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On Sat, 27 Jul 1996, JH Arnold wrote:

>  From the historical bits you have 
> included in your last few posts,  it would seem that you see yourself 
> engaged in recreating how medieval people "really thought" [as opposed to 
> Richard,  as the "modern scholar",  imposing new ideas].  But what you 
> think they thought [!] surprisingly enough underpins your own 
> "conservative" position [nb i don't claim to know your party politics 
> here,  i'm just picking a word to describe your view of history],  and 
> "naturalizes" it.  You suggest in the 
> post i have partly quoted above that terms of *struggle* were unknown to 
> medieval people,  and that the sources do not reflect the kind of 
> sociocultural tensions we historians like to ascribe ... This is,  to be 
> frank,  rubbish. 

First of all, I did not say that I thought I could recreate what medieval 
people "really thought" any more than anyone else making claims on this 
list about "understanding" the past, or "knowing" the past think they can 
recreate what medieval people "really thought."  Some degree of that 
claim is implicit in all claims to do history but I fully recognize the 
impossiblity of that task as I hope everyone else does.

Second, I did not say that "terms of `struggle'" were unknown to medieval 
people.  I did intend to say and think my comments can be read to have 
said that modern understandings of "struggle" are not necessarily 
medieval understandings of "struggle."  If my post was imprecise in this 
regard I apologize and make this clarification now.

I do believe that modern understandings of revolution and "struggle" are 
different from medieval understandings of struggle.  I do not find any 
evidence in ancient or medieval sources of a concept of revolution as 
totally overturning the "tradited" (to avoid confusion arising from 
"traditional") past.  Where commoners struggled against oppression from 
elites, they normally appealed to a golden age in which justice reigned 
and contrasted the present oppression with past justice.  A concept of 
the past, the tradited, as necessarily primitive and therefore worse than 
our present enlightenedness and future greater Progress, is unknown until 
the modern era.  Thus the very word "primitive" means something quite 
different to ancient and modern people.  Nor do I see in medieval sources 
evidence of a fundamental notion of conflict as the key to history and 
society, as it is in any number of modern philosophers and as it has 
become common in the populace in more recent times (the New 
Historicism and Deconstruction both place the notion of conflict at the 
heart of reality).  For ancient and medieval thinkers and, I would argue, 
for most people, the presence of conflict is largely a reminder of 
declension from the harmony that should obtain between rich and poor, 
powerful and powerless etc.

I did not claim that this is what people "really thought."  I simply said 
that, if one begins with different assumptions about society (traditional 
rather than revolutionary, harmony rather than irreducible conflict), one 
will read the same sources and see different things there.  I freely 
admitted my commitments and perspectives.  You now scold me for being 
blind to the way they influence the way I read medieval sources.  I said 
from the start that I know they influence the way I read medieval 
sources.  I was asking someone else, who quickly saw "hostility" as the 
key to explaining the denouement of the Waldenses, to consider whether 
the hostility he saw (a hostility/conflict that he and others have 
frequently found in various aspects of medieval culture in posts to the 
list) might in part reflect his own assumptions about social and cultural 
patterns.

Having said all of this, I hope that list members will not now say, "Aha" 
that means that because we all read into medieval sources some of our own 
presuppositions and commitments, one should give up on the search to find 
out what "people really thought."  I recognize the difficulty but refuse 
to give up on the search.  The first step in the search is to admit one's 
own biases and commitments.  I admitted mine from the outset.  I asked my 
interlocuter to consider whether a certain presupposition might operative 
in his interpretation.  His response was (paraphrased) "yes, but I don't 
really have `commitments'--i.e., I'm a bit biased but you're more 
biased because you have commitments but I don't.  I stand higher above 
the fray than you do."  Frankly, I'm tired of certain commitments (e.g., 
religious ideologies and "conservative" commitments to use your 
phrase--i.e., politically incorrect commitments, in today's Academy) 
being considered ipso facto more biased than other ideological 
commitments that are politically correct.

 There is a vast amount of work on the cultural 
> divisions between the litterati and the illiterati,  and the earlier 
> discussion on Walter Map's comments about Waldensian translations 
> illustrate that struggle beautifully. I do not comment on Map's discourse 
> in order to condemn him ["Bad,  naughty Walter"] but to analyse what is 
> going on in that historical context ["Why was Waldes pushed towards 
> heresy?  What were the nuances in the cultural understanding of 
> literacy at this point?  What was at stake in the whole issue?"]  It seems 
> to me that you *are* "defending" Map's position,  
> and trying to naturalise the forces of power at play there [which 
> incidentally,  as you no doubt already know,  places you in a long line 
> of Catholic commentators on heresy and inquisition,  lined up against 
> Protestants commentators seeking to represent heresy as the roots of 
> Luther].

I did not defend Map.  Map has an elitist perspective.  I did not say 
that all opinions expressed by elites in the Middle Ages are just, 
judicious, accurate assessments of "commoners" just because they are made 
by elites.  I simply protested that a blanket pro-commoner bias
(hence blanket anti-elitism) such as was expressed in Richard Landes' 
post would distort one's reading of the events.  Walter Map had no 
authority in the situation, hence could speak as irresponsibly as he 
wished.  His description must be weighed with all the other evidence and 
all the weighing must be done in awareness of one's own standpoint.

This is the classic Enlightenment critical method, except that 
Enlightenment types themselves seldom really took account of their own 
commitments; they were quite skilled at pointing out the commitments of 
medieval churchmen or aristocrats but failed to see their own 
precommitments.  Nor did they realize that an earlier _criti_cal method 
functioned in medieval culture, based on the principle of discretio 
(derived from _krisis_), about which I have published a few pieces. 
In our postmodern present, we gleefully point out how biased the 
Enlightenment types were, without realizing that postmodern pluralism, 
New Historicism, or Deconstruction give a priority, a bias to disorder 
over order, which necessarily will make it difficult to understand a 
period in history where Order and Harmony were assumed to be the ideals.  
(We, of course, in our hyperenlightened Postmodernity, know that all 
their talk of Order was either a naive or utterly clever way to rape and 
dispossess the Other, the marginalized, the Victims--but that is what 
bothers me about most PoMo interpretations: they too claim to tell us 
what "people really thought"--they replace the Hegemony of belief in 
Order with the Hegemony of belief in Disorder/Otherness/Decentering.  I 
can think of nothing more arrogant than to tell me that all those 
medieval people who talked incessantly about plurality within an 
overarching, greater Order didn't realize that the _real_ clue to reality 
is Decentering, Disorder, Deconstruction, Pluralism.
  The comments I made about evaluating and controlling preaching 
and vernacular translations had to do with those who held authoritative 
positions in the Church and society.  And I gave no blanket approval to 
their decisions, merely said that seen from the perspective of one 
holding responsibility for government, the phenomenon of the Poor Men of 
Lyons may appear different than if one sees it from the perspective of 
one who does not hold responsibility for government.  And I intended to 
imply that the dominant anti-institutionalism of the last 30 years in the 
West, with roots reaching back much further, colors the way we perceive 
the exercise of authority in the past and we ought to be honest about it.

Each scholar is entitled to her commitments and biases.  We do not 
agree.  Our situation is pluralist.  But when we extend that situation 
either to Reality as a whole (by decrying the Other who still 
naively believes in an ordered reality) or to the people of the past (by 
decrying those who read history from anOther perspective of Order/Harmony 
despite aberrant disorderly phenomena that are clearly observable), the 
we are extending the Hegemony of disorder over the Other (the Other who 
believes in Order).  Which means that the advocates of 
Deconstruction/Disorder/Pluralist Otherness are actually as hegemonic as 
any of the people in the present or past they criticize.

Now, true-blue PoMo folk may come back and say, that this only proves 
that their deconstructionist perspective is all we have, that I have 
conceded their point.  Fine, but then they are in fact making a hegemonic 
claim for their position.  The only way they can be truly pluralist is to 
truly admit the possibility of my claims for Order and authority and 
objective truth.  But that is to recognize that one or the other 
hegemonies must in fact dominate, that true Deconstruction and Pluralism 
is impossible.  The only issue is which one.  That is not the same as 
saying that interminable Struggle and Decentering is all we can have.

If one truly believes in the interminable clash of ideologies, of 
perspectives, of commitments, one would have to shut up and make no 
claims at all, because even to claim the interminable clash of ideologies 
as our "real" situation, is to make a hegemonic claim.  It is to move 
beyond mere pluralism or decentering.  And if all we can do is make 
_hegemonic_ claims, even if the hegemonic claim is the claim for 
Decentering struggle, then all of us are in fact claiming to know at 
least a bit more about "what they really thought" or about "what reality 
really is like" than the Other Guy.

Dennis Martin



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