Download PDF | John Joseph Saunders - A History of Medieval Islam- (1978)

 Download PDF | John Joseph Saunders - A History of Medieval Islam- (1978).

237 Pages 

Preface

DR. JOHNSON, commenting in one of the Ramblers on the oblivion which overtook Richard Knolles’ Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), despite its literary merits, explained this neglect on the ground that the author ‘employed his genius upon a foreign and uninteresting subject’ and recounted ‘enterprises and revolutions of which none desire to be informed.’ Indifference to Oriental history among the educated public of the West still exists, but is diminishing, and more ‘desire to be informed’ of the relations between Europe and Islam throughout the ages.

 Such recent works as Dr. Norman Daniel’s Islam and the West (1960) and Professor R.W. Southern’s Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962) provide striking evidence of the wider perspectives now being opened up, and as our historians cease to be Europe-centred and devote more attention to the nature and evolution of non-European societies, we may expect the history of the Muslim East to be studied with increasingly critical care. It is true that the task confronting scholars in this field is enormous. 

The language barrier alone is not easily surmounted. Many relevant texts remain unpublished, and many of the problems to be solved have scarcely been formulated, much less seriously tackled. Thus, for example, the social and economic history of medieval Islam has only just begun to be investigated. 

The unfamiliarity of the subject daunts some prospective students. The rhythms of Muslim history are not our rhythms. To give but one instance, the memorable struggles of Church and State, from which emerged the Western theory and practice of civil and political liberty, had no counterpart in Islam, which knows no distinction between secular and ecclesiastical, and is puzzled by our concepts of representative government and a free society. In this book I have aimed to provide a brief sketch of a vast theme, a rough outline which may serve as an introduction for those wishing to acquire a general view of the Muslim world during the Middle Ages. 

It would be absurd to claim it as a work of original research; it does not profess to trace the development of Islam as a religion, and it omits all but the briefest mention of Muslim Spain and India. I have tried to indicate the main trends of Islamic historical evolution down to the Mongol conquests, to avoid a mere recital of facts and names and dates, and to explain rather than to narrate. Hence I have exercised a rigid selection of material; much of moment has been left out, and the picture presented may often be unavoidably over-simplified.

 I wish to express my deep obligation to Professor C.F.Beckingham, Professor of Islamic Studies in the University of Manchester, and to Dr. J.A.Boyle, Head of the Department of Persian Studies in the same University, who kindly read the typescript and made many valuable suggestions for improving it. I am also grateful to the editors of Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale and History Today for permission to reproduce portions of articles which have appeared in these periodicals. Perhaps I may also be allowed to say how much my understanding of Islamic history has been deepened by the writings of Sir Hamilton Gibb and Professor Bernard Lewis, whose influence will be easily detected in these pages. 

In facing the perennial problem of the transliteration of Oriental names, I can claim no consistency. Place-names like Mecca, Medina and Cairo have been left in their familiar English form, together with such words as ‘Koran’ and ‘Caliph’. For the rest, I have usually followed the spelling given in the Encyclopedia of Islam, omitting the diacritical points and the long-vowel markings (which are restored, however, in the index entries), and substituting ‘j’ for the Frenchified ‘dj.

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Download PDF | Sharon Farmer, Carol Braun Pasternack - Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages - (2003).

Download PDF | Sharon Farmer, Carol Braun Pasternack - Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages - (2003).

386 Pages 

 Introduction

The essays in this volume take seriously the variety of recent theoretical stances that have compelled feminists to consider not only the fluidity and multiplicity of gendered identities but also the ways in which gendered constructs interact with other categories of difference. Most salient to our project are the insights of multiracial and postcolonial feminists, who have pointed out that genders are constructed in historically specific and changing ways within a range of interlocking inequalities—a “matrix of domination,” as Patricia Hills Collins has called it.

 In the twentiethcentury United States, prominent components of that matrix include class, race, sexual orientation, and gender.1 Postcolonial feminists remind us, moreover, that matrices of domination function differently in different contexts: in order to understand the contingency of our own culture’s matrix of domination and the gendered constructs that emerge within that matrix, we must look beyond the borders of our own society; in order to understand the implications of colonialisms, both premodern and modern, we must look at the multiply mixed identities that emerge in colonial contexts and on the borderlands between societies.2 

Looking at medieval societies provides us with one opportunity for crossing borders, and, indeed, a number of medievalists have paved the way for this project. Since the early 1980s, Caroline Walker Bynum has brilliantly highlighted the permeable and elastic nature of gender categories in western medieval Christian culture and the multiple positions that men and women could assume within the dominant constructs. Thus, for instance, the salvific, embodied God-man—Jesus—was often imagined in a feminized form, and male clerics often imagined themselves as brides to his bridegroom or as mothers to their own flocks. Moreover, the concepts of incarnation, bodily resurrection, and transubstantiation placed the holy, salvific, and often feminized body at the center of medieval Christian theology, thus subverting apparent binaries that might seem to devalue bodiliness and the feminine. 

More recently, medievalists have examined the ways in which other categories of difference complicated gendered constructs. Steven Kruger and Louise Mirrer have highlighted a tendency for western Christian polemicists and vernacular authors to portray Jewish and Muslim men as effeminate, even going so far as to imagine that Jewish men menstruated.4 Robert Bartlett and David Rollo have discussed how, in their attempts to portray the Irish as barbarous, the colonizers of Ireland emphasized bestial sex and the production of “perverse” genders, such as women with beards and hermaphrodites.5 

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has drawn on Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “mestiza” consciousness in order to elucidate, in the writings of Gerald of Wales, “that middle formed by the overlap among a multitude of genders, sexualities, spiritualities, ethnicities, races, cultures, languages.”6 Kathryn Gravdal has analyzed the ways in which masculine and aristocratic privilege worked together in stories about knights who raped peasant women.7 

Paul Freedman has discussed how elites portrayed peasant men as cowardly and inept at love, and thus less masculine than aristocratic men.8 Elizabeth Castelli has argued that late antique religious women achieved a form of maleness by remaining virgins, and Jo Ann McNamara has discussed the reasons why this formulation of virile womanhood was acceptable in the early Middle Ages but not in the High and late Middle Ages.9 Ruth Mazo Karras, David Lorenzo Boyd, and Michael Rocke have argued that in late medieval England and Florence men who took the passive role in sexual couplings with other men were portrayed as acting “as a woman,” thus becoming something other than fully male.10 Carolyn Dinshaw has emphasized that the ambiguities and inconsistencies in such portrayals point to the malleability and performativity of gender.11 Drawing on and engaging with multiracial and postcolonial feminisms, medievalists have broadened our understanding of the medieval past, and they have made important contributions to theoretical discussions among those who focus their attention on more recent epochs. Nevertheless, medieval feminist scholarship continues to exhibit at least two limitations. First, despite an emphasis on the multiplicity, malleability, and fluidity of gendered categories, most medieval feminist scholars continue to fall back into old binaries, even as we attempt to highlight examples that stretched the boundaries of those binaries. 

A reading of recent scholarship on the gendering of medieval Jews, heretics, monsters, and men who engaged in non-normative sex, for instance, can lead to the conclusion that, although elite male Christians included a broad variety of persons possessing male bodies within the category of “the feminine,” a single set of fixed binary oppositions nevertheless worked to construct a masculine/feminine binary.12 The second limitation has to do with scholarly focus: despite recent attention to “the postcolonial Middle Ages,” most of the scholarship that looks at the Middle Ages through the perspectives of feminist and postcolonial theories has been generated by literary scholars studying a narrow range of texts that were produced by Christians (most of them male) in northwestern Europe.13 

This volume attempts to address these limitations by bringing together scholars in a variety of fields—history, literature, Arabic and Islamic studies, Near Eastern studies, religious studies—who have asked questions about constructions of gendered hierarchies in four different medieval cultures: western Christian, Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic. Moreover, in an effort to push the volume toward an emphasis on “matrices of domination” rather than gendered binaries, the editors asked each of the contributors to engage with the intersections of gendered categories with at least one of three other categories of difference—social status, religion, and sexualities. The resulting essays work together to call attention to the multiplicity of gendered possibilities in medieval hierarchical constructions and the contingency of western constructions. Several of the essays, moreover, explicitly describe multiple gendered categories within a given social imaginary. 

Medieval Categories of Difference: Religion/Ethnicity, Social Status, Sexualities Since part of the project of looking historically at social categories and structures of domination is to expose their fluidity and contingency, we need to approach past societies with precision, taking care not to assume a priori that we know what the categories of domination were and how they worked. For that reason, contributors to this volume have tended to avoid terms like “race” and “class,” which might cause the reader to conflate medieval and modern categories of difference. 

While there is ample evidence that medieval people were aware of variations in skin color, and that they often assigned hierarchical values to those variations, medieval perceptions of such differences did not necessarily correspond to modern constructions of biologically inherited racial characteristics.14 Drawing on texts that were produced over several centuries, Steven Kruger argues that western European Christian culture constructions of race, religion, and sexuality included both a moral element, suggesting “choices that might be changed,” and a biological element, which sometimes seemed to disappear upon conversion but sometimes pointed to a more intractable “nature.”15 Robert Bartlett and David Nirenberg, by contrast, have placed greater emphasis on chronological development over the course of the Middle Ages. Bartlett argues that up until the fourteenth century most western Christian representations of ethnic differences focused not on biology but on malleable characteristics such as customs, language, and, most especially, religion.16 Along similar lines, Nirenberg has suggested that until the end of the fourteenth century the semen of a Muslim or Jew might be considered both corrupt and corrupting for Christians who came into contact with it, but those corrupting effects were thought to disappear once the man converted to Christianity, and a child who resulted from the semen of a Jew or Muslim could be raised as a Christian even if the father did not convert.17 

Bartlett and Nirenberg suggest that around the fourteenth century the boundaries between ethnic groups in Europe began to harden, and there was a shift from attitudes stressing malleable characteristics to attitudes stressing biological descent. Bartlett observes that in German towns guilds began to pass statutes limiting membership to those of German descent and prohibiting ethnic intermarriage.18 Similarly, Nirenberg suggests that after the forced conversion of large numbers of Spanish Jews in 1391, Spaniards who competed with the conversos for social and economic position began to assert that, despite their apparent Christian affiliations, conversos and their descendants retained a corrupt “Jewish” nature. Nirenberg reminds us, however, that it took time for the new attitudes to take hold, because “far from being obvious or natural, the ideological work involved in grafting culture onto blood was monumental.”19 

Like the term “race,” “social class” has specific modern resonances. The now classic formulation of modern class formation is that of E. P. Thompson, who argued that the self-consciousness of the modern working class arose not automatically, as a result of the common position that workers held vis-à-vis modern industrial capitalism, but as a result of the workers’ conscious agency: Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.20 Central to Thompson’s formulation is the idea that “class” cannot happen until a group becomes conscious of itself. Implicit to his formulation is the understanding that nineteenth-century laborers experienced their work relations in ways that were fundamentally different from the ways in which pre-nineteenth-century workers experienced such relations. To be sure, groups of individuals were also marked in the Middle Ages by their common relationships to the means of production. 

There were sharp divisions, for instance, among those who did not have to work because they lived on landed incomes, those who traded in goods that others made, and those who labored with their own hands; and there were important differences between those who depended upon rural sources of income and those who depended upon urban sources of income. Moreover, some of the people whose positions were marked off by those divisions developed group identities: genealogical and courtly literatures certainly point to a group consciousness among the landed aristocracy in twelfth-century France.21 We even catch occasional glimpses of self-conscious group identity among those who lacked power, wealth, and prestige: in fifteenth-century Catalonia, for instance, peasants based their claims to freedom from servitude on their common descent from mythical Muslim ancestors who had converted to Christianity.22 Still, the fault lines of economic and political power were different in the Middle Ages, multiple group identities (competing craft guilds, for instance) often worked to undermine the collective identities of those with similar economic positions, and the divisions between those who “owned” the means of production and those who added value to raw materials by working them with their hands were not as clear as they were in the classic era of industrial capitalism. 

For these reasons contributors to this volume have employed the expression “social status” rather than “class.” In approaching the question of medieval sexualities, many medievalists have drawn on queer and performance theorists, arguing that despite illusions of fixed and stable sexual identities, as constructed either by modern or by premodern dominant fictions, sexual behaviors and identities are, and were, fluid and unstable.23 Concerning the question of dominant fictions, however, medievalists have disagreed on the degree to which modern dominant fictions—like the heterosexual/homosexual binary—differ from the dominant fictions of the Middle Ages. Social constructionists have urged us to view the heterosexual/homosexual binary as a peculiarly modern western fiction. Before the nineteenth century, they argue, people engaged in sexual “acts” that were more or less condoned, but performing sexual acts did not result in either internally or externally constructed sexual identities: performing “sodomy” (which was itself an unstable signifier) did not make one a “sodomite.”24 

Michael Rocke’s research into the prosecution of sodomy in fifteenthcentury Florence largely supports the constructionist position that the homosexual/heterosexual binary is a modern invention: criminal court records suggest that while the Florentine state officially condemned sexual contact between men, the majority of males in Florentine society went through a life stage when they engaged in sexual acts with other males. The most important behavioral boundary entailed not sexual object choice, but performing in a manner that was appropriate to one’s age: adult males (who usually coupled with boys or with women) were expected to engage in sex in a “masculine” way—as the active partners. By focusing on court records, which he views as windows onto the actual behavior of Florentine men, Rocke is able to conclude that there was no heterosexual/homosexual binary in fifteenth-century Florence, and that individuals did not have fixed sexual identities. 

However, if we shift our gaze from documents of practice to the dominant fiction—as constructed in the Florentine legal codes—we might come to somewhat different conclusions. After all, the state did draw boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, and all sexual contact between people of the same sex was included in the unacceptable category. Moreover, the classification of sexual behaviors into those that were acceptable and those that were unacceptable constituted something of a binary, even if that binary was not made up of “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals.”25 In his analysis of the dominant fiction in twelfth-century France—as constructed in the vernacular literature of aristocratic elites—Simon Gaunt concludes that that fiction did indeed construct a heterosexual/homosexual binary. He argues, moreover, that the category of the despised homosexual served, much as it does in modern times, to create a dominant heterosexual (and, we might add, aristocratic) culture.26 

In this volume, Mathew Kuefler analyzes the social and political reasons for this “sodomitical panic” in twelfth-century French literature and its importance for the multiplication of gendered categories. Even in the literature of twelfth-century France, however, sodomites and heterosexuals operated within a sexual framework that differed from our own. Karma Lochrie has suggested that a much more pervasive binary than that contrasting homosexual and heterosexual acts was that which opposed “natural” and “unnatural” sex. In the constructions of clerical elites, she points out, “natural” sex was limited to a narrow range of possible options: “sex in the proper vessels with the proper instruments in the proper positions with the appropriate procreative intentions in orderly ways and during times that are not otherwise excluded.”27 Another working binary, which was closely related to the construction of a narrow range of “natural,” and therefore acceptable, sex acts, was that which divided the abstainers—virgins, ascetics, and clerics, who gained religious prestige by not engaging in sexual acts—from nonabstainers.28 

As Ulrike Wiethaus, Simon Gaunt, and Amy Hollywood have argued, many of those who abstained from bodily sex for religious reasons transposed their sexuality—in fluid and often “queer” ways—to the religious realm.29 In this volume, Ulrike Wiethaus explores some of the ways in which ascetic identities and “queer” mysticism complicated gender categories. Continuing debates among medievalists about the contours and characteristics of medieval categories of difference highlight both the need to read the sources with as much precision as possible, and the important role that such categories of difference played in medieval polities. This volume takes the next step by examining the intersections of gender categories with other categories of difference, thereby revealing the multiplicity of possible matrices of domination. Several of the essays also consider strategies of resistance to the discourses of domination. 

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Download PDF | Simon Barton, Peter Linehan - Cross, Crescent and Conversion_ Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom in Memory of Richard Fletcher - (2007).

Download PDF | Simon Barton, Peter Linehan - Cross, Crescent and Conversion_ Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom in Memory of Richard Fletcher - (2007).

377 Pages 

PREFACE 

Because we had only corresponded before, it was not Richard Fletcher himself but rather his distinctively elegant hand-writing, observed upside-down across a Madrid library table early in 1967, that first caught my eye. Then I noticed the unmistakably English figure, the floppy fair hair, the well-cut (albeit rather frayed) jacket, corduroys and proper shoes, all strongly reminiscent of the smoking room at the Drones, and on introducing myself encountered those impeccable manners, the hesitant semi-stutter and the screwing up of the eyes while he searched fastidiously for the mot juste, the delighted thrusting forward of the head on finding that his companion’s opinion coincided with his own, forever assenting, rarely asserting. 

At the end of that morning we adjourned to a nearby hostelry for the first of many such convivial retreats from the rigours of the research front-line. We did some archive-crawling together, compiling lists of regional delicacies from provincial Spinglish menus—“fryted egg” and “roasted heifer in his juice” helped down by copious amounts of “spumies whines” and “varios grog”—pitted our wits against the wily cathedral archivists of the day, and promised ourselves that sometime we would put together a Bad Archives Guide (strictly for private circulation). After the publication of his Episcopate book and St James’s Catapult, by 1989 when The Quest for El Cid was published Richard was becoming increasingly frustrated with the problems of continuing with Spanish history. 

But because The Quest proved his most successful work to date, he was perhaps a shade reluctant to revert to what had been his earliest historical love, nurtured by James Campbell, namely the earlier part of the period covered by The Conversion of Europe (1998). At the time of his tragically early death he had embarked on what he cheerfully described as a rewrite of Gibbon. Another thing about The Quest was that it revealed Richard at his most characteristic: as for example in his manner of introducing the various personae of his drama. I find I wrote at the time of his doing so “rather in the manner of an attentive host introducing his guests to one another before they go off to dress for dinner (‘We shall hear more of him shortly’, ‘We shall meet again’, and so on)”:1 again the Wodehousian harmonies, though now it is across the hubbub of a Blandings drawing-room that the strains of that distinctive light-baritone prosestyle reach us. Richard was a maker of gentle rain and because of that would probably never have lent his name anyway to anything as acerbic as that projected Guide. He was far too nice and far too decent ever to say anything likely to cause upset. He shrank from inflicting pain. Other than when stuck behind a very slow driver, he was, quite simply, the very definition of Cardinal Newman’s gentleman. 

My first acquaintance with Richard Fletcher came in 1984 when, as a callow MA student at the University of York, I tentatively knocked at his office door to seek his views about a dissertation I was then preparing on Anglo-Saxon kingship. From the very outset, Richard made a strong impression on me. I was struck by the courteous manner with which he responded to my naïve questioning, grateful for the sage advice he generously bestowed, and simultaneously transfixed by his Herculean— albeit ultimately unsuccessful—efforts to keep his pipe alight while we talked. In subsequent conversations, it was Richard who opened my eyes to the exciting possibilities that medieval Spanish history offered to the sufficiently intrepid, and two years later I returned to York to begin doctoral research under his supervision. Supervisory meetings with Richard often took place in a York pub, a practice that would doubtless be frowned upon by university quality assurance inquisitors today; but whatever the setting he was a constant source of advice, ideas and friendly encouragement. In later years, once the thesis had been safely put to bed and I had begun my first, faltering steps in the academic profession, I came to know Richard in another guise, that of stalwart colleague, ally and collaborator. In the late 1990s, we joined forces to prepare the translation of four Hispano-Latin chronicles that were later to be published as The World of El Cid (2000). 

In the introduction to that work we observed that “to our surprise and pleasure . . . harmonious co-operation was never once threatened by even the suspicion of a cross word so much as meditated, let alone uttered.” How could it possibly have been otherwise with Richard? The only difficulty as far as I was concerned was keeping up; Richard worked prodigiously hard, and when the bit was between his teeth he moved at a cracking pace. Our other collaborative work occurred when we were both invited to Portugal to take part in the filming of a local documentary on the 1147 siege of Lisbon. Richard was a confident performer in front of camera, but for whatever reason, that particular documentary seems to have remained in the can and his budding career as a “media don” was thwarted. This volume is intended as a commemoration of Richard’s career and his remarkable contribution to our understanding of the medieval world. 

The seventeen papers included here, contributed by some of the leading scholars of the period, reflect the three main areas of his scholarly endeavours: Church and society in medieval Spain; ChristianMuslim relations, both in the Iberian peninsula and further afield; and the history of the post-Roman world, with particular reference to the conversion of Europe. There is also an appreciation of Richard’s scholarly achievements by James Campbell. We dedicate this work to Richard’s memory with thanks, admiration and considerable affection, wholly mindful of the fact that both personally and professionally we are deeply fortunate to have known him. 

   

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Download PDF | Juhan Kreem, Juhan Kreem, Gerhard Jaritz - The Edges of the Medieval World - (2009).

 Download PDF | Juhan Kreem, Juhan Kreem, Gerhard Jaritz - The Edges of the Medieval World - (2009).

152 Pages 

PREFACE 

In his literary oeuvre, the Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda (b. 1949) has concentrated on ecological topics. In 1989, he wrote Mundo del fin del Mundo dealing with the killing of whales in the seas off Patagonia and actions initiated against it.1 This novel shows very well that the ends of the world need not only be something far away and therefore irrelevant for a society living in the “centre” but may also have to be seen as particularly important, and thereby near, in a number of respects touching all of humankind. In our days the same is particularly true about remote areas of the world confronted with problems of climatic change and global warming. 

During our first discussions about organising a meeting on medieval “worlds at the end of the world” we soon became aware of the fact that, as is true today, the edges of the world should be seen as a phenomenon that was regularly relevant for many members of society as a whole. Moreover, often they also have to be considered in different, context-dependent, ways. For some people, they may have been understood as the areas situated at the actual fringes of the globe, for others, however, they may have been the regions outside one’s own living space, that is, territory, town, village, or even house. Borders, limits, frontiers, and peripheries are recurring subjects in the historical disciplines, particularly in medieval studies. 

Not limited to the most direct geographic sense, such edges can also be found elsewhere, for instance, in the social, cultural, mental, and spiritual spheres. That also means that dealing with various medieval edges of the world may concern rather dissimilar questions to be raised and different source evidence to be analysed. The application of contextualising and comparative approaches is necessary.

 This volume is the outcome of an international workshop of specialists in different fields of the historical disciplines from eight European countries. In context with its topic, the meeting was held in the village of Koguva on Muhu, the third-largest island in Estonia, a place that also represents a position on the fringes of the European Union of today. The atmosphere of the island and the village influenced the discussions and re-sults of the meeting to a special extent. For the participants of the workshop this atmosphere became the “spirit of Muhu,” which formed the basis of an exceptionally fruitful scholarly discourse. In her opening contribution, Felicitas Schmieder concentrates on the spatial and temporal aspects of the topic. She deals with medieval ideas about connecting the geographical edges of the world with finis saeculi, that is, the final events of world history. 

These connections were discussed mainly from the twelfth century onwards and were represented on world maps in particular. Gerhard Jaritz analyses the geographical edges of the world and the creatures living there as a construction by the society of the centre, to be seen, on the one hand, as a kind of counter-image to one’s own world. On the other hand, he also shows the proximity and relation of phenomena ascribed to the fringes and a number of, often wondrous, occurrences in one’s own society. A continuous connection was made in the textual and visual representations of far-off peripheries and the centre, that is, between familiar space and the edges of the world.

 Else Mundal discovered from the analysis of Norse sources that the Vikings’ search for far-away lands and their journeys into the unknown cannot be seen in the context of any fear that they would sail over the edge. Torstein Jørgensen examines the theological perspectives of Adam of Bremen’s eleventh-century description of the land of the Norwegians as “the last in the world” and the “exceedingly fierce race of the Danes, of the Norwegians, or of the Swedes.” 

Anti Selart’s contribution concentrates on the late medieval political situation at some specific edges of Christianity. He is particularly interested in the rhetoric applied to describe or create Livonia’s fifteenth-century enemies and he explains it as a part of self-imagination, which in turn encountered similar competing self-imaginations. Juhan Kreem analyses the role of pirates in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Livonia. He deals with the insecurity of their life, one of the crucial characteristics of life on the edge. 

Tom Pettitt approaches the topic from the general aspect of the functional significance of edges and boundaries reflected in any cultural activities. He analyses this phenomenon with the help of medieval and traditional narrative and finds the powerful symbolic potential of the “Darkness at the Edge of Town” (Bruce Springsteen) or of the “the life at the Flurgrenze,” that is, the boundary itself. Judith Sebő looks for such boundaries in one’s own small world, the outskirts of towns in late medieval and early modern visual representations. Commerce, royal gift-exchange, and aristocratic identity play the most relevant roles in Aleksander Pluskowski’s contribution on the geographic sources, import, markets, and the functions of exotic animals and animal products in medieval Europe. He shows that “exotic animals could be ‘broken down’ into a set of components – conceptually and physically – emphasising different meanings.” 

At the workshop, the “beast of Muhu,” a New Year’s Goat (näärisokk) kept at the Muhu Museum in the village of Koguva, provided a kind of connection between the peripheries of the medieval world and the edges of modern culture. Constructed in 1950, it represents a house-visit custom during the first days of the New Year. Tom Pettitt and Kadri Tüür are conscious that one can no longer take for granted the survival of medieval and pre-medieval practices in modern folk traditions. With regard to such winter-visit customs, they are, however, able to suggest some continuity between the late medieval and modern periods. In the final paper of the volume, Lucie Doležalová deals with silence as the edge of language, when words are not enough and unable to express properly what the speaker had in mind. She shows that the notion of the limitations of language in the Middle Ages was particularly well developed in the context of the impossibility of grasping the nature of God. 

We would like to thank all the participants of the workshop and the authors of this volume for their motivation and contributions. We are also grateful to the Muhu Museum, the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Tallinn, and the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University (Budapest) for their support and their interest in the workshop and this publication. The “spirit of Muhu” led to the idea of continuing the discussion on edges, boundaries, and margins in the medieval world and society in regular discussions of specialists and publishing them in a series, The Muhu Proceedings, of which this book is the first volume. Gerhard Jaritz and Juhan Kreem Budapest and Tallinn, January 2009

 

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Download PDF | Sarah Gordon - Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature - (2006).

Download PDF | Sarah Gordon - Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature - (2006). 

231 Pages 

Introduction

Long before tales of gargantuan gluttony regaled early modern audiences, and centuries before pie-in-the-face or banana peel gags enlivened vaudeville slapstick, medieval French poets employed food as a powerful device of humor and criticism. Food and humor both have the power to satisfy, to entertain, and to construct identity; this power is doubled when they are combined. Unexpected usages of food may be humorous to large numbers of people because food is a universal, necessary, and sometimes banal part of everyday life. However, eating and drinking represent more than just basic or mundane elements of survival. Food may be perceived as a coveted object of desire or may figure at the center of a traditional celebration or ritual. 

The consumption of food and drink defines cultures and periods. As suggested by the now ubiquitous adage “you are what you eat,” alimentary customs may define an individual or a community. Diet and table manners are indicators of social status in a complex system of codified culinary norms. Food choice, preparation, and modes of consumption contribute to the construction of individual identities. Food and laughter, as two essential elements in human existence, can both be used to question and redefine meaning in culture—meaning linked to the role of the body and sexuality, to religion, to class hierarchies, and to gender relations. In general, both humor and food are identity markers; that is, they each entail belongingness to or exclusion from a given group. Because humor and food may be exclusionary, each defining group and community identity, humor about food in comic texts functions as effective social satire. Comedy about how one eats and what one eats (or does not eat) may involve self-evaluative humor for a given group, or on the other hand, may target members outside the group. Thus culinary comedy may mock either “us” or “them.” Those who eat similar food and have similar manners are acceptable while those who differ in their foodways may be perceived as other, strange, even disgusting or vulgar. Foodways help to define social hierarchies and boundaries, also marking status within a given community. In the Middle Ages, these communities may be clergy, bourgeois, vilains, nobles, or several more exclusive communities, such as the knights of the Arthurian court. Culinary comedy both satirizes and reinforces the conventions of these groups and their food preferences and behaviors as distinct from other groups. 

Through examination of medieval conventions surrounding both food and narrative, we may better interpret what may have provoked laughter and invited criticism for audiences of courtly literature. Gastronomy is beyond a doubt an integral element of French culture and history. Literary representations of food, eating habits, and drinking are central to centuries of French literature. Significant gastronomic elements in Rabelais, Molière, Brillat-Savarin, Balzac, Zola, Proust, Ponge, and countless others come to mind. Descriptions of symbolic foods and customary meals amplify themes. Protagonists are characterized by what and how they eat. Gastronomical discourse is rich in a broad spectrum of codes and symbols, particularly in medieval French art and literature. Medieval gastronomy is a complex form of material consumption; medieval culinary discourse consists of its conventional portrayal. In the Middle Ages consumption of food is marked by three very real possibilities of life: hunger, adherence to conventions of consumption, or gluttony. Extravagant feasting existed alongside voluntary fasting and catastrophic famine, any of which could be daily preoccupations, depending on one’s status in society. Evidently both extremes of bounty and hunger were cause for humor and ridicule.

 The ritual of the communal medieval feast was an elite social event that constructed identity and modeled courtly conventions. In courtly literature, any unanticipated deviation from courtly conventions and practices, particularly at mealtime, is shown as a playful provocation of laughter or a grave infraction with negative consequences. Because consumption was and is a powerful indicator of identity, medieval attitudes toward food are complex. Eating and fasting were tied to religion and morality. What one ate or abstained from eating could alter one’s spiritual identity, most obviously in the case of the Eucharist, hermetic vegetarianism, or the observance of feast and fast days (Crossley-Holland counts between 182 and 227 meatless days per year during this period, depending on observance). Religious food symbols were mocked by many parodic ecclesiastical texts, mock sermons, and in fictional literature by such blasphemous comic images as Renart’s holy andouille sausage. Pilgrims, hermits, and some clerics had ascetic diets, the physical manifestation of their spiritual devotion. Vegetables and grains or a vegetarian diet were seen as more pious fare than the courtly feasts of abundant roasted meat and game, the rich diet of aristocrats and knights.

 Food could signify the self as distinct from members of other communities. This was especially true in the diets prescribed by different religions. Muslims, Christians, and Jews have dietary codes or food habits that set them apart. Fictional narratives often remark on the differences of the “Saracen” diet with wonder or scorn. The Muslim diet with its food restrictions was seen as exotic and other, and was used to represent cultural differences in literature. Outside of the ecclesiastical arena, socioeconomic identity was dictated by food in both courtly and urban life. In short, much more so than in today’s diverse and globalized world, what one consumed showed how one lived, worshipped, celebrated, and sinned in the Middle Ages. Uniting the cultural and literary study of food with theoretical approaches to comedy, humor, and parody proves a fruitful methodology. Previous studies on medieval food have addressed primarily the socio-historical perspective, concentrating on the history of diet and alimentary practices. Though very successful in reconstructing a complex cultural history, they tend to overlook the considerable comic literary use of food in medieval French secular narrative literature. 

The chapters that follow reflect on ludic cultural representations of food and consumption in late-twelfth- through early-fourteenth-century French fictional verse narrative: epic chanson de geste, chantefable, verse romance, fabliau, and beast epic. Culinary comedy and non-humorous references to food nourish three highly conventional genres in particular during this period. Courtly romance, the fabliaux, and the multi-branch Roman de Renart contrast traditional convention with many levels of humorous and unexpected transgression, or contravention of the rules. The investigation of the way in which humor and the literary images of food interact in all of these genres, in conjunction with a discussion of didactic manuals and cultural expectations, will reveal much about medieval French literary production and reception. 

As will be observed in further detail in the following chapters, specific foods were often considered funny, their mere presence in a scene lending the opportunity for laughter and the occasion to cross the boundaries and go beyond the limits of what is socially acceptable. In romance and epic, roast poultry can be comic, because it often figures in food fights with knights, and because such food fights are a waste of that which is traditionally considered an expensive food and cooking technique preferred by nobles. Statistically speaking, the most commonly consumed food items in the fabliaux are: bacon, capons and geese, cakes, bread, and wine; given their frequency and the potentially high cost in the diet, these items are often the main ingredients of culinary comedy. In the fabliaux, poultry, fish, and bacon also become objects in the endless gender tugof-war, a sort of sexual currency. Appetite for poultry, such as roast chicken or partridge, is associated with sexual and financial appetites. Gluttony for char, viande, and vin are connected to lechery and sins of the flesh, while some fruits are viewed as aphrodisiacs. Oats and porridge are likened to bodily fluids in vulgar metaphors. Pork, bacon, lard, and larders come to represent corrupt members of the clergy—as symbols of gluttony, greed, lust, with the suggestion of corporeal resemblance to meat. Attempts at stealing cabbages or mutton, both common staples in the peasant diet, poke fun at vilain poverty and ignorance. 

Rotten foods, cooked foods, and fresh foods alike are employed as projectile weapons, allowing narrators to laugh in the face of famine and to mock warfare at the same time as foodstuffs are wasted in nonfatal battles. Spices are apt to be derided for their strong somatic effects, medicinal properties, high prices, and elite consumers; furthermore, just as spices transform the flavor of a dish, they may also be used to alter the narrative, providing a ridiculous twist. Poorly cooked or poor quality fatty foods, along with overripe fruit, provide comic relief in scenes of indigestion. Foods that are associated with heat, humidity, and flatulence become comic ingredients because of their sexual, aphrodisiac, and scatological associations. Round or phallic shapes of foods (in particular during this period, nuts, radishes, eggs, onions, roots, asparagus, carrots, cucumbers, sausages, etc.) also convey humorous sexual connotations, so that the mere presence or consumption of such objects, because of the resemblance to male genitalia, may signal comic intention. It is useful to review for a moment approaches to humor, laughter, and the comic. 

Aristotle put forth the idea that humor is one of the defining characteristics of humanity, yet comprehensive or definitive accounts of terms such as humor, laughter, and comedy have eluded scholars for centuries, beginning with Plato and Quintilian. The universality and broad nature of the phenomena of laughter and humor make an all-inclusive definition impossible. Humor and reactions to comedy may be subjective, culturally specific, and often based on diverse societal and personal factors. In the Poetics Aristotle defines comedy in part as: . . . an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain. In addition to this Aristotelian quality of the below-average ridiculous action or individual fault, harmless amusement is a key aspect of the comic. Marcel Gutwirth has provided a general definition of the term comic, denoting “. . . the range of events, willed or unwilled, aimed at bringing amusement (or simply having that effect)” (6). No attempt at an all-encompassing explanation of these social phenomena of comedy is made here; rather a concise review of existing theories and a synthesis of certain elements and terminology applicable to the present discussion of medieval literary and culinary humor are offered. 

Three major modern theories help to explain human humor and laughter, all three of which have been challenged, modified, and qualified over the course of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Elements of these broad approaches may be combined and related to different types and forms of humor, more specifically to food humor. Remaining the most accepted of the three approaches today, the Incongruity Theory of humor and laughter was developed by Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and many others. Inappropriate juxtapositions were comic for Aristotle too, particularly in the context of expectations surrounding socio-economic classes. Henri Bergson’s well-known treatise on humor, Le rire, highlighted the juxtaposition of the mechanical on the human, the “mécanique plaqué sur du vivant,” as the essential comic incongruity. The Incongruity perspective dictates that for a situation to be humorous or laughable, it must involve incongruity, or an unexpected juxtaposition. It is therefore elements of absurdity, incoherence, unlikely combination, or strangeness that may provide comic distance and cause us to laugh. Furthermore, exaggeration, overturning of conventions, or the inappropriate use of realistic detail can be incongruously funny. John Morreall gives a broad new definition for humor and laughter, based in part on the Incongruity Theory, seeing them as amusement that results from the enjoyment of a conceptual “shift.” Amusement is an important qualifier for Morreall, who points out that not every incongruous situation is necessarily funny or laughable; some may in fact provoke fear, for example. In working toward a new general theory of laughter, Morreall sees a shift in what is perceived as the most important element: “Laughter results from a pleasant psychological shift” (133). 

Providing a critical corrective, Morreall adds a caveat to the Incongruity Theory: “. . . though humor always involves the enjoyment of a perceived or imagined incongruity, often this enjoyment is accompanied by and boosted by our simultaneous enjoyment of an affective shift” (135). Michael Clark underlines that it is the perception of incongruity that is amusing (146). The Incongruity Theory of humor and laughter raises the fewest number of theoretical objections of the three theories and involves the fewest number of possible exceptions. One notable exception is the amusement and laughter expressed at actions or images that are expected, that is, those instances that are funny because we expect them to happen— because the punch line is known in advance. For instance, a certain behavior of a well-known character provokes laughter because of its repetition, foreshadowing, and inevitability based on familiar character traits. In addition, Victor Raskin’s linguistic theory of joke scripts, related to the Incongruity Theory and to the General Theory of Verbal Humor, provides a useful perspective. Jokes, according to Raskin, involve an opposition to the “expected state of affairs” and are connected to the abnormal. This type of comic turn of events may be seen in possible or partially implausible situations, but usually it deviates from the appropriate linguistic, societal, or narrative norm. 

Though the analyses that follow do not adhere to a linguistic perspective, which has its limitations, reference will be made to the terminology proposed by Raskin, who provides a useful typology of these playful “scripts” that we may borrow to better address and classify comic motifs in Old French literature, particularly in the narrative fiction of the fabliaux and the Roman de Renart (such as the scripts of Cunningness, Craftiness, Stinginess, Sexual Ignorance, and Sexual Opposition, evident throughout these short texts). In the second major theory, the Superior Theory, humor and comedy incite laughter through derision. The Superior Theory dictates that one will find amusing those situations in which one feels superior; in other words, we laugh at someone inferior—friend or foe—when we laugh. The humiliation of others is thus funny in the sense that it raises the amused person above the object of their laughter and amusement. This hypothesis, favored by Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, requires hostility and/ or humiliation to be present in the intent or the reception of the humor and explains why some people laugh when they see another person fall down in the mud or receive a cream pie in the face. 

Finally, the Relief Theory, or Release of Restraint Theory, holds that laughter is a release of pent up emotional and physical tensions. More physiologically based than the other theoretical approaches, the Relief Theory is limited, far from addressing every instance of comedy or laughter. The Release Theory of humor and laughter was expounded for example by Herbert Spencer and in Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The Relief Theory sees laughter as almost a cathartic moment, a positive physical reaction that relieves negative emotions based on anxiety, anger, stress, sexual frustrations, or societal constraints. Bakhtin’s notion of carnival shares some similarities with this perspective (though unfortunately limiting the exploration of the condoned liberation of laughter to primarily the Early Modern period). We may draw on elements of all three major perspectives on humor and laughter, as well as classify some of their structures according to Raskin’s scripts. Culinary narrative, when allied with comic narrative, becomes a multifaceted literary device of critical ridicule. No doubt, incongruity forms a basis for most medieval humor, especially in comic situations involving unexpected behavior and incongruous use of objects, such as food fighting. But the humorous in the Middle Ages is constituted by more than just the incongruous. 

The Superior Theory is applicable with ease to the amusing trickery and hostility of the fabliaux and the Roman de Renart, texts in which the punch line is based on the humiliation, suffering, and incompetence of others who are often of a lower status. Moreover, many instances of culinary comedy have a tone that is both didactic and amusing, involving a feeling of moral superiority among the audience members who evaluate the caricatures and burlesque actions of the fabliaux characters. The Release Theory is relevant to medieval French comic narrative, which treats explicit social and psychological tensions, often questioned, ridiculed, or overcome through laughter at otherwise taboo or unquestionable subjects. The composition and reception of the fabliaux may be addressed by the Release Theory. 

A combination of the three theories provides the most useful framework for the study of culinary comedy in the Middle Ages. As for a brief typology of comic techniques, a distinction may be drawn between the basic types of comedy that occur in the selected texts: verbal comedy, physical comedy, and situational comedy. All of these types of comedy may be integrated into a culinary element; surprise and suspense surround the audience’s anticipation of what will happen with a given food item, the formal object of amusement. The incongruity of exaggerations, complications, characters’ reactions, and misunderstandings, in contrast to (or in tandem with) our expectations provoke our laughter in parody of highly conventional genres. Food may serve a satirical or parodic function when coupled with unconventional, inappropriate behavior. 

The power of culinary comedy is its ability to disrupt. Conversely, culinary comedy helps on occasion to reinforce the same conventions it ridicules. The first chapter presents a discussion of the roles of food and of literary convention in the Middle Ages and the complex manner in which they intertwine, setting literary culinary comedy in its socio-historical context. Medieval attitudes toward food and the implications of codified consumption in the Middle Ages are explored, making reference to textual culinary convention in romance and epic and to extant written cooks’ treatises. An overview of the functions of food in culture and medieval culinary narratives accompanies a discussion defining the functions and effects of this humorous device. A contrast is drawn between the ubiquitous image of the bountiful feast and the daily realities of hunger. The focus is on the conventions of feast hospitality and on the excesses of gluttony and food play, with examples of culinary comedy found in romance, chanson de geste, and chantefable. 

The chantefable of Aucassin et Nicolette serves as a primary illustration of literary food fighting in a mock-epic battle that presents a violent inversion of convention; that is to say, such actions transgress, or infringe upon and violate, accepted social codes and cross the boundaries and limits of appropriate behavior in a courtly setting. The humorously incongruous use of food and exaggerated hunger in epic is equally striking. Certain young epic heroes of the chanson de geste, in particular Guillaume and Rainouart, are portrayed as brutish gluttons whose offensive and sinful actions are dictated by their demanding bellies rather than any traditional sense of duty. The other three contemporary genres treated in subsequent chapters are illuminated by close analysis of culinary humor because they are characterized by irony and ambiguous meaning, all of which are enhanced by incongruous and out-of-the-ordinary consumption. 

The French verse narrative texts selected for the present study are generally considered comic because they aim at entertainment, amusement, and happy or successful conclusions. Considering the comedy of eating that transgresses the acceptable and expected boundaries of the otherwise highly conventional world of Arthurian romance, Chapter 2 takes Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal, the thirteenth-century verse Perceval Continuations, Durmart le Gallois, the Roman de Fergus, the Roman d’Hunbaut, the Merveilles de Rigomer, and the Vengeance Raguidel as examples. A portrait of the conventional feast is drawn and then ruptured through an exploration of incidents of unknightly culinary conduct. Feasts and hospitality are fundamental elements of courtly culture, ridiculed by these derivative texts that situate comicorealism in opposition to convention. 

Audience expectations are presented and compared to unconventional situations, as we consider incongruity, irony, and ambiguity in romance. The guest-host relations discussed in Chapter 1—consisting of sharing, giving, and receiving food and lodging—provide an opportunity for verbal and culinary exchange and thus offer an occasion for culinary comedy to advance the comic plot to its happy ending. It is remarkable that in richesse of the romance genre, so typified by opulent feast and the generosity of courtly largesse, we discover images of hungry knights searching for nothing more than a good, solid meal in a bleak landscape. At the Grail castle in Chrétien’s Perceval and the Continuations, the naïve Perceval keeps his mouth shut except to eat and drink. Excessive eating is linked to his excessive silence. He commits many other social and culinary faux pas representing moral failings. The later romance heroes who follow a derivative trajectory exhibit even less admirable table manners, resorting to food fights. We find that as appetite grows in cultural and literary references, respect for convention diminishes. For Perceval, the blind following of seemingly empty convention is punished from the start. Conversely, for the thirteenth-century verse character of Gauvain, eating is an impetus to deviate from chivalric perfection and courtly convention in the Vengeance Raguidel. The portrayal of the reputation and renown of the twelfth-century Arthurian court is made suspect by the poor table manners of its best knights in the thirteenth century. Even the formidable Lancelot is degraded when forced to become a lowly kitchen servant in the Merveilles de Rigomer. 

Thirteenth-century French romancers composed with a glance toward past written and oral traditions and a knowing wink to the audience; such imitative romances use food and laughter to evaluate and rewrite. Chapter 3 turns to the essentially ludic genre of the Old French fabliaux in an investigation of the humorous use of food combined with other subjects, or scripts of comedy. The function of food in episodes involving alimentary, sexual, scatological, social, and religious topics is examined. All three theories of humor, as well as semantic joke scripts, illuminate the comic logic of the fabliaux. Unlike culinary descriptions in romance, limited for the most part to aristocratic consumption, the fabliaux treat food in great detail, from preparation to consumption and (in)digestion in all members of society. We also consider the contemporary dramatic text of the Jeu de Robin et Marion in this light. Culinary comedy in the fabliaux treats the status of vilains, bourgeois, knights, merchants, innkeepers, prostitutes, performers, students, members of the clergy, and others who populate a predominately urban world with comicorealism. Eating brings members of these groups together in a shift in focus from social classes presented in romance and epic. 

As familiar communal spaces in the fabliaux, the kitchen and dining table are the appropriate venue for blatant mocking of certain social classes and for the subtle derision of human shortcomings. Food may be an item of trade in a mercantile exchange, a form of hospitality, a means of seduction, or the coveted object of bumbling thieves. Fabliau episodes of culinary comedy are far more concerned with gender and sexuality than are the romance culinary comedy episodes. Husbands and wives bicker over the menu and steal food from one another. Female sexual and gastronomic appetites are combined in a misogynistic perspective, with the criticism that the female appetite is uncontrollable and sinful, leading men to gluttony and lechery, or tricking husbands and lovers through devious ruses.

 Furthermore, human relations to food are often constituted as erotic. This relation may be either verbal or corporeal. Rampant female and male appetites are unleashed in unexpected ways as the fabliaux use eating and cooking to explore gender dynamics. In narratives where our disbelief is suspended for the sake of fabliau logic or fabliau humor, where female orifices are portrayed as hungry and male body parts are often mistaken for sausages and meat, food or food-talk may substitute for sexuality. Sexual activity, in particular adulterous activity, is linked to foodstuffs, occurring around food or food-related objects such as tables, pantries, and knives. Moreover, meals may serve as a means to hide or facilitate such activity. 

More than one fabliau lover hides from a jealous husband under the cover of the dinner table or in the pantry. Meat cleaving and castration are confused. Cheating with food items doubles for cheating in the domains of sexuality and finance. The didactic and moral aspects of culinary comedy are explored in relation to the fabliaux and contemporary exempla, as well as in the chapter on the Roman de Renart. 

The final chapter investigates food humor as it functions in the verbal comedy and cunning ruses of the beast fables, a genre in which most of the anthropomorphic and human characters are driven by the hunger for pleasure, the hunger for revenge, and the hunger for food. Throughout the many branches of the Roman de Renart there is a union of human and animal nature, particularly in relation to food. One aspect of life that animals and humans have in common is the need for nourishment, though humans dine whereas animals feed. 

The characters’ rapports with food and with each other reveal much about their qualities and flaws. In the Roman de Renart, hunger, food seeking and stealing, and consumption reveal a cynical perspective on human nature, from which few occupations or classes are spared an evaluation of their stereotypical weaknesses and corruption. As in the fabliaux, hunger is associated with violence and deception, here heightened by the urgency and brutality of the animal kingdom. The Superior Theory of humor, in particular, sheds light on the laughter Renart’s hungry antics invite. 

The social injustices of renardie are ripe for the humor and societal criticism allowed by culinary comedy. Food and hunger are recurring elements in most branches of the Roman de Renart in text and image. An analysis of manuscript miniatures, as illustrations accompanying the literary text, further our understanding of contemporary interpretation because these telling images reveal an animalistic world obsessed by food, with the characters feeding on weakness and gullibility while surrounded by humor, hunger, playfulness, and ignorance. Culinary comedy represents a significant ludic element of the means by which twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets read, imitated, and (re)interpreted their predecessors with a critical eye.

 Food humor and food play are both amusing and dangerous. Like other types of play in human culture, food play involves adherence to rules, as well as trickery and pretense. In all of the texts explored, playing with food and different forms of food humor serves to quash both alimentary and literary conventions, calling into question accepted practices and audience expectations.

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