On Thu, 10 Jul 1997 [log in to unmask] wrote:

> A professor of mine once warned me that in the Middle Ages, "The Bible"
> meant "whatever was in your possesion."  By this he meant that variations
> in copying, corrections, and emendations were all to be expected in the
> innumerable mss of biblical books in circulation.  Not only that but that
> there is no guarantee, especially as one moves away from the ecclesiastical
> centers that all books of the bible would be available in any one place and
> only very rarely (as I understand) in any one codex.

But this, while true, contains in itself some modern fallacies: we think
of codices when we think of books; as Mary Carruthers and others have
shown, medieval people also thought of what they held in their minds.
Monastics, for instance, knew the Bible as a cycle of readings and used
the markers provided by the various days of the weeks and feasts of the
church year as a way to arrange the texts in their minds.  Not having all
the books of the Bible together in a codex didn't mean the same thing to
them as it would mean to us.  Richard and Mary Rouse, Paul Saenger and
others have explored how the Bible (and other books) became "reference
works," accompanied by indexes and other finding aids, as a school culture
reemerged north of the Alps--so both "systems" or "approaches" were
operating at the same time in various contexts.

Moreover, despite the variant versions floating around, attempts to
standardize the text of the Bible (and the liturgy--the Cistercians, for
instance) were undertaken from
the Carolingian period onward.  So, no, a standard text as we know it
today (or did, at least, before the proliferation of vernacular
translations from the 1960s onwards) did not exist, but neither was
everything up for grabs.


> to try and talk about The Church in the middle ages (and which one of us
> hasn't comitted that sin) is more misleading than helpful.  Most students
> of the Middle Ages, even some of the most famous, seem to take the 19th c.
> Roman Catholic model of the Church as roughly equivalent to the medieval
> catholic Church.  

Here I think you unhelpfully exaggerate.  In the first place, my
experience with fellow academics leads me to conclude that many of them
operate with a caricatured and misleading view of the 19thc Roman Catholic
Church (which is another way of saying that I disagree with them about
the nature of 19thc Catholicism). Second, most students of the Middle Ages
whom I know in person or by reading do not conflate the 19thc Roman
Catholic Church (caricatured or not) with the church in the Middle Ages.

Since this thread began with a discussion of popular misconceptions,
I would concede that some popular perceptions of the Middle Ages
do tend to conflate the church in the
Middle Ages with the 19thc Roman Catholic Church--probably grossly
caricaturizing both.

However, I think it important that in seeking to overcome popular
misconceptions, we don't go overboard.  We tend to read into history our
own prejudices.  In eras (Renaissance, Enlightenment) in which synthesis
and unity were valued in thought and culture, people tended to see
institutions (feudalism, The Church etc.) as unvaried and monolithic.  Of
course, that was a distortion.  To the degree that people in
the contemporary West claim to value pluralism and
diversity (with some rather remarkable blind spots), they
tend to see a greater degree of variation as they study the Middle Ages
than did Enlightenment historians.  But this prospecting for variants and
diversity also risks distortion, risks overlooking the degree to
which the Church in the Middle Ages was cohesive and coherent.  For it
certainly was both.  Indeed, contemporary scholars often hold it against
the Church that she tried, from the Gregorian Reform through IV Vatican to
the scholastic theologians, to synthesize and concordize discordances.  We
complain about this heavy-handedness, then turn around and decry those who
talk about "The Church" instead of countless variants of The Church.

In fact, official Catholic theology has always talked about diversity 
_and_ unity.  The oft-decried "hierarchical" understanding of society, of
doctrine, of ecclesial offices was one way to account for both diversity
and unity.  One could find numerous other illustrations of both synthesis
and variation as real _goals_ of the official church.  All too often,
however, depending on which axe we are sharpening at the moment, we speak
and write as if only a heavy-handed drive for centralization or an
irrepressible pluralism characterized the medieval Church.

Any institution that survives over the long haul has to account for both
unity and diversity.  The same applies to any society or culture.
Contrary to anti-Catholic screeds from the Middle Ages, Renaissance,
Modern or Post-Modern periods, the survival of the papal church
over 2000 years is due neither to pure authoritarian centralization nor
pure decentralized variation.  The Catholic Church has found ways to
cultivate both in a remarkable way (considering both its longevity and 
its global transcultural breadth)--if one
sets aside the deep-running passions that mention of Catholicism arouses
in the minds of most Western intellectuals and attempts some careful
comparative study of institutional history, I think this statement can be
defended.

I wish participants in this project success as they try to correct popular
misconceptions without injecting new ivory tower and academic
misconceptions into the landscape they depict.  The challenge is one that
awaits all of us in all of our historical work.

Dennis Martin



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