Download PDF | (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 25) Erica Buchberger_ Yaniv Fox - Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400-800-Brepols Publishers (2019).
305 Pages
Introduction
This volume is about inclusion and exclusion, which are social transactions that allocate or withhold resources from individuals or groups of people. It is interested in the development of these dynamics in texts produced by Christian authors working in the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean. Inclusion and exclusion are ubiquitous social phenomena with an unmistakable purchase on every human endeavour. In countless fields of activity, from war, diplomacy, and politics to commerce, religion, and beyond, we can track the footprints of inclusion and exclusion. First and foremost, however, inclusion and exclusion are intimately personal experiences, firmly rooted as they are in our earliest socialization processes.1 The developing individual learns her place within society by discovering how she resembles and differs from others and witnessing first-hand the implications of those correspondences.
Essentially, then, to include and exclude is to map the social landscape and navigate it according to the compass of similarity and difference.2 In one way or another, everyone with whom we interact is bound to us by similarity. Families, communities, and whole societies are constituted on the notion of similarity as a precondition for belonging. Depending upon the case, such similarity can be profoundly pervasive or markedly limited. Everywhere and always, however, the detection of similarities translates into behaviour. The sharing of space — with a friend, stranger, enemy, or even an animal, an object, or the perceived presence of a supernatural entity — prompts particular behaviours. These behaviours, which may prove pivotal, are spurred by the human impulse to divide the world into groups governed by assumptions about similarity and difference.3 Inclusion and exclusion are also complementary acts. In fact, one is meaningless when considered in isolation from the other. The moment that one includes, one excludes. And inclusion and exclusion are coded not only into the guidelines of normative behaviour but also into linguistic registers, regulating the ways in which members of a group address their perceived peers and their perceived ‘others’.4 The question, however, is not always one of ‘us’ and ‘them’. We tend to view the world concentrically, its alterity increasing with distance, whether physical or metaphorical.
In this way, we quantify alterity and compare categories of otherness. And this tendency is all-encompassing. What utterance does not assume and articulate some division between subject and external reality? The act of speech is perhaps the most intrinsic enactment of inclusion and exclusion available to human experience. Moreover, far from being merely binary modes of ontological or epistemological categorization, inclusion and exclusion are also powerful legal, political, and cultural tools. This volume will engage with the ways in which late ancient and early medieval societies applied these tools to shape the world around them. As a field of historiographical interest, inclusion and exclusion are a natural continuation of the growing preoccupation with questions of identity. In recent years, this topic has generated a vast body of literature, charting the adoption and adaption of various conceptual constructs that facilitate self-definition.5
Many of the broader categories of identity — religion, ethnicity, gender, class — have strong bearing on the discussion at hand. It might be useful to think of inclusion and exclusion as instruments in the service of the discourse of identity, bringing its conceptual constructs into the realm of social praxis. Recent work on intersectionality has likewise devoted much attention to the consequences of navigating multiple — at times, interlocking and even contradictory — identities.6 Such attempts at harmonizing conflicting social demands reflect the kinds of relationships that concern us here. Groups, the building blocks of society, are themselves heterogeneous units. As social forces, inclusion and exclusion can turn inward, either because groups order themselves hierarchically or because they perceive themselves as having both a centre and a periphery. Thus, there can be ‘better’ specimens of a certain group, who embody more of its characteristics.
The prophet Muhammad expresses such a sentiment when he tells his companions: ‘I am the most Arab of you all, I am of Quraysh and I was suckled among the Banū Sa‘d bin Bakr’, perhaps privileging his nomadic upbringing and his superior command of Arabic as coveted social resources.7 As this parable demonstrates, alongside the conceptual scaffolding that underpins these social phenomena, the decision to include and exclude also has a clear pragmatic rationale. Whatever form they ultimately took historically, resources have always been finite, giving rise to different ideas on how best to control and apportion them. Furthermore, competition over resources amplifies some differences while smoothing over others. The following chapters approach the regulation and distribution of resources from a variety of angles.
The Spatial and Chronological Setting The Mediterranean, a popular setting of historical treatment, shares many of the problems posed by other spatial choices, such as the Roman world, Christendom, and the West. Ultimately, each of these settings can seem rather arbitrary. Our choice, then, warrants a word of explanation. The populations, material goods, and ideas that inform the following discussions may have been borne on the waves of the Mediterranean or washed onto its shores. It is their impact on the terrestrial, rather than maritime, environment, however, that animates this volume. Moreover, as the contributions are not primarily concerned with ecological history or how the inhabitants of the Mediterranean littoral acted upon the sea or were, in turn, influenced by it,8 our use of the term ‘Mediterranean’ may be taken as a misnomer: after all, the chapters discuss southern Gaul, Italy, and Syria, but also northern Gaul and Britain. What makes these historical scenes specifically ‘Mediterranean’? Arguably, at one point, even Britain, Mesopotamia, and Ethiopia functioned as Mediterranean hinterlands, in the sense that the inhabitants of these regions were nourished by seaside economies, adorned themselves with Mediterranean fashions, and practised a Mediterranean religion.9 Here, one notes the degree to which historiographical discussion about the late antique and early medieval world remains beholden to the ideas of Henri Pirenne.
The Pirennian notion of a Mediterranean commonwealth, driven by economy but yoked together by an assemblage of cultural, linguistic, and religious similarities, certainly informs this volume. Yet it is precisely the breakdown of similarity, real or perceived, that serves as its polestar. In such moments of dissolution, inclusion and exclusion reveal themselves in starkest clarity. In the century or so since Pirenne produced his groundbreaking work, scholars have learned a great deal about the emergence of the post-Roman order. Such knowledge makes it difficult to affirm Pirenne’s idea that this order resulted from a barbarian ‘dream […] to settle down, […] in those happy regions where the mildness of the climate and the fertility of the soil were matched by the charms and the wealth of civilization’.10 Pirenne’s portrayals of the late Merovingians and Islam have likewise withstood scrutiny poorly, and critique of his ideas has constituted a highly fruitful avenue of late antique and early medieval historiography of the past century. In many ways, scholarship is still arguing with Pirenne.11 The Roman sea, for Pirenne, served as a conceptual adhesive, holding together disparate societies with the help of language, religion, economy, and culture.
The Muslim sea had the opposite effect, unmaking the ancient world and birthing a medieval one. The Mediterranean as a conduit of human activity in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages has not lost its currency in modern scholarship, although Pirenne’s dichotomous treatment of it certainly has.12 Roman cultural homogeneity has been shown to be, if not sheer fantasy, then at least the preserve of a paper-thin imperial elite.13 In the eastern provinces, it was not Latin but a variety of local languages such as Syriac and Coptic that prevailed in most spoken contexts; in more formal scenarios, Greek functioned almost exclusively as the East’s lingua franca.14 In the West, classical erudition (or lack thereof ) meant that a seemingly uniform Latinate community was, in actuality, highly stratified and susceptible to inclusive and exclusive forces.15 Germanic languages, which probably played different roles at different times, left little trace in the surviving literature, although, without question, they added a layer of complexity to this picture.
If Christianity is to be regarded as the sealant that held the vessel of late antique and early medieval culture afloat on the waves of the Mediterranean, we must also concede that it often played an opposite role. The undercurrents of heresy and schism steadily ate away at unity. For a while in the West, Nicenes and Homoians became the defining antithetical poles in the conversation on religion,16 while in the East, Chalcedon was the yardstick against which orthodoxy was determined.17 Even among those communities joined together in communion, Peter Brown’s notion of ‘micro-Christendoms’ teaches us that it was difference, not similarity, that appeared most saliently in this context.18 Our decision to take the Mediterranean as a frame of reference allows us to envision a space whose outer rim is intentionally ill-defined — a ‘greater’ Mediterranean19 — that, in the chronological parameters underlined below, was still informed by late Roman culture and was Christianized or in the process of becoming so. Continuity between the Roman and post-Roman world is therefore an enduring theme in the chapters of this volume.
As the chronological purview we have chosen clearly shows, the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean remained a culturally coherent space throughout the invasions of the fifth century and the Muslim conquests of the Levant and North Africa two centuries later. It was interconnected through trade, religion, and culture for much longer, adapting and transforming as it came into contact with new cultures and their ideas.
To be sure, the political map of the Mediterranean changed dramatically from the beginning of the chronological scope envisioned by this volume to its end. Significant unto itself, this shift conceals deeper cultural trends that took much longer to achieve fruition. Provinces that were absorbed by the Islamicate world soon reoriented themselves towards new linguistic and cultural centres, yet the process of Islamization would take centuries to run its course. All the while, Christian communities in the Levant and North Africa continued to look, either in agreement or in opposition, to Constantinople. The barbarian courts in the West and the papacy likewise continued to view themselves as part of a religious and political community headed by the emperor, whose influence was not effaced even by the rise of the Carolingians, Pirenne’s great progenitors of medieval culture.
The Chapters of This Volume Exclusion and inclusion come into sharper relief when seemingly monolithic social and cultural constructs are shaken, setting into motion processes of adaptation and change. During Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the space that for centuries had been occupied by the Roman state experienced precisely such a process. By and large, the chapters of this volume will confine themselves to the period 400–800 ad, or from the beginning of the last Roman century to the height of Carolingian power. Any attempt to map a periodization model onto the complexity of the historical process is inevitably artificial, and ours is no exception. It is, nevertheless, possible to say that the Mediterranean we encounter at the earliest point of this timeline differs in several significant ways from the one that emerges from the latest. The most conspicuous change entailed the abandonment of one and the adoption of another, very different, religious system. From the early fourth century on, the imperial administration at first took a sympathetic, then an ideologically committed, stance on the question of Christianity, steadily working to transform a polytheistic society into a Christian one.
The new religion did not emerge fully formed, of course. Much of the religious history of subsequent centuries can be viewed as a journey to discover where the theoretical and practical boundaries of membership lay. From the outset, Christianity aimed to mould society according to divine will. This subversive social vision expressly sought to reconfigure relationships between the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, and the politically powerful and the disenfranchised. Ecclesiastical thinkers were keenly aware that, while God was infallible, his interpreters were not. Already in the epistles of Paul, an exclusionary discourse was applied to those who would misinterpret the divine plan, drawing sharp distinctions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy and outlining the ways in which one could traverse the boundaries between the two in either direction.20 Once it achieved primacy in the Roman Empire, Christian thought was forced to make peace with more mundane considerations, which it did with surprising agility.
But even with new forces impinging upon the Church’s calculus, its claim to exclusive exegetical authority never waned. As a result, many would find themselves on the wrong side of the fence, either as non-Christians or as Christians of a lesser kind.21 The chapters of this volume are divided into four main thematic sections, each exploring the different paths taken by Christian societies as they attempted to regulate access to social and cultural resources. Of course, the Church was not one entity but many. Christian communities negotiated the parameters of social discourse in a multitude of ways, through the activities of small but influential intellectual circles, the coercive power of the state, and the legislative initiatives of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Each of these strategies produced different kinds of texts. The first thematic section, ‘Literate Communities and their Texts’, investigates how texts functioned as means of inclusion and exclusion. Whether by crafting a deliberate narrative, by creatively editing existing works, or by altogether restricting access to competing texts, scholars throughout the period at hand controlled the dissemination of ideologically charged rhetoric.
The first chapter of the volume, by Carmela Franklin, asks whether the ‘Frankish redaction’ — purportedly a subcategory of one of the five textual classes identified by Louis Duchesne — constitutes a valid interpretative framework for the Liber pontificalis. This examination has immediate bearing on questions of inclusion and exclusion since the manuscripts that contain the socalled Frankish redaction have long been regarded as a concerted Carolingian effort to enmesh the family’s political ascendancy in the history of the papacy in the eighth century. Such a reading would point to a deliberate Carolingian manipulation of the Liber pontificalis, with the aim of refashioning the historical narrative to conform to a certain political agenda. Yet Franklin concludes that the Frankish redaction cannot be interpreted in isolation from other manuscripts in its class, and that it was, in fact, a Roman creation that took shape through a disorganized process whereby marginalia migrated into the text. Dirk Rohmann sets out to examine the institutional treatment of texts considered outside the bounds of orthodoxy.
In addition to identifying outright violence against texts that originated from heretical schools of thought and pagan circles, culminating in officially sanctioned book burnings, he deals with the defensive attitudes embraced by authorities in an attempt to shield orthodox dogma from outside scrutiny. As Rohmann shows, by positing that heterodoxical compositions were indebted to older, pagan works, Christian communities were forming a new understanding of the term ‘heresy’, which encapsulated a more exclusive heresiological discourse. Shane Bjornlie proposes a new context for the reading of one particularly charged text, namely, Beowulf. In Bjornlie’s treatment, the sixth-century Scandinavian kingdom of the Geats functions in the epic as a layered metaphor for the ninth-century courts of Wessex and Aachen, allowing the author to analyse and work through the societal anxieties that ensued from the encounters of the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks with their partially acculturated Viking neighbours. Bjornlie argues that Beowulf is rich in textual couplets that embody this narrative strategy.
The spatial dichotomies posited by Beowulf — the mead hall, governed by an aging king, juxtaposed to the lawless fens, stomping grounds of Grendel — are one example of this, symbolizing the authorial preoccupation with the Anglo-Saxons’ own heathen past and the potential unravelling of their political culture. The second thematic section of the volume, ‘The Internal Dialogue of the Church’, looks at ecclesiastical authors and their efforts to forge a path to consensus and thereby circumscribe the parameters of orthodoxy. This project did not automatically denounce as heretical those schools of thought that diverged from accepted theological convention. Rather, it took a subtle, and ultimately more accommodating, approach to the question of heresy. Hence, divergent thought was judged not only against dogma but against other parameters, too, in an effort to seek a more inclusive principle of Christian community. Yonatan Livneh’s chapter examines the narrative strategies of Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, whose compositions envisage Church history in terms of constant inner conflict. This, argues Livneh, is a departure from previous attitudes governing ecclesiastical historiography. Choosing discord as a leitmotif was not meant to glorify or encourage Church disputes: quite the opposite. Weaponizing theological nuances was, for Socrates and Sozomen, behaviour deserving of criticism and was depicted accordingly as a boon for the Church’s adversaries.
Daniel Neary’s analysis of the writings of Anthony, a seventh-century monk in the Palestinian monastery of the Mother of God at Choziba, continues in a similar vein. Like Socrates and Sozomen, Anthony censures the litigiousness of Church leaders, whose proclivity for splitting theological hairs caused them to forsake more immediate spiritual concerns and brought the Church much misfortune. Far from adopting the sectarian positions of his theological partisans, Anthony sees religious controversy as an obstacle on the path to restoring the Palestinian church to its former greatness, opting instead for a more inclusive policy of religious oikonomia. Peter Schadler discusses the process whereby acceptance of ecumenical conciliar legislation became a parameter for orthodoxy in the compositions of Melkite writers. By examining a chronological arc that begins with the writings of Sophronius of Jerusalem, then proceeds to John of Damascus, and culminates with Theodore Abu-Qurrah, Schadler highlights an emerging concern with conciliar authority. All of these men were forced to contend with the reality of post-Chalcedonian councils and therefore developed a response that, while accepting of later ecumenical legislation, fashioned the first four councils as a true gauge of orthodoxy.
As Schadler shows, acceptance or rejection of conciliar legislation became an increasingly relevant criterion as the Muslim conquest of the Levant made communication with Constantinople increasingly sporadic, exposing Christian communities to Muslim scholarly attention and criticism. Post-Roman royal courts frequently weighed in on the Church’s internal dialogue. Social cleavages along doctrinal lines were a matter of great political concern, and the state therefore took an active role in controlling events on the ecclesiastical stage. Religious identity also interacted in subtle ways with other strata of social identity, occasioning the emergence of a complex grammar of religion, ethnicity, and class that corresponds only very partially to our own.
Christendom’s sense of its past, forged by centuries of controversy, was decisive in determining ecclesiastical and civil authorities’ response to the challenges posed by these outsiders, as the papers in the third section, ‘Persecution and Dissent’, discuss. As argued by Éric Fournier, under the Vandals, both Nicene and Homoian churches deployed strategies against one another that had originally evolved to resist the Donatists. The History of the Vandal Persecution’s graphic scenes obscure the fact that imperial legislation under Theodosius took a harsher stand on Donatists than Huneric, Victor of Vita’s most maligned king, ever did on Nicenes. Robin Whelan’s chapter probes the nuanced interplay between Gothic and Homoian identity in sixth-century Italy. Contemporary sources did not necessarily envision explicit links between these two discrete spheres of identity. Whelan considers the context in which several key papyri from Byzantine Ravenna were produced, against the backdrop of new exclusive legislation emanating from the imperial court.
He demonstrates how, in the uncertain atmosphere that followed the conquest of Italy, ethnic discourse could be employed to divert unwanted attention from confessional differences. Erica Buchberger considers the precarious state of Jews in seventh-century Spain by examining the evolving attitude towards Spanish Jewry as a consequence of internal processes taking place within the Visigothic polity. The adoption of Catholicism and the increased blurring of ethnic lines between Romans and Goths was an inclusive process that sought to redefine the political community. It did so by embracing an exclusionary approach towards Jews, who became ever more marginalized as time went on, exemplifying the degree to which inclusion and exclusion, as social forces at work, are closely intertwined. Thomas J. MacMaster perceives the Jewish policies of Frankish King Dagobert I as a local offshoot of a Mediterranean trend spearheaded by Emperor Heraclius. He uses supporting evidence to re-evaluate the claim made in the so-called Chronicle of Fredegar that Dagobert effected a comprehensive policy of forced conversion, which has hitherto often been dismissed as exaggeration or even complete fiction.
The fourth and final thematic section, ‘Elite Networks’, investigates inclusion and exclusion in the context of elite culture. Whether through political manoeuvring, the exchange of florid epistles, or performative feasting, elites used inclusion and exclusion to accentuate or downplay certain aspects of their identity to advance a range of social goals. The uncultured mores of barbarians in the sources has often been taken as evidence of their otherness. As Emmanuelle Raga shows in her discussion of dining, feasting, and diet, food and food culture were important strategies of distinction for Roman society. It is not immediately apparent, however, that these differences stemmed from ethnicity. Raga argues that social class and occupation are better predictors of such behaviour than ethnicity and that the modern emphasis on ethnicity has clouded our reading of the sources.
The culinary practices of soldiers and peasants would have appeared to Roman elites as offensive and boorish, but this judgement bore little relation to ethnicity. On occasion, barbarians could behave as aristocrats, and their performance was evaluated on the basis of their adherence to the social norms of the Roman elite rather than on ancestry. As Aleksander Paradziński demonstrates in his chapter, the carefully constructed ethnic identity of the Ardaburii, a family of high Roman officials of Alanic ancestry, flowed directly from its fluency in the language of late Roman politics. The family’s most successful members — Aspar, Ardabur, and Patricius — nurtured alliances at court as well as among non-Roman groups, such as the Thracian Goths. Their ethnicity, expressed in naming and matrimonial policies, reflected a desire, in Paradziński’s words, to appear ‘as Roman officials’ but also to broadcast ‘a clear signifier of a differing identity’. ***
Inclusion and exclusion are exceptionally complex social phenomena, especially when taken against the backdrop of a transforming Mediterranean between the fifth and ninth centuries. As a result, our chapters are much more exploratory than they are conclusive. Nevertheless, by peering into this chronological and cultural space through the lens of inclusion and exclusion, the authors of this volume converge on many important points, evidence of the usefulness of this approach for understanding the late antique and early medieval world.
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