had an objective and a subjective side. The objective side of Renaissance individualism was a matter of externalities, that is to say of considerations of ‘the state and . . . all things of this world.’ Objective individualism therefore seems closely related to the idea of the state as a work of art. Subjective Renaissance individualism turns on the question of how ‘man became a spiritual individual’.36 This ‘spirit’ was the essence of the Renaissance uomo universale, and is particularly evident in the autobiographies of the day. Burckhardt’s Renaissance individualism pertains largely to the self-conscious shaping of one’s image – both at the time, and with a view to posterity. And the fifteenth-century classical revival worked in the same way. Just as Renaissance tyrants, like Nietzsche’s amoral conquering heroes, shaped society and used people as tools, so the humanists used the classics to advance, and indeed to construct, themselves.37 Burckhardt’s widening of aesthetics also helps explain why he chose not to consider the fine arts themselves extensively in The Civilization of the Renaissance: he was more interested in art in a ‘Nietzschean’ sense, that is to say in a movement from art or the arts to life. In Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) this ‘Nietzschean’ tendency is taken even further, becoming virtually the stated theme of the work. Huizinga, moreover, applied this widening of aesthetics to medievalism. Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was a relative neophyte in the field when he became Professor of General and Dutch History at Groningen, his home-town university, in 1905. His principal supporter for the chair, PJ Blok (1855–1925), had taught him some history as an undergraduate and, more recently, had encouraged him to write his first serious historical work, The Origins of Haarlem 34 35 36 37

Burchkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 20. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., pp. 99–102.

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(1905). Huizinga had worked mainly in the field of languages, including philology and comparative linguistics. He completed a degree in Indo-Germanic languages in 1895. Two years later he submitted his doctoral thesis, which was on the role of the jester figure in Indian drama. He briefly attended the University of Leipzig in order to continue his study of languages. He himself, however, described this move as ‘not an unqualified success’. It is likely that Huizinga found mainstream academia unattractive even at this early stage. For throughout his career he defined himself and his projects in opposition to what seemed to be picayune specialization amongst academics. And later, when he was an established historian, he felt himself able to give full voice to these feelings in a manner that still strikes a powerful chord: Anyone who has the habit of ‘keeping up’ with several historical journals finds it hard to escape a feeling of discomfort now and then on glancing through the references to the flood of countless monographs, articles, and source publications that are being added to the material of history from month to month in every country. He sees the scholars of the world working their way further and further into the most minute details . . . a stream of trivia.38 [Historians] are providing the building stones [and] creating an illusion of humble unselfishness for the sake of others’ future profit. But when the master builder comes he will find most of the stones you have laid ready for him unusable. You are not hewing and chipping, but polishing and filing. And you are doing it because you are not strong enough for more vigorous labour.39

Huizinga’s cultural-history approach is the antithesis of these tendencies. His interest in history, culture and the Middle Ages began in 1902 when he visited Bruges and saw an exhibition of Old Dutch paintings.40 The Bruges exhibition was perhaps also the origin of his enduring concern about the relationship between history and art. Huizinga’s inaugural lecture as Professor of History at Groningen University was entitled ‘The Aesthetic Element in Historical Thought’.41 As well as mapping out the directions that Huizinga’s historiography would take, the lecture reveals him to have been at the philosophy-of-history coalface. He handles both the 38 Johan Huizinga, ‘The Task of Cultural History’, in Men and Ideas: Essays on History, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, trans. James S Holmes and Hans van Marle, New York, 1959, p. 19. 39 Ibid., p. 20. 40 Johan Huizinga, ‘My Path to History’, in Peter Geyl and FWN Hugenholtz (eds), trans Arnold J Pomerans, Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century and other Essays, London, 1968, pp. 244–76, esp. pp. 266f. 41 Ibid., p. 219–43.

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efforts of the Neo-Kantian philosophers, and the methodological issues at stake in the Lamprecht controversy, with admirable ease.42 As with Dilthey, Huizinga’s lecture seeks to balance reason against intuition. Huizinga wants to retain aspects of what he calls ‘epistemological studies’ within his approach, and to use these as an adjunct to his own ‘aesthetic point of view’. He nevertheless strongly criticizes the belief that the methods of the natural sciences are appropriate per se for history. Huizinga suggests that the historian’s task is to perceive the ‘totality of psychological and sociological phenomena’, and he emphasizes the role that examining the arts of any given culture should play in achieving this end. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the lecture is, however, a sophisticated discussion of the relationship between art and historiography that seems to use Schopenhauer’s views on the subject as a starting point. The ‘aesthetic element’ in historical thought that Huizinga has in mind is considerably broader than the arts, and he develops this idea by proposing some differences between poetry and historiography. While both genres (should) share in a creative use of language – here he agrees with Schopenhauer – the historian rearranges and reinterprets facts, finds connections, adduces totalities, and so on. Historiography therefore has an aesthetics of its own.43 And the aesthetics of historiography actually goes beyond that of poetry. Huizinga’s widening of historiography’s aesthetics represents something of a solution to the Crisis of Historicism because the historian’s creative use of facts or truths distinguishes historiography from both the arts and the sciences. While flights of fantasy are illicit from both an ‘epistemological’ and an artistic point of view, the insights of various historians will certainly differ; but that is a good thing as far as Huizinga is concerned. His approach is therefore more radical, and at the same time more secure, than the intersubjectivity of Weber and Dilthey. It is also more practical – and, frankly, more appealing – than Nietzsche’s view of historiography as self-conscious mythmaking. Huizinga’s widened historiographical aesthetics did not seek to ‘serve life’ in the fashion of Nietzsche; but it certainly served historiography, not least in the form of Huizinga’s own spectacular later efforts, The Waning of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens. The following discussions will suggest that, in addition to being examples of Huizinga’s historiographical aesthetics as elaborated in his lecture, these works consist of explorations of various forms of widened ‘Nietzschean’ aesthetics from history. The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) is often seen as a description of the decline of medieval culture – a culture in which meaning and content had given way to an empty formalism and an undue emphasis on detail and

42 Ibid., pp. 221, 224, 230. For Huizinga’s views on the Neo-Kantians see also ‘The Task of Cultural History’, in Men and Ideas, pp. 17–76, esp. p. 30. 43 Huzinga, ‘My Path to History’, p. 230.

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appearance.44 The very title of the work, moreover, perhaps suggests that Huizinga felt it had been necessary for medieval culture to die so that Renaissance civilization could arise. Nevertheless, when Huizinga actually mentions the Italian Renaissance, he frequently does so with a view to minimizing the differences between the medieval and Renaissance environments. This tendency is also evident in two of Huizinga’s essays on the ‘Renaissance problem’, which were published just after The Waning of the Middle Ages.45 These essays go so far as to question the usefulness and validity of the very term ‘Renaissance’, especially as employed by Haskins. And in The Waning of the Middle Ages Huizinga suggests that Burckhardt, whom he clearly admires in general, overemphasized the contrasts between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.46 Huizinga’s point is that some ‘medieval’ characteristics are discernible within the Italian Renaissance and, conversely, that some of the qualities that Burckhardt felt defined the Renaissance can not only be found earlier, but are also definitively medieval. Burckhardt’s widened sense of aesthetics comes to mind because attributing a similarly widened aesthetics to the Middle Ages fits in with Huizinga’s ‘critique’ of Burckhardt, and is arguably the theme of The Waning of the Middle Ages. While not, of course, denying that there were differences between medieval and Renaissance culture, Huizinga can be seen as having backdated, and made more prominent, a fundamental feature of Burckhardt’s characterization of the Italian Renaissance. The direct influence of Nietzsche, who is mentioned approvingly in The Waning of the Middle Ages, also seems important. Unlike Burckhardt, Huizinga’s widened aesthetics is underpinned by a (similarly widened) aesthetics that pertains specifically to historiography, an idea that brings to mind Nietzsche’s ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’. Huizinga’s proposition that late medieval culture was marked by a particularly significant ‘value for life’, as he puts it, also possesses unmistakable Nietzschean resonances. And when one acknowledges the importance of this widened ‘Nietzschean’ aesthetics, it becomes clear that, in complete contrast to the usual interpretations of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Huizinga is in fact suggesting that late-medieval 44 Republished as The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J Peyton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, Chicago, 1996. Although the translators of this edition claim an increased accuracy and faithfulness to the original, Huizinga himself read and approved of F Hopman’s well-known and often-republished 1924 English translation entitled The Waning of the Middle Ages. See the Pelican edition (1972) of Hopman’s translation, pp. 7f. As well, the work is still widely known as The Waning of the Middle Ages. I have therefore continued to refer to it as The Waning of the Middle Ages while using the more recent translation. 45 Johan Huizinga, ‘The Problem of the Renaissance’, Men and Ideas, pp. 243–87; ‘Renaissance and Realism’, ibid., pp. 288–310. 46 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Payton and Mammitzsch, pp. 43, 74.

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culture, with its unparalleled emphasis on style, was vigorous and admirable. The Waning of the Middle Ages begins with the issue of what might have made those times different from other cultural epochs.47 Speculating at a deep psychological level, Huizinga pinpoints the essence of the late-medieval outlook: a ‘passionate intensity of life’. Drawing on examples from the literature of the day, he describes sudden, violent swings of emotion, and seemingly bizarre oscillations between pride and humility, scepticism and credulity, forgiveness and revenge and so on. He argues that these contrasts arose from a deep insecurity connected to an awareness of the constant dangers posed by both human and supernatural forces of destruction. At this stage in the work Huizinga seems content to build up a vivid impression of this ‘passionate intensity of life’ in the reader’s mind, and to remark on the inability of mainstream academic approaches, especially those involving the study of official documents and the analysis of economic factors, to come to grips with the medieval psyche.48 In the second chapter of The Waning of the Middle Ages, however, he advances what can be taken as the argument of the whole work, namely that in the face of insecurity and suffering – a consciousness of the grim realities of life – there existed a ‘craving for a more beautiful life’. This craving is presented as an artistic impulse that, moving beyond ‘artworks as such’, became what Huizinga calls an ‘aesthetic of all of life’s circumstances’.49 In other words, the ‘violent tenor of life’ brought about an aesthetics so dynamic that it saturated all forms of thought and expression. The rest of The Waning of the Middle Ages consists of discussions of how this widened aesthetics is revealed in different aspects of late-medieval life. Huizinga believes that the context of the secular court, particularly that of the dukes of Burgundy, provides the most interesting and perhaps the most extreme examples of this aesthetics.50 Secular courtly life, being a domain of warriors, also emphasizes the late-medieval ‘aesthetic of all of life’s circumstances’ involved in a constant struggle with reality. There is a certain logic in Huizinga’s thinking here because this class of men was especially ‘prone to violence and passion’ and therefore needed to cultivate the ‘beautiful life’ so assiduously. Huizinga devotes the third and longest chapter of The Waning of the Middle Ages, entitled ‘The Heroic Dream’, to describing how this widened aesthetics informed both the behaviour of the knightly class, and the perceptions of those who wrote about them. His approach engenders stimulating discussions dealing with knightly vows, the chivalric orders, and tournaments, which are provocatively referred to as ‘applied literature’. The aesthetics of the ‘heroic dream’ also allows 47 48 49 50

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., pp. 8f., 17. Ibid., pp. 39, 59f. Ibid., p. 42.

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the apparent double standards – gaps between myth and reality, or appearance and reality – of late-medieval historians like Froissart and Chastellain to be perceptively analysed. Regarding these works as hypocritical and their authors as self-serving sycophants would, in Huizinga’s scheme of things, be anachronistic and shallow. The late-medieval historians and the knights they wrote about were self-consciously constructing and maintaining necessary illusions.51 And yet Huizinga allows a hint of tragedy to enter the stage as reality threatens to break through and to destroy the ‘heroic dream’. Most notably, Louis XI of France, the implacable enemy of Burgundy, reappears in his recognizably Romantic costume as a harbinger of modernity and, accordingly, a destroyer of medieval chivalric illusions. This tragic theme of dissolution is neatly encapsulated in the defection of Phillipe de Commines from court of the Duke of Burgundy to Louis. Commines was a knight who later became a ‘realistic’ and anti-chivalric – that is to say proto-modern – historian, thereby forming a contrast with Froissart and Chastellain.52 Remaining within the late-medieval chivalric environment, Huizinga then covers aristocratic attitudes towards love.53 A widened aesthetics is again the theme of his analysis, with a specific and powerful ‘value for life’ being evident in these attitudes: The entire struggle to beautify life is concentrated in the colourful presentation of the forms of love . . . The effort to stylise love was more than a vain game. The power of passion itself required that late medieval society transform the life of love into beautiful play with noble rules. Here above all, if men were not to fall into crude barbarisms, there was a need to frame emotions within fixed forms . . . [B]eautiful illusions [were created] within which people could imagine themselves to live, despite the fact that even among the upper classes life remained extraordinarily crude.54

In this chapter on love Huizinga’s uses the Romance of the Rose to sum up latemedieval culture in general. He argues that in the Romance of the Rose ‘old courtly ideals’ were filled with new ‘spirit’ and ‘content’.55 Similarly, although marking something of a terminus, late-medieval culture was the brilliant and vigorous final flourish of long-standing forms of expression, rather than any sort of decline. Over the next chapters of The Waning of the Middle Ages Huizinga deals

51 Ibid., p. 85. 52 Ibid., pp. 93, 120, 283. 53 Huizinga acknowledges (p. 128) that in the ‘lower’ strata of society love was largely controlled by the church. 54 Ibid., pp. 127f. See also p. 133. 55 Ibid., pp. 127, 133f.

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with other aspects of late-medieval life such as popular culture and religiosity, moving slowly but inexorably towards a series of definitive pronouncements on these matters. In the fifth chapter, which is called ‘The Vision of Death’, he shows that the reality of death and decay was dealt with aesthetically by means of various highly stylized forms of mourning. Huizinga then begins to discuss religion, arguing that going to church duplicated the ‘high artificiality’ of court life.56 The chapters on religion directly prepare for the first of Huizinga’s crescendos, which occurs in the ninth chapter, suggestively entitled ‘The Decline of Symbolism’. The chapter on symbolism aims to grasp the very essence of the medieval worldview – a way of thinking common to all members of society. Huizinga equates medieval symbolism with philosophical realism. He argues that because this doctrine posits the interconnectedness of all things, it not only assigns every particular some importance, but also leads to a coherent, structured view of things in general. Philosophical realism therefore underpinned late-medieval thinking. Henry Adams had already argued that philosophical realism was the essence of the medieval outlook, and that its passing signalled a loss of coherence in both medieval thought and medieval society. This argument would be revived in the third quarter of the twentieth century by David Knowles and Richard Southern. Adams, Knowles and Southern, however, all felt that the apogee of realism had been in the twelfth century and not the fifteenth. Nevertheless Adams, Knowles, Southern, and Huizinga all used the importance of realism as the basis for their respective revisions of dominant ideas about the Italian Renaissance, and for a critique of modernity. Huizinga felt that the symbolism associated with philosophical realism created an image of the world whose high degree of constructedness marks a complete contrast to the approaches of future epochs, especially the ‘causal-progressive’ thinking that characterizes modernity. The ‘value for life’ of a symbolic worldview was, moreover, ‘incalculable’ because through symbolism ‘it became possible both to honour and enjoy the world which, by itself, is damnable, and to ennoble the earthly enterprise, since every profession has its relationship to the highest and holiest’.57 Symbolism thus functioned as the basis of an unmistakably Nietzschean life-affirming myth. As well, Huizinga’s ideas on the importance of symbolism seem to represent a continuation and culmination of the medievalism of Schlegel’s circle. And, mirroring his ideas about philosophical realism, Huizinga sees a decline in symbolism as the precondition for the emergence of the modern ‘causal-genetic’ outlook, which is, unsurprisingly, most clearly evident in mainstream academic historiography.58 Huizinga’s pivotal discussion of symbolism is followed by two chapters that 56 Ibid., p. 184. 57 Ibid., p. 240. 58 Ibid., pp. 247f.

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expand on this subject by describing how various aspects of late medieval life from spirituality to warfare reveal both the workings of this symbolic outlook, and the beginnings of its passing. The climax of The Waning of the Middle Ages is then reached in the twelfth chapter, entitled ‘Art in Life’, in which the fine arts themselves are at last considered. One is perhaps tempted to ask why, given the importance of art in Romantic and cultural-history interpretations of the past, Huizinga left discussion of this subject so late. The answer, which is reaffirmed by the very title of his twelfth chapter, is that art was not covered earlier because the main focus was a widened aesthetics. Huizinga’s discussion of the fine arts follows logically from both his general ‘argument’ concerning the existence of this widened aesthetics, and his thoughts on symbolism. He laments that most of the works that would demonstrate his ‘argument’ best – Van Eyck’s more secular paintings, Claus Sluter’s sculpture, and so on – have been lost, the victims of the narrower, emasculated aesthetics of later ages. Nevertheless by using what has survived, and by augmenting this with literary evidence, he is able to suggest that: Art was still an integral part of life during that age . . . Art had the task of embellishing the forms in which life was lived with beauty . . . It is the destiny of art to vibrate in concert with the high points of life, be it the highest flights of piety or the proudest enjoyment of earthly moments. During the Middle Ages art was not yet perceived as beauty per se. It was for the most part applied art, even in cases where we would consider the works to be their own reason for being. That is to say, for the Middle Ages, the reason for desiring a given work of art rested in its purpose, rested in the fact that artworks are the servants of any one of the forms of life.59

Huizinga’s ‘Nietzschean’ widening of aesthetics went further than the Romantic sense of art as the epicentre of a culture.60 But Huizinga’s cultural history is still an extension of recognizably Romantic concerns. Towards the end of the chapter on medieval art Huizinga takes pains to distinguish between art history and cultural history.61 The latter is historiography constructed with a widened aesthetics in mind; and because of this it is able to capture both the essence and the totality of a culture. Huizinga’s contrast between art history and cultural history sheds light on the question of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. As we saw, his widened aesthetics generally means that the late Middle Ages are seen as both a terminus and a high-water mark of a particular cultural form. At times, 59 Ibid., p. 296. 60 See ibid., p. 282 for an interesting reference to Nietzsche himself. 61 Ibid., p. 319.

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however, the same aesthetics serves to diminish the differences between medieval and Renaissance approaches. Huizinga’s occasional use of terms such as ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’ in connection with medieval thought and culture also seems significant. Nevertheless when the meaning of these terms within ‘nineteenthcentury’ Romantic thinking (from Herder through Romanticism to Nietzsche) is recalled, one realizes that by using them Huizinga probably implies approval. In some essays published after The Waning of the Middle Ages, moreover, Huizinga uses the term ‘gothic’ to describe the Middle ages. His gothic age begins in the thirteenth century and is epitomized by the theology of Thomas Aquinas. One presumes that this gothic age continued until the period discussed in The Waning of the Middle Ages. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Huizinga also reserves high praise for the twelfth century: If one should want to specify in what age Western Christian civilization took on its definitive form, its configuration, one should have to decide on the twelfth century. The twelfth century was a creative and formative age without equal. There was actually much more of an awakening, an unfolding, in the eleven hundreds than in the age to which we are wont to attach the name Renaissance.62

Huizinga’s essays on John of Salisbury, Abelard and Alan of Lille, the leading intellectual figures of the ‘extraordinarily creative twelfth century’, lead him to characterize these figures as ‘pre-gothic’.63 And so, in complete contrast to Haskins, the twelfth century is different from both the ‘gothic’ high Middle Ages, and the Renaissance itself. The key to understanding Huizinga’s idea of the relationship between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance lies in appreciating the extent of his radicalism. This includes an awareness of the constructed and contingent nature of concepts such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.64 As with Foucault, questions about the nature of Huizinga’s epochs and their relationships with each other therefore seem to depend on how they are approached. Both this idea of the constructedness of cultural epochs, and Huizinga’s sense of cultural history (as opposed to art history), inform his analysis of Van Eyck’s paintings: In the art of the Van Eycks the representation of sacred objects in painting had reached a degree of detail that, taken strictly in an art-historical sense, could perhaps be called a beginning, but that, in terms of cultural history, represents a conclusion . . . [T]he

62 Huizinga, Men and Ideas, p. 179. 63 See esp. Huizinga, ‘John of Salisbury: A Pre-Gothic Mind’, ibid., pp. 159–77. 64 See Huizinga, ‘The Problem of the Renaissance’, Men and Ideas, pp.  243–87 for a sophisticated historiographical survey of understandings of the Italian Renaissance.

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naturalism of the Van Eycks, which is usually regarded in art history as an element announcing the arrival of the Renaissance, should rather be regarded as the complete unfolding of the medieval spirit . . . The art of Van Eyck is, in content, still entirely medieval.65

As well as epitomizing the medieval symbolic worldview, Van Eyck’s works show us that art-history and cultural-history approaches will lead to different perceptions of the Middle Ages and of the transition from those times to the Renaissance. The Waning of the Middle Ages thus suggests that cultural history involves its own particular understandings of the place of the medieval world in the overall scheme of things. In Homo Ludens (1938) Huizinga takes this approach even further and advances an alternative, cultural-history interpretation of Western history in general. Homo Ludens is not as well known as The Waning of the Middle Ages. Moreover, those who do know it tend to dismiss it as being a slight and idiosyncratic effort, especially when compared with the earlier work.66 It is, however, difficult not to see it as both an extension of The Waning of the Middle Ages, and a work of breathtaking vision in its own right. In Homo Ludens Huizinga’s premise that ‘civilization arises and unfolds in and as play’, and his bravura attempt to ‘integrate the concept of play into that of culture’, amount to an argument that encompasses the whole of Western culture.67 His notion of play can be equated with the widened aesthetics that he dealt with in The Waning of the Middle Ages. Far from being merely fun, play not only includes a desire to ‘live life as a game of artistic perfection’, but also at times seems to encompass all artifice including systems of thought.68 Play is therefore everything apart from brutal reality. Seeing Homo Ludens in this way as an elaboration of a widened ‘Nietzschean’ aesthetics naturally affirms its connections with Huizinga’s other works. Huizinga himself says that ‘traces’ of Homo Ludens existed in his thinking as early as 1903.69 Moreover, he specifically links this work with The Waning of the Middle Ages; he says that it was when he was attempting to come to grips with the purpose of late-medieval chivalric life that ‘the intimate connection between culture and play first dawned’ on him.70 In Homo Ludens the insights of The Waning of the Middle Ages are used as a 65 Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, p. 319. 66 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture, intro. George Steiner, London, 1970. See esp. pp. 13f., where Steiner refers to the work as an ‘arresting little book’ before advancing various criticisms. 67 Ibid., pp. 17f. 68 Ibid., p. 206. 69 Ibid., p. 17. 70 Ibid., p. 126.

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means of interpreting all epochs. Homo Ludens is in this respect a further widening of an already widened aesthetics. This radical and extremely broad-brush approach, moreover, casts the question of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance into an even higher relief. In some ways Huizinga’s approach militates against notions such as progress and decline being attributed to the past at all. Again like Foucault’s epistêmês, in Homo Ludens cultural epochs seem to follow one another like different coloured building blocks placed in a row. Using Huizinga’s just mentioned essays on twelfth-century intellectual life to compliment Homo Ludens, it is possible to say that by the 1930s he had come to think of the historical process as having included a pre-gothic stage lasting until around 1200, a medieval period per se that persisted into the fifteenth century and which he had described in The Waning of the Middle Ages, a sixteenthcentury ‘Renaissance’ era, a period of Baroque culture, and finally, it would seem, modernity. The ahistorical and the historical elements within this view of the past are reconciled because Huizinga’s various cultural epochs consist of quite different and seemingly unrelated manifestations of a deep transhistorical aesthetics, which is in fact the ludic impulse. Although there remains a feeling that the Middle Ages were marked by a particularly dynamic and interesting aesthetics, all periods are therefore on a fundamental level more or less equal. Except the present. The last sections of Homo Ludens contain vehement denunciations of modernity. Huizinga believes that in the nineteenth century, when ‘all Europe donned the boiler-suit’, the play impulse was lost, crushed by industrialization, and channelled, in a desiccated form, into mere games and sports.71 Modernity thus represents a decline from the whole of the (civilized) past. While both The Waning of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens are historiographical examples of a widened, ‘Nietzschean’ aesthetics, The Waning of the Middle Ages is more clearly a culmination of a specifically Romantic trajectory insofar as it features a stronger sense of a decline from the Middle Ages themselves, that is to say a loss of a unique and indeed admirable medieval cultural achievement. The Waning of the Middle Ages is therefore particularly significant for us because, as an example of Romantic medievalism, it at the same time seems so (post-) modern.

71 Ibid., p. 21.

7

From Process to Structure: The Annales School and Twentieth-Century Academic Medieval History As in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century academic medievalism consisted largely of progressive thinking. And as in the nineteenth century, this progressive thinking was made up of Idealist metaphysics and Hegelian visions on the one hand, and Ranke-inspired particularism on the other. There was, however, a shift in the balance of twentieth-century historiography, with particularism becoming more prominent. Overt historical optimism ceased to be fashionable in European intellectual circles after the First World War.1 At that time cutting-edge academic historiography began to move away from the idea of history as a process, and to concentrate on the study of historical structures. This change involved an increasing antipathy among academics to narrative history. Surely, many felt, the historian should analyse rather than tell stories. This interest in structure and analysis represented a neo-Rankean concern with particulars, and an extension of the impulse towards specialization that had increasingly characterized professional historiography since Ranke’s day. Yet interest in structure and analysis was also accompanied by particularly strident forms of epistemological optimism. In other words, the assumptions of Idealist metaphysics, though perhaps no longer quite so apparent, still lay within academic historiography. Historical optimism had waned, but historiographical optimism filled the gap. While it was no longer so easy to believe that these were the best of times in general terms, virtually all academic historians felt – and continue to feel – that the historiography of the day is better than that of the past. The influential Annales school of historians is the epitome of these developments. Throughout its existence the Annales historians defined themselves in terms of the claimed novelty of their approaches. These claims in turn informed analysis of the movement itself and of its significance. An impression of the Annales historians as being radically different from other academic historians therefore formed. Although the arguments of this chapter will lead to a rather different impression, the intention is not to diminish the importance of the Annales movement. For if the chapter achieves its aim of showing that the Annales historians were in fact at the very centre of the modern academic and 1 The attention generated by Oswald Spengler’s suggestively titled The Decline of the West (1922) is a case in point.

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institutional mainstream, this will, if anything, increase the significance of the Annales school. The chapter will feature discussions of the works of prominent Annales medievalists Marc Bloch and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. These discussions are intended to shed light on the nature of Annales historiography, and its influence on current historiography. The Annales school began in 1929 with the publication of the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale.2 In the period until the Second World War the journal was largely the work of Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), an historian of Early Modern Europe, and the medievalist Marc Bloch (1886–1944). When Annales was first published, Bloch and Febvre held appointments at Strasbourg University. Both were veterans of the Great War, and Strasbourg was in territory reclaimed from Germany after the war. Because it was in some ways a new French university, Strasbourg presented opportunities for up-and-coming academics with what appeared to be fresh approaches. Bloch and Febvre wanted Annales to show how studying history should change. Their main way of achieving this aim was to advocate interdisciplinary approaches. They drew particular inspiration from sociology, which, although vigorously taught at Strasbourg, had only quite recently become an accepted academic subject under the guidance of its founding father Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). This early sociology was concerned with studying so-called ‘social facts’, and with discerning underlying patterns of thinking and behaviour in various cultures. Bloch and Febvre also felt that economics and geography should become part of academic history. Bloch wanted to go even further and explore the connections between history and the natural sciences, especially physics.3 The original eight-man editorial committee of Annales included Albert Demangeon, who was the Professor of Economic History at the Sorbonne and the editor of Annales de Géographie, Henri Pirenne, the pioneer Belgian economic historian and Maurice Halbwachs, another economic historian. In addition, Paul Leuilliot, the first secretary of Annales, taught geography at Strasbourg. As well, Febvre himself had included social, geographical and economic considerations in his 1911 doctoral thesis, a study of the Franche-Comté region during the sixteenth century. Articles on economic history were the mainstay of Annales in the first decade of its existence. But the contributors’ attitudes were just as significant as their choice of subject matter. At that stage the journal not only reflected Bloch’s and Febvre’s overall vision, but also enabled them to express their own aims and opinions directly. The editorial of the first issue of Annales announces that while the new journal has drawn inspiration from past journals, it ‘brings to life a spirit 2 After the Second World War the Journal was renamed Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. It is still being published. 3 See Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam, New York, 1953, pp. 14–17.

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which is its very own’.4 The new journal will not, moreover, use or advocate ‘old, well-tried methods to document the past’. Interdisciplinary cooperation will, moreover, avoid ‘fragmentations’ among historians. The fragmentation in question seems to be period specialization. Accordingly, Bloch and Febvre rejected breaking up the past into distinct and accepted historical periods. The emphasis on economics and geography in Annales meant that historical studies often covered longer periods of time than had been usual. Bloch and Febvre were also convinced of the interdependence of the present and the past. This belief in the relevance of the past to current issues and concerns heightened their missionary zeal. Their sense of purpose was clearly revealed in the journal’s Enquêtes section, where they granted their imprimatur to projects and areas of research that they thought of as worthy. Overt proselytizing also took place in the journal’s reviews, which generally possessed a polemical thrust, and which were sometimes so aggressive that they caused controversy, as in the case of the ‘Jassemin affair’.5 Henri Jassemin, a graduate from the Ecole des Chartres who worked at the National Archives, received a doctorat d’état from the Sorbonne in 1933 for a thesis on the Paris Treasury Office in the late-medieval period. When published, Jassemin’s thesis was praised by local and international scholars. Febvre, however, savagely attacked it in an editorial of Annales. Beneath its well-presented surface it was, he opined, ‘useless’. Although Jassemin answered the attack stylishly, it was widely felt that Febvre had unfairly picked on him as part of a sustained assault on traditional scholarship in general, and on the conservative Ecole des Chartres in particular. Meanwhile Bloch conducted what virtually amounted to a vendetta against the historian Lefebvre des No’ttes, who had suggested that the advent of the harness had brought about the end of slavery in the Middle Ages. Bloch was, if anything, less restrained in his choice of targets than Febvre. For instance, he was highly critical of Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936) by Friedrich Meinecke, the former editor of the Historische Zeitschrift, and he accused the eminent medievalist Louis Halpen of merely presenting chronicles of political events.6 French historians at the time were not, however, strangers to vigorous debate, most of which took place within academic journals. But although Bloch and Febvre presented themselves almost as revolutionaries, Annales itself was positioned firmly within a journal tradition. Since the establishment of Historische Zeitschrift in 1859, historical journals had continued to express the Rankean 4 ‘A nos lecteurs’, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 1, January 1929, pp. 3–10, trans. Monica Juneja. 5 Later commentators are often surprised by the ‘extraordinary combativeness’ of these reviews. For example, Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: a Life in History, Cambridge, 1981, p. 158. 6 See Annales, 5, 1933, pp. 67–71; Annales, 6, 1934, pp. 48–53; and Annales, 7, 1935, pp. 634–43. There is a good short description of these and other similar controversies in Fink, op. cit., pp. 158ff.

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vision of rigorous research-based scholarship, while also being the accepted forum for the dissemination of new ideas and methods. A notable proliferation of these journals in France before the First World War was the result of increasing specialization among professional historians, and the influence of the social sciences. These tendencies caused some concern: it was feared that specialization was leading to compartmentalisation, and that historians were therefore becoming mere antiquarians; and there was antipathy among historians to the social sciences. But the very existence of the new social sciences provided an immediate solution to the problem of compartmentalisation: interdisciplinary cooperation would be the way forward. The journal Revue de Synthése Historique was founded in 1900 by the philosopher and historian Henri Berr (1863–1954) in order to promote interdisciplinary cooperation. From 1905 Lucien Febvre was responsible for a sub-section of Revue de Synthése Historique called ‘Les regions de la France’, and Marc Bloch’s first significant publication, a monograph on the Ile-de-France, was published as part of this project.7 Berr wanted this regions project to convey a sense of the ‘psychology of historical groups’. He believed that certain historical mentalities pertained to particular geographical regions. And by showing that each of the main regions of France (had) possessed its own outlook, Berr sought to oppose the unified and rather nationalistic sense of Volk advocated by some German historians. Nationalism had played a part in the heated debates about history that occurred in France before the Great War, and which paralleled the better-known and more cerebral Crisis of Historicism debates in Germany. The memory of France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) meant that the reception of German ideas was potentially more problematical in France than elsewhere. Nevertheless, in late-nineteenth-century France, as in Britain and America, the process of increasing professionalization among historians was virtually defined by the adoption of German methods and ideas. An important figure in these developments in France was Gabriel Monod (1844–1912). Although, as we saw, French historians of the previous generation such as Michelet were also influenced by German ideas, they still thought of themselves as national historians. Monod was a student of Michelet. After attending Humboldt University in Berlin and the famous seminar of the Rankean medievalist Georg Waitz at Göttingen in the 1860s, he became an open, unashamed advocate of the latest German ideas and techniques. The emergence of a French school of ‘historical positivism’ in the late nineteenth century was the direct result of this importation of Rankean thinking. The French positivists sought ‘knowledge pure and simple’ in the analysis of documents. Accordingly, they denied the importance

7 For Bloch, Febvre, and the Revue de Synthése Historique, see Fink, pp. 34, 45f.

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of literature and rhetoric, and they opposed overt philosophical speculation.8 The flagship works of French historical positivism were Introduction aux études historiques (1898) by Charles V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, and Méthode historique apliquée aux sciences sociales (1901) by Seignobos. Yet by the time these works were published, there was a growing hostility among French historians to ‘German fact-grubbing’. Swirling currents of nationalism and parochialism, criticism of aspects of the Rankean paradigm, and some consequences of the emergence of new disciplines in the social sciences, can all be seen in the ‘Schreuer debate’ that took place in France before the First World War. In 1911, the Bonn historian Hans Schreuer published Die rechtlichen Grundgedanken der französichen Königskrönung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die deutchen Verhältnisse, a study of French and German coronation rituals from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Schreuer’s work was thrown into sharp relief by a series of extravagant royal ceremonies held in Britain and Germany in the early years of the twentieth century that took place amid a background of growing rivalry between the European powers. Although favourably received in Germany, Die rechtlichen Grundgedanken polarized French academics. Perhaps surprisingly, it was mainly criticized by more traditional Rankean scholars, not least because it was perceived – and was intended – as an advance on the ideas of the highly regarded French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) as elaborated in works such as Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France (from 1874) and La Monarchie franque (1888). French Rankeans railed against Schreuer’s inadequate research and his apparently slapdash use of documentary evidence. Die rechtlichen Grundgedanken nevertheless found favour among more avant-garde French historians, who praised Schreuer’s use of sociological insights and comparative approaches. Marc Bloch followed the Schreuer debate closely. He was teaching at Montpellier at the time, and he checked Schreuer’s sources in the university library, making copious notes. This research formed the basis of Bloch’s first book, Les rois thaumaturges: Etude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (1924). In Les rois thaumaturges Bloch examined the history of the belief that medieval kings were miraculously able to cure the disease of scrofula by touching those afflicted. It is possible to see the influence of both Henri Berr’s anthropologyderived notion of the ‘psychology of historical groups’, and Durkheim’s idea of a ‘collective consciousness’ in Les rois thaumaturges. This important early work

8 For the French positivist historians and some interesting remarks on aspects of continuity between them and the Annales school see Elizabeth A Clark, History, Theory, Text: the Linguistic Turn, Harvard, 2004, pp. 64f.

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by Bloch also anticipates the concern with historical mentalities typical of later Annales historians such as the medievalist Jacques Le Goff.9 The study of the Middle Ages has always been at the centre of Annales history. The Annales school has had six acknowledged leaders: Febvre, Bloch, Braudel, Le Goff, Le Roy Ladurie and Duby. Of these, only Febvre and Braudel were not medievalists; Bloch, Le Goff and Duby all specialized in the Middle Ages, while Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: village occitan (1975) is probably the best-known book ever written about medieval life. Marc Bloch’s La société féodale (1939, 1940) nevertheless remains the most important and most highly regarded Annales work on the Middle Ages. Editions of La société féodale have been published in a dozen countries.10 It first appeared in English in 1961 as Feudal Society, and it has been reprinted many times, including in a two-volume paperback edition that has remained a standard university text book.11 La société féodale was a long time coming. In 1931, after many years thinking and planning, Bloch produced an outline for a work that would cover all aspects of feudalism. But during the 1930s, as well as lecturing, Bloch was working constantly on the Annales journal and was therefore unable to finish La société féodale until the end of the decade. This long period of gestation probably added to the scope and status of the completed work. A reader might expect Feudal Society to begin in the accustomed Annales manner with geography or economics. Instead, Bloch opens on a subtle note with a discussion of the term ‘feudalism’. Bloch states that the word had no real currency in the Middle Ages; the term ‘feudalism’ as used in the modern sense is, he suggests, found no further back than the Enlightenment period. Since then, moreover, it has had a variety of meanings. An obvious conclusion is that feudalism is a relatively recent construct. Bloch, however, does not adopt this position. He argues that although ‘feudalism’ has meant different things to different historians, it has always been used in ways that attempt to define the period in question. The word ‘feudalism’ therefore presents a problem or, for Bloch at least, a challenge: it invites the historian ‘to analyse and explain a social structure and its unifying principles’. In other words, the title Feudal Society asks what we mean by the word ‘feudal’. And the answer to this question lies in determining the nature of ‘feudal’ society itself. In order to get to grips with ‘feudal’ society, Bloch divided his work into two parts or books. The first part is called ‘the Environment’ and the second is entitled 9 For the Schreuer debate in France and the origins of Les rois thaumaturges see Fink pp. 47 ff. Les rois thaumaturges was translated into English as The Royal Touch: sacred monarchy and scrofula in England and France (1973) and became one of Bloch’s best-known works. 10 Fink, p. 196. 11 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. LA Manyon, Chicago, 1961.

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‘Social Classes and Political Organisation’. The apparent priority assigned to the environment brings Braudel’s later works to mind. But while Braudel would take Annales logic to an extreme and make geography the principal subject matter of La Méditerranée (1949), Bloch explains that the physical, social and mental environment that he is examining was determined by ‘geographical limits’. Yet this simply means that Feudal Society is about western and central Europe between the years 850 and 1250, an environment that was ‘hemmed in’ not only by mountains, seas and rivers, but also by the Muslims, Slavs and Byzantines. Bloch’s ‘Romano-Germanic World’ is a closed system that is as much the result of history, as it is the product of geography. There is also perhaps a hint of half-heartedness in Bloch’s discussion of ‘geographical limits’. Although this discussion allows him to unfurl the Annales banner, it is rather cursory. And it quickly becomes clear that the most important aspect of ‘the environment’ is the ‘mental environment’. Bloch suggests that analysing an economy or a mental climate can serve as a ‘starting point . . . for the historian of social structure.’12 He appears to be in no doubt that there are discernible connections between economics, social structures and mental environments. He suggests that the ‘very widespread’ changes that began in the mid-eleventh century serve to divide the overall period under consideration into two shorter ‘Feudal Ages’. Bloch’s Second Feudal Age is characterized by an ‘economic revolution’ that featured an increase in population, a growth in trade, greater use of currency and the emergence of a middle class, all of which entailed a ‘revision of social values’.13 Bloch’s sense of a medieval ‘economic revolution’ that featured – or was driven by – an emerging bourgeoisie seems indebted to the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935). Bloch, Febvre and Annales were strongly supported by Pirenne, who was a member of the Annales editorial committee when he was in his last years. Pirenne’s support was important because at the time the journal was new, but Pirenne himself was a well-established historian with considerable international standing.14 Pirenne’s main claim to fame is the controversial Pirenne Thesis, which is really two related arguments. First, Pirenne thought that the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Dark Ages occurred not in the fifth century in association with the barbarian invasions, but from the seventh century as a result of the Arab conquests, which closed Mediterranean trade routes, forcing Western European economies to become primitive and largely

12 Ibid., p. 59. 13 Ibid., pp. 69–71. 14 Pirenne’s support for Annales should be seen in part as a result of his long-standing desire for a cutting-edge historical journal with potential internationalist leanings. In the 1920s he made several attempts to set up such a journal. One of these attempts even involved the League of Nations.

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agrarian. Pirenne’s second argument is that from the late tenth century in Western Europe suburbs began forming around the strongholds of Dark Ages potentates, and that these suburbs were the origins of both modern cities, and a new class of merchants and artisans – a middle class. Pirenne also felt that an increasing level of economic sophistication associated with these developments was related to a re-opening of the Mediterranean.15 Pirenne exerted considerable influence on Annales historiography. His overriding interest in economic history, his use of the ‘quantitative method’ of analysis, his problem- and questioncentred approach to history and the Pirenne Thesis’ undermining of traditional periodization, all became central elements of Annales doctrine. As well as being an acknowledged master of economic history, Pirenne had also written a ‘total’ history. Anticipating Braudel, Pirenne wrote much of his History of Europe from the end of the Roman World in the West to the beginnings of the Western States during the First World War, while he was a prisoner of the Germans. This ambitious work, which unfortunately remained unpublished until after his death in 1935, attempted to combine economics with social and even political history. Although he at times discussed the Carolingian renaissance and the ‘intellectual civilization’ of the Dark Ages, Pirenne never considered historical mentalities as such.16 It is therefore possible to see Bloch’s treatment of this subject in Feudal Society as filling in a gap left by Pirenne. In fact, there is surprisingly little ‘hard’ economic history in Feudal Society, so the work as a whole could even be seen as complementing Pirenne’s oeuvre. Although Bloch’s analysis of the medieval mentality reads very well, much of it consists of borrowings from other historians. The introductory section called ‘Modes of Feelings and Thought’ is, for example, largely a restatement of the chapter entitled ‘the Violent Tenor of Life’ in Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages.17 Similarly, Bloch’s discussion of a twelfth-century growth of 15 Henri Pirenne, ‘L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen Age’, Revue Historique, 1895; ‘Mahomet et Charlemagne’, Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 1922; Medieval Cities: their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D Halsey, Princeton, 1969; Mahomet et Charlemagne, Paris, 1937; Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. F Vercauteren, New York, 2001. Pirenne was friend and follower of Karl Lamprecht (1865–1915), who was at the centre of the Crisis of Historicism debates in Germany. Lamprecht expressed his ideas in his multi-volume History of Germany (1891–1909), which was ridiculed by Rankean historians, resulting in the ‘Lamprecht controversy’. Meanwhile in France, Pirenne and others including François Victor Alphonse Aulard (1849–1928), an historian of the French Revolution and the First Empire, the medievalist Ferdinand Lot (1866–1952) and the geographer and economic historian Henri Hauser (1866–1946) debated the nature of history and the status of historiography, and questioned Rankean orthodoxy. 16 See Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, pp. 274–85. 17 Bloch, Feudal Society, pp. 72–87.

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self-consciousness, a process in which ‘human affairs were newly emerging as subjects for reflection’, not only follows Burckhardt closely, but also back-dates ‘renaissance’ qualities from the fifteenth century to the twelfth century in the manner of Haskins’ The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927). Agreeing with Haskins as well as echoing Pirenne’s thoughts on the Carolingian renaissance, Bloch argues that it is legitimate to use the term ‘renaissance’ because the phenomenon in question was in essence a revival and imitation of classical forms caused by new translations of Greek and Arabic works. And like Haskins, Bloch goes on to highlight the importance of the late eleventh-century period as the real beginning of the ‘twelfth-century’ renaissance.18 Bloch’s discussion of mentality does, however, go further than Haskins by assigning a central place to medieval vernacular literature. Bloch devotes considerable space to medieval epics. His premise is that the vernacular epics are a better reflection of the (early) medieval mentality than Latin literature. He then says that the epic poetry of the early Middle Ages ‘heralded the immense cultural development of the succeeding age’. Bloch’s treatment of this Second Feudal Age revolves around the vernacular chivalric romances. In other words, Bloch is suggesting that an important aspect of the twelfth-century renaissance was the popularity of the chivalric romance, a new genre that effectively replaced the epic. Although this is an interesting idea in itself, Bloch develops it by placing the emergence of the romance within a deterministic and recognizably Annales framework: he argues that the twelfth-century liking for Arthurian romances was the result of an opening-up of communications, which meant that old Celtic legends were ‘borne eastward from their original homes’ and spread throughout Western Europe.19 Bloch also surpasses Haskins when discussing the relationship between mentalities and the law. His description of a process in which custom and oral traditions were replaced by legislation does, to be sure, read like a more thoughtful version of Haskins.20 But Bloch’s main point is that the ‘transformation of legal thought’ that occurred in the twelfth century led to clearer divisions between the social classes. As Feudal Society begins to deal with classes and social relationships, the reader begins to sense that Bloch is at last entirely comfortable with his subject matter. Having discussed mentalities, Bloch moves to the question of vassal homage.21 This is the very heart of Feudal Society because Bloch argues that to have been the ‘man of another man’ defined the whole era, not least because it was a relationship that occurred in all levels of medieval society. Bloch describes 18 19 20 21

Ibid., pp. 103–8. Ibid., pp. 88–102. Ibid., pp. 109–20. Ibid., pp. 145–62.

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the Germanic origins of the ceremony of vassal homage and how this ceremony was gradually overlayed with Christianity, culminating in the oath of fealty. While the basic elements were in place by the Carolingian era, vassalage took ‘definite shape’ in the period of uncertainty after the Carolingian collapse. But only at that stage, when inheritance procedures had changed, did the fief become the raison d’être of vassal homage.22 Bloch then considers the running of the fief itself in the form of the manorial system.23 He is at pains to point out that, notwithstanding its place in feudal society, the manorial system was not the same thing as the feudal system.24 Rather, feudalism found its ‘natural setting’ in the manorial system, which was in fact older than feudalism and lasted longer than it. For Bloch argues that from the twelfth century the manor emerged from feudalism when both the fief and the peasant holding underwent a ‘transition from a social structure founded on service, to a system of land rent’.25 After feudalism the manorial system therefore became more of a purely economic phenomenon. Bloch’s treatment of vassalage anticipates much of book two of Feudal Society, which begins by reiterating that networks of ties of dependence were the defining feature of the age, and that this system included all of society ‘from the top to the bottom of the social scale’.26 Bloch tells the reader that while the first book described how this system arose and developed, the second book will show that in the Second Feudal Age the orders of society were more strictly differentiated while, at the same time, there was a greater concentration of political authority. The two books of Feudal Society therefore correspond to the two feudal ages. At the start of the second book Bloch resumes his quest to analyse the fundamental characteristics of the period. This time he concentrates on chivalry, suggesting that ‘the main characteristic of feudal society was the formation of a group of professional fighting men consisting primarily of vassals and their chiefs’.27 These fighters were distinguished by vassal homage and the dubbing ceremony. The origins of the dubbing ceremony can be traced back to the Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire. But Bloch argues that in the feudal ages the dubbing ceremony was more restricted than it had been among the Germanic tribes; it was now confined to one class of men. As with vassal homage, Christianity also played an increasingly important role in the dubbing ceremony, so that by the twelfth century individual consecration and the vigil were standard practice. Yet although Bloch is keen to explore the relationship between medieval religion

22 23 24 25 26 27

Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., pp. 241–54. Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., p. 313.

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and the ceremonies of the knightly class, it comes as a surprise to discover that the sections of Feudal Society dealing with – and attempting to define – society as a whole contain virtually no discussion of the clergy or, for that matter, the peasantry. Bloch gives two reasons for not covering the clergy in detail: he argues that the clergy were a legal class, not a social class; and he maintains that the church reform movements did not overturn the practice of lords controlling nominations for clerical positions, so that the clergy were really an extension of the knightly class.28 While both arguments are interesting, neither convinces, of course. And one is left wondering whether Bloch’s virtual conflation of feudal society and the knightly class owes something to traditional scholarly perceptions and conventions, or even to residual Romanticism. Traditional academic expectations and ‘nineteenth-century’ thinking infuse the second part of book two of Feudal Society, in which Bloch moves from the fundamental characteristics of the age to the issue of the relationship between the Middle Ages and later times. Rather ironically, it is the ‘new’ Annales doctrine of the relevance of the past to the present that has compelled Bloch to deal with this traditional issue. Bloch argues that his Second Feudal Age bequeathed to posterity a centralized authority, a secular bureaucracy, and the modern nation-state. This view of the Middle Ages as the origins of modernity – in these areas, at least – resembles the liberal-Hegelian medievalism of Haskins and Strayer. But it is clothed in the Annales fashion: ‘the age whose deeper history we are endeavouring to trace . . . witnessed the formation of states.’29 Some Pirenne-inspired Annales ‘depth’ is evident in Bloch’s view that the lasting characteristics of the Second Feudal Age emerged in the first place because of an increased density of population and a revival of towns, both of which afforded feudal lords greater opportunities for taxation via new, secular bureaucracies.30 Unexpectedly, however, much of Bloch’s discussion of the medieval origins of ‘national developments’ is devoted not to economics, nor even to politics, but to a return to the issue of mentalities. Bloch’s starting point is again the ‘cultural renaissance’ that began in the late eleventh century. He argues that national sentiment can be discerned in medieval literature from after the year 1100. But what was the connection between this incipient nationalism and the cultural renaissance itself? Bloch suggests that the change in mentality associated with the twelfth-century renaissance made it easier for people to understand their place in society, and so led to the subordination of the individual to medieval governments.31 We saw that Burckhardt attributed the emergence of individual28 29 30 31

Ibid., pp. 345–50. Ibid., p. 437. Emphasis added. Ibid., p. 421. Ibid., p. 422.

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ism to the Italian Renaissance period, and that Haskins back-dated ‘renaissance’ characteristics to the twelfth century. Bloch’s twelfth-century renaissance is quite like that of Haskins. But Bloch goes further and has the beginnings of modernity involve a loss of individualism. Perhaps Bloch’s proto-structuralism was always going to militate against assigning any real significance to the individual. But it is interesting that Bloch ends up with an Idealist and almost Hegelian view of the origins of the nation-state. Bloch’s discussion of the legacy of the Feudal Ages lays bare the main flaw of Feudal Society: an inability to deal convincingly with the question of historical change. In Feudal Society Bloch is usually dealing with structures; but from time to time he introduces the idea of process, leaving the reader to wonder about the relationship between the two. The reader is also left with uncertainties about the historical periods in question. Bloch’s Second Feudal Age, notably, begins abruptly like the first one, but has an indeterminate and rather problematical ending in which important features of the Middle Ages such as vassalage and chivalry do not live on, while certain consequences of the twelfth-century renaissance do. This is not an unreasonable position in itself, of course; as we shall see in the next chapter, some important late-twentieth-century Anglophone medievalists would say much the same thing. But the problem for Bloch is that, according to his own arguments, the very things he is most interested in left no impression on subsequent ages. It is therefore possible that notwithstanding the Annales doctrine of the relevance of the past to the present, Feudal Society might be little more than an elevated form of antiquarianism. Perhaps all forms of structuralist history run the same risk. The only way to avoid this risk definitively is to abandon both the Idealist idea of an objective or transcendental perspective on the part of the historian, and its corollary of objective historiography. The Annales goal of making the past relevant to the present would then be tenable because the historian would always be talking about the present in some sense or other. Naturally it is unfair to expect Bloch to have been a post-modernist before his time (though other historians including Huizinga, Burckhardt and Gibbon were well aware of the constructedness of historiography, and might therefore be described in this way). There is nevertheless a significant lack of historiographical self-consciousness in Feudal Society. As we saw, despite acknowledging changes in what the word ‘feudalism’ has meant, Bloch refused to see feudalism as a construct. Instead, he gave to the world a lengthy account of feudalism as it really was. In the decades after the Second World War Annales historiography came to be even more obviously aligned with structuralist approaches. But this is not to minimize the existence of both strong continuities in Annales history itself, and a long-term relationship between the Annales movement and Rankean orthodoxy. We have already seen that there was significant continuity between the academic environment in France before the First World War and after it. Both the pre- and

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the post-war contexts featured intense debate about the nature and direction of historical studies, with the basic issue at stake being the relationship between Rankean methods and newer interdisciplinary approaches. As a continuation – perhaps a culmination – of these pre-war dynamics, Annales was a successful balance between radicalism and tradition: it served as an advocate of new approaches without going so far as to be a critique of the aims or the fundamental beliefs of professional historians. In fact, it quickly became clear that being an Annales historian was good for one’s career. And Bloch’s and Febvre’s cocktail was so appealing that after the Second World War it was in any case virtually impossible not to be an Annales historian in France and, increasingly, elsewhere. The story of Annales historiography from the Second World War to the present is generally divided into two periods. There are therefore three Annales ‘generations’ in all, with the first generation lasting from the foundation of the journal to the Second World War. The year 1970 serves as an approximate dividing line between the second and third generations. During its second generation the Annales movement consolidated itself institutionally in France, and began to exert international influence.32 It is possible that Marc Bloch’s tragic death at the hands of a German firing squad in 1944 provided the movement with a highprofile martyr, and so helped it gain acceptance outside France. It is also possible that the odium in which all things German were held after the war heightened the appeal of a movement that was overtly French yet still internationalist in outlook, and that ostentatiously eschewed Ranke-style political histories. Moreover, Annales became a ‘school’ in the full sense during this period. It is likely that being thought of as a school also played a role in its further dissemination. As a school, Annales had clear, though largely unstated, structures of authority and mechanisms of succession. And as a school, Annales possessed a recognizable set of beliefs and methods that were encapsulated in its own trade-mark concepts. The most enduring of these is Braudel’s idea of the historical longue durée. Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) was Febvre’s student and protégé. In 1947, Febvre and Braudel founded the Sixième Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.33 The section, which ostensibly dealt with the ‘economic and social sciences’, became the capital and citadel of the Annales school. And when Febvre died in 1956, Braudel took over, becoming the de facto ruler of Annales. In 1962 Braudel also joined forces with Gaston Berger, a former leading light in

32 Fink (p. 337) sees the foundation of historical journals such as Past and Present (1952) in Britain and the Journal of Social History (1967) in America as evidence of the growing overseas influence of Annales. 33 When Febvre retired from the Collège de France in 1949, Braudel was elected as his replacement. A third founding member of the section was the social historian and politician Charles Morazé (1913–2003).

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the Ministry of National Education, to set up the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH). The FMSH and the Sixième Section both benefited from huge donations by American philanthropists, and Braudel was able to use these international connections to spread the Annales message. As a leader, Braudel managed to remain faithful to Bloch’s and Febvre’s vision, while steering Annales towards ‘global’ or ‘total’ history. The embodiment of this new direction was Braudel’s own La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II. After preliminary explorations in the 1920s, Braudel began this massive work in earnest in the late 1930s. He always regarded it as a ‘direct result’ of the ‘dazzling early period of the Annales of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’.34 Amazingly, Braudel largely completed it during the Second World War while he was a captive of the Germans. La Méditerranée was presented as his doctorate after the war and was published in 1949.35 Braudel divided the work into three sections.36 The first section deals with the physical environment, beginning with geography and moving through climate, weather, sea currents and so on. The second section deals with economics and societies. It is not until the third section that the reader encounters events, diplomacy and, finally, individuals. Although Braudel’s cursory treatment of individuals in La Méditerranée provoked disappointment and criticism, it was a deliberate move. For the main character in the work is, as Febvre himself sometimes pointed out, the Mediterranean Sea. And downplaying the role of individuals and the importance of historical events in order to concentrate on ‘deeper’ patterns and structures was already the definitive Annales gesture. Braudel certainly expressed this Annales orthodoxy with brio: events, he maintained, are merely ‘surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs’. But as well as being a sign of Annales orthodoxy, it is difficult not to see Braudel’s tripartite division of La Méditerranée – and the model of the historical process that this division suggests – as either a precursor to the idea of the longue durée, or even, perhaps, as the ultimate statement of that idea. Braudel developed the idea of the longue durée in a 1958 article in Annales.37 In this seminal article Braudel heaps praise on the approach of the French structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (born 1908), and rants against narrative, event-based histories.38 Braudel suggests that there are two possible 34 Preface to the second edition of La Méditerranée (folio p. xxvii). 35 In 1972–1973 La Méditerranée was published in English in two volumes as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in both Britain and America. 36 This tripartite division is reflected in the Folio Society’s three-volume edition of The Mediterranean, published in 2000 and based on the 1972–1973 English translation. 37 Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: lalongue durée’, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews, London, 1980, pp. 225–54. 38 Ibid., passim and especially p. 27.

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‘poles’ for an historian: ‘the instant and the longue durée.’ According to Braudel, the longue durée is therefore the antithesis of traditional narrative history. When describing what the longue durée actually is, Braudel uses metaphors of structure, depth, slow or minimal movement, and even permanence. Yet at times Braudel seems to be describing different sorts of longue durée. The reader is therefore left wondering whether various forms of longue durée might co-exist or overlap, and whether the longue durée might be an interpretative device as well as an historical phenomenon. The only example of a longue durée from history that Braudel provides – ‘the four or five centuries up to the upheavals of the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution’ – does not really clarify matters.39 Nevertheless Braudel’s basic arguments seem to be that the longue durée is related to ‘geographical constraints’, and that there is a particular association between the longue durée and long-term economic history.40 Braudel’s approach is clearly a form of Structuralism. In the 1960s, when the idea of the longue durée and Annales catchcries such as ‘history from below’ were becoming familiar, French Structuralism had already influenced a number of disciplines. During this period French thought in general, having broken free of Existentialism, achieved a status and a degree of influence unknown since the Enlightenment. Paris was the intellectual capital of the world and structuralism was in vogue. Although French Structuralism arose in the field of linguistics in the early twentieth century, it began to enter the intellectual mainstream from the late 1940s through the writings of Lévi-Strauss and, a little later, the literary and social philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Echoing Marc Bloch’s aspirations for history, Lévi-Strauss initially wanted to make anthropology into a science. And like Bloch, Lévi-Strauss was particularly interested in studying networks of exchange and ties of allegiance in various cultures. More generally, both structuralists and Annales historians made synchronic, rather than diachronic, analyses. Both were interested in the system, rather than in change. Mature Structuralism’s strong anti-humanist stance, moreover, brings to mind the downplaying of the role of the individual in Annales historiography, particularly Braudel’s. As if to reinforce the connections between Structuralism and Annales history, the move from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism coincided exactly with the emergence of the third generation of the Annales movement. The reign of Structuralism came to an abrupt end in 1968. By then French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) had been conducting a campaign of criticism against Structuralism for several years. He suggested that the transcendental or objective interpretive perspective implied by Structuralism and other forms of analysis 39 Ibid., p. 33. 40 Ibid., p. 32.

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was both chimerical and, more significantly, at odds with the basic suppositions of Structuralism itself.41 Derrida’s main target at this stage was Lévi-Strauss. But amid a backdrop of public unrest in Paris and elsewhere, Lévi-Strauss and other high-profile structuralists such as Barthes and Foucault abandoned Structuralism and embraced Derrida’s ideas, thus forming a coalition of the likeminded that became known as Post-structuralism, and which quickly attracted legions of followers. Although it is notoriously difficult to ascribe specific tenets to Poststructuralism, it is perhaps easiest to see this movement as an early form – and arguably the purest form – of Post-modernism. In this way the critical stance of Post-structuralism can be seen as having ushered in the post-modern period, which features a metaphysics of fragmentation that underpins an embracing of multiple perspectives. Fragmentation and multiplicity define the third generation of Annales. This generation of historians often tacitly rejected both Braudel’s ‘total’ approach to history, and the previous two generations’ fondness for geography and economics. Instead, the interests of the third Annales generation proliferated to include historical mentalities, women, popular culture, sexuality, dreams, childhood, the body, disease and so on. Naturally one is entitled to ask, in light of this postmodern fragmentation, whether any unity of purpose or outlook remained. But in a not untypical post-modern manner, the third generation of Annales historians was united, above all, by virtue of possessing a common aversion. For they remained true to Bloch’s and Febvre’s hostility to ‘conventional’ historiography; their ostensible radicalism still rested on a sometimes vociferous antipathy to narrative histories dealing with politics, diplomacy, and other ‘mere’ events. Various foci of the third-generation historians also possessed clear Annales genealogies. For example, although it represented a departure from Braudel, the ‘new’ emphasis on historical mentalities can be followed back to historical anthropology via Febvre’s work on Rabelais42 and Bloch’s Les rois thaumaturges. In addition, the acknowledged leaders of the third generation, Jacques Le Goff (born 1924) and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (born 1929), attained their positions in the period after 1968 by means of established Annales lines of succession. Le Roy Ladurie, who had been so obviously Braudel’s protégé and successor that he was known as ‘the Dauphin’, took Braudel’s position at the Collège de France, and Le Goff replaced Braudel as president of the Sixième Section before becoming president of the reorganized Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. 41 See in particular Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London, 1978, pp. 278–94. 42 Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: La religion de Rabelais, Paris, 1947; The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: the Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb, Harvard, 1982.

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Both the proliferation of foci and the change of leadership associated with the beginnings of the third generation of the Annales movement increased the movement’s international attraction, especially in the English-speaking world. Third-generation French Annales historians had a greater facility with the English language than their predecessors. When Le Roy Ladurie spoke at American campuses on what were really promotional tours for himself and for Annales, he was treated like a pop star.43 Meanwhile Annales history itself entered Anglophone academia with the tremendously appealing label of ‘the New History’, a direct translation of Le Goff ’s term la nouvelle histoire.44 By the end of the 1970s Annales approaches had swept through North American history departments, in the process completely vanquishing the liberal-Idealist medievalism of the immensely influential Joseph Strayer, a student and follower of Charles Homer Haskins.45 The dominance of Annales history in Englishspeaking academia was completed by the rise of women’s history in the 1970s.46 Women’s history was not associated with any claimed methodological innovations, so Annales historians remained unchallenged in this area. But women’s history also complemented Annales history in important ways. Like the Annales tradition, women’s history defined itself by its criticisms of political, institutional and events-based histories. Both movements therefore agreed that the subject matter of ‘traditional’ histories did not tell the real story. And although Annales history was – and has remained – dominated by male historians, when Annales historians such as Le Roy Ladurie produced detailed studies of agrarian peasant life, this dovetailed with the women’s-history principle of valorizing those who have hitherto been disenfranchized or forgotten. Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975) is the most important example of third-generation Annales medieval history.47 Braudel’s 43 Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 153. 44 See also François Dosse, The New History in France: the Triumph of the Annales, trans. Peter V Conroy Jr, Chicago, 1994. 45 For a discussion of Strayer’s influence see Paul Freeman and Gabrielle M Spiegel, ‘Medievalisms Old and New: the Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies’, American Historical Review, June 1998, pp. 677–704. Strayer’s approach and view of the place of the Middle Ages in the overall scheme of things are summed up in his On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, Princeton, 1970. 46 For a readable overview of women’s history that highlights the importance of developments in the 1970s see Anne Curthoys and John Docker, Is History Fiction?, Sydney, 2006, pp. 154–79; and for a short but interesting discussion of how the triumph of Annales history was ‘reinforced’ by both women’s history and residual Marxism see Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 156. 47 Published in English as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, trans. Barbara Bray, London, 1978.

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protégé Le Roy Ladurie came to prominence in 1966 with the publication of his doctoral thesis Les paysans de Languedoc (English translation The Peasants of Languedoc, 1974), a description of rural life in regional France between 1500 and 1700.48 Les paysans de Languedoc is both heavily indebted to Braudel, and a trademark Annales piece. It also shows that Le Roy Ladurie was aware of the work of avant-garde figures including Lévi-Strauss and Foucault, not least in his overt interest in ‘structure’ and his tendency to coin memorable neologisms. Les paysans de Languedoc is based on the quantitative analysis of economic data taken from various records of the time. Le Roy Ladurie himself, however, thought of it as a ‘total history’. As part of this ‘total’ approach he included aspects of social history, religion and psychology. The main argument of the work is the proposed existence of long-term rhythms and structures in the physical and (therefore) the mental worlds of the Languedoc peasants. These static or slowly changing patterns amount to an histoire immobile that occurs far beneath what to Le Roy Ladurie is the surface conjoncture of events. Although Montaillou has much in common with Les paysans de Languedoc, it is more of a ‘micro-history’ than a ‘total history’. In fact, it may well be the first significant example of micro-history, which became an established part of the Annales and ‘New History’ arsenal in the 1970s.49 Micro-history involves concentrating on a specific and perhaps previously overlooked piece of historical material in order to illustrate larger processes and patterns. For Montaillou Le Roy Ladurie used the extant part of an inquisition register created by the Bishop of Pamiers between 1318 and 1325. While the register itself is in the Vatican Library, an edition was published in France in 1965.50 Although Le Roy Ladurie felt that this edition was ‘not without faults’, he believed that it ‘can be considered the direct testimony of [the] peasants themselves’.51 The peasants in question were mostly from the village of Montaillou, which was on the northern or ‘French’ slopes of the Pyrenees Mountains. The inquisition register contains depositions by 29 individuals who lived in or near the village, or who were associated with it. At the time the village is thought to have consisted of about 200 people housed in 40 dwellings. The bishop was Jacques Fournier, who later became an Avignon pope as Benedict XII (1336–1342). Fournier’s inquisition was attempting to eliminate remnants of the Catharism, the dualist heresy which had been on the decline in the area from the time of the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). Le 48 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc, Paris, 1978. 49 The first micro-history is generally thought to be Carlo Ginzberg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, Baltimore, 1980, which was originally published in 1976 as Il formaggio e I vermi. 50 Jean Duvernay, Le Registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, evêque de Pamiers (1318–1325), 3 vols, Toulouse, 1965. 51 Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 1980, p. vii.

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Roy Ladurie thought Montaillou was ‘the last village which actively supported the Cathar heresy’. Naturally the inquisitors were mainly concerned with the religious beliefs of those questioned, but this concern led to descriptions of peoples’ habits and mores appearing in the depositions. And so Le Roy Ladurie used the register to assess the mentality of the villagers and to describe their lives. But Montaillou also includes other trademark Annales foci: it is a description of the physical environment, as well as a sociological, economic, ethnographic, and demographic study. Montaillou is divided into two parts. The first part, called ‘The Ecology of Montaillou: the House and the Shepherd’, deals mainly with what might be seen as externalities; it covers the physical environment, and makes quantitative use of economic and social data. The second part, which invokes Foucault with its title ‘An Archaeology of Montaillou: from Body Language to Myth’, describes the lives and outlook of the villagers. The first part begins with the village itself and its surroundings, before moving on to ‘biological factors’ such as food, and the social aspects of village life. Le Roy Ladurie suggests that contrary to accepted views about medieval life, there was no significant demarcation between the social strata in the village. The heart of the first part of Montaillou is the discussion of the domus that occurs in the second chapter. Le Roy Ladurie explains that the domus was both a house and a family, and that ‘the idea of the domus was a core reference’ to the villagers.52 He offers a detailed description of the structures themselves, and then describes the social relations within and between the different domus. This is important for Le Roy Ladurie because he argues that Catharism was transmitted throughout the village by means of the ‘prior social links’ pertaining to the domus.53 The discussion of the domus also serves as an introduction to another chapter, which is about the ‘dominant house’ in the village, namely the wealthy Clergue family. In this chapter Le Roy Ladurie uses the inquisitorial depositions of members of the family to come up with ‘reflections on the nature and exercise of power in Montaillou’, and to illustrate the social and economic systems of exchange that existed in the village. As part of these reflections the reader becomes acquainted with the village priest Pierre Clergue, who, along with his lover Béatrice de Planisoles, is one of the main personalities in the second part of the book. The second part of Montaillou is even more reliant on the depositions of the Fournier Register than the first. In attempting to create a picture of the villagers’ behaviour and beliefs, Le Roy Ladurie has chapters on sexuality, morality, marriage and love, the condition of women, childhood, religiosity and superstition, concepts of time and space and ideas of fate, death and redemption. All 52 Ibid., p. 25. 53 Ibid., p. 28.

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of this is based on an extensive indexing of the Fournier Register. The chapters consist in essence of an assemblage of everything in the register that pertains to the subject at hand, supplemented by the use of other relevant sources where appropriate. There is no narrative structure whatsoever. Although this approach is potentially rather distancing for the reader, the second half of Montaillou is much more readable than the first. The difference is that the second half deals with people; within the piles of information, some sense of the lives of historical individuals begins to emerge. Today’s readers cannot help, for example, being fascinated by Pierre Clergue, the prurient priest who, despite his apparent Cathar leanings, was an informer for the inquisition. Clergue ended up dying a prisoner of the inquisition. Clergue’s lover Béatrice de Planisoles was also imprisoned by the inquisition, though only for one year. Having been convicted of witchcraft, she was, however, forced to wear a yellow cross for the rest of her life. Béatrice’s tumultuous and unhappy life cannot fail to engage the modern reader. The immense success of Montaillou may be attributed both to it being an Annales work, and to it containing interesting historical characters. Montaillou was published when Annales history was at its influential and expansionary highpoint. The cover of the French edition notes that it was ‘inspired by the most up-to-date historical and ethnographical methods’, while the early English editions trumpeted it as being ‘in the tradition of French Annales historiography’. The English edition was also more readable than the French original by virtue of being much shorter. The forbiddingly long 625-page original was reduced to a 356-page English edition. Despite its Annales pedigree and qualities, Englishspeaking readers were mainly drawn to the characters in the work. The cover of the popular Penguin edition exploited this attraction and presented Montaillou as the ‘world famous portrait of life in a medieval village’. Scholarly reviewers in the Anglophone world warmly welcomed both the work itself and its Annales approach. There were, however, some voices of criticism that pointed out errors and signs of haste. Nonetheless, very few questioned the validity of Le Roy Ladurie’s approach in general.54 Yet light can be shed on the nature of Annales history by discussing both the status of the evidence used by Le Roy Ladurie and aspects of his methodology. A great deal clearly hangs on Le Roy Ladurie’s belief that the inquisitorial register ‘can be considered the direct testimony of [the] peasants themselves’. There is no doubt that the register, though incomplete, is a wonderful primary source. In 54 For an incisive early English-language review of Montaillou see Leonard Boyle, ‘Montaillou Revisited: Mentalité and Methodology’, JA Ralphs (ed.), Pathways to Medieval Peasants, Papers in Medieval Studies, 2, Toronto, 1981. As well as being a medievalist, Boyle was a senior librarian at the Vatican.

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many ways, however, it is also a difficult one. For a start, it is not a straightforward series of depositions; there are several retractions where witnesses changed their minds on important matters. Moreover, the register as it stands is in the Latin of the inquisitorial scribes, rather than the vernacular of the witnesses. In fact, in some cases the oral testimonies seem to have been translated from the vernacular into Latin, then back into the vernacular in case of possible changes and retractions, and then back into Latin once more. It is therefore quite possible that the depositions are infused with the outlook of the inquisitorial scribes. But it is also possible that the depositions represent the inquisitors rather than the witnesses in other ways. Simply put, is it not reasonable to suspect that the witnesses – who were really the accused – might not have tried to save their own skins by saying whatever they thought the authorities wanted to hear? And, equally, might not the inquisition have made records that were a reflection of itself and its aims, and even a justification for its very existence? As with von Sybel’s use of primary sources about the crusades, it is difficult to escape the feeling that Le Roy Ladurie might have mistaken complicated and, in a deep sense, highly rhetorical written records for facts. From a history-of-historiography perspective, it is now also clear that although the most appealing quality of Montaillou is its sense of historical characters, Annales orthodoxy as demonstrated by Braudel would seem to militate against any such emphasis on individuals. This is no bad thing in itself, of course. But it does throw Le Roy Ladurie’s treatment of these individuals into sharper relief. The basic question on this point is whether it might be better simply to read the original depositions, rather than the results of Le Roy Ladurie’s card indexing. This is a deep question, not least because it raises the issue of the historian’s presence in the work. We saw that in the early nineteenth century the Romantic historian Prosper de Barante criticized the overt presence of the historian in historiography. The author, he suggested, had taken the place of the narrative. This very criticism can be levelled at Montaillou. Le Roy Ladurie’s presence dominates the work. Montaillou really is the historian’s interpretative categories and his methodology. It is tempting to suggest that this kind of authorial presence is an important feature of modern mainstream academic historiography, and that it is related to the increasingly fierce competition among historians that has been associated with the process of professionalization. For Le Roy Ladurie’s authorial presence in Montaillou is quite unlike, say, Gibbon’s, in that it is not associated with either a sense of self-consciousness, or an acknowledgement of the constructedness of historiography. Both Bloch and Le Roy Ladurie are, then, claiming that their respective works are superior to the efforts of previous historians. And it is, more than anything else, Le Roy Ladurie’s methodological pyrotechnics that underscore this claimed novelty and superiority. The publishing of Montaillou immediately preceded the 1979 Annales

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half-century commemorations, which further emphasized the importance and influence of Annales history. By the 1980s the dominance of Annales was so complete that it was hardly noticed or commented upon any more. For example, in 1984 Annales heavyweight Jacques Le Goff ’s La Naissance Du Purgatoire (1981) was published in English.55 Although the cognoscenti knew that it was a trademark Annales treatment of historical mentalités, its acceptance in the English-speaking world did not seem to rely principally on it being an Annales work. Le Dimanche de Bouvines (1973), by well-known Annales historian and mentalité specialist Georges Duby, is another case in point. The book is about the Battle of Bouvines (1214), which is traditionally seen as a pivotal event in French history because King Phillip Augustus defeated German and English forces, thereby securing the position of the Capetian dynasty and establishing ‘French’ control over King John of England’s former Continental possessions. Duby’s work was intended as an iconoclastic repost to such perceptions. As such, it ostentatiously avoided discussing the battle itself and its consequences. In the introduction to Le Dimanche de Bouvines this polemical thrust was specifically associated with Annales approaches and with epistemological optimism: Despite their striving to be progressive, the positivist historians were trapped in a stubborn drive for pinpoint exactness . . . This was the result of focussing solely on political action, on its motivations and its consequences . . . This is the reason that led me to look at this battle and the memory it has left from the perspective of an anthropologist . . . [T]he event’s imprints cannot be properly interpreted without first being put back into the cultural system which they affected at the time . . . Bouvines offers an extremely favourable locus of observation for someone attempting to rough-hew a sociology of war at the beginning of the thirteenth century . . .56

Although the typically combative Annales introduction was retained in the English translation (1990), by that time it was not considered necessary to mention the author’s Annales pedigree or any aspect of his methodology – or even that he had one. On the dust jacket, notably, Duby was simply an ‘eminent French historian of the Middle Ages’, the ‘Professor of History at the Collège de France’, and ‘the author of numerous books on the Middle Ages’. In its domination of mainstream academia Annales history had realized Bloch’s and Febvre’s original aims. But perhaps this domination was so smooth and so complete because Annales had never really been outside the mainstream. We saw that Annales itself was part of a tradition of academic journals, and that 55 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, 1981. 56 George Duby, The Legend of Bouvines: War, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Catherine Tihanyi, Berkeley, 1990, pp. 5–6.

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many of the concerns of Bloch and Febvre pertained to the pre-World War One intellectual environment. But we have also seen that Annales history has been virtually defined by strident and persistent claims of novelty. Yet claimed novelty is in fact the definitively Rankean gesture. This was never more obvious than with Ranke himself. Since the time of Ranke, phases of criticism and novelty have occurred in academic historiography without disturbing its foundations. The hostility to philosophy and philosophical history among Annales historians only served to underline their deep philosophical – and especially epistemological – orthodoxy. Annales history was an extension of Rankean particularism. Shorn of the metaphysics of historical progress, it still retained an Idealist metaphysics of knowledge. The keystone of Annales history was always a sense of progress in the discipline of historiography. And as we shall see in the final chapter, most professional historians today, with their new forms of specialization, continue to believe that historiography is improving, and continue to exhibit hostility towards ‘conventional’ histories.

8

The New Romantics: Literature, Literacy and Late Twentieth-Century Understandings of the Middle Ages In the mid-twentieth century a current of English-language historiography used medieval literature and culture – rather than economics, social relations or institutions – as a means of grasping both the essence of the Middle Ages themselves, and the place of those times in the historical process. In contrast with Annales approaches in particular, this historiography was mainly concerned with feelings and emotions, and with the inner lives of historical individuals. The flagship work in this approach was Richard Southern’s widely read The Making of the Middle Ages (1953). This chapter will suggest that Southern’s ideas represent a form of neo-Romanticism, and that this neo-Romanticism was rather at odds with the academic mainstream, which was, as ever, characterized by progressive thinking. Moreover, as in the nineteenth century, this neo-Romanticism was ultimately overtaken by progressive and discernibly Idealist attitudes. An important stage in this process occurred in the 1980s when there was a shift in focus among historians from medieval literature to the question of literacy itself. Until then this dialogue between neo-Romanticism and the Idealist-particularist mainstream was often expressed through the ‘Renaissance problem’, which persisted as an issue as a result of the Haskins-inspired ‘revolt of the medievalists’ that occurred from the second quarter of the twentieth century. Gradually, however, the ‘Renaissance problem’ revolved less around the use of the word ‘renaissance’, and became more a question of the relationship between twelfth-century cultural developments and those of subsequent eras including modernity. We saw that the nineteenth-century Romantics assigned a priority to medieval culture, and that the genre of cultural history emerged from their concerns. Some Romantics and cultural historians also placed aspects of medieval philosophy at the centre of their understanding of the Middle Ages. Southern did too. In all these cases the philosophy in question was seen as a cultural artefact or signifier, rather than being placed within Idealist metaphysics, or seen in antiquarian terms as an end in itself. Southern, though, went further and used medieval philosophy, notably the works of St Anselm of Canterbury, in order to assess the emotional tenor of the age. Southern also drew connections between Anselm’s theology and developments in medieval vernacular literature. Southern’s groundbreaking use of Anselm in these ways is all the more remarkable for being based on a synthesis between history on the one hand, and the study of philosophy and literature

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on the other. In thinking of vernacular literature as a locus and expression of medieval emotionalism, Southern was building on CS Lewis’ The Allegory of Love, and on the pioneering Romance philologist Gaston Paris’ idea of medieval courtly love. Gaston Paris (1839–1903) dominated the study of medieval vernacular literature in France in the last third of the nineteenth century.1 During this period French literary studies, as with history, became modern, professional and ‘scientific’ by virtue of the adoption of German ideas and methods. Gaston Paris was at the forefront of these changes. Paris studied classical philology at Bonn and Göttingen, before returning to France and deciding to become a specialist in Old French. He completed a doctorate at the École des Chartres. His dissertation, Historie poétique de Charlemagne, was published in 1865 and remains his best-known work. Paris held positions at the École Practique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, and he co-founded the journals Review critique d’histoire et de literature (1866) and Romania (1872). In an 1883 article, in Romania, Paris first elaborated his idea of courtly love.2 In discussing Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte de la charrette (c.1180), which is about Lancelot, Paris suggests that the work is significant because of ‘the conception of love it offers’. Love prevents Lancelot ‘from being master outside of this sentiment of any part of his being’ and ‘reigns in his soul with no counterweight’.3 Paris then enlarges on this idea by using Andreas Capellanus’ De amore (c.1180). Love thus conceived is defined by Paris as follows: It is illegitimate, furtive . . . The lover is always in a position of interiority vis à vis the woman . . . In order to be worthy of the tenderness he desires or that he has already obtained, he carries out all imaginable acts of prowess . . . Finally, and this element contains all the rest, love is an art, a science, a virtue, which has its rules just like the rules of chivalry or courtliness, rules that one possesses and that one applies well or less well according to one’s progress, and which one cannot transgress without being judged unworthy.4

Contrary to what has often been assumed, in calling this mixture of passion and constraint amour courtois or courtly love Paris was not actually coining a 1 Gerald R Brault, ‘Gaston Paris’, in Helen Damico and Joseph B Zavaldi (eds), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, New York, 1998, vol. 2, pp. 151–65; R Howard Bloch, ‘“Mieux vaut jamais que tard:” Romance, Philology, and Old French Letters’, Representations, 36, Fall 1991, pp. 64–86. 2 Esp. Gaston Paris, ‘Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde: Lancelot du Lac, II: Le conte de la charrette’, Romania 12, 1883, pp. 459–534. 3 Bloch, ‘“Mieux vaut jamais que tard:” Romance, Philology, and Old French Letters’, p. 69. 4 Ibid.

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neologism. The term is found (as cortez amors) in a twelfth-century Provençal poem, and it is very like fin’ amor or ‘fine love’, which occurs regularly in medieval Provençal and French poems. The use of the term has, however, remained controversial; some have strenuously maintained that despite these occurrences, courtly love as understood by Paris and those who have agreed with him is in fact a modern invention. Whatever the case, Paris’ idea of courtly love has become one of the key concepts that we moderns use to think – and to argue – about the Middle Ages. Courtly love was definitively fixed in the canon of modern ideas about the Middle Ages by CS Lewis’ The Allegory of Love (1936). Having achieved firsts in classics, ‘greats’ and English, CS Lewis (1898–1963) was awarded a permanent fellowship at Magdalen College Oxford in 1925.5 He taught in the English faculty at Oxford with his friend JRR Tolkein (1892–1973). Both are famous for their works of fiction, of course. But of the two, Lewis’ academic efforts are probably better known. In the early 1930s, Lewis began to think about medieval art and literature with a view to coming to grips with the medieval imagination. He came to regard the twelfth-century literary imagination as a balance between a romantic courtly tradition on the one hand, and a quest for cosmic harmony and conceptual structure on the other. And, adding stridently Nietzschean overtones to this already recognizably ‘nineteenth-century’ thinking, he believed that the elements in this medieval synthesis were supported by – and to some extent expressed – deeper warrior instincts.6 The Allegory of Love does not, however, amplify this argument as a whole. Rather, it concentrates on one aspect of Lewis’ synthesis, namely the romantic courtly tradition, and presents it as a specifically medieval example of a longer-standing tendency to use allegory. But in combining the particular and the general in this way, The Allegory of Love raises the issue of the relationship between the Middle Ages and other epochs including modernity. Lewis argues that we moderns think and feel about love in ways that derive from the medieval idea of courtly love, and that these thoughts and feelings were unknown before the Middle Ages: It seems to us natural that love should be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity and the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for ‘nature’ is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century Provence. It seems – or it seemed to us till lately – a natural thing that love (under certain conditions) should

5 Derek Brewer, ‘CS Lewis’, Helen Damico and Joseph B Zavaldi (eds), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2, pp. 405–14. 6 For a good discussion of Lewis’ historical vision see Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, pp. 213–22. Cantor argues that Lewis’ idea of a medieval impulse towards intellectual structure arose from a school of ‘neo-Thomism’ among pro-Catholic philosophers.

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be regarded as a noble and ennobling passion: it is only if we imagine trying to explain this doctrine to Aristotle, Virgil, St Paul, or the author of Beowulf, that we become aware how far from natural it is.7

Lewis acknowledges that certain individuals in the Middle Ages might have thought that their feelings about love owed something to the ancients, especially Ovid. But he argues that they actually ‘misunderstood’ Ovid, failing to see irony, parody and even outright humour in the Ars Amatoria. And so the emotional revolution that began in eleventh-century Provence was not caused by any revival of classical forms or feelings, not least because such momentous changes lie beyond causal explanations: The new thing in itself I do not pretend to explain. Real changes in human sentiment are very rare – there are perhaps three of four on record – but I believe they occur, and that this is one of them. I am not sure that they have ‘causes,’ if by a cause we mean something which would wholly account for a new state of affairs, and so explain away what seemed its novelty.8

Lewis’ eleventh- and twelfth-century emotional revolution is therefore more important than the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance: ‘compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.’9 And the significance of Lewis’ revolution lies in it not having been a classical revival. Lewis’ idea of a medieval emotional revolution was therefore an emphatic contribution to the ‘Renaissance debate’. Although coming from different scholarly traditions, both The Allegory of Love and Haskins’ The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century undermined the perceived importance of the Italian Renaissance. Haskins understood Carolingian culture and twelfth-century developments as pre-cursors to the Italian Renaissance and modernity. We saw that although Haskins was at times contradictory, he did in the main propose a progressive historical vision that included obvious stages of improvement in the form of renaissances. Lewis, however, felt that ‘humanity does not pass through stages as a train passes through stations’.10 And as we have just seen, he used the traditional ‘Renaissance’ category of classical revival to argue against the importance – and the very idea – of the Renaissance. The debates surrounding this issue took an interesting turn in the third quarter of the twentieth century when the idea of the Italian Renaissance as it had been understood was gradually abandoned. This 7 8 9 10

CS Lewis, The Allegory of Love: a Study in Medieval Tradition, Oxford, 1936, p. 3. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 1.

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process began before the Second World War in ‘the revolt of the medievalists’. Erwin Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, (1960) was arguably the last significant defence of the idea of an Italian Renaissance.11 Panofsky advanced what was in effect a combination of Haskins and Burckhardt insofar as he thought of the twelfth century as a ‘proto-renaissance’, and he felt that Carolingian and even Ottonian culture had anticipated later developments. But in 1970, well-known Renaissance scholar Nancy Struever abandoned traditional ‘Renaissance’ categories such as individualism and humanism. She suggested, instead, that the principal importance of the Italian Renaissance, such as it was, lay in certain attitudes towards language at the time. Struever proposed the emergence of a ‘rhetorical’ outlook that involved a sense of the relativity of truth.12 Since Struever’s change of direction the traditional Burckhardtian understanding of the Italian Renaissance has had virtually no place in academic work in the area.13 Yet, as the claims of Italian Renaissance scholars receded, those of proponents of a twelfth-century renaissance advanced to fill the space vacated.14 Perhaps more than ever, the twelfth century continued to be regarded as either the birth of modernity or a vital stage in its attainment. In the 1980s, the twelfth century was still being positioned unselfconsciously within a Haskins-style progressive historical vision.15 But the waning of the idea of the Italian Renaissance was also associated with an approach to the Middle Ages that stressed feelings and emotions, and which was therefore in the tradition of CS Lewis and Gaston Paris. This more radical approach also included an appropriation and re-use of the traditional Renaissance categories of humanism and individualism. The architect of this way of thinking about the Middle Ages was Richard Southern. Richard Southern (1912–2001) was awarded a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford, where he graduated with first-class honours in history in 1932. A paper he wrote on Ranulf Flambard (d. 1128), the Norman Bishop of Durham, won the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize for 1933.16 Southern then received a research fellowship at Exeter College at Oxford. Like many of his 11 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Stockholm, 1960. 12 Nancy Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance, Princeton, 1970. 13 See WJ Bouwsma, ‘The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History’, American Historical Review, 94, 1979, pp. 1–15 and R Waswo, Review of PO Kristeller’s Renaissance Thought and its Sources, in Bibliotheque d’humanisme et Renaissance, 43, 1981, pp. 167ff. 14 For this process see JO Ward, ‘Rhetoric, Truth, and Literacy in the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’, in Richard Leo Enos (ed.), Oral and Written Communication: Historical Approaches, Newbury Park, 1990, pp. 126–57. 15 See esp. Robert L Benson and Giles Constable (eds), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge, MA, 1982. 16 Revised and reprinted in Richard Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, Oxford, 1970, pp. 234–52.

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generation, he did not complete a doctorate. Instead, he carried out several years of fairly unstructured research under the guidance of his mentor FM Powicke (1879–1963), who is nowadays remembered for The Loss of Normandy (1913), and a massive but thoughtful work on King Henry III of England (r. 1216–1272).17 Although Powicke was mainly a political and institutional historian, he suggested that Southern should research St Anselm of Canterbury (1033/1034–1109), thus beginning a lifelong interest on Southern’s part. In 1937, Powicke, who was the regius professor, made Southern a fellow and tutor in history at Balliol College, a position Southern held until 1961 when he became Chichele Professor of Modern History. In 1952, a London publisher commissioned Southern to write a textbook on the Middle Ages. At the time Southern had only published articles and reviews. He had contracted tuberculosis, and in the year off he took from teaching while recovering he wrote The Making of the Middle Ages (1953). His publishers may well have been disappointed at first, because although The Making of the Middle Ages was quite wide-ranging in its own way, it avoided institutional, constitutional and economic history, and it hardly mentioned what were considered many of the key events of the Middle Ages. The Making of the Middle Ages was nevertheless hugely successful; by 2005 it had been through 49 editions in five languages. Part of this success can be attributed to it being both fairly short and very easy to read; Southern’s writing style is economical and elegant. The significance and the enduring appeal of the work, however, perhaps pertain more to the novelty of Southern’s approach and the impact of his arguments. It is also tempting to suggest that readers were drawn to Southern because, like CS Lewis, he created a very appealing picture of the medieval world. And in doing so, he followed his own precept that ‘the first duty of the historian is to produce works of art’. The Making of the Middle Ages covers the period from the late tenth century to the early thirteenth century. Two dates serve as bookends for Southern’s history: 972 and 1204. The second of these is the capture of Byzantium, the climax of the Fourth Crusade. But the first date does not mark a decisive military or political event. Rather, it is when Gerbert d’Aurillac (c.946–1003), the future Pope Sylvester II, began teaching logic at Rheims. Southern thus assigns a priority to ideas over events. He does, to be sure, suggest that the Battle of the Lech or Lechfeld, in which Otto the Great defeated a Magyar incursion near Augsburg in 955, was an event whose significance rivalled that of the Battle of Marathon. Lechfeld ensured the stabilisation of the boundaries of Europe and so enabled an ‘acceleration of economic activity’ and a ‘slow recovery of political order’ to 17 FM Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: the Community of the Realm in the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols, Oxford, 1947; The Loss of Normandy 1189–1204: Studies in the History of the Angevin Empire, Manchester, 1913.

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take place during the period under consideration. Yet these are more-or-less background occurrences; they are important mainly because they ‘made possible even more secret and momentous changes in thought and feeling, and in the direction of society for both secular and spiritual ends’.18 Part of Southern’s argument is that this ‘secret revolution of these centuries’ was noticed at the time. He ends his introduction to The Making of the Middle Ages with a quotation from Chrétien de Troyes around 1170 saying that ‘the pre-eminence of chivalry and learning’ had passed from Greece to Rome and then to Chrétien’s time.19 While Chrétien and his contemporaries were aware of the achievements of their own epoch, such an awareness, Southern argues, would have been inappropriate and indeed impossible at the beginning of the period. In the fifth and last chapter of The Making of the Middle Ages Southern uses Chrétien as the paradigmatic example of the new outlook that emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The introduction to The Making of the Middle Ages therefore foreshadows this argument without spoiling the reader’s journey to the last chapter by saying too much. The intervening chapters represent an ascent to this climax, moving from the straightforward and the concrete to increasingly conceptual and rarefied matters. And each chapter shows that significant changes occurred in the particular areas being discussed. The titles of the first two chapters of The Making of the Middle Ages, ‘Latin Christendom and its Neighbours’ and ‘The Bonds of Society’, almost suggest an Annales approach such as in Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society. Southern’s method and his outlook are, however, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bloch’s. As we saw, Feudal Society begins with the physical environment. Southern, in contrast, starts by explaining the cultural and linguistic variations found across Europe during his period. The physical environment – mountains, rivers, and regions – plays a part in this, of course. But geography is of no importance in itself; it is only relevant because it affected cultural differences. The contrast with the Annales historians becomes even clearer when Southern moves on to relations between Europe and the ‘outside world’ and, in the second chapter, the nature of medieval society.20 In these areas Southern is concerned with change and with the significance of change, rather than with networks, systems, or long-term rhythms and structures. The changing relations between Europe and ‘outside world’ are, for example, not really of interest in themselves. Instead, their importance lies in having facilitated a ‘traffic of ideas’ that played a part in developing ‘the mind and imagination of Europe’.21 Equally, a chapter about the ‘bonds of society’ 18 19 20 21

Richard Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1953, p. 13. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 25–63. Ibid., p. 73.

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might lead the reader to expect Bloch-style discussions of the feudal system and serfdom. But Southern begins by discussing marriage as illustrated by the lives of prominent women like Agnes of Poitou (c.1025–1077), who became an empress of Germany, and Countess Matilda of Tuscany (1046–1115). He then uses the family history of the eleventh-century counts of Anjou to illustrate changes in methods of rule and government. He argues that ‘movement in government’ throughout the period ‘coincided with the rise of the schools’, which led to the emergence of a trained bureaucracy. But, as ever, it is the results of these changes that interest Southern. He believes that the study of Roman law revealed the existence of an ‘elaborate system of purely human proof ’. This increasingly perceived ‘human basis of secular government’, moreover, led to a ‘new intensity of spiritual life in the study of an individual soul’.22 And when he does finally touch on serfdom and knighthood, Southern’s aim is to demonstrate that these areas also saw changes in circumstances and perceptions. He suggests that by the end of the twelfth century the nature of serfdom had been more rigidly defined, and the idea of nobility had begun to move away from being based on property and knighthood, and to enter a period of a ‘new nobility of blood’.23 Southern’s third chapter, ‘The Ordering of the Christian Life’, surprises the reader by beginning with another noble family, this time of the counts of Catalonia. The chapter describes the transformation of church life brought about by ‘the zeal of the eleventh century’. The behaviour and attitudes of the Catalonian nobility reveal the nature of the ‘old church life’ before this transformation. Rather than presenting the transformation of the church through a chronological narrative describing the reform movements and their effects, Southern uses a series of historical vignettes. The most dramatic of these is the visit of the reforming pope Leo IX (d. 1054) to Rheims in 1049.24 Leo, who had just become pope, was at Rheims to consecrate a new church at the monastery of St Remegius. But he decided to turn the occasion into a church Council, and so he called on bishops and other prelates to attend. The Council met in the monastery church, with the bones of St Remigius (d. 533) placed on the altar and dominating the scene. Before proceedings began each bishop and abbot in attendance was asked aloud whether he or someone else had paid money to secure his position. The pope was making a stand against the sin of simony or the buying and selling of holy offices. This practice meant that the nobility had been able to position family members and allies in the highest levels of the church. The answers the prelates gave at Rheims were for the most part evasive. Some admitted their wrongdoing, pleaded mitigating circumstances, and were forgiven. One bishop fled during the night 22 Ibid., pp. 97f. 23 Ibid., pp. 103, 111. 24 Ibid., pp. 125f.

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and was subsequently removed from office. Others who had failed to attend or who remained contumacious were excommunicated. The reader is held in thrall by the drama of the occasion. But Southern explains that the real drama lies in its novelty. Here is a sign that a momentous change was taking place: a separation of the sacred and the secular. And it is only after the reader has seen an illustration of this change in the form of Leo’s visit to Rheims that Southern describes the preceding church-reform movements, the aspirations of the reformed papacy, and the resultant struggle between the papacy and the German emperors, which he sees as the ‘first major dispute in modern history’.25 The most important result of the church-reform movements was, however, the establishment of a powerful institutional church with a Europe-wide system of government. Southern points out that the work of church government and the formulation of church doctrine needed a ‘large and varied body of learning’. He discusses this body of learning in his fourth chapter, ‘The Tradition of Thought’. As usual, he focuses on change, especially a significant change of emphasis in the syllabus of study. Rhetoric, Southern argues, had been at the centre of an Augustinian tradition of using classical learning to interpret the bible. But rhetoric gave way to logic. And it was the revival of logical studies that brought about ‘the intellectual formation of the Middle Ages’.26 The first sign of this change was Gerbert of Rheims’ teaching of the logical works of Boethius, Porphyry and Aristotle that were known at the time. The digestion of the newly available works of Aristotle was, moreover, the ‘greatest intellectual task’ from the end of the tenth century to the late twelfth century. Southern sees logic as an ‘instrument of order in a chaotic world’. He argues that the use of logic brought about the orderly and systematic medieval worldview, and revealed the power of the mind itself – even, or especially, in the areas of faith and dogma. Developments in theology also suggest that logic was a force for change and a challenge to tradition and authority. The growth of logic-based scholastic theology in the twelfth century, notably, represented a ‘stepping out into the arena of serious controversy’. By the middle of that century, Southern argues suggestively, ‘the quoting of authorities was the beginning of debate, not the end of it’. Changes in learning and in the application of learning were associated with the emergence of cathedral schools, which were larger and more dynamic educational environments than the older monastery schools. Moreover, bringing to mind Southern’s earlier quotation from Chrétien de Troyes, by the twelfth century those associated with the cathedral schools were conscious of their own achievements, and of the changes that had taken place since Gerbert began teaching logic in 972. Bernard of Chartres (d. after 1124), for example, thought that the great scholars of his day such as Peter Abelard 25 Ibid., p. 133. 26 Ibid., p. 179.

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(1079–1142) were like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, that is to say the ancients. But they could see further, and so, according to Southern, the period of ‘abasement before the shrine of antiquity’ was over.27 The final change that Southern describes is in the area of feelings. At the beginning of the fifth and last chapter, which is called ‘From Epic to Romance’, Southern tells his readers that he is about to ‘draw together the scattered threads’ of the book, and to ‘face more directly . . . the fundamental changes of attitude or shifts of emphasis, which have met us in every sphere of life.’28 Southern’s approach has hardly been ‘scattered’, of course. In fact, at this very point the reader becomes fully aware of the conceptual structure of the book. The reader’s journey has taken the form of a Dantesque ascent that began with the European environment and moved through medieval society, the church, and learning and ideas, before reaching feelings and emotions at the summit. Along the way the reader has gone from the external to the internal. In the final chapter, Southern advances the main argument of the book. He suggests that a conceptual and emotional reorientation took place in Western Europe in the twelfth century, that the theology of Anselm of Canterbury signals the emergence of new ways of thinking and feeling, and that the clearest illustration of an overall change was the replacement of the epic form in literature by the romance. But this is not a conventional historical argument. For like Lewis, Southern does not think that the changes he is dealing with are susceptible of explanation: These changes are hard to define and their connexion can more readily be felt than explained. Indeed, in a strict sense, these changes defy definition, and the connexion between them cannot be explained – it can only be exemplified in the lives of individuals . . . We have seen in the preceding chapters many changes which seem to be primarily matters of external relations . . . we must now try to see them, as far as may be, from within in their effects on individuals.29

Southern believes that these changes ‘were most quickly recognized and made intelligible’ in the monastic environment. Two individuals from this environment stand out: St Anselm (1033–1109) and St Bernard (1090–1153). While Bernard gave the new sentiments a ‘more robust and more integrated expression’, it was Anselm who ‘opened up a new world of ardent emotion and piety’ through the prayers he composed during the period that he was prior at the abbey of Bec in Normandy (1063–1078). The emotional intensity of these prayers continued into Anselm’s theology, where thought and feeling were united for the first time. 27 Ibid., p. 203. 28 Ibid., p. 219. 29 Ibid.

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Anselm’s theology departed from the hitherto prevailing Augustinian approach by proposing a new understanding of Christ’s role in salvation. In the process Anselm minimized the part played by the Devil in the drama of redemption. According to Augustine, Christ had atoned for Adam’s sin and defeated the Devil because when He died on the cross the Devil unjustly subjected to death someone who had not sinned. The first book of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (1098) refutes this ‘Devil-ransom’ theory on the grounds that it implies that the Devil had held a just dominion over humanity. Anselm’s new theological approach, which is elaborated in the second book of Cur Deus Homo, stresses the incarnation itself rather than Christ’s death, and so virtually removes the Devil from the equation. All of this suggests to Southern a ‘fresh appreciation’ of Christ’s suffering and a closer relationship between God and humanity. He argues that this new relationship between God and individuals brought about a greater awareness of the potentialities of human consciousness that manifested itself in many ways including a more ‘rational’ attitude towards faith. Anselm’s emphasis on the humanity of Christ including His suffering as a human also signalled the emergence of new attitudes towards human emotions and feelings.30 One important aspect of this paradigm shift was, according to Southern, a startling growth in the worship of the Virgin Mary, whose motherhood of the human Christ was now fully appreciated, and whose newly appreciated humanity led to her being seen as a source of personal comfort for her devotees.31 Although Anselm and Bernard were important figures, Southern believes that the ‘climax of the developments’ occurred early in the thirteenth century with St Francis (d. 1226) and his followers. In their hands the experiences of Anselm and Bernard were ‘brought to the market place and became the common property of the lay and the clerical world alike’.32 But by then the ‘new ways of thought and feeling’ had already begun to bring about substantial changes in secular society. Southern suggests that these changes are best seen by comparing epics such as the Song of Roland with the romances of Chrétien de Troyes.33 He argues that the world of the epics is inhabited by warrior knights who possess a sense of a common objective and fight against easily recognized external enemies. These warriors are, moreover, ‘unmoved by the romantic loyalties of the heart’. But in Chrétien’s romances, which were written in the third quarter of the twelfth century and largely displaced the earlier epics, one finds ‘a new world’. Chrétien’s warriors are not engaged against a common enemy. Instead, they undertake solitary quests, often against mysterious foes. And, in what Southern believes is 30 31 32 33

Ibid., pp. 234ff. Ibid., pp. 237–40. Ibid., p. 240. Ibid., pp. 241–6.

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the secular equivalent of Bernard’s Cistercian spirituality, Chrétien’s heroes are motivated not by loyalty to a group, but by an ‘internal religion of the heart’. The emotionalism of Bernard and Chrétien nevertheless preceded a further spreading of the new sensibilities by the Franciscans. And the enormous popularity that miracle stories about the Virgin Mary achieved from the thirteenth century suggests yet another widening of these sensibilities.34 With echoes of Huizinga, Southern ends The Making of the Middle Ages with the observation that by the thirteenth-century medieval civilization was characterized by an ‘effortless variety and spontaneity’ that distinguishes it from previous periods including – and especially – the Carolingian age.35 In making a point of distinguishing his period from the Carolingian age, Southern seems to be arguing against a Haskins-style model of history. We saw that Haskins thought of the Carolingian renaissance as a precursor to the Ottonian Renaissance and the twelfth-century renaissance, which itself anticipated the Italian Renaissance. With Southern, in contrast, medieval civilization was unheralded. But what happened to medieval civilization? That there is no answer given to this question is perhaps the only disappointment in The Making of the Middle Ages. To be sure, Southern has fulfilled his obligations as suggested in the title of the work by describing the creation of a civilization. But the reader is left wondering about the relationship between medieval sensibilities and those of the succeeding epochs, especially modernity. In his subsequent works such as Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (1970) Southern did, however, attempt to come to grips with this question. As well, these later works reveal a change of emphasis: Southern increasingly saw the scholastic intellectual edifice of the thirteenth century as both the culmination of the twelfth-century conceptual reorientation, and the high point of the Middle Ages. His thinking on this point thus drew closer to the traditional Romantic idea of medieval conceptual unity as expressed in Gothic architecture and the theology of St Thomas Aquinas. With Henry Adams and others, this Romantic understanding of the Middle Ages also included a sense of a loss of unity and cohesion in the form of a breakdown of the medieval synthesis. Cambridge medievalist David Knowles’ widely read The Evolution of Medieval Thought (1962) reprised this Romantic idea of a medieval conceptual breakdown. Knowles argued that philosophical nominalism, which he regarded as essentially corrosive, existed from the late eleventh century. This form of nominalism was, however, defeated by philosophical realism, which formed the basis of the intellectual edifice of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 34 I discuss the question of the relationship between Mariology and twelfth-century intellectual changes in ‘Perpetual Devotion: Interpreting Medieval Mariology’, in Chris Bishop (ed.), Text and Transmission in Medieval Europe, Newcastle, 2007, pp. 148–78. 35 Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, p. 257.

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But in the fourteenth century, in what Knowles calls ‘the harvest of nominalism’, medieval conceptual unity was destroyed forever by the arch-nominalist William of Ockham (1288–1348). In Medieval Humanism, Southern describes the confident and optimistic worldview of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as perhaps the ‘most important kind of humanism Europe has ever produced’. But like the Romantics and Knowles, he suggests that this humanism could not survive the sceptical and pessimistic fourteenth century as ‘the hope of universal order faded’.36 Shortly after Medieval Humanism was finished, however, the American medievalist Norman Cantor interviewed Southern. Cantor brought up the question of the natural sciences in the Middle Ages. Southern answered by suggesting that the twelfth-century conceptual reorientation included ‘an attempt to look scientifically at the natural world, to discover its construction, its laws, and its main features’, and that this reorientation represents the beginning of ‘a continuing movement in Western history down to the present day’.37 Southern’s view of the historical process is therefore rather like Huizinga’s insofar as it all depends on how you look at it: when considering culture it is discernibly Romantic; but when thinking about the natural sciences there are suggestions of a progressive view of things. In his unfinished last work, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (1995, 2001), Southern clarified his ideas about medieval civilization, and about the relationship between the Middle Ages and later times.38 Scholastic Humanism continues the change of emphasis evident in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies; as its title suggests, it maintains Southern’s focus on scholasticism as the most important achievement of the Middle Ages. Soon after Medieval Humanism and Other Studies had appeared, some of Southern’s followers began to build on both that work and The Making of the Middle Ages by talking about medieval individualism.39 This marked another appropriation of traditional renaissance categories by medievalists, and so represented a continuation of ‘the revolt of the medievalists’. In Scholastic Humanism, however, Southern again takes pains to avoid positioning the Middle Ages within a renaissance-driven and progressive model of history. He distinguishes ‘renaissance’ humanism from scholastic humanism: whereas the former featured classical imitation and was exclusively literary, the latter involved seeking, acquiring and ordering

36 Southern, Medieval Humanism, pp. 29–60. 37 Norman F Cantor, Perspectives on the European Past: Conversations with Historians, New York, 1971, p. 194. 38 Richard Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols, Oxford, 1995, 2001. 39 Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200, London, 1971; RW Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, New Haven, 1974.

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knowledge.40 Southern suggests that from around 1100 to 1160 the ‘mainlines of scholastic thought’ were opened up by ‘innovators’ such as Anselm of Laon (d. 1117), William of Champeaux (d. 1121), and their students. These innovators began the scholastic project by introducing order into the unstructured mass of ideas and information they had inherited from the ancients. Their confidence in their abilities and their techniques then led to a grand humanistic attempt to make the universe fully intelligible within a Christian framework. For the next two hundred years this ‘large-scale unity of life and ideals’ in the form of the scholastic project was the ‘major directing influence on the formation of the outlook, institutions and individual lives of the greater part of the European population’.41 Intellectuals in the scholastic age were buoyed by the belief that the attainment of their goals in a final synthesis was at hand, or was not too far away. But in the fourteenth century this great hope began to fade as dissention and nitpicking increasingly characterized scholasticism itself. Southern argues that scholasticism’s disintegration was ‘necessarily very long’, not least because coming up with contradictions was an important part of scholastic method. Ultimately, however, the ‘patient analysis and compilation’ of scholasticism gave way to ‘different methods of investigation, whether descriptive, intuitive, visionary, or systematically experimental.’42 But once again Southern presents multiple perspectives regarding questions of the persistence of scholasticism, when it disappeared, and the consequences of this disappearance: The practical application of this intellectual programme produced a reorganization of medieval society along lines which were very generally operative until the eighteenth century. It was the abandonment of this programme, after it had been variously redefined and gradually abandoned from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, which caused the great crisis of disbelief in the existence of any attainable body of knowledge about an eternal state of Being, to which many works of the nineteenth century give poignant expression.43 [T]hese efforts of the medieval schools increasingly fell into widespread contempt from the fourteenth century onwards. But . . . despite the contempt of intellectuals, a large part of the teaching of the medieval schools continued to influence the thoughts and conduct of the majority of people in western Europe . . . until the twentieth century . . . As a counterblast to this apparently final dispersal, however, a remarkable revival

40 41 42 43

Southern, Scholastic Humanism, vol. 1, pp. 21f. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., pp. 12f. Ibid., p. v.

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took place [namely] a growing appreciation of medieval civilization in all its aspects throughout the nineteenth century . . .44

The reader is told of this process of breakdown and disintegration at a very early point in Scholastic Humanism. Although most of the work consists of discussions of scholasticism when it was at its most vigorous, these discussions are thereby imbued with a sense of melancholy, even tragedy. The emphasis on scholasticism in Southern’s later works therefore, if anything, brings his ideas even more into line with traditional Romantic understandings of the medieval world than was the case with The Making of the Middle Ages. As well, Scholastic Humanism has a note of self-consciousness that is almost never heard: it is unusual enough for a professional historian to see his or her own work as a product of historical forces; but Southern goes further and sees his concerns as the products of the very historical circumstances – the demise of scholasticism – that he is writing about. Southern’s neo-Romanticism was also unusual for a professional historian. While it may not be possible or even desirable to explain the existence of this neo-Romanticism, it is clear that something unusual occurred in the midtwentieth-century Oxbridge environment that produced Lewis, Southern and Knowles. Perhaps the experience of the world wars and the demise of the British Empire led to a reaction against traditional political history and its implied valorization of the present. Southern, like Burckhardt, possessed a strong antipathy towards modernity. In particular, he lamented the ‘mass secularization’ of the twentieth century. And like the Romantics, he saw the Christian Middle Ages as the antithesis of this lamentable aspect of modern life. Southern’s nonmainstream academic status is also important. Although he was, of course, a successful professional historian, he thought of himself as a critic of standard academic attitudes and practices. This critical posture may have arisen from what was undoubtedly an exceptional knowledge of the origins and development of academic historiography in the nineteenth century.45 Southern surprises the reader by praising Ranke, whom he sees in almost medieval terms as having produced a synthesis of Romanticism and the ‘German scientific genius’.46 But he feels that in the period after Ranke professional historiography and university curricula went wrong on account of an:

44 Ibid., pp. 1f. 45 See especially Richard Southern, ‘The Shape and Substance of Academic History’, in RJ Bartlett (ed.), History and Historians: Selected Papers of RW Southern, Oxford, 2004, pp. 87–103. Southern originally delivered this paper in 1961. 46 Ibid., p. 97.

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omission of those parts of the human experience which are not related to public affairs. [This move] cut short many of the promising developments in the historical interests of the early years of the nineteenth century – the interest, for example, in art and architecture, liturgy and worship, and in most aspects of European history which have never found a secure academic home with us. Nothing is more striking about the Oxford historians of the late nineteenth century than their disregard of everything in history that could not be related to institutions and politics.47

While advocating change, Southern is not making an Annales-style case for interdisciplinary approaches and methodological advances. Neither is he suggesting that historiography can or should improve in a qualitative sense in order to tell us more about the past than ever before. He merely wants some historians to change their focus so that history might once again deal with what is important. And in doing so, historians will produce ‘works of art of a distinctive and special kind’.48 Southern’s finely balanced version of cultural history, like his medieval cultural synthesis, did not last. After it had gone there was again a perceived separation between history on the one hand, and culture and literature on the other. In fact, one almost wonders how Southern’s synthesis of history and culture could have existed in the first place given that it ran counter to the prevailing tendencies in both history and literature studies. A glimpse of the literature-studies mainstream can be seen in the works of Peter Dronke, Cambridge’s specialist in medieval Latin literature. Dronke’s widely read Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (1970), notably, advances an anti-historical central thesis. Dronke argues that ‘the emergence of the individual in poetry has no intrinsic connection with this age rather than with another’.49 Moreover, Dronke’s sense of individualism is not that of the renaissance debate; it is a matter of finding evidence of innovation in medieval poetry. Dronke’s views were not conceived or presented in terms of history. Rather, they were part of a dialogue with the ideas of German philologist Ernst Curtius (1886–1956) as expressed in his monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948). Dronke’s attempt to argue against Curtius’ theory of the literary topoi did not seek to counter the ahistoricism that was suggested by the latter’s formalist approach, and which is potentially present in all literature studies. Neither did Southern’s synthesis of history and culture have any real effect on the historiographical mainstream. Although his works were widely read and he had some followers, he did not found – or belong to – an historical 47 Ibid., p. 99. 48 Richard Southern, ‘The Historical Experience’, in Bartlett (ed.), History and Historians, pp. 104–19, esp. p. 105. 49 Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry 1000–1150, Oxford, 1970, p. 23.

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school as such. The Making of the Middle Ages was in some ways his peak; well before Scholastic Humanism things had moved on and the dominant ways of looking at the Middle Ages within academic historiography were again essentially progressive. A decisive change occurred in the 1980s with a new focus not on culture or literature, but on literacy itself and the process of cognition. In contrast with Southern’s belief in artistic and essentially descriptive historiography, this new focus on literacy and cognition was quasi-scientific. It brought with it a promise of deeper understandings and even of causal explanations. Moreover, in the case of cognition, it not only suggested an Idealist metaphysics of knowledge, but also proposed an Idealist historical vision. But Southern’s influence did linger in one sense: he contributed to the continuing and perhaps growing feeling that, whatever one’s precise views on the matter, the twelfth century had been a significant period in Western history. As a result, historians who used literacy and cognition to interpret the twelfth century did not feel obliged to justify their choice of historical period or subject matter in any overt sense. Literacy became an important academic issue largely as a result of pioneering work by the American-based British classicist Eric A Havelock (1903–1988) and Walter J Ong (1912–2003), an American Jesuit scholar. Havelock sought to counter the widespread belief that ancient Greek philosophical thinking had consisted more or less of a continuum of related ideas and approaches. Instead, he felt that a rupture occurred in Greek philosophy from the time of Plato, and that this rupture involved a shift from oral to literate forms. Although the rupture is most evident in changing philosophical definitions and arguments, Havelock believed that it amounted to a linguistic, conceptual and cultural paradigm shift.50 Havelock’s thesis influenced the communications theory of Marshall McLuhan. Not surprisingly, however, many scholars disagreed with it. But, if nothing else, it turned thinking about orality and literacy into an area of academic enquiry. This field was dominated by Havelock himself and Walter J Ong, who began academic life as one of McLuhan’s graduate students. Ong’s basic argument, which he began to develop in the late 1950s, suggests a distinction between ‘primary oral’ cultures and ‘chirographic’ or writing-based cultures. Moving from orality to literacy involves, Ong believed, entirely different ways of thinking. The two most important historical ‘events’ in this adoption of literacy and a literate worldview were the pre-historical emergence of writing itself, and the early-modern invention of printing. In his later works, such as Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of 50 See especially Havelock’s Preface to Plato, Cambridge, MA, 1963, Prologue to Greek Literacy, Cincinnati, 1971, and The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, Princeton, 1981. Havelock’s thesis rather resembles Nietzsche’s views on Greek culture and philosophy. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. Greg Whitlock, New York, 2006.

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the Word (1982), Ong also suggested that modern communications technology is bringing about a ‘new orality’ combining ‘chirographic’ culture with elements of ‘primary orality’ that are resurfacing after being dormant for centuries, perhaps millennia.51 Ong felt that one of the best ways to illustrate the differences between oral and literate cultures is to examine their respective approaches to narrative. While oral narratives are structured mnemonically, literate narratives are linear and presuppose a distinction between audience and author. This is because literate people think of themselves as existing within linear time, and literacy brings with it an ‘interiorization’ of thought. Linear narratives and conceptual ‘interiorization’ therefore overturn a priority previously assigned to memory and the spoken word. But despite the long-standing existence of writing, the definitive emergence of Ong’s literate ‘chirographic’ culture only occurred with the advent of printing. The Middle Ages therefore represent a liminal and only partially literate culture. For example, Ong suggested that medieval university disputations reveal the persistence of both orality itself and an associated belief in the pre-eminence of the spoken word.52 In The Implications of Literacy (1983) Canadian medievalist Brian Stock used Ong’s insights in order to concentrate specifically on conceptual changes in the Middle Ages.53 In effect, Stock superimposed the literacy-orality question onto the ‘renaissance problem’, and onto Lewis’ and Southern’ ideas of medieval cultural change. The Implications of Literacy describes ‘the rebirth of literacy and its effects upon the cultural life of the eleventh and twelfth centuries’.54 Stock argues that in the eleventh century a ‘different style of reflection’ arose that ‘broke irrevocably’ with Dark-Ages approaches and ‘moved towards those of early modern Europe’.55 This new style of reflection tended to question established authority and habits of thought that had been ‘maintained in the systems of human interchange by means of the spoken word.’56 Both ‘learned’ traditions and the areas of exchange between ‘popular’ and ‘learned’ contexts were decisively affected by the wider literacy-based reorientations. The ‘central motor of change’ in these potentially volatile areas of exchange was a literate interpreter of texts working within a less-literate environment. Stock suggests that this relationship between literate individuals and the less literate constituted various ‘textual communities’, in which traditional authority was questioned. The period from around 1050 to 51 Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word, New York, 1988, esp. p. 136. 52 Ibid., p. 123. 53 Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Princeton, 1983. 54 Ibid., p. 3. Emphasis added. 55 Ibid., p. 14. 56 Ibid., p. 5.

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1150 does strike one as particularly turbulent; it featured a series of conflicts and controversies. These included the investiture controversy, faith against reason, the advent of nominalism, debates about fundamental theological issues such as the Eucharist and the holy trinity, the question of church reform, and the emergence of heresy as a perceived phenomenon. Although there appear to be significant differences among these various conflicts, Stock sees them all as manifestations of a wider tension between ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ outlooks. Stock argues that increased literacy not only presented a challenge to tradition and authority, but also brought with it a conceptual and cognitive revolution. Stock’s new ‘literate’ outlook involved a reconfiguration of the relationship between the mind and the world: Experience . . . became separable, if not always separated, from ratiocination about it: and the main field of investigation turned out to be, not the raw data of sense or the Platonized ideal of pure knowledge, but rather the forms of mediation between them.57

A new interest in discovering how the natural world worked emerged as a result of this changed relationship between the mind and the world. Stock nevertheless believes that the most fundamental change associated with literacy was in the ‘process of categorization rather than the content of knowledge’. Bringing to mind Ong’s ‘interiorization’ of thought, he suggests that although the senses were the starting-point of any enquiry, ‘verification’ did not occur empirically. Rather, it took place by ‘examining the inner workings of the mind which in the medieval context meant the relation of thoughts and things.’58 One aspect of this reorientation was a separation of the literal from the allegorical. Stock argues that the eleventh-century Eucharistic debates were an early example of this particular separation.59 These debates revolved around Berengar of Tours (c.1000–1088), who appeared to have abandoned doctrinal orthodoxy by arguing against the ‘real’ or corporeal presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Berengar said – or was thought to have believed – that Christ’s presence during the mass was symbolic.60 Stock therefore associates the older ‘oral’ outlook with a literal view of things and with an associated emphasis on the actual and the corporeal. For this reason he discusses a treatise on saints’ relics (De pignoribus sanctorum) by Gilbert of Nogent (1064?–c.1125).61 Gilbert’s treatise arose from a dispute

57 58 59 60

Ibid., p. 531. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 219. See Margaret Gibson, ‘The Case Against Berengar of Tours’, Studies in Church History, 7, 1971, pp. 61–8. 61 Stock, The Implications of Literacy, pp. 244–52.

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between his monastery of Nogent and the monks at Soissons, who claimed to possess a milk-tooth of Christ. Gilbert’s apparent hostility to the cult of relics had interested a few twentieth-century scholars including Southern’s follower Colin Morris, who saw Gilbert as a rationalist and a sceptic.62 Stock broadly agrees with Morris. Gilbert’s main argument is that reason must be used by a competent churchman to decide the validity of relics. Stock points out that Gilbert contrasts reason based on texts (in litteris) with hearsay, rumour or memory, and that he associates the oral with the popular, the inauthentic and the disreputable. In other words, Gilbert is both advocating and using a style of reasoning based on texts. In many ways Gilbert’s treatise on relics provides good support for Stock’s thesis about literacy. It is nevertheless difficult to escape the feeling that Gilbert is really concerned with who is doing the reasoning, rather than what kind on reasoning is being done. Gilbert’s evident desire to distance himself from the ‘oral’ and popular is also perhaps as much a product of social climbing as a result of the changing use of texts. In addition, the more one gets to know Gilbert through reading his ‘autobiography’, the more difficult it is to see him as having been at the forefront of change in this or any other matter. In fact, Gilbert’s worldview seems the antithesis of the confident humanism of Anselm as understood by Southern. And Gilbert’s rather sad claim that he met and impressed Anselm only serves to underline his second-tier status.63 The Implications of Literacy does, however, also feature analysis of the works of indisputably significant intellectual figures such as Anselm, Abelard and Bernard. Stock’s use of Anselm in particular merits some discussion because it allows a comparison with Southern’s approach. Stock begins his consideration of 62 Scholars have debated whether Gilbert was a ‘rationalist’ before his time, or a ‘moralizing biblical exegete’. See B Monod, ‘De la methode historique chez Guibert de Nogent’, Revue historique, 84, 1904, pp. 51–70; B Landry ‘Les idees morals du XII siecle’, Revue des tours et conferences, 1938–9, 2, pp. 343–62; J Chaurand, ‘La conception de l’histoire de Guibert de Nogent’, Cahiers de civilization medievale, 8, 1965, pp. 381–95; C Morris, ‘A Critique of Popular Religion: Guibert of Nogent on the Relics of the Saints’, Studies in Church History, 8, 1971, pp. 55–60. 63 Gilbert’s De vita sua sive monodiarum suarum libri tres, trans. CC Swinton Bland, ed. John F Benton as Self and Society in Medieval France: the Memoirs of Abbot Gilbert of Nogent (1064?–c.1126), New York, 1970, esp. p. 434. See also Paul J Archambault (trans.) A Monk’s Confession: the Memoirs of Gilbert of Nogent, Pennsylvania University Press, 1996. For assessments of Gilbert himself see John Benton, ‘The Personality of Guibert of Nogent’, Psychoanalytic Review, 57, 1970–1971, pp. 562–86; Jonathon Kantor, ‘A Psychohistorical Source: The “Memoirs” of Abbot Gilbert of Nogent’, Journal of Medieval History, 2:4, 1976, pp. 281–304; and CD Ferguson, ‘Autobiography as Therapy: Guibert of Nogent, Peter Abelard, and the Making of Medieval Autobiography’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 13:2, 1983, pp. 187–212.

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Anselm with the unexpected suggestion that an intellect of Anselm’s calibre is not ‘reducible to a combination of cultural forces active at the time’. Stock nevertheless believes that because Anselm ‘returns so often to basic problems involving written language’ he is an excellent illustration of the central argument of The Implications of Literacy.64 Although Anselm’s De grammatico and De veritate (both written c.1080–1088) deal specifically with language and signification, Stock concentrates on the better-known Monologion (1076) and Prosologion (1077–1078). He suggests that the Monologion represents a shift from ‘oral’ to ‘literate’ insofar as within the work Anselm is converting ‘ordinary conversation’ into a ‘logically coherent discourse or ‘internal conversation’.65 The Monologion certainly bears no resemblance to a spoken conversation; it is in the form of an equipollent proof in which the term ‘God’ is successively redefined until a suitable starting point for the Prosologion is reached. Yet the Prosologion and the later Cur Deus Homo do take the dialogue form. Stock, however, regards Anselm’s use of dialogue as a kind of ‘internal conversation’. He also suggests that Anselm’s transition from the Monologion to the Prosologion represents a ‘second attempt to move from a silent text to one that is written down’.66 The Prosologion features Anselm’s famous ontological argument which purports to prove that the very act of thinking about God means that God must exist. The argument hinges on the relationship between mental existence and real existence. It therefore seems to fit quite well with Stock’s overall thesis about the effects of literacy on cognition and conceptualisation. Stock, however, goes further and attempts to see Anselm’s dialogue-style presentation of the argument not only as an ‘internal conversation’ but also as a clash between orality and literacy. Anselm’s interlocutor ‘the Fool’ cannot understand that possession of the concept ‘God’ in intellectu entails the real existence of God. According to Stock, the Fool is therefore ‘a kind of illiterate’.67 It could nevertheless be argued just as plausibly that the Fool’s adherence to a gap between mental and physical existence – a distinction between verba and res – marks him out as, if anything, a more obvious case of the effects of literacy than Anselm himself. How does Stock’s portrayal of Anselm compare with Southern’s? In his short appraisal of Cur Deus Homo Stock is content largely to repeat Southern by suggesting that in this work Anselm was attempting to create a ‘man-centred [sic] theology’.68 This is by no means inconsistent with Stock’s main argument, of course. Yet Cur Deus Homo does not in any obvious sense bear out Stock’s belief 64 65 66 67 68

Stock, The Implications of Literacy, p. 331. Ibid., pp. 333, 343. Ibid., pp. 343f. Ibid., p. 346. Ibid., p. 333.

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that Anselm ‘returns so often to basic problems involving written language’. While Southern was content to pick a single – though important – work from Anselm’s oeuvre, Stock’s thesis thus involved a claim about the entire oeuvre that is difficult to substantiate. In fact, not a great deal of what Stock says conclusively demonstrates that his thesis is correct. While Southern’s neo-Romantic cultural-history approach is less vulnerable to this sort of criticism because it does not claim so much, Stock’s more technical subject matter and argument need relatively solid evidence. Simply put, Stock’s approach is more like science than art. Accordingly, Stock’s progressive historical vision includes an Idealist metaphysics of knowledge. Both Stock’s subject-matter and his methods are meant to be taken as improvements on previous approaches. And like the Annales historians, this sort of improvement involves using insights and techniques not traditionally associated with historiography – as when Stock tells his readers that The Implications of Literacy ‘cross[es] the boundaries of several disciplines’.69 It is, however, Stock’s thesis itself that most reveals the Idealist nature of his thinking. As we saw, Stock argues that as a result of literacy the mind became separated from, and yet at the same time constitutive of, the world. This is pure Kant. Indeed, it might be said that with a subject-object dichotomy, a distance between the self and the world, the idea of the constructedness of phenomenal reality, and a sense that a process of categorization is fundamental to this constructedness, Stock has discovered that the basic components of Kantian thought existed in the twelfth century. Stock’s technical and quasi-scientific approach to medieval conceptual change was taken further by Charles Radding in A World Made by Men: Cognition and Society 400–1200 (1985). In 1973 Radding completed a doctorate under Joseph R. Strayer at Princeton. Radding’s doctoral thesis, The Administration of the Aids in Normandy, 1360–1389, reveals Strayer’s orientation towards institutional and administrative history. In 1978, however, Radding aligned himself with the Annales movement in an article on medieval mentalities that used a ‘cognitivestructural’ approach.70 This change of direction led to A World Made by Men, his first major work. A World Made by Men is consistent with Stock’s ideas about medieval conceptual change. But Radding makes innovative use of cognitive science and developmental psychology in order to understand the nature of this change. The overarching argument of A World Made by Men is that between 1050 and 1150 ‘European society for the first time took on many of the features that

69 Ibid., p. vii. 70 Charles M Radding, ‘The Evolution of Medieval Mentalities: A Cognitive-Structural Approach’, American Historical Review, 1978. Later, in 1988, Radding co-wrote an article that was published in Annales itself: William W Clark and Charles M Radding, ‘Abélard et le batisseur de Saint-Denis: Études parallèles dans l’histoire des disciplines’.

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continue to characterize Western civilization in our own time’.71 Echoing Stock and even Southern, Radding suggests that this change involved a fundamental cognitive reorientation, the most important feature of which was an increased reliance on reason. Theology and law best reveal this new emphasis on reason, with changes in these areas again representing a challenge to tradition and authority. Radding’s new mode of cognition challenged the medieval status quo because it featured lateral or ‘peer-directed’, rather than hierarchical, reasoning. Radding explains that his model of cognitive reorientation is based on the philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and on the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Radding takes from Vico the idea that people ‘create’ their worlds, and that different societies therefore exist because people think differently.72 Vico became fashionable in the last quarter of the twentieth century largely on account of his belief that outlooks are explicable in terms of languages.73 While Radding does not take up this point in any overt sense, he uses the Vico-inspired notion that ‘when . . . ideas change, people remake their societies’ as a starting-point for his enquiries. Vico thought that history consisted of a pattern of cycles that lasted until the advent of Christianity, after which there was progress leading to the present. But although Radding also believes in progress, his model of the historical process is based more directly on Piaget’s theories of the cognitive development of children. According to Piaget an individual’s cognitive faculties develop in distinct stages according to a process that does not rely on external stimuli.74 The worldview of children, for example, is therefore not created or even affected by how their parents explain things to them. Radding believes that the conceptual reorientation of the eleventh and twelfth centuries resembles the attainment of the final stages of Piaget’s developmental scheme.75 And so from the eleventh century ‘departures from the reasoning of the early Middle Ages’ are discernible.76 The first example of these departures is Fulbert of Chartres (d. 1028), whose letters demonstrate ‘peer-directed reasoning at a personal level’.77 Like Stock, Radding attempts to relate his conceptual reorientation to the political and intellectual controversies that broke out in the eleventh 71 Charles M Radding, A World Made By Men: Cognition and Society 400–1200, Carolina, 1985, pp. 30f. 72 Ibid., esp. pp. vii, 331. 73 The major work in the twentieth-century ‘discovery’ of Vico was Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, London, 1976. See also Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V White (eds), Giambattista Vico: an International Symposium, Baltimore, 1969. 74 A World Made By Men (pp. 263–79) has an Appendix called ‘A Short Course in Piagetian Psychology’. 75 Ibid., esp. pp. 255–62. 76 Ibid., p. 155. 77 Ibid., pp. 159–66.

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century. For instance, Radding equates the church reform movements with his older outlook, and he sees the investiture controversy as a struggle between two forms of this older outlook. He nevertheless suggests that debate surrounding the question of investitures may have provoked intellectual developments that included the emergence of his new outlook. This is a more nuanced interpretation of the investiture controversy than Stock’s. It also fits better with the evidence insofar as Pope Gregory VII hardly seems to represent a mode of thought that valorizes reason, and leading reformers including Peter Damian (c. 1007–1072) were generally hostile towards the use of logic.78 The best-known logician of this period was Peter Abelard (1079–1142). Radding regards Abelard’s Ethics as the purest example of his new outlook. Ethics, which Abelard wrote late in his life, is generally seen as significant because of its emphasis on intentionality. Radding suggests that in Ethics Abelard brings ‘to the relationship between man [sic] and God the expectation of reciprocal respect that had been taking shape on a human level in the eleventh century.’ He maintains that evidence of this process became ‘abundant around 1100: in Anselm’s work on the incarnation of Christ.’79 Radding thus broadly follows Southern’s view of Anselm, though perhaps without making him such a pivotal figure. Radding’s Anselm remains in some ways a part of the process of eleventh- and twelfth-century conceptual change, rather than either a high-point of that process or a cause of it. The eleventh- and twelfth-century conceptual change that Radding describes represents the beginnings of modernity insofar as he believes that on a fundamental level we moderns still think in the same way as Abelard and Anselm. Radding thus proposed significant continuity between the present and the past. This sense of continuity is, moreover, augmented by a sense of both epistemological and historical progress. While bringing cognitive science to history suggests a progressive view of knowledge about the past, applying Piaget’s categories to history means that Radding advances an Idealist and even recognizably Hegelian model of the historical process. It will be remembered that Michelet and Hegel saw historical epochs as stages in an individual’s life, and thought of modernity in terms of a wise and vigorous old age. Radding perhaps goes even further (back) and implies that conceptual maturity had been achieved by the twelfth century. Nevertheless Michelet, Hegel, and Radding all seem to agree that the historical process possesses – or possessed – a telos directed towards the present. Radding’s model of the historical process is significant in a history-of-historiography sense because this was the last time that such things were said and taken seriously. In fact, Radding’s views on the historical 78 See Irven M Resnick, ‘Attitudes towards Philosophy and Dialectic during the Gregorian Reform’, Journal of Religious History, 16:2, 1990, pp. 115–25. 79 Radding, A World Made By Men, pp. 212f.

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process coincided conceptually and temporally with those of Francis Fukuyama as expressed in the latter’s 1989 essay ‘The End of History’, which was expanded into The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Fukuyama thought that the end of the Cold War had brought about ‘the end of history’, by which he meant that humanity’s ideological and political ‘evolution’ was complete in a triumph of Western liberal democracy. Although these views caused a considerable stir at the time, they can now be seen both as a product of particular historical circumstances, and as an overtly Hegelian understanding of history. Perhaps ‘the last man’ in the title of Fukuyama’s book should have been ‘the last Hegelian’, for from that point grand neo-Hegelian historical visions have had no place in academia. Completing a process begun by the Annales historians, Idealist metaphysical views of the historical process now virtually disappeared, leaving behind an ascendant Idealist metaphysics of knowledge about the past, and a new ‘Rankean’ particularism, both of which characterize current historiography. And in the meantime Southern’s synthesis of history and culture had come to appear as out of date as his scholastic humanism; it too had dissolved in the face of a new nominalism in the form of post-modern fragmentation.

9

The Shock of the Old: Medieval History and the Formation of the Current Academic Environment Recent medieval history features an almost bewildering variety of themes and topics. As well as more-or-less traditional areas of enquiry, over the last two decades medievalists have been working on subjects as diverse as bodies, mysticism, angels, animals, deviance, demons, monsters, alterity, abjection, cooking, blood, pus, pain, death, sexuality and changing academic understandings of the Middle Ages.1 There are several likely reasons for this diversity. A great deal of academic work is now directly or indirectly influenced by Postmodernism, with its metaphysics of fragmentation and sense of groundlessness. Variety, multiple perspectives and ongoing re-use and re-interpretation are therefore encouraged. Moreover, as we saw, the triumph of Annales history in its fractured (and already post-modern) third-generation form combined with the rise of women’s history to question the subject matter of traditional academic history, and to suggest a range of alternative areas of enquiry. Although it is easy to feel that diversity might be the only defining feature of the current academic environment, this chapter will show that some thematic and conceptual patterns are nevertheless evident within recent scholarship about the Middle Ages. It will be suggested that these patterns can in part be explained by reference to the same factors – Annales history, women’s history and, especially, recent Continental philosophy – that produced the diversity in the first place. Post-structuralism has provided the language for a great deal of academic work on the Middle Ages; its influence has led to some notable additions to the canon of ideas that we use to think about those times. But there is an irony here because the poststructuralist ideas that fed this recent academic diversity were usually radical, corrosive and, in our sense, aesthetic, while the attitudes of the historians in question were – and have remained – progressive. Accordingly, this chapter will suggest that it is also possible to see the diversity that characterizes the current environment as a continuation of the drive towards ever narrower specialization that began in the nineteenth century with the professionalization of the study of history. This line of thought includes the proposition that current 1 For some further (relatively early) examples of this diversity see Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M Spiegel, ‘The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies’, American Historical Review, 13, 1998, pp. 677–704, esp. pp. 699–700.

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medieval history is informed by the same Idealist metaphysics of knowledge that has characterized professional historiography since the time of Ranke. In other words, despite the ‘philosophical’ gulf between Post-structuralism and mainstream academic work, historians embraced Post-structuralism because its metaphysics of fragmentation dovetailed with their tendency towards specialization, and because its lexicon of new terms, methods and topics supported their Idealism-based belief in improvement. Within its overall aim of coming to grips with current academic approaches to the Middle Ages, this chapter will therefore concentrate on the relationship between recent radical Continental philosophy and mainstream academia. Although Post- structuralism has been explained often enough, it seems appropriate to begin with a brief description of the elements within that movement that have had particular relevance to the doing of medieval history. We saw that Post-structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s with Jacques Derrida’s criticisms of the hitherto dominant Structuralism, and that Derrida’s ideas coincided to some extent with the thinking of Claude LéviStrauss, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Of these, Derrida and, especially, Foucault have most decisively influenced changing academic attitudes towards the Middle Ages. Although he had been teaching and writing since the mid 1950s, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) did not come to prominence until after the 1961 publication of Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. In 1964 an abridged English-language version of this work was published as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Meanwhile Foucault had completed Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (1963).2 The main argument of these early works is that there is no progress in the human and, by extension, the natural sciences. Knowledge and truth in these areas are constructed within systems of language and signification. Accordingly, our attitudes towards madness and sickness, and how we treat or cure these phenomena, do not represent advances on the ways of previous eras. Rather, they are products of our particular linguistic and conceptual matrix. Even drawing connections between madness and mental illness – which many of us might take to be timelessly valid – is a recent view of things.3 Being groundless, these systems of signification can and do change. Foucault’s outlook was therefore both structuralist and deeply historical. In fact, all of his works can be seen as attempts to define various eras 2 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. AM Sheridan Smith, London, 1973. 3 Foucault had made this point in Maladie mentale et personnalité, which was published in 1954 and revised in 1961. See Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. AM Sheridan Smith, New York, 1976, esp. p. 69.

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by analysing their historically contingent ideas, experiences and relationships as determined by the linguistic and conceptual matrix in question. And Foucault’s better-known later works can therefore be seen as elaborations of the themes first suggested in his early works on madness and medicine. Foucault’s best-known and most influential works are The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Discipline and Punish (1975). In The Order of Things he announced his ‘archaeological method’, which was intended as a replacement for traditional history insofar as it questioned accepted periodization and conventional attitudes towards knowledge. Archaeology thus conceived sought to reveal the nature of the conceptual structures of various eras including our own. Coining a memorable neologism, Foucault referred to the structures themselves as epistêmês, and he argued that there have been four distinct epistêmês since the late Middle Ages. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault refined his thinking about these epistêmês by focusing on discourse or discursive formations, and by introducing the concept of the archive, which seems to have been an even broader network of determinants than the epistêmê itself. Although Discipline and Punish continued this exploration of conceptual structures, it featured an important new emphasis on power, especially the ways in which it acts upon perceived deviance, and the ways in which it is expressed in institutions such as prisons and schools. Analysing changes in how power was used and thought about now represented Foucault’s principal means of understanding the various modern and pre-modern eras, and the differences between them. In an immensely influential argument, he suggested that there was a special relationship between power and the body – that the body was somehow a site for, or constructed by, a ‘mechanics of power’. Foucault’s unfinished last work, The History of Sexuality, amplified this theme by presenting the entire history of sexuality as a ‘history of bodies’.4 The underlying argument of The History of Sexuality is that, as with madness, sexuality is historically contingent and determined by the conceptual structures of the day. Sexuality and gender are therefore not, Foucault argued, universal or natural. There have been many disagreements over what Foucault really said and what he really meant, of course. And it is probably fair to say that these disagreements, together with his authoritative yet opaque mode of expression, have increased his appeal. But perhaps the area of real uncertainty with Foucault pertains not so much to what he said as such, but to the status of what he said. Simply put, if his historical vision excludes not only progress, but also continuity, and if all knowledge is constructed, how can anything meaningful be said about the past, or even, for that matter, about the present? On the one hand, Foucault is 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York, 1978, esp. pp. 151f.

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thus open to the criticism that his own (structuralist) approach undermines what he is actually saying. But on the other hand, there is the possibility that he might be presenting us with a Nietzschian mytho-poetic form of history. Foucault was heavily indebted to Nietzsche. In a 1971 essay called ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, notably, he analysed Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (1887) and suggested that his own histories were genealogies in Nietzsche’s sense.5 In fact, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ and the histories that came after it are often bracketed together and referred to as Foucault’s ‘genealogical period’ in order to distinguish them from his earlier ‘archaeological’ works. Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s ‘genealogy’ is almost the diametrical opposite of the usual meaning of the word. Although using an organic metaphor of branching, Foucault’s form of genealogy is meant to undermine the idea that current phenomena and practices have knowable origins, and can be seen in terms of directionality, progress or telos. If Foucault’s histories were, as Hayden V White suggested in a seminal article, informed by Romanticism and Nietzsche, then they were intended – at least in part – as histories that sought by virtue of their poetic qualities to ‘defamiliarize’ both the past and the present.6 And if this is so, Foucault’s histories are closer to Derrida’s view of things than their well-known disagreements would suggest. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was the founder and leader of Post-structuralism. Although, as we saw, Derrida became famous on the strength of his criticisms of the Structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and Foucault, this criticism was only a subset of a wider critique of the Western intellectual tradition. Derrida felt that philosophy and the human sciences are incapable of providing either the certainty or the increases in knowledge that have defined work in these areas. Certainty and knowledge are chimerical because there is no transcendental perspective from which they can be grasped. We are all embedded in our own language: everything is language, and language is always metaphorical. In these matters Derrida would seem to be largely in agreement with Foucault. But Derrida argued that belief in such a transcendental perspective underpinned even Structuralism.7 His radical view of language, moreover, militated against Foucault’s sense of epistemic coherence because, according to Derrida, language is anything but coherent. Rather, the metaphorical nature of language means that meaning itself is unstable. Accordingly, work in the human sciences consists – for the most part, unwittingly – of a continual play of re-interpretations, and of a 5 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York, 1984, pp. 76–100. 6 See Hayden V White, ‘Foucault Decoded: Notes from the Underground’, History and Theory, 12(1), 1973, pp. 23–54. 7 Derrida’s criticism of Structuralism is encapsulated in a 1966 paper delivered at Johns Hopkins University. See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London, 1978, pp. 278–94.

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succession of rhetorical strategies. Analysing the human sciences is therefore a form of textual analysis. And in his own analyses Derrida’s main tactic, known as ‘deconstruction’, was to show how texts thus conceived actually contradict and undermine themselves in the very process of aspiring to knowledge, objectivity and transparency. Most notably, Derrida argued that the Western intellectual tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomies such as truth and art, knowledge and opinion, reason and emotion, and so on.8 These dichotomies are self-serving, hierarchical, and over-simplistic in a powerfully rhetorical way: they repress one of the elements in question, and they suppress multiplicity and play. The history of Western thought is therefore really a history of exclusions and suppressions that arise from the ‘sacrificial structure’ of Western thought itself. Perhaps the most important ‘sacrifice’ in the history of Western philosophy is the distinction between speech and writing. Derrida argued that speech, rather than writing, has been aligned with immediacy and truth. And so in his own works he sought to ‘revalorize’ writing by means of an ostentatious literariness. Derrida’s principal area of influence is usually thought to be literature and literature studies, rather than history. His interest in writing, language and textual analysis, and the highly literary nature of his works, support this perception. Derrida’s literariness is nevertheless important for history because it may be seen as an extension of the Romantic and Nietzschean idea that the human sciences including history really are, and should be approached as, forms of literature. Moreover, the key concept in Derrida’s deconstruction – the idea that a text will inevitably undermine itself – has had significant implications for historians of the Middle Ages, not least because it has featured in the analysis of medieval ‘texts’ including, but not confined to, literature. Derrida’s influence among historians has, however, also extended further than this form of textual analysis. Part of Derrida’s deconstruction of Western thought was the idea that the elements that are suppressed as part of the formation of dichotomies or ‘binarisms’ will, under analysis, return to disrupt the privileged status of the primary element. This idea was important for historians. Derrida himself suggested that ‘a deconstructive understanding of history consists . . . in transforming things exhibiting writings, genres, textual strata . . . exhibiting institutional, economic, political “realities” that have been repulsed, repressed, devalorized, misscriticized, delegitemated [sic], occulted by hegemonic canons . . .’9 This aspect of Derrida’s thinking strengthened the already existing feeling that previously ignored individuals, groups, and phenomena should become the main focus for historians. Borrowing 8 See esp. Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, 1982, pp. 207–71. 9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Enquiry, 15, 1989, p. 821.

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from the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), Derrida thought of these previously repressed elements in terms of ‘the other’ and ‘otherness’.10 And from the 1980s this idea of otherness or ‘alterity’ joined the canon of ideas through which historians have thought about and depicted the Middle Ages. But by the time Derrida’s ideas began to affect how the Middle Ages were understood, Foucault’s works had already influenced many historians. Although Robert Mandrou and Ferdinand Braudel enthusiastically reviewed Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique in Annales in 1962, Foucault was largely ignored by historians until the 1970s. Even the huge popularity of The Order of Things (1966) failed to translate into any discernible influence on the discipline of history.11 It is possible that this work and its successor, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), were too opaque and gnomic to have any real effect among working historians. Whatever the case, things changed with the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975). Although still written in the trademark ex-cathedra style, this work seemed more intelligible than its predecessors. It was also more obviously historical in terms of both its argument and its subject matter. By then, moreover, Foucault’s earlier works had been brought to the attention of English-speaking historians through articles by Hayden V White and George Huppert in the journal History and Theory.12 And in 1977 White reviewed Discipline and Punish in the ultra-mainstream American Historical Review.13 The publication of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which appeared in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, maintained the momentum gained with Discipline and Punish, and suggested – or legitimated – further areas of enquiry for historians. By the end of the 1970s a series of discernibly ‘Foucauldian’ historical works had emerged. The subject matter of this new historiographical sub-genre either overlapped with, or was derived from, Foucault’s works; the main themes were insanity, sexuality, punishment and deviance. Most of these Foucauldian works also followed Foucault himself by dealing with the earlymodern period. Prominent Foucauldian works from this period include Michael Ignatieff ’s A Just Measure of Pain: the Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution (1978), Michael MacDonald’s Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing

10 See esp. Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: an Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, Writing and Difference, trans. Allan Bass, Chicago, 1978, pp. 79–153. 11 Allan Megill, ‘The Reception of Foucault by Historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48, 1987, pp. 117–41. 12 Hayden V White, ‘Foucault Decoded: Notes from the Underground’, History and Theory, 12, 1, 1973, pp. 23–54; George Huppert, ‘Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault’, History and Theory, 13, 1974, pp. 191–207. White praised Foucault while Huppert was highly critical. 13 American Historical Review, 82, 1977, pp. 605f.

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in Seventeenth-Century England (1981)14 and John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (1980), the first recognizably Foucauldian work to deal with the Middle Ages. While more and more works were written in accordance with these Foucauldian themes, historians also began to demonstrate the influence of Foucault and others by applying Post-structuralism to further areas of enquiry. As well, it became increasingly fashionable to talk about Post-structuralism itself within historical works – usually in a ‘methodological’ introduction. R Howard Bloch’s Etymologies and Genealogies: a Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (1983) is a striking example of these tendencies. Bloch begins his introduction by discussing the figure of Merlin as depicted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain and the thirteenth-century Huth Merlin or Suite du Merlin. Bloch demonstrates the influence of both Derrida and Foucault by arguing that in these texts Merlin reveals ‘the pluralistic possibilities of writing’ and ‘poses generally the question of the relation between knowledge and power’. He then states that the characteristics of Merlin as depicted suggest: the subtle beginnings of what might be called a literary anthropology of the Middle Ages. I say ‘anthropology’ because Merlin’s . . . vision of a society which, as his lack of paternity infers, is radically other takes at its own point of departure the comprehensive index of cultural elements and the deduction of its innermost laws. I say ‘literary’ because the vehicle of such a supposedly scientific undertaking is itself poetic and indissoluble from the polyvalent capacity of language both to inform – to maintain its ‘transparence’ – and to delude.15

Readers will recognize Foucauldian, Derridean, and even Nietzschean, concepts within this short passage. Its style is also significant. For it is difficult to avoid the impression that Bloch was trying to replicate the density and the authoritative tone of Foucault’s and Derrida’s works. Bloch’s idea of a literary anthropology of the Middle Ages serves as a starting point for a lengthy discussion of Poststructuralism, and of the position of his project among the key concepts and works of that movement. Bloch begins with Lévi-Strauss and Derrida. With the latter’s well-known criticism of Lévi-Strauss in mind, Bloch suggests that his own project gives rise to ‘the possibility of a historically situated reconciliation between the two’. He then aligns his project specifically with ‘the monumental work of M. Foucault’ because Foucault’s work is also ‘situated in the disjunctive 14 For further examples see Megill, op. cit., pp. 131f. 15 R Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: a Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages, Chicago, 1983, p. 5. Original emphasis.

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space between Lévi-Strauss and Derrida’. Only in the last page and a half of the 29-page introduction is the actual argument of Etymologies and Genealogies elaborated. Even here Bloch states that his ‘closer look at the medieval language arts’ will, ‘to invoke Foucaultian terminology, [reveal] not merely one representation among others but the representation of the laws of representation’. And when it is finally unveiled, Bloch’s argument – that within medieval literature and medieval society one can discern certain structural relationships that can be characterized as ‘genealogical’ – also turns out to be both ‘Foucaultian’, and Nietzschean via Foucault. Etymologies and Genealogies was very successful. It earned high praise from reviewers including Brian Stock, Petrarch specialist Nicholas Mann and even Foucault himself, who described it as ‘important and ambitious’ and opined that Bloch had ‘completely achieved his aim’.16 It was published in paperback form in 1986, and translated into French in 1988. Bloch obtained a chair at Berkeley in 1985. He then produced another work on Old French literature, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (1986). In 1990 he became Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. In the following year his Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love was published. Bloch described Medieval Misogyny as ‘an essentially feminist topic’.17 Being a ‘discourse of misogyny’ and an analysis of the construction of gender, Medieval Misogyny represented a combination of women’s history and Post-structuralism. This combination, placed within a medieval context, had already come into vogue on the strength of Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1988). As revealed in her presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1997, Bynum sees herself and her academic career as sprung from the 1960s. She completed her BA degree at the University of Michigan in l962, and submitted her PhD in 1969 at Harvard, where she taught until 1976. During that period the influence of the women’s movement of the 1960s began to affect mainstream academia including medieval history.18 This influence can be seen in a number of essays about medieval women published from the late 1970s, including Janet Nelson’s ‘Queens as Jezebels’.19 Nelson used Gregory of Tours’ sixth-century 16 The favourable reception given to Etymologies and Genealogies can be glimpsed through the excerpts on the back cover of the 1986 paperback reprint. Foucault’s is at the the top. 17 R Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love, Chicago, 1991, p. 1. 18 For discussions of this process see Susan Mosher-Stuard (ed.), Women in Medieval History and Historiography, Philadelphia, 1987. 19 Janet Nelson, ‘Queens as Jezebels: the Careers of Brunhild and Bathild in Merovingian History’, in D Baker (ed.), Medieval Women: Essays Presented to Professor Rosalind Hill, Oxford, 1978, pp. 219–53.

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History of the Franks in order to assess the place of women in Merovingian society. She argued that in such a relatively disordered society the fortunes of a woman – even, or perhaps especially, a queen – were particularly precarious because they relied ‘on her personal, sexual association with a husband whose interests or fancy could all too easily attach him to her supplanter’. Although Nelson used a well-known historical source in order to work within a new area and to draw new conclusions, her article was not presented in any overt sense as a revision or criticism of previous approaches. Nevertheless, as with the Annales historians, defining oneself in opposition to established ideas and practices became an important gesture for this generation of women’s historians. Joan Kelly-Gadol’s ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ (1977) is a case in point.20 The essay begins in the Annales manner by saying that ‘one of the tasks of women’s history is to call into question the accepted schemes of periodization.’ KellyGadol’s main proposition is that ‘events that further the historical development of men . . . have quite different, even opposite, effects on women.’ The Italian Renaissance is an example of this general trend. Kelly-Gadol understands the Renaissance as a ‘social and cultural expression’ predicated on a reorganization of Italian society ‘along modern lines’ that occurred from around 1350. And she argues that ‘these developments affected women adversely, so that there was no renaissance for women – at least not during the Renaissance’.21 Caroline Bynum’s ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual’ (1980) replicated the critical posture of Kelly-Gadol’s essay, and overlapped with its subject matter to some extent.22 As readers will have noted, Kelly-Gadol’s understanding of the Italian Renaissance was not only rather straightforward, but also unfashionable. In contrast, although we can now see that its days were numbered, Bynum’s target was an idea with some currency and standing at the time. Her choice of target and her approach to the issue also led to a far more sophisticated piece of work. In ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual’ Bynum shows awareness not only of changes in ideas about the Italian Renaissance, but also of the process by which traditional renaissance categories such as individualism had been applied to the Middle Ages. She suggests that the idea of the emergence of individualism in the twelfth century has two main foci: one based on the analysis of (mainly secular) literature, and the other pertaining to religious sensibilities. Bynum’s essay deals with the latter category. Although she sees Richard Southern

20 Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, Boston, 1977, pp. 176–201. 21 Ibid., esp. p. 176. 22 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 31, 1980, pp. 1–17. Reprinted in Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley, 1982, pp. 82–109.

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as the main proponent of this twelfth-century religious individualism, her argument engages more directly with the generation of historians who broadly followed or extended Southern’s ideas, especially Colin Morris and John F Benton. Bynum’s argument has two elements: Just as the [twelfth-century] discovery of the self is not a twentieth-century awareness of personality, so the emphasis on models, types, and ways of affiliating with groups cannot be the modern sense of personal lifestyle. Not only is it possible to specify something of the particular nature of twelfth-century culture by the phrase ‘discovery of self;’ it is possible to delineate the period even more precisely when ‘discovery of the self ’ is coupled with . . . ‘discovery of consciously chosen community.’23

First, then, the twelfth century ‘discovered’ the group as well as the individual. Second, the twelfth-century individual was in any case quite unlike the modern individual. Bynum elaborates the first of these propositions in a nuanced manner by looking at changing corporate metaphors. The second proposition is, however, stated rather than demonstrated. It is nevertheless the more interesting of the two, not least because it explicitly denies continuity between the Middle Ages and later eras including our own. It is also significant as an early statement of what would become the unifying theme of Bynum’s later works, namely the principle of alterity. These later works, including Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987), dealt broadly with the construction of gender and the issue of corporeality or the body. But the increasingly outré subject matter of these works – Bynum ended up writing about blood24 – seemed as though it were designed to demonstrate the extreme and irreducible otherness of the Middle Ages vis-à-vis the present. Holy Feast and Holy Fast, which has remained Bynum’s best-known and most important work, reflected her developing interest in gender and late-medieval spirituality. Its subject matter also had a polemical thrust insofar as talking about the significance of food was meant to counter a potentially excessive interest in sexuality among historians influenced by feminism. Bynum believed that this interest in sexuality meant that historians were projecting contemporary concerns onto those of medieval women. Alterity was therefore being undermined. As well, Holy Feast and Holy Fast seems to have been written, to some extent at least, as a response to Rudolph M Bell’s Holy Anorexia (1985). Bell had argued that ‘some holy women in late medieval times were described in terms that were similar in important ways to clinical descriptions of modern-day suffers of 23 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 108. 24 Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, Philadelphia, 2007.

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anorexia nervosa’.25 He used saints’ lives or vitae, especially that of Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), in order to identify three kinds of medieval anorexic behaviour. He suggested that two of these corresponded to modern forms of the disorder, while the third was still ‘relevant’ to how we categorize and treat anorexia. Bell’s historical argument was that the anorexic behaviour of these late medieval women occurred ‘in response to the patriarchal social structures in which they were placed’.26 This argument concurred with the tenets of women’s history as derived from both feminism, and the construction-of-gender focus of Poststructuralism. Yet Bell’s approach failed egregiously to take alterity into account; he seemed to be suggesting not only that we can understand the medieval women in question, but also that some people today behave in more or less the same way. This is why, one suspect, the preface to Holy Feast and Holy Fast reads as a rallying call for the principle of alterity. Bynum does, to be sure, praise Bell’s ‘quantitative’ research. She suggests, moreover, that readers of Holy Feast and Holy Fast and Holy Anorexia might find that the two works, with their different approaches, complement each other. But in case the subject matter of Holy Feast and Holy Fast were not in itself a sufficient demonstration of alterity – and Bell had shown that it might not be – Bynum felt it necessary to warn her readers in very direct terms against thinking that they might see things in the same way as the medieval women that she was writing about.27 Bynum’s commitment to the principle of alterity determined the structure and pace of Holy Feast and Holy Fast as well as its subject matter. More than half the book is taken up with a vast range of examples illustrating the ways in which medieval women thought of food in relation to their religiosity. This heaping up of examples is based on the proposition that ‘to convince modern readers of the decidedly bizarre behaviour of medieval women, it is necessary to give the evidence’.28 Bynum draws on saints’ lives and other sources written by men as well as the ‘women’s own writings’. The women in question range from well-known saints and mystics like Catherine of Siena to relatively obscure – at least before Bynum wrote about them – figures including Mary of Oignies (1167–1213) and Lidwina of Schiedam (1380–1433). Many of Bynum’s examples pertain to women’s attitudes to the Eucharist and their desire to eat nothing but the consecrated host. The crescendo of alterity occurs, however, in the fifth chapter with a description of the behaviour of Catherine of Siena, who derived spiritual edification from various

25 Rudolph M Bell, Holy Anorexia, Chicago, 1985, p. ix. 26 Ibid., p. xii. 27 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley, 1987. See especially pp. xiii–xv. Bynum describes how she and Bell exchanged parts of their respective manuscripts. 28 Ibid., p. xv.

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nauseating practices including drinking pus.29 Bynum waits until the book’s sixth chapter, which begins its third and last section, before offering any explanation for such behaviour. Her main explanation is that ‘eating, feeding, and not eating enabled [medieval women] to control their bodies and their world’.30 This explanation is again accompanied by many examples which are drawn this time not only from history, but also from anthropology and from various modern cultures. These examples serve to associate women with the preparation of food and therefore, by extension, with control over food. In fact, Bynum argues that food is the only area in which medieval women had more-or-less undisputed control. Therefore, by fasting and limiting themselves to certain kinds of food, medieval women were expressing and exerting themselves in the best – and perhaps the only – ways open to them, that is to say in the area that they controlled in the first place. Bynum then fills out these explanations with an analysis of changes in the symbolism of food. This analysis includes the idea of ‘symbolic reversal’ in heavily gendered symbols. But as though fearing that all this explanation and analysis might militate against the principle of alterity, Bynum is careful to finish her analysis of symbolism with a discussion of what the symbols meant to the medieval women themselves, rather than what they mean to us. And so, in a triumph of alterity, the ‘bizarre’ behaviour of medieval women that is the subject matter of Holy Feast and Holy Fast leads back to a survey of how medieval women interpreted their own behaviour. Writing about alterity nevertheless raises methodological and philosophyof-history questions. Bynum made a point of setting out her own position on these matters in the introduction to her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1991).31 She suggests that her essays ‘arise fundamentally from medieval material, not from contemporary theoretical perspectives’. Establishing some sort of distance between her historical work and these ‘theoretical perspectives’ seems to be her main aim: I have not aligned myself explicitly with any current dispensation. In all my work I have struggled first with medieval texts, and discovered only subsequently that my formulation of their significance has resonances with (although also differences from) such theoretical positions as postmodern feminism, deconstruction, or poststructural symbolic anthropology. Nonetheless it would be churlish not to admit that what I am doing . . . fits many of the prescriptions of the ‘new cultural history.’32

29 Ibid., esp. pp. 170f. 30 Ibid., p. 189. 31 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘On Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode’, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York, 1991, pp. 11–28. 32 Ibid., p. 22.

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Bynum is particularly keen to distinguish her approach from some forms of feminism. What is at stake here is, again, a sense of alterity. She reminds her readers that medieval people ‘did not think as we modern folk do about biological sex and culturally constructed gender’. Going even further, she states that when medieval women speak about themselves in the sources, it has ‘no direct connection with current feminism’. Bynum nevertheless believes that the sources from the late Middle Ages are rich enough to allow us to discern ‘female voices’ for the first time in history. In other words, in these sources ‘we are hearing characteristically female concerns’, rather than the literary constructions of male writers. But this claim to historical knowledge potentially sits rather uneasily alongside the principle of alterity. Bynum’s position on this point is both finely balanced and surprisingly firm. She acknowledges that our reading of a text ‘will change because we change’. She nevertheless feels that we should not abandon ‘causal analysis or contexts’, that we are able to read texts in contexts, and that ‘we can and must determine both chronological order and social structure’. And, as Holy Feast and Holy Fast showed, we can also explain. While a Romantic historian such as Barante would have presented the sources in question to the modern reader in an artistic manner and left it at that, in Holy Feast and Holy Fast Bynum offers evidence-based historical interpretations and explanations. What are we to make of this careful balancing act? In 1993 the mainstream American journal Speculum devoted an entire issue to feminism and medieval history. Among the articles in that issue was Kathleen Biddick’s ‘Gender, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible.’33 Biddick’s article includes a critique of Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Although it is a trial to read on account of being written in the dense and jargon-ridden style that had become fashionable, Biddick’s article does contain a couple of interesting observations on Bynum’s approach. First, Biddick notes that Bynum claims to possess a methodology that ‘guarantees access to medieval women’s experiences’.34 And second, she suggests that Bynum is in fact something of a structuralist.35 There is much to be said for this suggestion. Bynum does indeed seem to have more of an affinity with the histories of Foucault and with structuralist theories of signification, than with the overt Poststructuralism of Derrida, whose sense of literary free play and indeterminacy seems at variance with her approach to history. But there is also another way of looking at Bynum’s methodological balancing act and her attempts to create some distance between her own approach and various ‘theoretical perspectives’. Her attitude towards these ‘theoretical 33 Kathleen Biddick, ‘Gender, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible’, Speculum, 68:2, 1993, pp. 389–419. 34 Ibid., p. 391. 35 Ibid., esp. pp. 395, 398.

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perspectives’ brings to mind Ranke’s relationship with Hegelian Idealism. In both cases the historian had a fine understanding of, and was largely sympathetic with, the philosophy in question. But in both cases the historian was trying to make sure that within a ‘new’ conceptual environment determined by a ‘new’ totalizing metaphysics, there was still enough room for the doing of history. Simply put, in both cases the historian did not want history to be outweighed by philosophy. There was a danger of this occurring because in both cases the philosophy in question was intrinsically historical – at the very least insofar as it made claims about history. Nevertheless in both cases the ‘new’ philosophy seemed at first blush to be suggesting that the historian’s work might have been done. Yet in both cases it turned out that the philosophy itself supplied not only the raw materials for a methodological ‘revolution’ within historiography, but also the subject matter for a raft of ‘new histories’. There is therefore some irony in Ranke’s and Bynum’s attempts to distance themselves from ‘theoretical perspectives’ because in both cases, if the ‘theoretical perspectives’ had not existed in the first place, their respective histories could not have taken the forms and the directions that they did take, and they would not have been so historically significant. Bynum’s histories are different from Ranke’s, of course; gender and bodies are at the opposite end of the spectrum from nation-states and institutions. But it is the same spectrum. It is the spectrum of academic historiography, which is held together by Idealist epistemology. But, how did this Idealist epistemology manage to survive, accommodate, and even be invigorated by, the advent of Post-structuralism? Part of the answer seems to lie in the harmony between the post-modern metaphysics of fragmentation on the one hand, and the tendency towards specialisation among professional historians on the other. Poststructuralism validated this specialisation and opened up new areas in which it could expand and flourish. The absorption of Post-structuralism was also driven by the thirst for novelty that we saw with the Annales movement, and that has characterized professional historiography since its Rankean beginnings. Using the methods and language of Post-structuralism thus satisfied the desire to be different from and, by extension, better than previous historians. And on a very deep level, it appears that the Idealist epistemological metaphysics underpinning professional historiography was so robust, so constitutive of the environment itself, that it was in any case easily able both to resist and to absorb the essentially Romantic ideas of Post-structuralism, just as Romantic sensibilities were both excluded from, and incorporated within, academic historiography at its creation. The 1993 issue of Speculum marks the moment at which Post-structuralism found a place at the very centre of medieval studies. ‘Theoretical perspectives’ had achieved the status of established doctrine. It is nevertheless bizarre that there was nothing in that issue by Caroline Bynum, who was more responsible than anyone else for creating and popularizing the genre of Post-structuralism-inspired

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women’s history of the Middle Ages. Perhaps the process of adopting ‘theoretical perspectives’ had moved on slightly. For as far as one can tell, Kathleen Biddick’s main point seemed to be that, unlike herself, Bynum had failed to fully embrace certain aspects of Post-structuralism. In other words, possessing the most recent and the most radical ‘theoretical perspectives’ was now such an established part of the historian’s panoply, that someone with Bynum’s status and reputation as an innovator could be criticized in a mainstream journal for not being up-to-date enough. In a wider sense, however, the imprimatur given to ‘theoretical’ women’s history by Speculum supported Bynum’s approach and her subject matter. Perhaps surprisingly, in works such as The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity (1995) Bynum herself began to move away from focusing strictly on gender issues. Holy Feast and Holy Fast was nevertheless at the peak of its popularity and influence during this period, as can be seen with the appearance of works such as E Jane Burns’ Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (1993) and John W Baldwin’s The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (1994).36 This period also saw a mushrooming of university courses dealing with Bynum-style subjects. And from these courses there emerged a generation of medieval historians who, as a rite of passage, wrote essays and theses on topics inspired by Holy Feast and Holy Fast. I myself was part of this environment in a very small way. In the early 1990s I did an undergraduate course at Sydney University called ‘Medieval Misogyny’, and my honours-year thesis appeared in a collection of undergraduate and postgraduate pieces called Worshipping Women: Misogyny and Mysticism in the Middle Ages (1997).37 But Post-structuralism-inspired medieval histories did not replace traditional approaches to the subject altogether. The postmodern metaphysics of fragmentation and the academic particularism it encouraged meant that there was still room for these traditional approaches. And there was, in any case, arguably more commonality of outlook between the old guard and the proponents of novelty than was suggested by their frequently acrimonious exchanges during the ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s. In the 1990s academic medieval history separated out into several main clusters, each of which, according to the principles of fragmentation and particularism, had many sub-divisions. The cluster with easily the highest profile was made up of studies carried out under the aegis of ‘theoretical perspectives’ or what became known as ‘the linguistic turn’. A

36 E Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature, Philadelphia, 1993; John W Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200, Chicago, 1994. See also Joan Cadden, The Meaning of Sex Differences in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1993. 37 John O Ward and Francesca C Bussey (eds), Worshipping Women: Misogyny and Mysticism in the Middle Ages, Sydney, 1997.

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second major cluster consisted of works about the Middle Ages that conformed to traditional expectations in regard to subject matter and methodology. But between these two poles there were several rather fluid assemblages that managed to combine ‘theory’ and tradition. The area of heresy and persecution was one such assemblage. As we saw, Henry C Lea’s works including The History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1888) brought this subject into the academic world. Lea’s thoroughness nevertheless left the impression that there might be little else to say on this and other similar matters. In the 1970s, however, seminal works on medieval heresy by Robert E Lerner, Jeffery Russell, and RI Moore appeared.38 Witchcraft also came into vogue at the time, and it was broadly linked to heresy and magic by Richard Kieckhefer and Norman Cohn.39 The works of these historians cannot really be linked with Continental ‘theory’ – although it seems significant that this was the period in which the cachet of the Annales movement, with its call for histories that looked at ‘new’ subjects in ‘new’ ways, was at its height in the Anglophone world. Buoyed by the beginnings of the near obsession with Catharism that was provoked by the success of Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, interest in heresy gathered pace into the 1980s. In 1987, however, the subject of medieval heresy was finally brought into a more direct alignment with ‘theoretical perspectives’ by RI Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe. The title is pure Foucault, of course, and it almost single-handedly created the influential idea of the ‘the rise of the persecuting society’ in the Middle Ages.40 But The Formation of a Persecuting Society had more than a timely title; its main argument also coincided with Post-structuralism’s emphasis on social construction and representation. Moore’s argument in fact owed a great deal to traditional but inspired scholarship by Robert E Lerner and Norman Cohn.41 In the previous decade Lerner had suggested that many of the charges the medieval church had brought against various heretics, especially the so-called Brethren of the Free Spirit, were entirely false. Similarly, Cohn had examined witchcraft 38 Robert E Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, Berkeley, 1972; Jeffery Russell (ed.), Religious Dissent in the Middle Ages, New York, 1971; RI Moore, The Birth Of Popular Heresy, London, 1975 and The Origins of European Dissent, London, 1977. See also Edward Peters (ed.), Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe: Documents in Translation, Philadelphia, 1980. 39 Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500, Berkeley, 1976 and The Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany, Philadelphia, 1979; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: an Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witchhunt, London, 1975. 40 For a discussion of the idea of a medieval persecuting society see Freeman and Spiegel, op. cit., p. 698. 41 Lerner, op. cit.; Cohn, op. cit.

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from late antiquity to the early modern period and concluded that the existence of obvious themes and commonalities in accounts of witchcraft over this long period resulted from a combination of the psychological makeup of the accusers, and the existence of a learned, indeed literary, tradition of accounts and accusations. Lerner and Cohn had thus implied that the reality of heresy might have been quite different from the church’s view of the phenomenon. And it was this ‘official’ conception of heresy that was transmitted to subsequent eras. Moore took these ideas further and argued that heresy itself was a construct. He was not claiming that there had been no ‘heretics’ whatsoever. Rather, he was suggesting that medieval heresy was not only the result of a process of categorization, but also an expression of the insecurities and fears of members of the institutional church. The formation of the medieval ‘persecuting society’ was therefore more a matter of the outlook of leading churchmen and of changes in the authority of the institutional church, than a response to a state of affairs in the world. Like heresy itself, the idea of a medieval ‘persecuting society’ also shifted between ‘theoretical perspectives’ and more traditional approaches.42 Studies on heresy by Moore and others suggested that the medieval ‘persecuting society’ was formed in the thirteenth century. But Moore was not proposing a radical alterity, or a disjunction between the thirteenth century and subsequent eras. Rather, he saw persecution in terms of continuities insofar as medieval persecution informed later ideas and developments. In some senses, Moore’s model of medieval persecution and Richard Southern’s view of the lasting importance of thirteenth-century scholastic humanism are different sides of the same coin. And when Moore abandoned heresy and moved into more traditional areas of enquiry, this sense of continuity assumed a more familiar guise. In The First European Revolution, 970–1215 (2000), notably, Moore used long-standing metaphors of origins and continuity by suggesting that ‘Europe was born in the second millennium of the Common Era, not the first’, and that the emergence of a new social order in the twelfth century was the ‘foundation upon which European society has been constructed’.43 The title of Moore’s book refers to his belief that twelfth-century social and economic changes remained in place more-or-less as a system until the French Revolution, and thereafter exerted a lesser, though still significant, influence.44 There is therefore also a hint of Braudel’s idea of the historical longue durée in The First European Revolution. And a long central section called ‘Sex and the Social 42 See, for example, David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton, 1996 and Anne Gilmour-Bryson, ‘Sodomy and the Knights Templar’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7, no. 2, 1996, pp. 151–83. 43 RI Moore, The First European Revolution, 970–1215, Oxford, 2000, pp. 1, 12. 44 See ibid., esp. p. 64.

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Order’, which includes sections on matters such as family, chivalry, chastity, and incest, brings to mind Annales history in general and Montaillou in particular. On a purely conceptual level, The First European Revolution thus strikes one as being a mixture of Richard Southern’s Making of the Middle Ages and Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society. Current scholarship on the Middle Ages that does not pertain to ‘theoretical perspectives’ can be defined by such use of established ideas, approaches and interpretative paradigms. Recent works by medieval historians Edward Grant, John D Cotts, and Willemien Otten are good examples of this tendency. In God and Reason in the Middle Ages (2001) Grant describes a ‘new self-conscious emphasis on reason’ that arose in the eleventh century, and which is evident in the theology of the day and in the developments that led to the creation of the first universities. Echoing Southern and the Annales historians, Grant argues that this medieval ‘age of reason’ lasted until the seventeenth century.45 Similarly, in The Clerical Dilemma (2009) Cotts combines Southern and Brian Stock by discussing the effects of literacy on twelfth-century cultural life. Cotts also repeatedly uses the term ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ in what appears to be an unselfconscious manner.46 Willemien Otten, in something of a contrast, embraces a Southern-like neo-Romanticism in From Paradise to Paradigm (2004). Otten speaks of twelfth-century humanism as an ‘all embracing discourse’ that placed the human and the divine on the same level, and she argues that having reached a climax in the twelfth century, this humanism ‘vanished soon after’.47 The persistence of these well-established conceptual categories is a cause for reflection. On the one hand, this re-use of already existing ideas could be seen as being part of Postmodernism. In other words, scholars who are largely unaware of, or even hostile to, Postmodernism itself are nevertheless producing postmodern works. There is indeed much to be said for thinking that all recent histories are in some sense part of the postmodern condition. But on the other hand, the outlook and even the intentions of the historians themselves are surely also of some importance. For historians such as Grant, Cotts and Otten appear to see themselves, like Bernard of Chartres, as standing on the shoulders of giants. The giants in this scenario are Marc Bloch, Richard Southern, Charles Homer Haskins and others. That is why these recent historians are ‘traditional’. But perhaps ‘traditional’ historians, ‘theoretical’ historians, and those in between, 45 Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 2001, esp. p. 2. 46 John D Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century, Washington, 2009, pp. 14f., 100, 263, 267. See also Rodney Thompson, ‘The Place of Germany in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, in Alison I Beach (ed.), Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, Brepols-Turnhout, 2007. 47 Willemien Otten, From Paradise to Paradigm: a Study of Twelfth-Century Humanism, Leiden, 2004, p. 1.

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are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And perhaps the difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘theoretical’ histories is a matter of which giant’s shoulders the historian is standing on. For academic historians are united in believing that whoever the giant is, they can or will see further. It is therefore difficult to avoid the impression that, perhaps without realizing it, all academic historians spend some time on the shoulders of Ranke and Hegel.

Epilogue MEDIEVAL HISTORY AND THE ‘MODERN NARRATIVE’ In 1825, Albertine de Broglie, writing to the Romantic medievalist Prosper de Barante, suggested that ‘history is the muse of our time’. Barante was entirely receptive to the idea. His chosen path in life indicated a complete devotion to the muse of history, and he himself said that ‘never has curiosity been applied more avidly to the knowledge of history’. De Broglie and Barante were describing the emergence of the historical consciousness of modernity. Part of this historical consciousness is the feeling that history is uniquely important. Although each period and culture no doubt possesses a narrative of its own, modernity can therefore be defined by history. The eighteenth-century ‘enlightened narrative’ freed contemporary circumstances from history in general and from the Middle Ages in particular. In contrast, modernity’s narrative immersed modernity itself – along with us moderns and issues such as how we can know things in the first place – in history. Moreover, having one single ‘modern narrative’ has not been enough. As we have seen, modernity has a double-sided narrative, the Romantic and the Idealist, each with its own historical and epistemological metaphysics. But what is the relationship between this multi-faceted ‘modern narrative’ and professional historiography? And in what ways do the efforts of current historians correspond with the overarching and defining modern worship of Clio, the muse of history? It is as well to remember that academic history is a product of modernity’s historical consciousness, and not, as it is all too easy for historians to imagine, the cause of it. Only in the decades after Albertine de Broglie was writing to Prosper de Barante did academic history as we know it emerge in Germany. Elsewhere it was much later. As well, although academic history is the product of modernity’s historical consciousness, it does not reflect or express all aspects of it. Academic historiography has had a rather contradictory history. On the one hand, there is increase: there has been an amazing proliferation of themes, subjects and approaches; and there have been many key additions to the inventory of ideas through which we look at the past and the Middle Ages. But on the other hand, there is decrease: the very formation of academic history involved eliding some elements of the ‘modern narrative’, while important stages in the history of modern professional historiography have seen further omissions and abandonments.

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Have we, then, reached a point where we have more histories, and more kinds of history, but with fewer connections with the ‘modern narrative’ and the historical consciousness of modernity? For only one element of the modern historical consciousness now remains definitively attached to academic history: Idealist epistemological metaphysics. That there is a series of disconnections between academic history and the modern historical consciousness is surely more than an irony – though it is indeed profoundly ironic. It may, for example, go some way to explaining why most academic history cannot be read by anyone apart from a few specialists in the particular field. This is not to say that historians should necessarily feel obliged to write populist works; but the failure of academic histories even to engage other historians, let alone the educated layperson, will be of concern to some. Others will be more sanguine. Many modern historians have believed – and continue to believe – that history is on firmer ground than ever because of the shedding of the ‘baggage’ of the past. A more Romantic view of things will nevertheless include the feeling that something might have been lost in this process of shedding. It will suggest that academic historiography is the poorer for having excluded important parts of the ‘modern narrative’. It will return to an insight banished from the groves of academe by Idealism and institutionalism, namely that popular works, historical fiction and historical dramas are capable of conveying a powerful and satisfying sense of history in their own right. And it might even ask how long academic historiography will persist in its present form as a desiccated version of the modern historical consciousness. After all, since academic historiography is an historically contingent phenomenon, at some stage it will be a thing of the past.

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Index

Abelard, Peter 134, 164, 199, 210 Adams, Henry 127–9, 132–4 Adams, Herbert Baxter 128 Ancient Constitution, the 14, 16–17, 28, 92 Anglo-Saxons, the 14–17, 28, 56, 91, 100, 122–3, 126, 128 Anselm of Canterbury 191–2, 196, 200–1, 210–12, 214 Bacon, Francis 10 Bancroft, George 128 Barante, Prosper de 93, 96–9, 237 Bayle, Pierre 20 Berington, Joseph 91 Bloch, Marc 168, 172–9 Bloch, R Howard 223–4 Böhmer, Johann 83 Bolland, Jean 18 Brady, Robert 15, 28 Braudel, Fernand 179–81, 222 Burckhardt, Jacob 6, 139, 141, 143, 149, 152–6, 159, 175, 177, 195 Burgess, John W 128–9 Bynum, Caroline 224–31 Carlyle, Thomas 56–8, 63, 79, 91, 133 Chateaubriand, Francois-René de 63, 93–4, 99 Cohn, Norman 232–3 Coke, Edward 16 Creighton, Mandell 125 Crusades, the 46, 65, 68–9, 75, 82, 84–6, 94–5, 107, 112, 117–20, 122

Dilthey, Wilhelm 151–2 Dronke, Peter 206 Droysen, JG 115–16 Duby, Georges 188 Febvre, Lucien 168–70, 172–3, 179–80 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 71–4 Fontenelle, Bouvier de 19 Foucault, Michel 3, 218–20, 222 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor 62, 86–9, 153 Fukuyama, Francis 215 Gassendi, Pierre 13 Gibbon, Edward 23, 29–34, 65, 84, 94, 100, 118, 145, 153 Gilbert of Nogent 18, 118–19, 209–10 Gregory VII, Pope 49, 61, 83, 85–6, 103, 214 Grimm, Jacob 83 Hallam, Henry 92 Hart, Albert B 129 Haskins, Charles Homer 8, 113, 136–40, 175, 183 Havelock, Eric A 207 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 3, 5–6, 49, 59, 70–1, 74–9, 105, 108–9, 111, 135, 142, 214 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 44–7, 52, 82 Huizinga, Johan 8, 61, 88, 141, 156–65, 174 Hume, David 23–9, 33 Hurd, Richard 56, 63–4 Ibsen, Henrik 142–3

Derrida, Jacques 181, 218, 220–2 Descartes, René 7, 12, 19, 22

Jassemin, Henri 169

248

INDEX

Kant, Immanuel 3, 22, 33, 35–43, 46–8, 57, 59 Knowles, David 134, 202–3, 205 Lamprecht, Karl 151 Lea, Henry C 129–32, 232 Le Goff, Jacques 182 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 182–8 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 182 Lewis, CS 192–5 Louis XI, King 66–8, 96–9, 104, 161 Luden, Heinrich 83 Mabillon, Jean 18 Macaulay, T.B. 93 Magna Carta 17, 28, 66, 92–3, 123–4, 130 Maitland, Frederic 126–7 Michaud, Joseph Francois 93, 108 Michelet, Jules 99–105, 139, 214 Monod, Gabriel 114 Montfort, Simon de 17, 123–5, 130 Moore, RI 232 Müller, Johannes von 82–3 Munro, Dana C 118–19, 139 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 7, 141, 146–51, 220 Nodier, Charles 63 Normans, the 14–17, 28, 65–6, 84, 86, 92–3, 100, 107, 122, 124, 126, 136–9 Ong, Walter J 207–8 Panofsky, Erwin 195 Paris, Gaston 192–3 Pauli, Reinhold 125 Peter the Hermit 94–5, 118 Pirenne, Henri 173–4 Prothero, George 125 Radding, Charles 212–15 Raleigh, Walter 15–16 Ranke, Leopold von 5–6, 44, 81–2, 105–12, 125 Rapin, Paul de 17 Raumer, Friedrich von 83–90, 108

Renaissances, understandings of 6, 61–2, 103, 105, 131, 137–40, 149–50, 152–6, 159, 162–6, 175, 177–8, 191, 194–5, 202–3, 206, 208, 225, 324 Reformation, the 23, 46, 50, 75, 77–8, 91, 93, 105, 112, 117, 131, 152 Savigny, Friedrich von 109, 126 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 73–4 Schiller, Friedrich 47–52, 72 Schlegel, Friedrich 55, 58–63 Schopenhauer, Arthur 73, 143–8, 155, 158 Schreuer, Hans 171 Scott, Walter 58, 64–70, 106 Seebohm, Frederic 126–7 Seeley, John 125 Southern, Richard 9, 134, 191, 195–207, 215 Southey, Robert 91–2 Spelman, Henry 15, 28 Stael, Madame de 62–3 Strayer, Joseph 9, 140, 183 Stock, Brian 208–12 Stubbs, William 120–6 Sybel, Heinrich von 82, 115–20, 152–3 Taylor, Henry Osborn 135–6, 139 Thierry, Augustin 99–100 Tolstoy, Leo 141–2 Turner, Sharon 63 Ussher, James 14 Vico, Giambattista 21, 44, 100, 213 Vinogradoff, Paul 126 Voigt, Johannes 83 Waitz, Georg 113–14, 116, 170 Ward, Adolphus 125 Ward, John O 120 Weber, Max 4, 43, 45, 151, 158 White, Hayden V 2, 4, 106, 109–10, 222 Wilken, Friedrich 82