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On Sat, 27 Jul 1996, Dennis D. Martin wrote:

> 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.  

check out the chiliastic "tradition" which anticipates a radical reversal
in the social and political order... you can't get more "revolutionary" 
than that one.  not surprisingly, this is a teaching which our clerical
sources are almost universally hostile, esp. from the time the church
allied itself with the forces of aristocratic order. ps: to those who 
know chiliasm well, marx is a secular chiliast.

> 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.  

i think this is a fairly outdated argument now. even the movements (like
the Cappuciati and the Peasants of 1381) who looked back to a golden age
(time of adam and eve) did so to challenge fundamentally the structure of
society in the present. again i invoke the apocalyptic chiliastic 
tradition as a) deeply Christian and b) fundamentally forward looking. 
the idea of progress is not "unknown" until the modern era, it just has 
not come to dominate elite discourse until then.  when Guibert of Nogent 
call "commune" a new and awful word, he does not speak for medieval 
society as a whole in his suspicion of the new, he speaks for his 
aristocratic, conservative, document-producing clerical elite.  the 
thousands of communards in Laon, for whom "commune" is a battle-cry 
obviously did not think ill of the word.  did they not see their (and 
other) communes as progress? permit me to speculate here where the 
sources do not take us...

> 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.

again let me point to the apocalyptic reading, which, i think you must 
grant was a fairly popular and widespread way of understanding current 
events (pace Augustine): it is the quintessence of conflict thinking, 
with everyone literally forced into the mold of forces of good and evil.  
even without this, i find it hard to understand how you can argue that, 
given the constant resort to devil/angel dichotomies in medieval 
religious thought to explain *everything* you can say that there is no 
evidence "in medieval sources of a fundamental notion of conflict as the 
key to history and society." have i misunderstood you?

> 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.  

or not see things that are there.  it is clearly in the interests of the 
aristocracy to present their case for order as one of harmony. does that 
mean that the (far larger) number of people who were not the material 
beneficiaries of such order also saw it that way?  comparatively speaking 
no tradited society (i like the term) has as many peasant revolts and as 
many expressions of hostility to the ruling elite as does medieval 
western xn.  that is not, i wd submit, an accident.

> 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.  

just because you admit a partie-pris does not mean that you are therefore 
immune to criticism for the way that stance influences your reading of 
the sources. i think your comments above on "not seeing" notions of 
revolution and progess in the middle ages is a good example of how much 
your a-priori commitments predispose you to "not seeing" what's there, in 
the sources.

> I was asking someone else, 

me

> who quickly 

it may have seemed quick to you, but i have thought about it quite a bit.

> 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.

i don't know if i'd call them assumptions. i think there is a very large 
body of evidence to support the view that medieval culture is filled with 
conflict (eg the course of the papal reform), not the least of which is 
the consistent appearance of Christian groups who see the orthodox church 
as the whore of Babylon, and the consistently more violent approach that 
that church takes towards those who believe such things.  i think of them 
as conclusions not assumptions.
 
> 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.

i am hardly politically correct, as any of my friends will tell you. i 
think you are tilting at the wrong windmill here.
 
> 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.

i do think that it is unfair to call my sympathy for commoners and for
those called to the apostolic life a "blanket pro-commoner bias" or
"blanket elitism". i can see the warts (many) in popular attitudes and 
behaviors.

walter map may have spoken irresponsably but he also
represented a widespread attitude, and his account of waldo's humiliation
by the literati at the court reflects more than merely his personal
attitude. i consider his account especially valuable precisely because he
is letting us see behind the scenes. you want to "weigh it with all the
other evidence" in the case, which means marginalizing it by emphasizing
the "official positions" articulated by more "responsible" sources. i
don't think those responsible sources are nearly as valuable as map's;
it's like the difference btw comments on and off the record.  give me an
off-the-record comment that rings true (as does map's) over reams of
official statements any day. if you want to understand how waldo and his
followers felt upon leaving the papal court (which is what will help us
understand how this enthusiastically pro-Catholic group cd turn against
the church -- ie the point of this historical exercise), read Map and
interpret the papal response in light of Map (which is (more or less) what
i suggested at the start to someone who did not understand what the pope
was doing). 
 
> 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. 

refs? i'd very much like to read them.

> 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, 

as i mentioned, i am not a post-mo, altho i think they are on to
something. it is precisely their use of their exegesis as a form of
cultural terrorism that i find so appalling.  but, yes, i am in favor of
listening to and hearing as many voices as i can in the texts and
reconstructing history as the interaction of these various views.  thus
for me, the peace movt is not only a "conservative movement" started and
directed by the episcopacy, but a social phenomenon that affected and was
affected by every group and stratum of medieval society (including, to an
impt degree, not yet considered, women).  i do not think we understand
either its course or its subsequent impact on medieval society by limiting
our view of its successes and failures to those perspective articulated 
by our sources. 

> which necessarily will make it difficult to understand a 
> period in history where Order and Harmony were assumed to be the ideals.

by...? this is, i submit, a gross generalization that reflects an 
inability to see beyond the aristocratic sources. if you rephrase that to 
say "difficult to understand a body of sources produced by people trained 
to believe that Order and Harmony were the ideals..." i'm with you. but 
don't impose such ideals on the 90-97% of the culture that did not 
necessarily either benefit from or share that perspective. 
  
> (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.

as my 12-year-old daughter wd say: hello'oo, i'm not saying that. i'm 
just saying that the hegemony of belief in Order is far more the 
impression of the sources than the reality, and that many others were not 
so much believers in the hegemony of disorder/otherness/decentering as 
believers in their versions of (right) order and that the result was a 
decentered, disordered pluralism which only seems like order when you 
stick close to the sources. i'm not saying they were pluralists, i'm 
saying that there were plural discourses going on, many not nearly as 
articulate and none as privileged in having our ear, as the 
ecclesiastical one*s*.  but that even within that documentation, if we 
listen carefully, we can hear the others. and that, i submit, is our job: 
reconstruct as many of the discourses and their relative strength at any 
given time as we can.  then we begin to understand the course of events 
(like Waldo's journey).

>   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.  

agreed. and they manifest themselves as hostility.

> 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.

agreed. i am, by nature, a heretic.

> 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) 

i don't decry it (unless it slips over into something like apologia for 
the inquisition -- which i am not accusing you of), but, i'm sorry, i do 
consider it naive.

> or to the people of the past (by 
> decrying those who read history from an Other 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.

agreed that in its most visible and obnoxious form, deconstruction is 
precisely that. i try and avoid it, and wd appreciate it if you wd read 
me more carefully before lumping me with the cultural terrorists.

rlandes


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