Benedictine Anniversaries (Benedict XVI)

We've celebrated a couple of anniversaries for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) the past several days: his 95th birthday on Holy Saturday, April 16 in 1927 (also the day of his baptism), the anniversary of his election as Pope on April 19, 2005--and we will also mark the anniversary of his installation as Pope on April 24. 

(It should also be pointed on that when he was born and baptized on April 16, 1927 it was also Holy Saturday.) 

As his life as a theologian and cleric continues to be evaluated, his influence in doctrine and liturgy come to the forefront, and in my stack of books to read I have his The Spirit of the Liturgy from Ignatius Press in a commemorate edition which includes Romano Guardini's classic work of the same title, which I have read before.

All this--and the recent notice about the new edition of The Stripping of the Altars coming this summer--made the arrival of an e-mail from the Adoremus Bulletin with an article about the Roman Rite in the later Middle Ages even more fascinating. Father Uwe Michael Lang of the Oratory in London has written several books about the liturgy and writes here in objection to the common theme of liturgical decline before the Tridentine reforms, particularly commenting on lay participation:

The prevailing use of Latin as a sacred language certainly removed the liturgy from the vast majority of the lay faithful, but it did not raise an impenetrable barrier to popular participation, as is often assumed. At least in Romance-speaking countries, where the vernacular language developed from Latin, there was a basic understanding at least of the meaning conveyed in liturgical texts.[2] Moreover, the vernacular Prayer of the Faithful at the main Sunday Mass in the parish church offered to the laity a form of involvement that corresponded to their spiritual and temporal needs. The oldest known example of such “bidding prayers” from England precedes the Norman Conquest and has been dated to the early 11th century. In other countries, as well, the Prayer of the Faithful employed local languages, such as Catalan, Basque, and Breton, as well as Occitan and German dialects.[3] This vernacular rite was inserted at some point during the offertory, and commonly after the incensation of the gifts and the altar and before the priest’s washing of hands (lavabo).

And he also argues that comprehension and participation should not be limited to understanding only one text (the written word), but that there were other texts the lay participants "read":

Liturgical participation cannot be reduced to the comprehension of texts, and Frank Senn has proposed a broader conception that includes “other ‘vernaculars’ than language, not least of which were the church buildings themselves and the liturgical art that decorated them.”[4] From a similar perspective, Éric Palazzo has explored the sensory dimensions of the liturgy: the stimulation of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting made participation in the Mass a synesthetic experience.[5] Lay participation was by its very nature unscripted: it was not regulated by the official liturgical books that gave detailed instructions to the clergy regarding what to say and how to perform the sacred rites. Thus, the faithful were able to engage with the Mass in a variety of ways that are not easy for us to grasp precisely because they were not scripted. Paul S. Barnwell speaks of “the meditative and affective nature of much lay devotion in the period.”[6] The sensory dimensions of the late medieval liturgy offered important stimuli for such meditation.

Please read the rest there--it's one in a series of articles on the history of the Roman Rite of the Mass by the same author. The immediately previous article about Medieval devotion to Jesus in His Real Presence in the Eucharist is also excellent.

Edward Short on R.W. Southern and Whig History

Edward Short, whose new edition of Newman's Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching I reviewed last year here and here, writes about the English historian of the Middle Ages, R.W. Southern, for the Catholic World Report. 

Describing a paper Southern delivered in 1988 to the St. John's College Historical Society, “The Truth about the Past”, Short highlights the medievalist's explanation of how history replaced scholastic theology at the University of Oxford as the organizing principle for understanding the truth about the past. Not just the discipline of history, doing research and verifying facts, but the interpretation of the results of that research to explain all the progress of the present: in other words, Whig history:

In reviewing how history was revisited from 1850 onwards in an attempt to fill the void left by the desuetude in which the scholastic tradition fell, Southern charted the failure of secular humanism. Initially, it was thought that the best means of studying history to establish general truths was through a study of institutions, particularly the development of Parliament and common law, and, by extension, the development of constitutional liberty, a development which could act as a useful guide not only to the conduct of life but to the challenges of empire, when the English still had an empire for which proconsuls had to be supplied.

Here, in embryo, was the Whig conception of history, according to which all history culminated in the triumph of Whig constitutionalism, and Southern vividly describes the welcome with which it was received two years after the Revolutions of 1848 rocked European institutions to their foundations. “It came as a huge liberation from a prison of despair to discover that here in our midst there was something like a divine instrument for the enlargement of human life,” Southern writes, “developing through the centuries from the earliest days.” Indeed, for those who had despaired of the general truths of Revelation, it offered nothing less than “a kind of secular embodiment of that force which had in the past been particularly associated with the now derelict pattern of Revelation.”

Consequently, History, not Theology, came to rule the academic roost. The claims made for the redemptive properties of historical study might now seem, as Southern says, “pure moonshine;” but it did not seem so in 1930, when Southern was an undergraduate. “Indeed, history had succeeded beyond all expectation in giving the university that central position in society which it had had in the thirteenth century and had gradually lost in the intervening centuries.” By 1900, one third of all undergraduates were studying history. Fifty years later, historical study had begun to lose and would never regain its fleeting centrality. . . .

Please read the rest there, especially for the explanation of why that the influence of historical study waned after 1950.

In the last part of the essay, Short almost convinces me that I should read R.W. Southern's two volume Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe.

Almost.

Book Review: "America on Trial" by Robert Reilly (Part One)

From Ignatius Press:

The Founding of the American Republic is on trial. Critics say it was a poison pill with a time-release formula; we are its victims. Its principles are responsible for the country's moral and social disintegration because they were based on the Enlightenment falsehood of radical individual autonomy.

In this well-researched book, Robert Reilly declares: not guilty. To prove his case, he traces the lineage of the ideas that made the United States, and its ordered liberty, possible. These concepts were extraordinary when they first burst upon the ancient world: the Judaic oneness of God, who creates ex nihilo and imprints his image on man; the Greek rational order of the world based upon the Reason behind it; and the Christian arrival of that Reason (Logos) incarnate in Christ. These may seem a long way from the American Founding, but Reilly argues that they are, in fact, its bedrock. Combined, they mandated the exercise of both freedom and reason.

These concepts were further developed by thinkers in the Middle Ages, who formulated the basic principles of constitutional rule. Why were they later rejected by those claiming the right to absolute rule, then reclaimed by the American Founders, only to be rejected again today? Reilly reveals the underlying drama: the conflict of might makes right versus right makes might. America's decline, he claims, is not to be discovered in the Founding principles, but in their disavowal.

The Catholic World Report published a symposium of reactions to America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, but I encourage you to read the book--like I did--before you read the 13 responses by philosophers, historians, and others. Form your own opinion first on what Reilly has attempted and achieved before being influenced by them. I saw the symposium, scanned the summaries of the responses, and stopped--then went to Eighth Day Books and bought my copy. When I was last in the store Tuesday this week (for a discussion of Book III of Boethius' The Consolations of Philosophy with a group of friends) Warren was sold out, but I'm sure he'll be getting more copies soon.

Robert R. Reilly, whom I saw speak at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference in Wichita  (cancelled this year by COVID of course) a few years ago on his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, in this book offers an exploration of the philosophical and intellectual sources that inspired the Founders of the United States of America in their quest for independence from Great Britain and the establishment of a new nation. 

He goes all the way back to the pre-philosophical era, explores Greek philosophy focusing on Aristotle, Jewish monotheism, and the Latin/Roman Catholic synthesis of Greek philosophy and Revelation focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas, and continues his philosophical lessons through to the eighteenth century. 

Aristotle and Aquinas, with their confidence in our ability to reason based on the reality we experience around us are his heroes in these chapters. The Catholic synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Revelation meant that we could, in a limited way of course, try to understand God and His creation with confidence, determine what is good, true, and beautiful, and live according to the Natural Law He created in the world, demonstrating the continuity between His Natural Law and His Revelation. This synthesis, Reilly argues, provided the foundation for the equality of all before the law, Divine and human, and the rights of all of God's creation to justice, including the consent to be governed. 

Along the way he offers an important defense of the Middle Ages, so often misidentified as the age of the "divine right of kings". Although it created many struggles between the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the rulers of countries and empires, Reilly suggests that the "two swords" theory of the Middle Ages created a balance of rights and responsibilities for the ordinary person that a single sword--the state controlling both secular and religious order in each country--takes away. This recalled to my mind how the 17th century courts of the Inquisition were considered more just by those being tried in the Civil in those Catholic countries that still--even though as Reilly later points out, many Catholic rulers adopted the single sword model--maintained some semblance of the "two swords" theory with two Court systems. There was a greater presumption of innocence and a higher standard of proof of guilt in the Church Courts of the Inquisition, such that those accused of secular crimes would fake religious crimes to change the court they would be tried in--the BBC even said so!

Then he demonstrates how William Ockham in philosophy and Martin Luther in theology, through their nominalism and voluntarism, destroyed this synthesis and shifted the basis of knowledge and action from Reason to Will: even God's Reason. Larry P. Arnn of Hillsdale College addresses Reilly's view of Martin Luther in his Preface, counselling Lutherans and other Protestants to respond carefully and charitably, noting that Reilly quotes Martin Luther accurately and judiciously.

Reilly asserts that the English theologian Richard Hooker re-established Aristotelian realism in the (High) Church of England but I found that chapter not as convincing as Reilly intended. Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity did not restore the "two swords" to England--the Church of England was as Erastian after as before--and even if James I praised Hooker's work that king upheld the theory of the Divine Right of Kings and the right of the monarch to rule the Church and the state without the consent of the governed. Yes, Hooker helped restore Natural Law to some extent, but the history of the Church of England demonstrates the limits of his legacy. His section on the relationship of the Church to the State, as Reilly notes in a later chapter, was not published until after both his and James I's deaths, because it was too controversial during that reign.

Reilly adds Thomas Hobbes to his triumvirate of the enemies of Reason and the Natural Law as he examines that gloomy philosopher's Leviathan as an effort to avoid civil war through absolute earthly obedience to the monarch, even above obedience to God. Heaven is no rewarding destination, only enforced peace on earth. The control of the state is necessary to hold in check the common, individual desires of each citizen to keep them from killing each other in the pursuit of worldly goods and security. Like Ockham and Luther, Hobbes deplored the thought and influence of Aristotle.

(Reilly mentions Machiavelli in his discussions of these contrasting views of political authority, but evidently judges him and The Prince to be a little outside the English background of the Founders.)

Juxtaposing James I of England's doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings to arguments by St. Robert Bellarmine and Father Francisco Suarez defending the sovereignty of the people and their right to consent to be governed, echoing Medieval theories. He cites parallel statements of Bellarmine, Suarez, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence on the "Source of Political Power", "Power of the People and the Requirement of Consent", and "Right to Revolution and Self-Determination". Reilly notes that our Founding Fathers weren't citing these arguments because their authors were Catholics (whom most of them detested and feared) but that they acknowledged the truth and effectiveness of these arguments as they were cited in Robert Firmer's defense of the Divine Right of Kings in his attempts to refute them. Lastly, he describes the influence of Algernon Sidney and his Discourses Concerning Government on the Founders, again noting the congruence between the two Jesuit scholastic theologians and Sidney.

The chapter on John Locke ("Problem and Solution") is a crucial one for Reilly's argument as he works to separate Locke's epistemological theories from his political theories. Again, part of his effort is to demonstrate what in Locke's philosophical and political works influenced the Founders. Reilly defends Locke from charges that he valued freedom and liberty only for the sake of hedonistic pleasures and shows that Locke has the common philosophical view of happiness as the fulfillment of Natural Law and Reality. He compares and contrasts Hobbes and Locke to demonstrate that the latter's thoughts are congruent with "orthodox" philosophies of Reality and Natural Law. Locke's epistemological skepticism did not extend to the afterlife, as he hoped for Heaven on his deathbed and wanted the Psalms read to him. That chapter was convincing to me.

I continue this review another day as this post is getting long! Since my background in Philosophy is scanty--one class at WSU that started with the thought of A.J. Ayer and scattered reading on my own--Reilly's systematic review of this history has been thought-provoking and fascinating to me.

A Hymn for Lent from Herebert

Eleanor Parker--the medievalist and blogger, not the actress--writes for The Catholic Herald about William Herebert of Oxford and his hymn translations:

Herebert’s name is not well known today, but his poems, beautiful and distinctive in their own right, also represent an important milestone for English Catholicism: he was one of the first people to turn the Latin hymns of the Church into English poetry.

We don’t have many details about Herebert’s life, but he was probably born in Herefordshire around 1270. He was educated at the universities of Paris and Oxford, where his contemporaries included Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and in 1317 he became master of the Franciscan house in Oxford.

He was evidently a learned man, and his poems show that he gave careful thought to the difficult question of how best to express complex religious ideas in his own language.

Herebert’s poems survive in a manuscript book written in his own hand, noted down along with his Latin sermons and other texts useful for the medieval preacher. There are 23 short poems, arranged roughly according to the cycle of the liturgical year. Some are original compositions, but most are translations or reworkings of Latin or French texts, freely adapted into English. They include the first English verse translations of some well-known hymns, such as Veni Creator Spiritus and the Palm Sunday hymn All glory, laud and honour.

You could go to her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, and see several posts about William Herebert, including this one about a Lenten hymn:

This is a Middle English translation of the Lent hymn 'Audi, benigne Conditor', by the Franciscan friar William Herebert (c.1270-1333):

Lustne, mylde Wrouhte, oure bones wyth wepinge
In þys holy uastinge, vourti dawes lestynge.
Holy secher of monnes þouht, þou wost oure brotelnesse;
To hem þat beth yturnd to þe graunte vorȝyfnesse.
Meche, vorsoht, we habbeht agult; vorȝyf hem þat knoulecheth.
To worshype of þyn oune nome, to sunvol mon be leche.
Graunte ous pyne wyþouteuorth þe body wyth vastinge,
Þat oure gost wyþynneuorth veste vrom sunnynge.
Graunte ous, Holy Trinite, þat in Godhede art on,
Þat þe ȝyft of leyntes vast notfol boe to mon. Amen.

That is:

Hear, merciful Creator, our prayers with weeping
In this holy fasting, forty days lasting.
Holy searcher of man’s thought, thou knowest our brittleness; [frailty]
To them who are turned towards thee, grant forgiveness.
Much, truly, we have sinned; forgive them that acknowledge it.
For the honour of thine own name, be physician to sinful man.
Grant us so to mortify the body outwardly with fasting
That our souls inwardly may fast from sinning.
Grant us, Holy Trinity, who in Godhead art one,
That the gift of Lent’s fast may be beneficial to man. Amen.

Please read the rest there. She posts about her Catholic Herald article here, and promises more poems and hymns from William Herebert!

Pugin and Absolute Gothic

At the Imaginative Conservative site, James Baresel discusses the connections artists and architects made between the neo-Gothic style and social issues, including economics in the Victorian era. He asks the question, "Should Christians Romanticize the Middle Ages?" and comments on A.W.N. Pugin's absolute commitment to "medievalism":

The leading light of the romantic neo-Gothic architectural movement was Catholic convert Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Perhaps no man has even taken medievalism to a greater extreme. His goal was nothing less than a restoration of England not just to Catholicism, but to a medieval English Catholicism as part of a restoration to what he considered to be an overall medieval way of life. Late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth-century Gothic was to him both an apogee of architectural development and a permanent set of canons for particular categories of buildings. Such structures as railway stations that lacked a medieval precedent were to be designed upon the basis of “Gothic principles.” Priests were to be clad in Gothic vestments while celebrating Mass. When Blessed John Henry Newman planned an introduction of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri into England, Pugin objected on the grounds that the Oratorians had always been Italian with no historical connection to England and were grounded in the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation rather than in any way medieval. Upon visiting Rome, Pugin found himself detesting perhaps the greatest achievements of Catholic art and architecture in history—the Renaissance and the Baroque of the great basilicas—due to their ornate beauty and because he, in all seriousness, considered them to be pagan.

To articulate his vision for English society, Pugin published Contrasts, contrasting scenes from early industrial England with what he believed to be his country’s medieval past. He went far beyond pointing out that life for many in the Middle Ages was in fact more tolerable than life in the early factories. Medieval life was depicted as all but idyllic, his own age as an absolute disaster. Some of the contrasts in the book propagandistically showed a medieval town with rising (Gothic) church spires next to a nineteenth-century town with rising factory chimneys. In other cases, images of Gothic and neo-classical churches were placed next to each other on what must have been the assumption that the reader would inevitably consider the former to be the more beautiful. And, of course, Gothic architecture and its influence on peoples’ minds was alleged to be an essential element of creating a desirable state of society.

Read the rest there.

I am always troubled by how Pugin almost seems to exalt the Gothic above Catholicism itself by insisting that Gothic art and architecture was absolutely essential to worship and prayer. I always appreciate the beauty of a church and I do favor the Gothic style, but I also know that true sacramental worship doesn't depend on the style of architecture. For Pugin to have protested against the Oratory of St. Philip Neri being established in England because it "had always been Italian with no historical connection to England" certainly ignored how international medievalism was. After all, the Gothic style originated in France! Catholicism is indeed universal and should not be identified with only one period or culture.

Medieval Manuscripts Digitized at the Fitzwilliam

Whenever people ignorantly refer to the Middle Ages, the long period between the Fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, as the Dark Ages, the colorful images of medieval prayerbooks, psalters, and Bibles, and of glorious brightly colored stained glass in Gothic cathedrals are two of the best ways to correct them. Of course I know that the Middle Ages had some dark times, but what era hasn't? Seeing the brightness and vividness of the Hours of Philip the Bold and the stained glass of  the Cathedral at Chartres indicates that there's more to learn, at least, about the Middle Ages.

The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge just opened this exhibit of medieval manuscripts to highlight the color/colour of these works:

This exhibition celebrates the Fitzwilliam’s 2016 bicentenary with a stunning display of 150 illuminated manuscripts from its rich collections. They range from the prayerbooks of European royalty and merchants to local treasures like the Macclesfield Psalter, from an alchemical scroll and a duchess’ wedding gift to the ABC of a five-year old princess.

Manuscripts were at the heart of Viscount Fitzwilliam’s collection with which the Museum was established in 1816. Many of them are displayed here for the first time. They can only be seen at the Museum due to a clause in Fitzwilliam’s bequest which prevents them from leaving the building and reveals the anxieties of the Founder who had assembled his treasures in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

The hundreds of images sheltered in volumes that were cherished in princely and religious libraries for centuries constitute the largest and best preserved repositories of medieval and Renaissance painting. With most panel and wall paintings destroyed by war, greed, puritanical zeal or time, illuminated manuscripts are the richest resources for the study of European painting between the sixth and the sixteenth century - the main focus of this exhibition. Highlights of Byzantine, Armenian, Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts are also included. Travel from eighth-century Northumbria to seventeenth-century Nepal via Oxford, Paris, Bruges, Cologne, Florence, Venice, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Kashmir.

Discover the secrets of original masterpieces and modern forgeries. Find out what cutting-edge technologies reveal about their painting materials, and the images’ meaning and value to their owners.

You may sample the digitized images here, and notice those English books that survived the Reformation, as well as those that survived the French Revolution.

History Today vs. English Heritage: "The DARK Ages"

The English Heritage Society referred to the period from 400 to 1066 A.D. as "the Dark Ages" at an exhibit at Tintagel Castle, and one of the writers at History Today doesn't like it:

The term ‘Dark Ages’ found a foothold in the 17th and 18th centuries, with historians like Edward Gibbon writing about the ‘darkness’ of the period, and reached its peak in the mid-19th century as, with a fervent belief in the dawn of a modern age, a growing Empire needed to build a dark past from which to emerge. The Dark Ages cling to Victorian ideals.

As a concept it is steeped in intellectual and cultural superiority used to dismiss the early Middle Ages as a period of ‘intellectual darkness’ before the Renaissance. In fact, we know far more about late Anglo-Saxon England than we do about Roman Britain.

The phrase feeds into a romanticised view of the period: lost to the mists of time, savage and lawless. But that could not be further from the truth. We might not have the overwhelming wealth of materials of later periods but enough survives to see the extent of their intellectual and cultural development. Pre-Conquest England was not without law, culture and politics.

Not to mention the anti-Catholic aspect of the nomenclature.

English Heritage defends its choice of term:

When considering how to refer to the period of time between c.400 - 1066 in our interpretation at Tintagel Castle, and other historic sites in our care, English Heritage carefully considered a number of factors, in full understanding of the conflict and confusion that the term 'Dark Ages' can create. We considered a number of alternatives all of which ultimately also proved to be problematic.

In relation to the interpretation scheme at Tintagel Castle, the terms 'post-Roman' and 'pre-Saxon' are difficult, particularly in the context of Cornish history. More scholarly names such as 'late Antiquity', 'migration period' or 'early Christian' are all potentially problematic for the general public. 'Early medieval' or 'early Middle Ages' is perhaps the most suitable, but we have found that these terms are popularly associated with the period around 1066 and the Normans; potentially confusing at a site such as Tintagel which also has medieval buildings.

Just label the period: c.400 to 1066 A.D. and leave off the descriptive. I think it's disingenuous for English Heritage to pretend that "the Dark Ages" is not a pejorative term. This site reflects the usual interpretation of the term "the Dark Ages" as an age of superstition, which equals religious faith:

Despite the religious conflicts, the period of the Dark Ages was seen as an age of faith. Men and women sought after God; some through the staid rituals of the Catholic Church, others in more Orthodox forms of worship. Intellectuals view religion in any form as, itself, a type of “darkness.” These thinkers assert that those who followed religious beliefs lied to themselves, creating a false reality. They were dominated by emotions, not fact. Religion was seen as contrary to rationality and reason, thus the move towards enlightenment -- a move away from “darkness.” Science and reason gained ascendancy, progressing steadily during and after the Reformation and Age of Enlightenment.

To some extent, the period of the Dark Ages remains obscure to modern onlookers. The tumult of the era, its religious conflict and denigration, and debatable time period all work together to shroud the period in diminished light.

The early Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch is usually credited with ascribing the term to the period after the Fall of Rome until his contemporary age's rediscovery of classical language and literature:

It is generally accepted that the term was invented by Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said that "amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom" (Mommsen, 1942). Christian writers had traditional metaphors of "light versus darkness" to describe "good versus evil." Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the "dark age" for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of "light" because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's time, lacking such cultural achievements, was now seen as the age of darkness.

Why did Petrarch call it an age of darkness? Petrarch spent much of his time traveling through Europe rediscovering and republishing the classic Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore the classical Latin language to its former purity. Humanists saw the preceding nine hundred year period as a time of stagnation. They saw history unfolding not along the religious outline of St. Augustine's Six Ages of the World (from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, from David to the exile of the Hebrews in Babylon, from the return to the time of Jesus, the Christian era) but in cultural (or secular) terms, through the progressive developments of Classical ideals, literature, and art.

Petrarch wrote that history had had two periods: the Classic period of the Romans and Greeks, followed by a time of darkness, in which he saw himself as still living. Humanists believed one day the Roman Empire would rise again and restore Classic cultural purity. The concept of the European Dark Ages thus began as an ideological campaign by humanists to promote Classical culture, and was therefore not a neutral historical analysis. It was invented to express disapproval of one period in time, and the promotion of another. [Emphasis added!]

With Chesterton on the Middle Ages

Preparing for my presentation for the Catholic Culture Conference this weekend at the Spiritual Life Center ("Cobbett and Chesterton on Merry Old England"), I've been reading books and essays by Chesterton. Registration closes today at noon, so you'd better call in now!

Throughout his Short History of England, his study of Chaucer, and many essays in which he mentions the Middle Ages, Chesterton notes that the twentieth century Englishman (or woman) knows nothing about the Middle Ages except what prejudices he or she has received about the darkness and obscurity of that Catholic era. As an example, The American Chesterton Society posts this essay from the Illustrated London News, November 15, 1913, "Getting to Know the Middle Ages":

It is quite natural that the prosperous people in our time should know no history. If they did know it, they would know the highly unedifying history of how they became prosperous. It is quite natural, I say, that they should not know history: but why do they think they do? Here is a sentence taken at random from a book written by one of the most cultivated of our younger critics, very well written and most reliable on its own subject, which is a modern one. The writer says: “There was little social or political advance in the Middle Ages” until the Reformation and the Renaissance. Now I might just as well say that there was little advance in science and invention in the nineteenth century until the coming of William Morris: and then excuse myself by saying that I am not personally interested in spinning-jennies and jelly-fish – which is indeed the case. For that is all that the writer really means: he means he is not personally interested in heralds or mitred abbots. That is all right; but why, when writing about something that did not exist in the Middle Ages, should he dogmatise about a story that he has evidently never heard? Yet it might be made a very interesting story.

A little while before the Norman Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism, continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long before the beginnings of the Reformation. The great cities have arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls “little social or political advance.” There is scarcely an important modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time.

Read the rest there.

Also from The American Chesterton Society, Dale Ahlquist writes about Chesterton on Chaucer:

Chesterton has often been dismissed for blindly idealizing the Middle Ages, but the real problem is quite the opposite. The modern world automatically attacks the Middle Ages as something backwards, dark, and superstitious, the enemy of reason and liberty. Chesterton merely defended the truth that reason and liberty enjoyed a high point in medieval times that the world has not really seen since. He acknowledged that there were still problems in those times, and there are certainly many things that we can rightfully regard as improvements. But history is not a story of progress. Our fortunes move both backward and forward. While technology provides a kind of liberty, it also provides a kind of slavery. While the experts are useful as servants, they are unbearable as masters.

In the Middle Ages the peasant class, according to Chesterton, was still successfully fighting off the rise of the Aristocratic state. He refers to a famous peasant uprising where they “killed the lawyers; a comprehensible and (relatively) even commendable course; though they also showed some disposition to hang anybody who could read or write; which is perhaps carrying the distrust of professionalism too far.”

The most difficult thing for us to understand about that culture is that it was purely Catholic, there were no Reformers or Rebels to contend with. The theology was solid and widespread. The criticisms of the Church came in the form of making fun of stuffy Roman officialism, or, in the case of Geoffrey Chaucer, making fun of friars.

As I recall, though dimmed by years, when I studied The Canterbury Tales in college, it was as if the Reformation had already happened in Chaucer's time: the Church was corrupt; Indulgences were for sale; we were as anti-clerical as Lollards or Voltaire; Martin Luther came far too late to the ball! After this project, I think I need to read Chesterton on Chaucer and then re-read The Canterbury Tales without jaundice. After all, April is not over yet!

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for the seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Blog Tour Interview: "The Middle Ages Unlocked"

I interviewed the authors of The Middle Ages Unlocked: A Guide to Life in Medieval England, 1050–1300 (Amberley Publishing, 2015), Gillian Polack and Katrin Kania, as part of their U.S. blog tour. One of the things about the book that intrigued me was the two disciplines of history and archaeology (thus question #4) working together:

1. For many years, under the influence of the Enlightenment philosophers and historians, people thought of the Middle Ages as the “Dark Ages”. Does your history offer a key to unlock this view of the Medieval era?

Since the Renaissance, the Middle Ages has been considered the time in between Classical history and the Renaissance. The Renaissance self-defined as rebirth, and tried to distance itself from the time before, calling them the Dark Ages. These days, the time between the fall of Rome and early modern times tends to be described differently. Our book shows one section of the Middle Ages, the time from 1050 to around 1300, in their variety, and it quickly becomes clear that the Middle Ages were not Dark Ages at all. They were neither all dirty, nor all poor, nor all cold and dark and dreary.

2. With the celebration of the Magna Carta this year, did you highlight the issues of freedom and rights in your history?

Our book was a long-term project. We were delighted that it was released in the year of the Magna Carta anniversary (the UK release was actually on the very day!) but we had not planned for it. Freedom and rights are explained in our history as part of legal systems and religion. The Magna Carta is, of course, mentioned, but we did not focus on the Magna Carta specifically: it was far more of a political event than a fundamental shift in rights. We explain structures and society – our book does not replace political histories, but helps to understand them and to put political events into a wider context.

3. Do you consider this book a resource for research or a book to be read straight through—or both?

Both! We worked hard to make it pleasant to read through, and to find a good, logical structure for the individual chapters that lets them flow into each other. The individual chapters are stand-alone enough to provide information on a specific topic, and the corresponding recommendations for further reading are helpful in getting started on further, deeper research.

4. Please discuss how the disciplines of history and archaeology work together (or against each other) in helping us understand the past.

This is a very good question! History and archaeology tend to focus on different aspects and look at things differently even if the research topic is the same. Historians and archaeologists thus have to figure out what the other discipline is looking at, how they pose their questions and what they focus on, which means good communication is absolutely essential for working together successfully. If this does work, blending historical and archaeological work is helpful for getting a bigger, wider picture, and for avoiding misinterpretations due to gaps in our respective sources. For instance, an archaeologist will know more about the materials and techniques used in a workshop, and that knowledge can help the historian to better understand why a workshop was worth a certain amount of money, or why getting a specific resource from abroad could have been important for the craftsperson. Our respective disciplines can work dynamically together, giving important insights and helping us, as modern people, to better understand the Middle Ages.

5. In both your introduction and the foreword by Elizabeth Chadwick, the importance of religion in the Middle Ages is stressed. How can secular readers appreciate the role of religion in Medieval England when they don’t share the worldview that “God is Everywhere”?

Most modern people have a different take on religion to that of a medieval person. Medieval piety was very much a part of daily life. However, that does not mean that somebody needs to be pious, or religious at all, to read and learn about the Middle Ages. Appreciation of how important something is, and how that something works, is fortunately not closely tied to actually believing, using, or having that something. People can learn how a car works, and appreciate how important a car is to our modern society, without having or using one themselves – there is no reason why an atheist should not be able to understand and appreciate how religion permeated medieval society, and how important it was for both government and private life.

6. And to follow up on that question, do you think it is necessary for us to appreciate the role of religion in that era to understand the Middle Ages? If we don't what are the consequences?

Yes, it is absolutely key to take the importance of religion in the Middle Ages into account when we try to understand the era. When its role is underestimated, or when religion is ignored, many things are hard to understand or make no sense to us. On the other hand, it is also very important not to overestimate religion, or to believe that every priest taught their congregation the same things. There was a great deal of variation in religious belief and practice, and churches were not only places for worship, but also social spaces used in many different ways.

7. Aside from primary or contemporary sources, what historians most influenced your overall view of the Middle Ages?

The wonderful thing about working on an overview is that it allowed us to form our own views of the Middle Ages. Of course there are prominent names for research in specific topics, but we have never relied on just one single view or just one single book. Writing an overview also means that many topics are touched from different directions, and it automatically results in a re-evaluation of the current view. Our coming from different academic disciplines added another level to this. So there is no single historian (or archaeologist) that we can name here, and we are happy that this is the case.

8. Are the details about daily life applicable only to England in this era, or would we expect to find similarities with life on the Continent at that time?

Some details are, and some are very different from life on the continent. There is a signifiacnt amount of overlap between English life and life in western France, including the Old French spoken in these areas. It is hard to extrapolate beyond that – not only because we have not researched in detail how similar or how different daily life may have been, but also because this can vary from place to place and from example to example. A spindle stick would look about the same in England, Finland and Germany, but shoes might have looked very different. To really say something about this, however, we need to have enough sources giving us information in sufficient detail, which is not always available. There are several more books’ worth that could be written about similarities and differences between England and France alone!

9. Elizabeth Chadwick highlighted a detail that would add verisimilitude to her next novel set in medieval England. Do you think of this book as a resource for writers? Who else should read this book?

The book was originally intended to help writers understand and use medieval England, so we are happy that writers like Elizabeth find it useful. People who need world-building skills for fantasy or science-fiction novels or other applications such as role-playing might also profit from reading the book, as it shows how many different aspects interconnect and influence each other. The book will also help the general public to get a basic understanding of the era, which will make it easier to find out more on individual aspects, and to put those into context – so basically everyone interested in the Middle Ages might want to read our book!

10. With the cutoff date of 1300 in the subtitle, are you suggesting that life in England was different in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Did things start to change?

The fourteenth century was an appalling time. War, plague, famine: it had the lot. Cultural change didn't happen overnight, but it did happen. The period before the fourteenth century set up social structures, legal and political systems that shaped even today’s England, however the amount and nature of the changes that happened in the fourteenth century would have required The Middle Ages Unlocked to be a much longer book if we had included it. Material culture also changed a great deal after the thirteenth century. All these reasons together made it easy for us to decide when to stop with our history.

According to the publisher:

To our modern minds, the Middle Ages seem to mix the well-known and familiar with wildly alien concepts and circumstances. The Middle Ages Unlocked provides an invaluable introduction to this complex and dynamic period in England. Exploring a wide range of topics from law, religion and education to landscape, art and magic, between the eleventh and early fourteenth centuries, the structures, institutions and circumstances that formed the basis for daily life and society are revealed. Drawing on their expertise in history and archaeology, Dr Gillian Polack and Dr Katrin Kania look at the tangible aspects of daily life – ranging from the raw materials used for crafts, clothing and jewellery to housing and food – in order to bring the Middle Ages to life. The Middle Ages Unlocked dispels modern assumptions about this period to uncover the complex tapestry of medieval England and the people who lived there.

Catholics, the English Reformation, and Liberty

Bruce P. Frohnen, Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative and Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University College of Law, writes about Catholics, the English Reformation, and the idea and ideal of liberty:

Were it true that only England provides a true history of liberty’s growth prior to the time of modern revolutions, that would be tragic from two points of view. It would show that there is in fact something “anti-liberty” about Catholicism, as Protestants often have claimed. Further, it would seem to excuse the sometimes quite oppressive and even violent treatment of Catholics by English authorities and by those who wish to follow in their footsteps today. Catholics should not need to be reminded that the English government going back to Henry VIII, and coming forward even into the twentieth-century, has been hostile toward Catholicism and Catholics. The martyrdom of numerous priests and bishops such as St. John Fisher, the sacking of the monasteries, and laws forbidding the saying of Catholic mass and even decreeing execution for priests lasted for centuries. Catholics were disenfranchised until the nineteenth-century and even in the twentieth-century social disabilities were common (e.g. J.R.R. Tolkien, being Catholic, was not allowed to dine with his Protestant colleagues at Oxford). A central justification of these injustices was that Catholics were “loyal to a foreign prince” who sought enslavement of both souls and bodies, imposing the tyrannous hierarchy of Catholicism. Even on the continent, the story often was repeated that Popes ruled their “estates” as tyrants and sought only to expand their temporal authority in order to force reconversions to their faith and re-establish a kind of absolute rule over the bodies and minds of the people. What is more, it has been this vision of Catholicism as intrinsically hostile to human liberty that has fed into an anti-Catholic sentiment in portions of the American public that has damaged religious liberty and constitutional government itself.

If true, the charges leveled at the Catholic Church and her people would be damning, indeed. Were it true that only the particular cultural institutions and developments of Protestant England, along with, perhaps, those of Protestant Holland, could produce political liberty then Catholicism would be riven by internal contradictions. Catholics recognize that, while salvation is the ultimate, highest good, liberty also is a real human good and freedom aids greatly in the development of the human person. If their religion were hostile to liberty, then, they would have to choose between salvation and freedom. Thankfully, ordered liberty is not a purely English phenomenon and Catholicism is entirely consistent with ordered liberty, not merely in theory, but also in historical practice. My purpose, here, is to examine some of the reasons for Americans’ focus on English liberty. Some of these reasons are accidental and some genuinely important. They are worth exploring for what they can tell American Catholics about ourselves and about the requirements for ordered liberty.

It is best to begin with accidental reasons. Most Americans know little about medieval and early modern history of any kind. What is more, the further one strays from English history (which has a great deal written about it, almost all of which is, well, in English) the less knowledge there is. This is not just a matter of self-centered disinterest—such “multiculturalist” arguments make just as much sense in regard to Italy or medieval Germany as in regard to Africa and the Far East, which is to say, none. It is natural and right that people know most about their own history; they always should know more than they do, but that goes for all times and all fields. American culture is predominantly British, in the wide sense, and so our historical knowledge tends to focus on Great Britain and its center, England.

There is, not surprisingly, a somewhat more sinister aspect to our ignorance of the middle ages and the sources of liberty in particular, one that applies to England as well as the continent and has ideological origins and results. The assault on courses in Western Civilization and on the study of Western history has hit hardest in the area of European history before the modern era. Americans for generations have learned increasingly little about the medieval world, becoming more and more ignorant of the development of their culture and civilization. This ignorance has allowed for ideological fantasies to gain more than a foothold on university campuses and even in the public mind.

Read the rest there. In many ways Frohnen is reflecting on the effects of the Whiggish interpretation of history, which has read into the past the defeat of Catholicism as the prerequisite for modern freedom. See Butterfield's study of this pattern of reading victory into the past: The Whig Interpretation of History. In my opinion, the best antidote to this ignorance of the medieval period is to read the works of Christopher Dawson and Regine Pernoud.

The Rosary and Anachronism

I noticed this post on the English Historical Fiction Authors page about the use of beads in prayer and the term "rosary":

The image of a Catholic kneeling in prayer, rosary in hand seems timeless. Having a Dark Ages character rub the beads while murmuring a prayer wouldn't be an anachronism, would it?

Yes and no. Christians, and people of other faiths such as Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, have used beads to keep track of the prayers they were repeating. In the fourth century, Egyptian Abbot Paul used 300 pebbles that he would drop. (Would picking up all those little stones count as penance, too?)

By the seventh century, at least some of the faithful used strings of beads.

The author notes that the term "Rosary" was not used in English until 1547. 

Reading this post reminded me of an historical anachronism I found in a novel, Leonardo's Swans, set in Renaissance Italy. A character prays the Rosary and ends the decades with the Fatima prayer:  "O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Your Mercy". That prayer dates from the early twentieth century so a person in that era would not have added it to the recitation of the Rosary.

Another note for thinking about how Catholics have prayed the Rosary through the centuries: the Ave Maria ("Hail Mary") was just the two verses from St. Luke's Gospel, the first chapter (28 and 42) with the addition of the name Mary: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee (the Angel's greeting) and Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb (her cousin Elizabeth's greeting). The second part--Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death--was a later addition, as was the name Jesus at the end of the second verse.

Anne Winston-Allen wrote Stories of the Rose, published by Penn State University Press, to trace the development and popularity of the Rosary prayer throughout the medieval period. Nathan Mitchell picks up the story of the Rosary and its importance to Catholic identity during the Counter- or Catholic Reformation period in his book The Mystery of the Rosary.

The Flat Earth and Propaganda

You probably know by now that I like this sort of thing. Writing for History Today in 1991, Jeffrey Russel uncovers the sources of the lie that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat and that Christopher Columbus was going to fall off the edge when he headed out to explore the world. It's an absolute fabrication that, like Marie Antoinette saying "Let Them Eat Cake", has been debunked over and over and yet persists in sloppy thinking about the past. The article concludes:

We have seen how the Error was established. The question is why it persists in gripping the educated public imagination after having been debunked by historians over six decades. Because the medieval worldview is so foreign to the modern, positivist worldview, it is misunderstood as superstition: medieval people were so superstitious that they must have believed in something as foolish as the flat earth. Underlying this is the Protestant prejudice against the Middle Ages for being Catholic, the Rationalist prejudice against Judeo-Christianity as a whole, and the Anglo-American prejudice against the Spanish, a prejudice so common that it is known to historians as 'the Black Legend of Spain'. The few actual medieval flat-earthers were belaboured to confirm the prejudice, and the bulk of the evidence on the other side was ignored.

And beneath this distortion is the ethnocentric contemporary urge to believe that contemporary post-industrial society is the outcome of a beneficent progress. The attribution to a group of a belief system which the group itself does not actually hold is a manifestation of blind prejudice familiar to sociologists.

Chronocentrism – the assumption of the superiority of 'our' views to that of older cultures – is the most stubborn remaining variety of ethnocentrism. 'Irrationalism born of hope never dies', and the trust that we are making progress toward a goal (which is not defined and about which there is no consensus) leads us to undervalue the past in order to convince ourselves of the superiority of the present. And this extracts a heavy price. The belief that history or providence or whatever is inexorably leading us in some direction reduces our sene of responsibility for ourselves in the moment that is the present.

Our determination to believe that Flat Error arises out of our contempt for the past and our need to believe in the superiority of the present – that is, of ourselves. And since the present is transformed day by day, minute by minute, second by second, into the past, while the future is unknown and unknowable, we are left on the dark sea without stars, without compass or astrolabe, more unsure of our position and our goal than any of Columbus's sailors. The terror of meaninglessness, of falling off the edge of knowledge, is greater than the imagined fear of falling off the edge of the earth. And so we prefer to believe a familiar error than to search, unceasingly, the darkness.

Russell introduces a new term for the whig view of history--chronocentrism--based on our rather irrational belief that we are always progressing.

Read the rest of the article here.

The REAL Eleanor of Aquitaine

History Today posts this review of Inventing Eleanor: The Medieval and Post-Medieval Image of Eleanor of Aquitaine, by Michael Evans, published by Bloomsbury Academic:

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124- 1204) has stood in the spotlight for eight centuries, but paradoxically the real Eleanor remains a shadowy figure. Duchess of Aquitaine, Queen of France and England, mother of two English kings, her achievements have been overlaid by successive washes of notoriety, glamour and spin, until separating fact from fiction has become a Herculean task.

In Inventing Eleanor, Michael Evans attempts that untanglement with panache. Examining the ideas, myths and legends surrounding Eleanor, he focuses on the historians and artists who have constructed an Eleanor very different from the 12th-century queen and sets out to discover how and why. The work considers the medieval primary sources before tracing the post-medieval development of Eleanor’s image to the present.

Inventing Eleanor is a fine addition to the Eleanor oeuvre. It has a scholarly focus, but it is written in a winning and readable style. Evans argues convincingly that Eleanor was ‘far from unique among 12th century royal and noble women’ and seeks to unravel how she acquired her false reputation for exceptionalism. He opines that her modern biographers must take a lot of the blame and that we, the public, would often rather believe colourful myth above prosaic truth. He explores the way in which Eleanor’s reputation has been distorted to suit the ideologies of particular historical periods and historians. The feminist movement of the late 20th century, for example, has spawned an interest in Eleanor as a female hero, exaggerating her influence, reinforcing her fabled exceptionalism. 

Read the rest there.

According to the publisher:

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204), queen of France and England and mother of two kings, has often been described as one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. Yet her real achievements have been embellished--and even obscured--by myths that have grown up over eight centuries. This process began in her own lifetime, as chroniclers reported rumours of her scandalous conduct on crusade, and has continued ever since. She has been variously viewed as an adulterous queen, a monstrous mother and a jealous murderess, but also as a patron of literature, champion of courtly love and proto-feminist defender of women's rights. Inventing Eleanor interrogates the myths that have grown up around the figure of Eleanor of Aquitaine and investigates how and why historians and artists have invented an Eleanor who is very different from the 12th-century queen. The book first considers the medieval primary sources and then proceeds to trace the post-medieval development of the image of Eleanor, from demonic queen to feminist icon, in historiography and the broader culture.

The contents:

Introduction / Section I: Medieval and Post-Medieval Myths About Eleanor / 1. Eleanor as Queen of France / 2. Eleanor and the South / 3. Eleanor and the Crusades / 4. Eleanor and England / Section II: Eleanor and the Historians / 5. Eleanor in Anglo-American Historiography / 6. Eleanor in French Historiography / Section III: Eleanor in Culture / 7. The Visual Arts / 8. Drama and Opera / 9. Literature / 10. Eleanor in the Movies / Conclusion: The Transformation of Eleanor.

Here is an interview with the author, in which he notes how hard it is to correct myths of history. He is fighting another version of the Whig interpretation of history, in which authors like Amy Kelly, Thomas Cahill and others see 20th and 21st century feminist values in a thoroughly medieval woman.

Looks fascinating, but it's incredibly expensive! Almost $90.00 for the Kindle edition! The publisher certainly did not spend much money on the cover design--but it's an academic press I know. This is book for inter-library loan!

Next to Read: Robert Barlett's History of Saints

One of my birthday presents is Robert Bartlett's Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? from Princeton University Press:

From its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints--the holy dead. This sweepingly ambitious history from one of the world's leading medieval historians tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. Drawing on sources from around the Christian world, Robert Bartlett examines all of the most important aspects of the saints--including miracles, relics, pilgrimages, shrines, and the saints' role in the calendar, literature, and art.

As this engaging narrative shows, a wide variety of figures have been venerated as saints: men and women, kings and servant girls, legendary virgins and highly political bishops--and one dog. The book explores the central role played by the bodies and body parts of saints, and the special treatment these relics received: how they were treasured and enshrined, used in war and peace, and faked and traded. The shrines of the saints drew pilgrims, sometimes from hundreds of miles, and the book describes the routes, dangers, and rewards of pilgrimage, including the thousands of reported miracles. The book surveys the rich literature and images that proliferated around the saints, as well as the saints' impact on everyday life--from the naming of people and places to the shaping of the calendar. Finally, the book considers how the Christian cult of saints compares with apparently similar aspects of other religions.

At once deeply informative and entertaining, this is an unmatched account of an immensely important and intriguing part of the religious life of the past--as well as the present.

Robert Bartlett is the Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Making of Europe, joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize, andThe Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton). He has also written and presented documentaries on the Middle Ages for BBC television.

Bartlett takes his title from St. Augustine's The City of God. Looks fascinating. Here's the first chapter.

Chesterton on "A Christmas Carol": Modern and Medieval Spirits

From his 1922 introduction, Chesterton compares and contrasts two of Dickens' great misers, Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and Gradgrind in Hard Times:

In this one work of Dickens, therefore, the historical and moral importance is really even greater than the literary importance. In this respect it bears some resemblance to another of his works, which might seem superficially its very contrary. "A Christmas Carol" is perhaps the most genial and fanciful of all his stories. "Hard Times " is perhaps the most grim and realistic. But in both cases the moral beauty is perhaps greater than the artistic beauty; and both stand higher in any study of the man than of the writer. And although one represents the first skirmish in defence of the old traditions, and the second the final pitched battle against the new theories, in both cases the author is fighting for the same cause. He is fighting an old miser named Scrooge, and a new miser named Gradgrind; but it is not only true that the new miser has the old avarice, it is also true that the old miser has the new arguments. Scrooge is a utilitarian and an individualist; that is, he is a miser in theory as well as in practise. He utters all the sophistries by which the age of machinery has tried to turn the virtue of charity into a vice. Indeed this is something of an understatement. Scrooge is not only as modern as Gradgrind but more modern than Gradgrind. He belongs not only to the hard times of the middle of the nineteenth century, but to the harder times of the beginning of the twentieth century; the yet harder times in which we live. Many amiable sociologists will say, as he said, "Let them die and decrease the surplus population." The improved proposal is that they should die before they are born.

So without meaning to, Dickens anticipated a commentary the modern eugenics and abortion movement--according to Chesterton. In the same way, without meaning to, Dickens celebrated the spirit of the Middle Ages, again according to Chesterton in his study of Dickens ("Dickens and Christmas"):

It would be hard to find a better example of this than Dickens's great defence of Christmas. In fighting for Christmas he was fighting for the old European festival. Pagan and Christian, for that trinity of eating, drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day which is really a holiday. He had himself the most babyish ideas about the past. He supposed the Middle Ages to have consisted of tournaments and torture-chambers, he supposed himself to be a brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost a Utilitarian. But for all that he defended the mediæval feast which was going out against the Utilitarianism which was coming in. He could only see all that was bad in mediævalism. But he fought for all that was good in it. And he was all the more really in sympathy with the old strength and simplicity because he only knew that it was good and did not know that it was old. He cared as little for mediævalism as the mediævals did. He cared as much as they did for lustiness and virile laughter and sad tales of good lovers and pleasant tales of good livers. He would have been very much bored by Ruskin and Walter Pater if they had explained to him the strange sunset tints of Lippi and Botticelli. He had no pleasure in looking on the dying Middle Ages. But he looked on the living Middle Ages, on a piece of the old uproarious superstition still unbroken; and he hailed it like a new religion. The Dickens character ate pudding to an extent at which the modern mediævalists turned pale. They would do every kind of honour to an old observance, except observing it. They would pay to a Church feast every sort of compliment except feasting.

As Chesterton further notes in another work on Dickens, his Appreciations and Criticisms, it is rather a mystery that Dickens did so much to revive in some ways the old traditions of celebrating Christmas:

How did it happen that this bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has indeed been celebrated before in English literature; but it had, in the most noticeable cases, been celebrated in connection with that kind of feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger de Coverley kept Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise of Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. And Dickens was not only indifferent to the dignity of the old country gentleman or to the genial archæology of Scott; he was even harshly and insolently hostile to it. If Dickens had lived in the neighbourhood of Sir Roger de Coverley he would undoubtedly, like Tom Touchy, have been always "having the law of him." If Dickens had stumbled in among the old armour and quaint folios of Scott's study he would certainly have read his brother novelist a lesson in no measured terms about the futility of thus fumbling in the dust-bins of old oppression and error. So far from Dickens being one of those who like a thing because it is old, he was one of those cruder kind of reformers, in theory at least, who actually dislike a thing because it is old.

The Translation of St. Thomas a Becket's Relics

I posted the last letter St. Thomas More wrote to his dear daughter Margaret Roper the day before the anniversary of his martyrdom. In the letter he mentions that he hopes his execution is scheduled for the morrow, before the Feast of St. Thomas on July 7. A Clerk of Oxford explored that feast more fully here yesterday and then discusses some aspects of medieval feasts and devotion to saints:

Translation feasts like today's are particularly tricky to explain to a modern audience. It's easy to be cynical about their original motivation, since the practical benefits are usually so obvious as to make the whole idea seem like nothing more than a money-grab: building a bigger or more prominent tomb to attract and accommodate pilgrims, providing a saint with an extra feast to celebrate (often at a more convenient time of year for travel or liturgical commemoration - as clearly illustrated in the case of Becket, whose December feast, awkwardly close to Christmas, was supplemented by a summer translation one), claiming a saint as belonging to one church rather than a rival, and so on. Some medievalists get very sniffy about the pragmatism of it all, their high-minded idealism clearly offended by the idea of churches trying to make money off their saints. There's a lingering Puritanism in some circles (even within academia, but certainly outside it) which can't quite allow that medieval cults of saints were ever anything but a big con - that the saints of the Middle Ages were mostly a bunch of obscure people who were praised far beyond their merits, credited with patently invented miracles, and lauded in tiresome hagiography, with the aim of extracting money from gullible pilgrims. . . .

But if we take translation feasts as an example, trying to understand rather than to condemn or mock, they can tell us fascinating things about the communities who organised them. They can help us trace, for instance, which parts of a community's history were most important to its identity at any point in time, or how a community defined itself against other nearby houses - the translation of Thomas Becket marked the moment when he became Canterbury's most famous saint (as he remains today), surpassing the Anglo-Saxon archbishop-saints, who were still venerated but no longer as culturally useful as they had been for the community in the period immediately following the Norman Conquest (on which see this post on Dunstan and this on Ælfheah). A translation tells us not all that much about the saint whose physical body is its focus, but a great deal about what a saint's memory meant to the people who venerated him or her. What is really commemorated today, then, is not just Thomas Becket but his importance to Canterbury and to the wider world: the fame which brought pilgrims to his shrine, the political charge which made him important enough for his name to be scratched out and his carols cancelled in the sixteenth century, and, yes, the income which built Canterbury Cathedral, a treasure-house of medieval art which still draws thousands of tourists and pilgrims every year. All this deserves to be remembered - and even blogged about.

Read the rest--and enjoy all the great pictures--there.

The Middle Ages Weren't That Dark/The Renaissance Wasn't That Bright

I'm reading G.K. Chesterton's The Thing, as I mentioned, and I think he would appreciate this article, which turns the tables on the usual paradigm re: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. That table turning is something Chesterton does all the time.

First, the article, from The Telegraph by Dominic Selwood, "The bloody underside of the 'civilised' Renaissance":

If you looked only at the luscious paintings by Fra Angelico and Botticelli, and if you listened only to the soaring ethereal voices of Palestrina and Byrd, you would think the Renaissance was a release of centuries of pent-up creativity. You would conclude, as was once fashionable, that when the Renaissance detonated in late 1300s Italy, it sprayed hope, colour, and sensuality into a monochrome and rigid medieval world grappling with a plague that had slain a third of Europe. [In case you think Selwood is exaggerating, remember William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire.]

But you would be wrong for many reasons.

For starters, there was nothing monochrome about the medieval world. You need only look at the extraordinary renovations now under way at Chartres cathedral, where they are restoring the hulking grey walls and statues to their former brightly decorated brilliance, injecting a vibrancy that those who grew up with 1960s architecture can barely take in.

Equally as importantly, there was a lot the Renaissance, for all its splendour, left unchanged. It may have been a celebration of living rather than earthly preparation for an afterlife, but it did not immediately improve life for everyone. For example, as the oligarchs of the day splashed their immense wealth around, patronizing works and monuments to their eternal glory, the majority of the population remained bound to the unforgiving and harsh drudgery of subsistence level agricultural and artisanal life.

We sometimes have a slightly deluded view of the period, seeing it as the dawning of a civilised age of "high culture", with an intense new focus on art, writing, and music – quite unlike anything that had gone before.

Selwood goes on to comment on two horrible executions--dark highlights of the Renaissance--that of Girolamo Savonarola (mentioned in the context of the anniversary of his "Bonfire of the Vanities" on February 7, 1497) and the other of Mary, Queen of Scots on February 8, 1587.

As he describes Savonarola's end:

In the time-honoured fashion, a kangaroo court was duly convened. Savonarola and his two most loyal fellow Dominican friars were first tried by civil judges, then by Church commissioners, although neither result was ever in doubt. As one of the judges noted before the trial, “We shall have a fine bonfire tonight.”

The three priests were quickly convicted, sentenced, stripped, walked over spikes, then hanged and burned in the central Piazza della Signoria. The once-adoring Florentines danced around the pyre, and the city’s children threw stones at the burning corpses.

And then he describes the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (illustrated above):

It was a tawdry affair. Mary was not permitted a priest of her religion, so said her own prayers quietly in Latin. She remained poised and calm. Among her last words, she forgave her executioner with all her heart because “now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles”.

The first blow with the axe missed her neck and took off part of her head. The next was not hard enough, But the third finally severed her neck. Her dog, bloodied by the gore, lay between her head and shoulders, refusing to be parted from her. According to an eye witness, “her lips stirred up and down a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off”.

As a final insult, her request to be buried in Rheims was overruled, and she was given a Protestant funeral in Peterborough.

Read the rest of the article here (which also ties in the forthcoming visit of Queen Elizabeth and Pope Francis at the Vatican).

Now, for Chesterton's turning the tables: in an article titled "The Early Bird in History", Chesterton notes "there's a common and current charge against the Catholic Church, that she is, as the phrase goes, always behind the times."

Not that there's anything wrong with that, he says, when you consider the times, but then he notes at least one instance in which the Catholic Church was far ahead of anyone else and in ways that no other institution had caught up with (in 1929, at least). He examines the rehabilitation of St. Joan of Arc. Chesterton notes that her canonization may have taken centuries, but her rehabilitation did not. The Church investigated, acknowledged the injustice, and cleared her name during the lifetime of her family-- of her mother. 

Then Chesterton considers some other cases: Did Edward III repent of the brutal execution of William Wallace by Edward I?  Did Elizabeth I rehabilitate Sir Thomas More, acknowledge the error of his trial, conviction, and execution as a traitor? Of course they did not. 

He acknowledges that in the 19th century the English did "make a romance about Wallace" and finally start thinking of St. Joan of Arc with more favor and recognition of their own tawdry role. (Shakespeare's depiction of Joan, he notes, features "insular insults".)

Chesterton has two more historical parallels: have the English honored Daniel O'Connell, the catalyst of Catholic Emancipation within one hundred years of that great milestone (1829-1929)? Have they accepted Robert Emmet of Ireland as well as they've accepted George Washington of the United States of America? No--in 1929, they had not. Thus, Chesterton demonstrates that the Catholic Church was not so far behind the times as "people" say, and in fact, the secular world is really far behind in the process of acknowledging past injustices.

You've have to read the rest of the essay, particularly as Chesterton cites how far ahead of their times the Jesuits were! 

Next week, I might have to share what Chesterton writes about Dean Inge and Thomas More--it's funny, true, and surprising at the same time.