Download PDF | A History of Private Life, Volume II: Revelations of the Medieval World. Ed. Georges Duby. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, London 1988.
677 Pages
Preface , Georges Duby
IN Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie depicts women, on abundant evidence, as much given to gossip and even more to curiosity, their eyes glued to keyholes, spying out what goes on inside other people’s houses so they can tell the neighbors about it. He concludes: “Not until our own day and the advent of more bourgeois societies enamoured of private life did this female espionage diminish or at any rate decline somewhat in the face of repression.”
This is a clear statement about a question that this book hopes to answer in part. Is it legitimate (not merely pertinent) to speak of private life in the Middle Ages, to transfer to such a remote era the idea of privacy, which first emerged in the nineteenth century in England, at that time the society that had progressed furthest in the establishment of a “bourgeois” culture? All things considered, I believe the question can be answered in the affirmative. It was no more legitimate for historians to apply, say, the concept of class struggle to the feudal era, yet it has proved undeniably useful that they have done so. The exercise not only showed how the concept needed to be refined but, more important, clarified the nature of power relations in an archaic social system, in particular those relations that had nothing to do with class conflict. Hence we have not hesitated to use the concept of private life, anachronistic as it may be. We have attempted to identify the dividing line between what people in medieval society considered private and what they did not, and to isolate that sphere of social relations corresponding to what we nowadays call “private life.”
The exploratory, tentative nature of our investigation cannot be overemphasized. The text you are about to read has many question marks. Like archaeologists beginning work on a village abandoned after the Great Plague of the fourteenth century, we have made some initial soundings; like them we expect to discover only a few rich sites—elsewhere coming up empty-handed. The results of our. venture depend on the density and quality of the remains: not only written sources but also artifacts, as well as sculpted and painted images that can tell us something about how people lived.
We begin around a.p. 1000, when the documentary record suddenly becomes richer. Another turning point, no less dramatic, occurred some time between 1300 and 1350. After this, everything takes on a new coloration. The change was in part accidental (precipitated, most notably, by the Black Plague of 1348-1350), yet within a few decades it profoundly altered the way people lived throughout the Western world. A related phenomenon is the shift that occurred in the focus of European development, which moved from northern France to Italy primarily but also to Spain and northern Germany. Other changes affect our sources of information, enabling us to see more clearly the realities of what we are calling private life. During the first half of the fourteenth century a large piece of the veil that previously masked those realities was suddenly torn away.
Profound developments led men of that age to study material things with greater lucidity and attention than ever before. As the contemptus mundi, the attitude of contempt for the world, that had dominated the high culture of the Middle Ages began to wane, appearances, deceptive and sinful as they may have been thought to be, no longer seemed quite so reprehensible as in the past. Consequently, around 1300, art—the art of representing aspects of life by means of line and volume, the art of painters and sculptors—took a turn toward what we now call realism. The scales fell away from men’s eyes. Artists began to transcribe exactly what they saw, using all the techniques of illusion at their disposal. Because painting enjoyed the fullest arsenal of such techniques, it became preeminent among the arts, and the first painted images of intimate scenes began to appear. Through the eyes of the painter we can penetrate the interior of the home, of private space, after 1350, much as the curious women of Montaillou had done a few decades earlier. For the first time the historian has the means to play the voyeur, to observe without indiscretion what went on in this closed world where Van der Weyden, for example, placed the Virgin of the Annunciation and the Angel.
And that is not all. Physical artifacts of private life, of great use to the historian, become much less scarce after the middle of the fourteenth century. Archaeology has recovered vestiges of everyday life that throw light on the last two centuries of the Middle Ages. Most of the excavations have been carried out on the sites of deserted villages—and large numbers of villages were deserted after the Black Plague. Of the castles, urban dwellings, and village houses still extant, the oldest, with few exceptions, date from the fourteenth century, no doubt as a consequence of the rise in the overall standard of living that followed the period of depopulation initiated by the pandemic. This is also true of what remains of furnishings and finery. Look at any museum. At the Cluny, for example, there is an extraordinary disproportion between exhibits of items from after 1300 and those from before; if we look only at those items that concern private life, the disproportion is even greater.
As realism made its influence felt in literature, the texts begin to reveal things that had previously appeared only in brief snatches. The romances ceased to be quite so lost in the mists of reverie. The documents that survive in ever greater numbers in the archives as one moves toward the end of the Middle Ages are more loquacious and inquisitive than earlier sources. Like the new painting, they enable us to glimpse what went on inside the home, to look behind the screens, to insinuate ourselves into domestic interiors and spy on their inhabitants.
Among these new sources are numerous official documents, for by the fourteenth or fifteenth century the state, stronger and more powerful than in the past, had conceived the ambition of total control, of exploiting its citizens to the full. To that end it had to know what went on in people’s minds, the better to extort from them their belongings and repress their rebellious tendencies. Public authorities conducted investigations, required declarations, and in various other ways penetrated the secrets of private life. The record book of Jacques Fournier, inquisitor and future pope, from which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie learned all he knows about the private life of the peasantry, dates from the beginning of the fourteenth century. Fournier’s was but one of many similar investigations, the record of which somehow miraculously escaped the ravages of time.
Because the struggle between rival institutions for control of the lives of private individuals was intensifying during this period, in their efforts to resist, people attempted to construct a “wall” around private life. By the fourteenth century we know a great deal more about what went on behind that wall, because private individuals began to write more than before, because they began to employ notaries for private business, and because we begin to see the first in that unbroken chain of eloquent documents that have proved so useful to historians: estate inventories, marriage contracts, and wills. Soon the archives would begin to collect even more instructive intimate writings: letters, memoirs, and family record books.
As the fourteenth century dawns, we catch sight of a vast panorama that had previously lain almost entirely shrouded in shadow. What people commonly take to be the Middle Ages, the period that serves as backdrop to historical novels, of which we dream along with Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet, is not the period around the year 1000, nor is it the time of Philip Augustus. It is—in terms of feelings, ways of loving, table manners, rules of etiquette, the inner life, and piety—the Middle Ages of Joan of Arc and Charles the Bold. The structure of this book is dictated in large part by the major change that occurs in the first half of the fourteenth century. What comes before is far more problematic and, for our purposes, lacking in substance.
The mists that obscure our view begin to lift around a.p. 1000 and continue to evaporate right down to the dawn of the fourteenth century, thanks to steady material progress and its effects on spiritual life. Three centuries of uninterrupted economic growth is a fact to be reckoned with. What concerns us here, however, is the direct impact of economic growth on the nature of private life.
The increasingly common use of money was not without consequence for the concept of personal property, for the very idea of what belongs to one person and not to others. Another consequence of progress was a gradual transition from a gregarious to a more individualistic existence, which led to greater introspection; within the privacy of the house there developed an even more intimate preserve, an inner privacy of the self. This period of general relaxation and constant renaissance saw a greater openness to remote or forgotten cultures: Islam, Byzantium, ancient Rome. People discovered, in the exotic behavior of others, structures in which the relation of public to private was different from what they were used to, and the discovery gradually changed the way they behaved. The steady rise in the standard of living, the unequal distribution of the fruits of the expanding seigneurial mode of production, and the growing differentiation of social roles heightened the contrasts between city and countryside, wealthy and poor households, and men and women. At the same time, the increasingly rapid circulation of men, ideas, and fashions tended to diminish regional distinctions and spread uniform standards of behavior throughout the West.
In a work of this kind all observations must be dated as precisely as possible. Yet we begin at so rudimentary a level that it is not always possible to organize our scant knowledge in strictly chronological fashion. We therefore decided that it would be more appropriate and useful to structure the work differently. Because we do not wish to conceal how fragmentary our understanding is, we have divided the book into various sections. The first of these consists of two parts. One is concerned with private life from 1000 to 1220, focusing primarily on the period 1150-1220 (when the pace of progress apparently quickened, the gap between generations probably was wider than it has ever been until recent times, and the sources for the first time begin to disclose the attitudes of people outside the ambit of the Church). Another deals with a period, region, and social stratum for which we possess especially abundant source materials: the notables of Tuscany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The last major sections of the book are more adventurous. In them we examine two aspects of the overall evolution of western European society during an extended period of time—the transformation of domestic space and the flourishing of the individual—concentrating on religious and artistic expressions of individuality. Separating these major sections is one dealing with the imagination; it is based on literature from northern France composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Fiction, though it must be interpreted with a delicate touch, yields irreplaceable information about how private life was actually experienced.
This book is a joint project, and in the early stages we dreamed of working together so closely that it would be impossible to detect what each person had contributed. It quickly turned out that this was too ambitious. We did cooperate quite effectively (especially in the Sénanque colloquia, where we collectively profited from hearing reports of the work of our invited guests). Each of us complemented and corrected the work of the others. Yet in the end it seemed less artificial and more equitable to assign primary responsibility for each part or section to one individual.
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