Richard Landes <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>every list needs a Certifiably Insane member
>If this is what's troubling you I should say that we do not have much to
worry as long as you are still with us.
>hey. don't leave out some of the rest of us.
nutz to that. you've not even lost your amateur standing compared to the oO
and me, richard.
Pat Sloane's observation that:
>In art history, the year 1000 is usually regarded as the beginning of
the Romanesque period,
seems to me to be very roughly in the ball park, though i'm not too sure
about:
>with much attention to millennial ideas that were in the air at the time.
as Leah noted, this smacks a bit too much of Henri Focillon's _L'An Mil_,
which i don't think is given much credance these enlightened days (even among
backwater Art Hysterians).
and, i'd picque the knit that "romanesque" (like "gothic") is, to me, a bit
troublesome as a term, unless always qualified with the thought that it is
very much of an Art Hysterical Construct --and you know how dangerous *those*
(constructs) can be.
e.g., some of the illuminations in the Corbie Psalter (early 9th c.) strike me
as thoroughly "romanesque" --or, if you prefer to be *really* picqie--
"proto-romanesque" in feeling, look and intent; while the specific figure
style is also just as clearly near the orgins of the beginnings of the
stylistic "sequence" (George Kubler's useful term)
which "leads to" "Gothic."
(http://www.hp.uab.edu/image_archive/cr-03/miniature08.jpg --mis-identified as
from the "stuttgart psalter" and perhaps not the "corbie psalter," but close
enough for our purposes.)
and, in a sense, one could view the "romanesque" church of Tournus (11th c.:
http://www.pitt.edu/~medart/image/france/france-t-to-z/tournus/m0669tor.jpg )
as "proto-gothic" in its extraordinary striving for verticality, lacking only
the structural innovations of the early 12th c. to make it completely "gothic"
in form.
"gothic" was a becomming, with roots which go *way* back.
that being said, in point of fact there certainly was *some*thing quite
remarkable happening in certain architectural circles round about the
turn of the millennium.
and, as you imply (and Dayton Phillips, my old history mentor used to say),
"Around about 1000 Europe really begins to hum."
generally. across the board.
so, in a way, it would be extraordinary if there were *not* something going on
among the Jewish communities of Northern Europe.
and yet, they were (as i miserably understand the situation) *in* Christian
Europe, but not *of* it.
from which we may conclude (at least on this list, not being "regular"
historians) that whatever it (or they) was that brought about this quite
astonishing "resurgance" (or just "surgance") of cultural expression, it was
quite a pervasive tide which lifted all those boats.
not a "mere coincidence" at all, surely.
my own way of thinking about these matters is pretty much a mish-mash of
poorly remembered/understood ideas gleaned from such ancient synthetic works
as Friedrich Heer's _Medieval World_
and (for general methodology, esp., but not exclusively, Art Hystery) George
Kubler's _The Shape of Time: Reflections on the History of Things_ (these from
1961 and 1962, respectively, i see --on the cutting edge of scholarship when i
read them in '67) and my own applications of them to try and understand
various situations i've come across.
Heer's idea of a general, across the board "closing down" of at least the
options available to Northern Europe in the course of the 13th c. has fairly
well stood the paradigmatic tests which i've inflicted upon it
over the course of 30+ years; curiously and unfortunately, i have no memory
of his ideas about the "opening up" of things in the period you
are interested in. be worth a look-see.
>…i don't think -- open to correction here -- that the chronology was
impt for tax collection purposes.
depends upon what you mean by "tax collection", i suppose; and where/what
region you might be talking about.
in the 11th+ c. Chartraine "taxes" and all sorts of various rents and
fees were generally due on various feast days, e.g., the St. Remi --the local
economy much have really been dynamic the day after the St. Remi.
>my point cd be stated simply in the notion that in 950 a northern european
jew who wanted his son to become a rabbi wd send him either east (byzantium,
palestine, babylon) or south (north africa). by 1050, he'd send him to study
with the students of gershom in a variety of northern european (lotharingian)
cities. so in under a cn, northern european jewry goes from being a marginal
frontier settlement to being a cultural center.
that seems like a pretty good indication of the state of things --allowing, of
course, for the paucity and accidentality (is *that* a word?) of surviving
evidence one way or the other.
best to all from here,
christopher
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