> > On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Dennis D. Martin wrote:
> > > So a pro-aristocracy bias is one of the handful of biases that cannot
> > > contribute to insight and advancing scholarship?
> On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Richard Landes wrote:
> > not my contention. but a pro-aristocracy bias is likely to blind you to
> > the cases (legion) where a pro-aristocratic documentation is pulling the
> > wool over your eyes. sure it can advance, and it can prevent really
> > mis-conceived reconstructions for advancing, but it is very unlikely to
> > break free fromt he thrall of the (very few) people who tell us what it
> > was like.
> On Sat, 27 Jul 1996, Dennis D. Martin wrote:
> I'll try one more time and if we continue to talk past each other, will
> not belabor the rest of the list with this. My comments here relate both
> to what your comments above and below.
> Rarely, if at all, was the argument that controls over vernacular
> translations of the Bible or lay preaching couched in terms of "you folks
> are commoners, i.e., you are not aristocrats, so we cannot give you free
> license to preach or translate because it would undermine social
> stability. Rather, the arguments ran along the lines of "controls are
> necessary in any ordered society." It is the modern scholar, e.g., Prof.
> Landes, who inserts the following reasoning: the people doing the
> controlling, writing the rules, were aristocrats. Hence their desire for
> social stability was also a bias in favor of an aristocratic-peasant
> society.
what people say in their own, carefully crafted defense and
self-justification, and what they are thinking about are not always the
same thing. it seems a justifiable *speculation* to ask whether the
advocates of an untranslated bible as a form of social control were not
thinking about the problems of the bible in the hands of commoners,
especially when many of their political and social arguments (eg the
three orders) were so clearly contradicted by biblical values. we do know
that with a regularity that is quite striking vernacular bible
translations were followed peasant activity that questioned the
legitimacy of aristocratic rule, sometimes in quite violent ways
(Waldensians 1170s, Cappuciati 1180s; Wycliffe 1370s, John Ball et al.
1380s, Luther 1510s, Muentzer et al. 1520s). do you really think the
advocates of (a particular kind of) aristocratic were unaware of these
tendencies?
> De facto it was, because this was the only culture they had
> known. They could not conceive of a mass-commoner society--I don't know
> of any ancient or medieval culture that had known such.
this is an unfair dichotomy. surely they had examples of cultures that
were not run according to the aristocratic model they were presented with
(Jewish communities did not have the class divisions of Christian, and,
esp on the subject of biblical access, they made concerted efforts to
include the manual laborer), and they tried on their own to create such
structures (the Peace movt is, in its more radical phases, an effort to
severely restrict the arbitrary authority of the aristocracy, the communes
a more limited but more successful effort to do the same, the
Cappuciati still another). the apostolic
lay communities are the most radical case of such efforts, and their
condemnation as heresies seems fairly clearly to have political
motivations of the kind i am suggesting above.
> The story of the
> modern Western European world is the story of the rise of the commons and
> its eventual triumph (but not over the aristocracy; recall that the
> absolutist monarchs of the early modern period first employed the
> commons/third estate against the aristocracy to eliminate the aristocracy
> as a real power, then the commons eventually triumphed over the tyrannous
> kings).
why do you say not over the aristocracy if the kings used commoners to
bring low the aristocrats and then were themselves brought low by their
"tool"? this devt, is, in fact, closely related to the impact of the bible
on lay culture, and, i wd argue, represents precisely the kind of
nightmare that the medieval aristocratic church was trying very hard to
avoid. and the story of this modern western european world starts not in
medias res in the 16th cn, but in the 11th, with the peace movt, the
apostolic "heresies", the communes...
> Stating that viewing things from the perspective of the aristocracy
> (even if as a thought-experiment) blinds me, pulls the wool over my eyes,
> whereas looking at things through the eyes of the commoners tells me how
> it really was strikes me as privileging one over the other, not taking
> them as complementary.
i have two responses to that comment. a) we have (naturally) privileged
the perspective of the aristocracy for so long that it may be time to
lavish a little attention on the views of other groups, just as a kind of
balance. it is not a "thought experiment" to view things from the
aristocratic point of view, it is inherent in a "straight" [ie *not*
speculative] reading of the sources; b) ultimately we may find the two
approaches complementary, but given the profound hostility of much of our
aristocratic source material to commoners, i think it naive not to see the
perspectives we are examining as mutually hostile in at least some cases.
since our sources systematically give us the aristocratic self-image,
restoring the other parts of the story does strike me as a major advance
in reconstructing the situation. this does not mean that we need take the
side of the commoners (of that i may occasionally be guilty), but
sometimes it takes some real sympathy to figure out how they wd have felt
(eg the Cappuciati after the local lay and clerical aristocracy turn on
them).
> I am, however, grateful, that you have some of your commitments, even if
> you deny they are commitments.
i'm not sure what you mean by deny my commitments. i do sympathize with
the commoners and i do remain abidingly suspicious of my aristocratic
sources. if that be chip, let it remain.
rlandes
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