I'm a fairly new subscriber to this list, and have enjoy
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear all,
I'm a fairly new subscriber to this list, and have enjoyed all the posts so far. But none caught my attention as this string about Believers as Historians.
I've taught medieval history at four-year liberal arts colleges, where there is open hostility to "religious" content of any sort. So I had to confront the issue daily, since I taught primarily from primary sources. This is not even to mention "justifying" my scholarly interest in church decoration as historical evidence ... and the even more eye-brow raising fact that I am a politically liberal, practicing Catholic.
At any rate, I've developed a way to "cut the pie" that seems to work with students and colleagues alike. I draw it from the Platonic world-view [which -- yes -- I often must explain].
I define “Christianity” as a Platonic ideal that encompasses all transcendent, wholly spiritual, unchanging absolutes. The Divine – with a capital “d” – sits enthroned at the center of this realm -- the epitome of the spiritual absolutes, and their ultimate source. The Divine is fully accessible only to angels and mystics.
Then there is divine revelation -- the myriads of ways [texts, symbols, icons, people] -- by which the Divine has chosen to manifest the Divine Self. This is the proper subject for theologians.
I’m not an angel or a mystic; I’m only a theologian sometimes. Most of the time, I’m an historian.
Historians look at the ways people in the past experienced, interpreted, acted on, and interacted with, divine revelation. Those ways are conditioned by – among many other things – social status, gender, education, economic conditions, personal questions or problems, social tensions, etc. [My list can go on and on, depending on how restless my audience becomes :>)].
But my point is this: Distinguishing in this way between “history” and “Christianity” explains why a modern person and a medieval one – ostensibly receiving the same revelation from the same unchanging Divine – interpreted it in radically different ways and came up with radically different versions of the same religion.
So -- yes, when I cut the pie in this way -- one can believe and still be a "scientific" historian, provided that one keeps in mind that our experience of belief is fundamentally distinct from the experience of people in the past.
Elaine
Elaine M. Beretz, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Center for Visual Culture
Bryn Mawr College
101 Merion Avenue
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2899
--- On Mon, 9/21/09, Peter McDonald <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Peter McDonald <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [M-R] Believers as Historians
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Monday, September 21, 2009, 7:28 AM
> medieval-religion: Scholarly
> discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> I think Jim gets it pretty right. The essential quality in
> an historian is a sympathetic imagination combined with the
> right degree of critical distance. The following from the
> /Times /obituary of Professor George Holmes (one of my
> doctoral examiners) is very pertinent:
>
> 'In /The Later Middle Ages 1272-1485 /(1962) Holmes
> declared that “the understanding of a distant society
> requires an effort of the imagination, exercised as far as
> possible without nostalgia, sentimentality and contempt”.
> And noting that a medieval cathedral “is still, no less
> than when it was built, the most splendid creation of the
> medieval world” he urged that “the easiest way to get a
> glimpse of the lost world is to stand in a cathedral and try
> to imagine the aims of its builders”.'
>
>
> Dr Jim Bugslag wrote:
> > medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval
> religion and culture
> >
> > Marjorie,
> > From a post-modern perspective, there is always an
> intersection of ideologies for art historians and any other
> kind of historian to deal with: that of the period they are
> dealing with, and their own. I have certainly noticed, when
> dealing with religious art, that there are radically
> different receptions among my students, along religious
> lines. A Catholic or Orthodox student is far more
> comfortable with the idea of praying to images, or even
> kissing them, while a Protestant or Jewish student finds it
> far easier to align themselves with the iconoclasts than the
> iconodules. And "areligious" materialist students are often
> dumbfounded either way. One would hope that anyone who has
> reached professional status in one of the historical fields
> would be self-aware enough to be able to handle such
> differences, but since we are all, after all, human, there
> is always unrealized potential along these lines. Visser's
> statement, or her friend's statement, seems a bit extreme.
> Cheers,
> > Jim
> >
> >
> > Marjorie Greene wrote:
> >> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of
> medieval religion and culture
> >> Doctissimi,
> >>
> >> I would first like to thank the person who
> mentioned Margaret Visser's Geometry of Love, which I am now
> happily devouring. I'll head straight for Sta Agnese f.l.M.
> the next time I'm in Rome to see all I missed and to see it,
> I hope, through Visser's eyes.
> >> Early in her text, she makes the following
> startling (to me) statement:
> >> "A friend who is a well-known art historian once
> told me how, as a student, she had been assured by her
> colleagues that any scholarly accomplishment in the area of
> Christian art was out of the question for her because she
> was a 'believer'".
> >> Is this a common attitude? It suggests that an
> historian of anything must be some sort of emotional blank
> slate, with no affective stake in or concern with what s/he
> is writing about. I'm trained in literary critical theory
> and practice. No one ever told me that my work on Christian
> authors would be worthless since I'm a believer. I find the
> notion absurd.
> >> Any comments?
> >> MG
> >>
> >> Marjorie Greene
> >> http://medrelart.shutterfly.com/
> >>
> >>
> >>
> __________________________________________________
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> >> Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
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> >> http://mail.yahoo.com
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