Repatriate the Bayeux Tapestry!

by J J Cohen

Via the Medieval Material Culture blog, two links on the possible origin of the tapestry in England, and calls to bring it back. Don't miss the modern version as well.
(thanks, Jonathan Hsy)

Kerfuffle Wading: On Liberal Fascism's sadly missing chapter

I probably shouldn't wade into the kerfuffle with Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism (well treated at Sadly No, here and here. EDIT More seriously, see here), but here I go with a medievalist intervention, deferring responsibility for doing what I should not do by saying, with Dietrich, that I can't help it.

I quote the following from a recent interview between Goldberg and Theodore Beale

Beale: You know, Guerri says the reason the Fascist regime was less dramatic than the German and Soviet regimes was because Italians were weak Catholics. So when they replaced their religion with the secular religion, they became weak Fascists as well.

Goldberg: I think that's right. Michael Ledeen has many detractors when it comes to contemporary politics, but he was a very serious scholar of Italian Fascism in his previous career. One of the things that first got me interested in this topic was over ten years ago when Ledeen gave a talk at AEI. It was very interesting and at the end, a buddy of mine turned to me and said: “I think what he is saying is that Nazism was really bad because they had the Black Forest and terrible weather, and Italian Fascism wasn't that bad because the Italians are a bunch of nice people.” That's a really grotesque way to put it, and yet there's a certain truth there. These sorts of isms are going to bring out the character of a people. No idea so sets fire to the minds of men that it erases their culture, their background, or their fundamental psychological understanding of the world. Certainly not on a mass scale.

Beale: It's very Eddie Izzard: “We are all Fascists now.... ciao!”

Goldberg: There's a story that Ledeen tells about a restaurant. One of the things that Mussolini did in this very Jamesian way was to declare all of these domestic policy wars, these moral equivalents of war. There was the Battle of the Grains and the Battle of the Births, and one of them was the Battle of the Flies, because there was so much disease going around Italy back then. Anyhow, this guy goes into a restaurant and sees there's flies all over the place, so he asks what's going on with the war against them. The waiter says “well, the flies won.” That's a very Italian perspective. One of the things I learned while writing the book is that there's this glib association of fascism with anti-semitism, and while one can't say that the Italians were completely blameless in that regard, at the end of the day, anti-semitism was just completely contrary to Italian history and culture. Italy was polyglot, multi-ethnic and Catholic, so whatever anti-semitism was there was theological, not biological; the Catholic Church's position was that Jews could be saved, not that they should be eradicated like vermin. I wanted to do an entire chapter on this but it was just too far afield. The heroism and decency of thousands upon thousands of Italians when it came to the Jews is one of the incredibly untold stories of that era. Anti-semitism and Italian Fascism are just not kindred phenomena.

There's too much to deal with here. For instance: Italy, being a Catholic country (or people? I suppose in this case one means the other, except for the "multi-ethnic" part), did not practice a virulently antisemitic fascism because of Catholicism's policy on Jews (rooted in Augustine's commentary on Psalms 58:12); Italians did not become serious fascists because they were weak Catholics. So, did Catholicism guide them in its strength or its weakness? Or both?

As for polyglot, multi-ethnic, Catholic countries and their tolerance towards Jews...well, there's medieval London, which would fit the criteria, were it not for the pogrom during Richard I's coronation, and/or twentieth-century France, except for its complicity in the Holocaust. Even with his conceptual mistakes, Goldberg can still wonder why antisemitism didn't take root as intensely in Italy as it did in Northern Europe. He might have started his wondering by reading Gavin Langmuir's “L’absence d’accusation de meurtre ritual à l’ouest du Rhône” (in Juifs et judaisme de Languedoc. Cahiers de Fanjeaux 12. Toulouse, 1977, 235-49) and perhaps he would wondered whether to be convinced by the several possibilities Langmuir offers (perhaps, to cite my notes, the earlier development of credit and commerce in Southern Europe made Jews less distinct, or religious belief played a different role in these societies that were more Romanized, or there's some kind an inverse relationship between clerical activity and popular hostility, or perhaps heretics were the real bogeymen in S. Europe).

I do wish, however, that Goldberg had written the chapter he claims was "too far afield." Perhaps he would have ran across some information of use on medieval Italian Jews and how they helped form the Italian national character (more on that below). He could have started with Ariel Toaff's Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996). He might have discovered the racism used against Pope Anacletus II (discussed in Mary Stroll's The Jewish Pope: Ideology and Politics in the Papal Schism of 1130, 1987), and perhaps have found something similar to his own racist noise against Obama.

Had he done his research (not really his habit), he would have discovered in any number of sources that in fact it generally was better to be Jewish in Rome than in Cologne, Rouen, London, or York, that is, so long as one wasn't being compelled to race during Carnival and be stoned by Christians (see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetry 53). Or so long as one wasn't an old man rolled down a hill in a spiked barrel (I found reference to this tradition in Claudine Fabre-Vassas The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig, Carol Volk trans., Columbia UP, 162, and, in my effort to confirm it just now, in the online Medici Archive Project:

The "palio degli ebrei" or "race of the Jews" in the Corso had a long and peculiar history of its own predating the Counter Reformation by several centuries. At one point, Christian "jockeys" in the race rode Jews instead of horses. Another festive "game" of the season was to roll a Jew in a nailed barrel down the Testaccio Hill. By the mid-sixteenth century, there are accounts of the Pope personally watching "races of barbarians, buffaloes, donkeys and Jews," from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia (where four centuries later Mussolini made his most famous public appearances.) By the 1580s, the Jews are known to have run the race naked; later, they evidently began to assume elaborate costumes, thereby reversing the originally humiliating intention of the event. In 1668, Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi abolished the "palio degli ebrei", substituting an annual tax of 300 scudi for the festive decoration of the street and a stylized ceremony of homage to the Pope on the Capitoline Hill.

(for the transmutation of the old Jew to pig, see here)). Goldberg might also have run across information on the expulsion of Jews from various parts of Italy in the Middle Ages and afterwards: Sicily (depending on my notes) in either 1492 or 1493 and Naples in 1541, and the forced conversions in Southern Italy in 1290. Perhaps he would have found something on the Jewish ghetto of Venice (and how Napoleon ended it). This is all pretty lugubrious stuff (especially when one needs a murderous tyrant to break down the gates), but all to the point on the so-called national character of Italians.

Or "Italians." I put the nation in the quotation marks in hope of responses to my invitation. Let my readers and co-bloggers, if they have anything handy, provide something less woeful about Italian Jews, something that might point us towards a discovering of intermingling, interdependent Jewish and Christian culture in Italy, medieval or otherwise, perhaps something like this, perhaps something less hostile even. And perhaps if we can come up with some thought on that we can help, at least in our fantasies, to lead Goldberg away from the poisonous invocation of "biology."

Nationalism and stereotypes. Also, peeing in teacups.

Readers of ITM likely know the litany of nationalist stereotypes that were repeated throughout the Middle Ages. G. G. Coulton laid them out well in "Nationalism in the Middle Ages" Cambridge Historical Journal 5 (1935-37): 15-40. In my own work, I've looked at a moment when William of Malmesbury attempts to convey a crusade-inspired Christianitas that transcends national difference ... but does so in unselfconsciously nationalistic terms. During the First Crusade, he writes, Christians everywhere joined the cause, even those dwelling "on remotest islands and among barbarian nations." He describes these "distant" races according to what each must abandon in order to join the cause: "The time had come for the Welshman to give up hunting in his forests, the Scotsman forsook his familiar fleas, the Dane his constant drinking, and the Norwegian left his diet of raw fish" (History of the Kings of England 4.348) -- a litany of stereotypes that undercuts the imagined unity.

A recent advert for Eurostar service between London and Brussels also demonstrates how hard it is to stop thinking outside nation-enveloping caricature ... for both parties involved. Here the Manneken Pis becomes a soccer hooligan / skinhead peeing in a teacup.

(full story, NYT [which adds to the jumbo generalizations with many of its own] or Guardian blogs, for some vox populi)

Identity Soup: Today's Juxtaposition

A small post. In Feb. 2006, Jeffrey wrote this:

Back to the temporal archive: pork is a food central to Christian identity, a demarcative use that is positively medieval. Is it no surprise, then, that rightwingers in France -- people who are fond of imagining a medieval purity of the French and of Europe that in fact never existed -- have taken to serving pork-based soups to the poor in order to exclude impoverished Muslims and Jews from their charity? Craig Smith reports in the New York Times that "la soupe au cochon" has been christened "identity soup" by those who serve it (many of whom belong to the extremist Bloc Identitaire, whose website features feral pigs....

The Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims of today's Paris are not the same as the Jews, Christians, Muslims of the Middle Ages, but that pig soup and the lines of community and exclusion it is supposed to materialize really are part of the food's enduring medieval temporality. Spooning out dishes of pig soup won't work, of course, to bring about the wished-for boundaries and purified spaces; it may even provoke violence (in anger over exclusion, in anger over the fact that the soup isn't magically doing its demarcative job). This "traditional" meal of pig flesh is served with exuberance, and as if in perfect innocence ("la France n’est pas encore une république islamiste" the racists declare sweetly, ladle in hand). Yet la soupe au cochon marks a frightening return of medieval rhetorics of antisemitism and Islamophobia, demonstrating the ways in which an object as seemingly inert as bowl filled with pork can carry into the present its own little wrinkle in time.

On Saturday, I saw La Vie en Rose (in France: La Môme (The Kid)). Edith Piaf has just stunned New York with a performance of the title song, full of feeling because she's directing it to her lover, the boxer Marcel Cerdan. Marlene Dietrich shows up and declares "votre voix est comme l'âme de Paris" (your voice is like the soul of Paris: note, I swear she said ta voix, but various French bloggers contradict me).

So what? The lover, the fellow who summoned up the soul of Paris in her, was Marcel "Le Bombardier marocain" Cerdan (although I should note that although Cerdan was born and lived in Morocco, his parents were born in France).

And Piaf? The Soul of Paris? Her mother was Italian, but not only Italian: Edith's maternal grandmother was an Algerian Berber, Aïcha Saïd Ben Mohammed.

Little Quote of the Day: Fetchez la vache

Been quiet around these parts. Here's a placeholder QOTD to supplement our various posts on heterogeneity and the English past (for example, here and here).

While browsing in a library, I ran across Bernard Ribémont's modern French translation of Jean Corbechon's Middle French version of Bartholomew the Englishman's De proprietatibus rerum. My curiosity did not disappoint me when I wondered what Jean would have to say about England.

We have the usual descriptions of England taken from Bede, but then Jean hits a snag: a wild praise of England as a land so rich that it needs nothing from other lands, a land whose people are generous, honest, fun loving, and then--you can just see him throwing his quill down in disgust--he declares that there's just too much to summarize and that the work praises England rather too much. It is 1372, after all. He then writes:

... il croit louer son pays et, en fait, il le blâme, car il dit que les Anglais descendent des Géants tout d'abord, puis de Brutus et des Troyens, enfin des Saxons. En disant ainsi, il en fait des bâtards en leur donnant plusieurs pères. Et puis il parle très imparfaitement de cette question, car il oublie la conquête faite par le duc Guillaume et les Normands, qui conquirent l'Angleterre si vaillamment qu'il en reste encore les traces dans les armoiries et les coutumes. Cela ne doit par être oublié, car il y a moins de honte à avoir été conquis par les Français ou les Normands que par les Saxons. (238)

He believes that he is praising his country, and in fact, he is scorning it, because he says that the English descended from giants first of all, then from Brutus and the Trojans, and then finally from the Saxons. In saying so, he makes them bastards by giving them several fathers. Moreover, he speaks very imperfectly on this issue, because he forgets the conquest of Duke William and the Normans, who conquered England so valiantly that there are still traces [of the conquest? of the Normans?] in the heraldry and customs of England. This should not be forgotten because there is less shame in having been conquered by the French or the Normans than by the Saxons.

(image taken from here)

Postscript: ALK just asked me, "Are there medieval accounts of boring people? Like some monk writing about another monk who was really boring." I had to say that I didn't know. Any suggestions?

Quote of the Day: Robert Bartlett on Medieval Other Worlds

One of my favorite histories of the English Middle Ages is Robert Bartlett's encyclopedic England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075-1225. The title might lead you to expect the usual "this king did this and then his son did that and then the barons got angry and did this,"but the book is nothing of the sort. In a stunning 772 pages Bartlett manages to cover everything from governance to war to rural society to the arts to the course of life to the cohabitation of humans and animals to the church ... and on and on, in passages that exude as much wit as erudition. My favorite chapter of the book is "Cosmologies," broken into the subsections Time; The World; The Chain of Being; and Beings Neither Angelic, Human or Animal. In that very last section Bartlett surveys the mysterious Other Worlds that the twelfth century imagined cozied up against and erupted at times into our own.

Here are a few snippets from that last section:

Although there was no simple all-embracing formulation that writers of the twelfth century could use to label green children from below the earth, diminutive household spirits, beautiful ladies dancing by night in woodland halls, and other fleeting and uncanny creatures, they were clearly considered to belong together and are not merely a category invented by modern historians and scholars. The evidence is that writers like Ralph of Coggeshall and Gervase of Tilbury group their stories about such beings together ... If such beings thus constituted a class, there was still no agreed explanation of their origin and nature ... The minds of the men and women of England in our period thus ahd room for a variety of beings that did not fit neatly into the orthodox and established trio of man, beast, and (good or bad) angel. There was nothing 'popular' about such beliefs, except in the sense that they were widespread ... Strange breeds and spirits were thus just as much at home with the gentry as the peasantry. Similarly, a learned education did not make one less likely to believe in such beings. The clergy was a s deeply enmeshed as the gentry ... The strange creatures that flitted across the borders of the human and the mundane world were not beyond the bounds of possibility. Below the Essex fields, within the Yorkshire barrows, and beyond the Suffolk shore were creatures who lived an alien life of their own.

I'd only add: I'm not sure that these aliens lived their own lives so much as they lived lives of possibility on behalf of those who dreamed them. Among these possibilities was that of an England that did not have to come into being through violent circumscription, a capacious rather than constrictive space that could be a part of an archipelago rather than a pars pro toto.

La disparition de Richard Taylor

I love the idea of this book. A French novel that unfolds entirely in England, with quotidian English characters who eat mushy peas and pork pies ... but who speak only in French (in fact those two foods are some of the very few English words in the book). Lucy Dallas writes of Arnaud Cathrine's La disparition de Richard Taylor in the TLS

The novel is pitch perfect; the absurdity of these British people speaking in French soon fades away, though perhaps it contributes to the unsettling atmosphere. ("Lost in London" 27 April 2007)

Something about this act of reverse translation and its estranging effect is certainly related to our little thread on wonder ... as it is to thinking about the compelxities of what it means to be English in an England that has ceased to be very English.

I've been ruminating over how contemporary writers in England narrate -- or assume, or critique -- life in the changed nation as my department initiates a new British Writer in Residency program with a transnational Britain focus. Nadeem Aslam will be our first guest, giving me the impetus to read -- finally -- his Maps for Lost Lovers. I suppose the project I was formerly calling Infinite Realms is the medieval symptom of all this.