medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

To quote a small portion of my conversation with Christopher last week: 

"E: So it often comes down to trying to peak through
the lattice of what a scribe has written to get a glimpse at the
circumstances: the role someone takes relative to the people around him at that moment and for that occasion. I'm not the first to make this point, of course.

C: who else talks about it?" 

Others of you have asked me this off-list, too. 

My speculation draws from a recent reading of Robert F. Berkhofer III, Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). This led my to re-read two other studies: M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); and Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. 

All three of them are terrific. Chief among the many. many shared virtues is the fact that the authors take very seriously parts of charters that are too often dismissed as formulaic and they use those "formulas" to look behind the words into the social, administrative, and political worlds that produced the charters. 

This approach satisfies my inner Latin nerd, and has sent me back into some of my sources with a renewed desire for precision in defining terms. 

But: to borrow another "formula:" the eccentric speculations I've based on the work of these three masterful scholars are entirely my own. :>).

Elaine  

Elaine M. Beretz, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Center for Visual Culture
Bryn Mawr College
101 Merion Avenue
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2899


--- On Fri, 1/27/12, Christopher Crockett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Christopher Crockett <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [M-R] training of a priest
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Friday, January 27, 2012, 1:51 PM
> medieval-religion: Scholarly
> discussions of medieval religion and culture
> 
> From: Elaine Beretz <[log in to unmask]>
> 
> > “The potentially important role they *could* play, if
> the right
> circumstances demanded it.”
> 
> > This is precisely the case! And to my mind it’s what
> makes studying the
> eleventh and twelfth centuries so fascinating. Regionalism
> and localism are
> the norm, as I’ve argued about artistic traditions and
> artisan education in
> a recent article.
> 
> Elaine M. Beretz, "Beauvais Romanesque and Suger's Workshop
> at Saint-Denis:
> Creative Appropriation and Regional Identity," Studies in
> Medieval and
> Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 5 (2008): 56-130.
> 
> (which i've *got* to finish reading, sometime during this
> lifetime)
> 
> >So I’m most definitely not arguing that Beauvais is a
> template for any
> other city, region, or “country.”
> 
> yes, only those from the Fringe can claim that.
> 
> > In this period, the terminology/titles attached to
> church offices are not
> standardized in the way they would come to be later. What
> someone called an
> office in Beauvais or Chartres probably differed from what
> one called it in
> Rome.
> 
> one certainly doesn't have to go all that far afield to find
> significant
> differences in (at least) the titles used to designate the
> dignitaries
> (_personae_, as they are styled in the charters) of the
> chapter.
> 
> i know not about Beauvais, but many cathedral chapters in
> France had a fellow
> styled the _scholasticus_ who was charged with, well,
> running the school.
> 
> the major compiler of the Glossa Ordinaria (and one of the
> teachers of the
> young and more-than-somewhat impudent Abelard) was Anselm of
> Laon, whose
> official title was Scholasticus in the cathedral chapter of
> Laon.
> 
> otOh, there was no such _persona_ styled that in the chapter
> of Chartres
> --there the school was under the control of the Chancellor,
> the second ranking
> dignitary of the chapter, after the Dean. (did the
> Chancellor at Paris control
> the schools of the diocese as well, or was there a
> Scholasticus? i can't
> recall.)
> 
> >[And with my “friends” in Beauvais, I’d be willing
> to believe that
> that
> difference was stubbornly maintained...]
> 
> not so much that, i would say, as just the tendency in a
> very conservative
> society and tradition-oriented society to cling very
> tenaciously to the basic
> principle of "custom" --especially in the context of a
> general absence of any
> strong centralized Authority and in the presence of a
> general "rip anything
> off which ain't Nailed Down" mentality among the Power
> Elites (unlike our own
> Law-Abiding & Benighted Era, of course).
> 
> the fact that i know of only one major change in the
> organization of the
> chapter of Chartres in the course of the 11th-13th centuries
> might support my
> point --or, perhaps, be illustrative of my general
> ignorance.
> 
> in the mid-1190s the "prévotés" (i don't know what else to
> call them --they
> did not have the same footprint as the archdeaconries) of
> the chapter's
> Provosts (who were charged with overseeing the management
> and exploitation of
> the chapter's vast land holdings) were totally reorganized
> and given new names
> (reflecting the new names of the seats of the prévotés).
> the total number of
> them might have been changed, as well, increased from 4 or 5
> to 5 or 6, i
> can't recall.
> 
> 
> i've often wondered how this could have been accomplished,
> given the inherent
> resistance to such fundamental change in the chapter's
> "customary"
> organization, and have just assumed that it was because the
> destruction of
> Fulbert's cathedral by fire in 1194 and the subsequent
> *massive* rebuilding
> project (which resulted in the present cathedral)
> necessitated the absolute
> maximization of the chapter's financial resources --and the
> old system of
> provost-ships had been, apparently, riddled with nepotism,
> corruption, abuse
> and inefficiencies from Time Out of Mind.
> 
> 
> > Peeling away assumptions from later periods about what
> an office is or how
> it functions too often leaves one with a muddy mess. And the
> terminology
> shifts within the same city, even in documents drawn up in
> the same year!
> 
> i don't believe i have seen this, in the Chartres documents
> --or maybe i've
> not recognized it as such and just *assumed* a consistency
> when there was
> none.
> 
> >So it often comes down to trying to peak through
> 
> say, is that anything like a "peek experience"?
> 
> >the lattice of what a scribe has written to get a
> glimpse at the
> circumstances: the role someone takes relative to the people
> around him at
> that moment and for that occasion.
> 
> yes, getting oneself totally immersed in the little world
> which any given
> charter offers a window on --getting into that world,
> raising one's head up
> and having a good look around-- is essential to
> understanding and exploiting
> the full usefulness of the documents, i believe.
> 
> > I'm not the first to make this point, of course.
> 
> who else talks about it?
> 
> > This raises another thorny issue, though: the role of
> the scribe in
> attaching Latin titles to roles. I had long assumed that a
> title for a church
> office that one city/diocese/region shared with others was
> an index of the
> success of papalism. But does this necessarily have to be
> the case?
> 
> i don't think it was "papalism" as such --at least not as we
> might understand
> the term after, say, Innocent 3.
> 
> >In a world where the roles and duties of office are
> often ad hoc, am I right
> in assuming that the scribe would have a limited number of
> Latin words to
> describe people acting in public roles?
> 
> not my area of "expertise" (whateverthehell that might be)
> by a Long Chalk,
> but i've always thought of the institutional organization
> present in any given
> diocese to have been a mixture of a variety of historical,
> political and
> ecclesiastical circumstances.
> 
> Provence and the Mediterranean regions of the Empire would
> have had a much
> heavier overlay of institutionalized imperial customs than
> would northern
> Gaul, i should think, and the latter would have been
> "settled"
> ecclesiastically later --in many cases centuries later.
> 
> the institutions (particularly the capitular institutions)
> set up in a newly
> established center of a diocese like Chartres or Beauvais
> would, of necessity,
> have been a combination of those which the first bishop(s)
> might have brought
> with them from where ever they came from and, as you say,
> the rather ad hoc
> circumstances they found themselves in Out in the Boonies of
> the late Empire.
> 
> i've always thought (unencumbered by any actual knowledge of
> the situation) of
> cathedral chapters as the institutionalized extensions of
> what was,
> originally, the bishop's "household":
> 
> a fellow or two or three to aid in the ecclesiastical
> administration of the
> diocese (-->>Archdeacons);
> 
> a secretary to handle his correspondence
> (-->>Chancellor);
> 
> a fellow or two or three to oversee the material _fisc_ of
> the diocese
> (-->>Provosts);
> 
> someone to see to the physical fabric of the cathedral
> church itself
> (-->>Capicerius);
> 
> a "major domo" to oversee all these guys (-->>Dean),
> etc.
> 
> as the diocese matured over the centuries this "household"
> of the bishop both
> grew in size (e.g., the number of provosts and archdeacons
> increased as the
> fisc and christian population grew) and became
> institutionally semi-autonomous
> from the bishop --or at least from any given bishop-- as it,
> institutionally,
> represented something of a Morte Main viz-a-viz the bishop
> (bishops come and
> go, Chapters last forever).
> 
> anyway, that's my Fantasy.
> 
> c
> 
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