I was very pleased to be able to have lunch today with Addy Huneke ’23, who graduated from Reinhardt with a history degree and creative writing minor this past spring. Addy is now working at the National Archives at St. Louis, where she helps researchers find the documents (largely military records) that they’re interested in. She also continues her writing and is finishing up her second novel. Congratulations, Addy!
From The Telegraph:
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, French pioneer of ‘microhistory’ whose study of Montaillou was a bestseller – obituary
Professor Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who has died aged 94, was director of the French Bibliothèque nationale, Professor at the Collège de France and a leading exponent of the “annales” school of history; he was best-known for Montaillou (1975), a reconstruction of 15th-century peasant life in a Pyrenean village that became an international bestseller.
Ladurie once divided historians into two groups – “truffle hunters” and “parachutists”. Truffle hunters are miniaturists, lovingly recounting histories of minor and exotic events, case studies of the strange, novel and unexpected that, despite their uniqueness, cast light on their times.
Parachutists take a panoramic view, highlighting the grand sweep and emphasising big trends rather than particulars. Since he was a gourmet with a French appreciation of haute cuisine, there was little doubt as to which school of history Ladurie belonged.
Montaillou is a hamlet high up on the French slopes of the Pyrenees which, in the early 14th century, had about 400 inhabitants. Many of them were Cathars – devotees of a heresy which taught that the world had been created by the Devil as his battleground with God.
In the previous century a succession of crusades had been proclaimed against its adherents and the heresy had all but disappeared. But in the early 14th century, a Bishop of Pamiers called Jacques Fournier (later Pope Benedict XII) decided to have another go at eliminating Catharism, which had experienced a sudden revival in his diocese in the area around Montaillou.
The bishop set up his own personal inquisition which sat for eight years. The whole population of Montaillou was clapped into jail and interrogated one by one. Subsequently, he had his inquisitorial register, containing their depositions and confessions, transcribed into folio volumes which he kept with him when he became Pope and which remain in the Vatican library.
Jacques Fournier’s register had been known to scholars for many years, but to the prevailing “parachutist” school it seemed to be of no more than antiquarian interest. Ladurie saw its scholarly value in illuminating a little known period of history, and its popular potential in satisfying public curiosity about the lives of ordinary people in the distant past.
Prof. Ken Wheeler discusses his book Modern Cronies on Then Again, “a bite-sized history podcast by the Northeast Georgia History Center.”
Prof. Wheeler was also interviewed about it by Niels Eichhorn on H-Civil War.
Modern Cronies was reviewed by Michael Frawley of the University of Texas – Permian Basin in Civil War Book Review.
An announcement: I am no longer a professor of history at Reinhardt University, and am in fact teaching at a charter school in Minneapolis. Accordingly, I believe it would be unseemly of me to continue posting here. Since Reinhardt has yanked my email account, if you would like to contact me, please do so at jdagood -at- hotmail -dot- com, with the appropriate substitutions.
Thank you for your readership.
Today is the feast of Demetrius of Thessaloniki, one of the more significant warrior saints (and a myroblytic one to boot).
What I find interesting is that “Demetrius” is in fact a pagan-derived name, meaning “devoted to Demeter.” It’s parallel to “Isidore,” meaning “gift of Isis,” or “Diodorus,” meaning “gift of Zeus.” All three of these names are borne by Christian saints! Apparently, like the names of the days of the week or the months of the year, early Christians were prepared to tolerate this vestige of paganism. I suppose by the late Roman empire names were simply “names,” as they are for us, and fewer people were in the habit of inventing literal names expressing qualities they hoped to see in their children.
An article published in the July issue of Terrae Incognitae, the journal of the Society of the History of Discoveries (of which former Reinhardt faculty member Anne Good is about to become president), has been getting a certain amount of attention. The full text may be read at the publisher’s website. Paolo Chiesa of the University of Milan has discovered, in the (currently unpublished) Cronica universalis of Galvaneus Flamma (1283-c. 1345), a reference to “Marckalada,” which Chiesa interprets as the “Markland” mentioned in several Viking sagas. The relevant passage:
Sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway say that northwards, beyond Norway, there is Iceland; further ahead there is an island named Grolandia, where the Polar Star remains behind you, toward the south. The governor of this island is a bishop. In this land, there is neither wheat nor wine nor fruit; people live on milk, meat, and fish. They dwell in subterranean houses and do not venture to speak loudly or to make any noise, for fear that wild animals hear and devour them. There live huge white bears, which swim in the sea and bring shipwrecked sailors to the shore…. Further westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build with them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds. However, no sailor was ever able to know anything for sure about this land or about its features.
Unfortunately, the Cronica universalis does not also mention Helluland or Vinland, two other New World locations mentioned in the sagas, but the appearance of “Marckalada” does suggest that in fourteenth-century Milan some people knew about other places “beyond Greenland,” likely through information exchanged in the nearby maritime entrepôt of Genoa.
It is always tempting to believe that this is where Columbus got his ideas about sailing westward to Asia, but keep in mind that there is a difference between information and knowledge. That is, “Marckalada” in this context is no more real than Prester John or the Cynocephaloi. Furthermore, note that Columbus did not sail to Greenland in order to recreate Leif Erikson’s journey (indeed, for his first voyage he sailed south to the Canary Islands before turning west). The only thing that can really be said about this piece of information is that, if Columbus actually knew of it, it was only one of many suggesting to him that Asia was just over the horizon.
Announced today in various places: the Vikings founded L’Anse aux Meadows exactly one thousand years ago. The abstract from Nature, where the discovery was published:
Transatlantic exploration took place centuries before the crossing of Columbus. Physical evidence for early European presence in the Americas can be found in Newfoundland, Canada. However, it has thus far not been possible to determine when this activity took place. Here we provide evidence that the Vikings were present in Newfoundland in AD 1021. We overcome the imprecision of previous age estimates by making use of the cosmic-ray-induced upsurge in atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations in AD 993. Our new date lays down a marker for European cognisance of the Americas, and represents the first known point at which humans encircled the globe. It also provides a definitive tie point for future research into the initial consequences of transatlantic activity, such as the transference of knowledge, and the potential exchange of genetic information, biota and pathologies.
Emphasis added. Read the whole thing.
It occurs to me, though, that there’s no indisputable proof that the Vikings ever set foot on the North American mainland. (But if we’re considering geographical North America, we don’t need L’Anse aux Meadows, since Greenland, where the Vikings had settlements for almost 500 years, is part of North America.)
From Gregory Urwin at Journal of the American Revolution (hat tip: Dan Franke), notice of an event that is not what most Americans would like to remember about the Revolutionary War:
On October 19, 1781, Gen. George Washington attained his apex as a soldier. Straddling a spirited charger at the head of a formidable Franco-American army, Washington watched impassively as 6,000 humiliated British, German, and Loyalist soldiers under the command of Lt. Gen. Charles, Second Earl Cornwallis, emerged from their fortifications to lay down their arms in surrender outside Yorktown, Virginia. The following day, Washington voiced the elation filling his heart in a general order congratulating his subordinates “upon the Glorious events of yesterday.” Ordinarily a stickler for discipline, Washington authorized the release of every American soldier under arrest “In order to Diffuse the general Joy through every breast.
Five days later, October 25, the Continental Army’s commander-in-chief issued quite a different order. Thousands of Virginia slaves—“Negroes or Molattoes” as Washington called them—had fled to the British in hopes of escaping a lifetime of bondage. Washington directed that these runaways be rounded up and entrusted to guards at two fortified positions on either side of the York River. There they would be held until arrangements could be made to return them to their enslavers. Thus, with the stroke of a pen, Washington converted his faithful Continentals—the men credited with winning American independence—into an army of slave catchers.
This is not the way that Americans choose to remember Yorktown. When President Ronald Reagan attended the festivities marking the battle’s bicentennial in October 1981, a crowd of 60,000 nodded in approval as he described Washington’s crowning triumph as “a victory for the right of self-determination. It was and is the affirmation that freedom will eventually triumph over tyranny.” For the African Americans who constituted one fifth of the young United States’ population in 1781, however, Yorktown did not mark the culmination of a long and grueling struggle for freedom. Rather, it guaranteed the perpetuation of slavery for eight additional decades.
Read the whole thing. I think that the New York Times‘s 1619 Project goes too far when it claims that the American Revolution was fought to “preserve slavery,” but that certainly was one of its practical effects. That the British offered freedom to slaves for taking their side is a fact that UELAC members glory in;* that Mel Gibson’s movie The Patriot (2000) claimed the precise opposite (as well as attributing to the British war crimes committed by the Nazis in occupied France) was rather offensive.
* Of course, it does not mean that white Loyalists believed in racial equality, as Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalists would attest.
From Kathryn Walton at Medievalists.net:
People have always been fascinated by ghosts. Tales of humans returned from the dead have appeared in folklore and literature from around the world for millennia. The medieval period was no different. Tales of actual hauntings were common in medieval folklore. Many people believed in the ability of ghosts to return and haunt individuals, places, or communities. The feature “The Ghosts of Byland Abbey” gives a great example of one haunting piece of folklore from the period.
But ghosts were also common in medieval literature, and ghost beliefs that circulated at the time shaped how they were depicted.
Belief in ghosts was not actually common across the Middle Ages. While the early people who inhabited Britain probably had some belief in ghosts, when Christianity arrived in the country, the new religion made some attempt to stamp out this superstition. Saint Augustine had denied that there could be any relations between the living and the dead; he’d insisted that apparitions of ghosts were demonic illusions. Later Christian thinkers echoed his ideas and attempted to deny that ghosts actually roamed the earth.
According to Jean-Claude Schmitt (whose book Ghosts in the Middle Ages gives a great overview of the history of medieval ghost belief) early Christian thinkers took this approach to prevent the worship of the dead, which was considered an inherently pagan practice. They also wanted to redirect attention towards the importance of the soul in heaven.
Belief in ghosts, however, lived on and was eventually accepted into Christian thinking. Gregory the Great composed a few small stories about dead people who spoke to the living to request their prayers. This idea appealed to later Christian thinkers and eventually ghosts began to appear in medieval ecclesiastical literature. Ghosts were understood then as souls stuck in purgatory who would appear to their relatives and others with warnings and requests for prayers.
This belief soon made its way into the literary world and some really fantastic ghoulish characters began to appear in medieval literature. There are too many to discuss in a single feature, but a few of the most interesting appear in the most famous literary tradition to survive from medieval England and France: the legends of King Arthur.
More at the link.
Sad news:
Professor Derek Pearsall, co-founder with the late Professor Elizabeth Salter of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, passed away on Thursday 14 October, aged 90. He was an enormous influence on many of us who flourished under his tutelage and his scholarly reputation helped to establish York’s CMS as an outstanding beacon of teaching and research. May he rest in peace.
According to Wikipedia, Pearsall received an MA from the University of Birmingham in 1952, was Gurney Professor of English Literature at Harvard, and delivered the British Academy’s Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture in 1998. I found his work very enlightening and enjoyed speaking with him at conferences. He will be missed.