At 10:40 PM 1/15/00 +0000, you wrote:
>Apologoes to any who recognise this! I put it in because give
recent
>contributions it seems to fit a
>bit better today.
this is a wonderful reflection. thank you.
>My interests lie in what is loosely termed the 'early modern' and one
of the
>things we have to accommodate there is that which went before.
But if I go
>to an
>early-modern forum I get Calvin, Luther, Bucer and
'Reformation' in excess.
>There seems to be no bridge whereby the more conservative aspects
of
>religion, the
>lineal continuation of medieval religion (in my sphere both islam and
roman
>catholicism) into the 'early-modern', can be opened to
discussion.
irony. because at one point it was a major concern of protestant
historiography to claim a whole range of medieval heresies (esp.
waldensianism) as "proto-"protestant (parallel with communist
readings of early xnty [kautsky]). it's an argument that i think
has considerable merit, agenda aside, and interesting that early modern
scholars have lost sight of it. i wonder why?
>In many
>ways it makes much
>'early-modern' discussion very thin beer because we tend to know what
new
>ideas came in, but not which old ones went out, and (more important?)
which
>ones stayed.
this is nice. read kuhn's chapter in structure of scientific
revolutions on the "invisibility of scientific
revolutions". we have difficulty remembering what it was like
before. that's the historian's job (at least as i understand it),
to put the extra effort into a) finding out as much as we can about the
period from its artifacts (the most impt being its texts), and b)
imagining the world that produced them.
>The problem seems to be that the medieval world actually went
do you mean, "continued to go"?
>somewhere
>(all OSBs and SJ's are living proof!) but this isn't much
acknowledged.
true. i think i's part of the secularization of historiography that
was, if i'm not mistaken, the product of a distinctly protestant cutting
edge of historians culminating in people like Gibbon and Adam Smith
(1776). there are distinct advantages to this approach (as with
many elements of secularization as a remedy to theocracy), but the
problem is -- and here the eastern orthodox anonymous (hereinafter EOA)
was justified in his complaint -- it tends to have its own rigid agendas,
to depreciate and devalue things that it does not understand (indeed,
fears). as a result, the profoundly creative and socially valuable
religiosity of the middle ages which produced, among other things, the
ecclesiastical orders like OSB (SJ is a bit late for your case), do not
appear on their historiographical radar screens. and what, after
all, is an historian, but a bat in the cave of the past, as deaf to the
voices of past people as the bat is blind. and what can we do, but
refine our radar, and pick up the many voices of a bygone age, and
reconstruct as richly as we can, the "conversation" they had
then.
>There is an introspective
you mean self absorbed? i think of introspective as carrying the
connotation of self-questioning and self critical, which your thin beer
drinking early modern colleagues do not seem to be...
>fixation on its beginnings
early modern?
>rather than on its
>consequences.
middle ages? i don't get this.
>I find [log in to unmask] often looks to
me
>like a hagiography discussion group. Nothing wrong with that if
>it's the consensus, and I learn a lot, it's just not what I had
originally
>expected from the description. I haven't seen much mention made
of islamic
>saints, for example. Perthaps it's in the nature of all discussion
groups
>to become
>introspective as a discussion is nothing without its active
participants.
it's a function of who's on, and who's posting. i'd love to see a
discussion of islamic saints (and jewish ones for that matter). is
anyone on this list prepared to make some statements we can work
with?
>For me one of the great moments of the last 1000 years was the siege
of
>Malta in 1565. It represented the point where two expansionist
medieval
>power blocs, backed up by their medieval religious systems, rubbed
noses and
>agreed to differ (although close-up it may not have seemed like that
to
>those unfortunate enough to be on the island at the time, or indeed
at
>Lepanto some years later! ) .
who beseiged whom? i don't know if i'd call the ottoman empire
medieval. but are you aware that this took place at the approach of
1000 AH (=1581/2), and this represents, at least acc to some historians
of Islam, the point at which a millennial expansionist millennialism
(starting with Suleiman) broke it's teeth.
>Now I found out recently that there is a full
>page picture in BN Lat.Ms.6097 of two Knights Hospitaller
visiting the
>Grand Turk as ambassadors
>before the siege of Rhodes in 1480. It's an amazing picture for
what it
>represents. Art reflecting life; reality tackling dogma; politics
and
>religion; representatives of the two major mediterranean medieval
religions
>actually talking to each other, &c &c. Shouldn't this fall
within the scope
>of your list?
>
>Yet technically 1480 is outwith your remit and I'm not sure that
the
>early-modernists would claim it
>as their own! Where should I turn?
>
>Tangentially yours,
>
>John A.W. Lock
maybe we need a new list either looking at the transition cns --
1350-1750; or a list looking at the last millennium, with particular
attention to large trends -- a macrohistory list. is there such a
thing?
r
