Download PDF | Europe after Rome A New Cultural History 500-1000, By Julia M. H. Smith, Oxford University Press, 2005.
399 Pages
Introduction
As concepts originating in the Italian Renaissance, ‘Antiquity’ and ‘the Middle Ages’ are deeply embedded in historical consciousness, and few would doubt that these catchwords stand for distinct phases of Europe’s past. Scholars during the Renaissance, however, popularized the terms as antithetical poles of European culture, the former positive, the latter negative. When History emerged as a separate university discipline in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the study of the past for its own sake became institutionalized.
This occurred in a way that isolated Antiquity and the Middle Ages from each other in different museums and art galleries, libraries and academic departments. Certainly, serious scholars no longer treat the so-called medieval period as the bleak antithesis of the ancient world, even if the notion of a ‘Dark Age’ lingers in journalistic vogue. Nevertheless, debates about the relative contribution of ‘Antiquity’ and the ‘Middle Ages’ to the complex and problematic phenomenon of ‘European Civilization’ have persisted in juxtaposing the one against the other. In all this, the centuries in between have remained the poor relations, dismissively labelled as impoverished, barbarian, superstitious, or archaic. If the broad sweep of European history is conceived in linear or evolutionist terms, they are viewed as a period of national origins for narratives whose unfolding requires simple virtues, distinct identities, and suitable foundations for later progress.
Alternatively, within a cyclical view of history, they become an interlude of lesser significance between two peaks of political and cultural achievement, the Roman Empire and the cosmopolitan Christian Europe of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both frameworks impose value judgements rooted in the political needs and cultural preferences of post-Enlightenment Europe. This book rejects these hard-worn paradigms. It proposes that the dynamic transformation of Europe’s cultures between Antiquity and the Middle Ages is of fundamental significance in its own right. When did this transformation occur? Periodization can be the bane of historians. Scholarly arguments, each with their own premisses, locate the end of the ancient world anywhere between the fifth century and the late tenth or early eleventh century.
Where the caesura is placed depends on whether priority is given to political, institutional, social, economic, or cultural criteria as the basis of periodization: the neat half millennium of my subtitle is deliberately artificial. It serves as an approximate guide to the contents of this book, for this contested period forms its subject. At its opening, around the year 500, Roman imperial rule had already ceased to be operative in the West, but most other aspects of Roman culture and practice persisted, little affected by changing political structures: in 500, Europe was post-imperial, but not thereby post-Roman. By around 1000, quite different imperial polities dominated the political landscape, and the Roman cultural legacy had both been transformed and exercised a transforming effect over a vast area of Europe.
Those changes are equally evident in the city of Rome itself, the former western imperial provinces, and the lands far beyond them. In order to establish their main contours, I pursue themes both before and after the rounded dates of ad 500 and ad 1000. This allows me to demonstrate that, within the overall matrix of social and cultural development across these centuries, change occurred at different times and speeds in different places. Multiple terminologies accompany disputed periodization. The ‘late Antiquity’ of the ancient historian, the ‘early Middle Ages’ of the medievalist, the ‘early historic period’ or ‘late Iron Age’ of the archaeologist of non-Roman Europe reflect different disciplinary presumptions and analytical perspectives but can all refer to the same century. For simple convenience, I have generally preferred to use the phrase ‘early Middle Ages’ to cover the entirety of the matter discussed in this book, but that too is arbitrary.
The geographical scope is similarly less self-evident than my title might suggest. In mythological origin, Europa was a Phoenician princess. But the god Zeus, in the form of a bull, raped her and carried her off over the sea: her name came to refer to one of the three continents known in Antiquity. By the ninth century, the name ‘Europe’ was shedding its use as a geographical descriptor and acquiring instead strong overtones as a designator of the zone where Latin Christian traditions found allegiance. Indeed, for much of the Middle Ages, ‘Europe’ yielded to ‘Christendom’, the land of Rome-centred Christianity, as the preferred term of cultural identification. A legacy of confusion between geographical and cultural signification has persisted ever since. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘Europe’ could be divided along political, religious, and social fault lines into ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ sections, with ‘Mitteleuropa’ assigned an ambivalent role and a contested location somewhere in between. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the meaning of ‘Europe’ is under renewed scrutiny, its geographical, cultural, religious, and political connotations more debated than ever before.
Even at the most simplistic level of definition—the member states of the European Union—Europe has changed while this book has been in preparation. My frame of reference certainly approximates to the expanded European Union that came into being on 1 May 2004, but with two significant qualifications. The first is the exclusion of Greece (together with its nonEU Balkan neighbours). Retaining a focus on the area that by the end of the first millennium was acquiring an identity as Latin Christendom has meant relegating the Byzantine world to an offstage role. The second is imposed by the evidence available. Some parts of ‘Europe’ were inhabited by preliterate peoples for part or most of these centuries, while others are poorly represented in surviving documentation. Scandinavia, the Slav regions, and the Danubian plain all fall into the former category; much of Scotland and Wales into the latter. Thus the contours of this book are inevitably those of the extant written word. I have avoided the temptation to fill the gaps by using texts from later centuries that purport to offer a window onto these earlier times, but instead have sometimes turned to material evidence to complement the textual record.
Even so, the very uneven coverage of archaeological research and publication imposes its own constraints. The story of the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages has conventionally been told in two parts. The first instalment tells of imperial decline, barbarian invasion, economic stagnation, and the decay of urban culture; its sequel hails the rise of national monarchies and an internationally organized Christian church accompanied by the gradual recovery of economic prosperity and civic life. Of the various forms of this grand narrative, the one most familiar today privileges France, Germany, and England and allocates occasional episodes to Italy. It defines its subject in terms of significance to the post-medieval history of nation building and high culture, thereby virtually ignoring everywhere that did not conform to the nineteenth-century paradigm of the nation state.
While this overt teleology has certainly weakened since the 1960s, distinctive national historiographical traditions nevertheless still inform twentyfirst-century approaches to the early Middle Ages. Additionally, much scholarly literature continues to take as its field of analysis either the modern polity or the early medieval ethnic or political grouping deemed to precede it, whatever specific topic is under investigation. The only place the reader of this book will find any trace of these approaches is at the back, in the Further Reading. I have substituted three revisionist approaches, chosen for their combined analytical vigour. In the first place, I rebalance the usual introduction 3 historiographical emphasis on a ‘core’ region by attention to a much broader geographical field of vision stretching from Scandinavia to Spain and from Hungary to Ireland. As Figure 0.1 suggests, this is a region of great natural differentiation between north and south, upland and lowland, coast and interior; this variation forms the backdrop to the chapters that follow. Secondly, I repeatedly move between polities, medieval or modern, cross-cutting national historiographical preoccupations and ignoring modern political boundaries. Finally, I reject any notion that Europe in the early Middle Ages can be characterized as a homogeneous culture-province.
My premiss is diversity of experience, not analogy of historical outcome. In place of teleological determinism, I substitute a comparative ethnography of the early Middle Ages. This method draws heavily, albeit indirectly, on the work of social and cultural anthropologists; its purpose is to enable questions of general applicability to receive locally specific answers. These cumulatively establish a cross-cultural analysis of early medieval societies and facilitate comparisons and contrasts between them. The organizing problem that I address in this fashion can be summarized thus: how did the men and women who lived between 500 and 1000 order their own worlds in social, cultural, and political terms? In answering it, I emphasize the variety of early medieval experience by highlighting both the omnipresence of localisms and micro-regions and the diversities inherent in gender and status distinctions. Those around whom power congealed—strongmen, lords, kings, emperors—form the goal of my analysis, not my point of departure.
Thus they tend to occur towards the end of each chapter, and especially the end of the book. I have chosen to get at them by addressing issues that pertain to the organization of almost all social groupings: language and communication; kinship and gender; the accumulation and symbolism of wealth; religious practice and ideology; personal and group identity; political legitimation and status. Rather than merely explaining what happened, these concerns analyse how and why things happened, how communities were organized, how people gave meaning to their lives and validated their own ways of doing things. The book begins by establishing the ‘ground rules’ for subsequent chapters: not only the general limits of what we know about the early Middle Ages and how we can know it, but also the constraints of terrain, climate, and agricultural technology. The first two chapters thus introduce the many and varied environments within which men and women spoke, wrote, and thought, lived and died; together they establish diversity of experience and responsiveness to change as recurrent themes. The next pair of chapters argue that social relationships—between kin-based groups, on the one hand, and between men and women, on the other—organize all communities at every level from household to empire, whatever the locally specific forms of social organization might be.
The fifth and sixth chapters turn from the power relationships inherent in distinctions of kin and gender to those organized around immovable and movable wealth— that is, around land and treasure. Once again, situational variety indicates a wide range of responses to the generic problem of maintaining status and hierarchy, of turning resources into enduring political and spiritual advantage. The final pair of chapters focuses on experiences of religious and political change and draws attention to ways in which they were made to seem ‘natural’ by heavy ideological investment. Both emphasize the importance of Christianity as a transmitter of cultural values derived from an earlier, Roman, age, and the many imaginative uses to which Roman cultural resources were put. All chapters have the same geographical and chronological parameters, Europe from 500 to 1000. They function like transparent overlays: each one offers a diagrammatic sketch of one aspect of a complex whole, but, as they are placed one upon the other, the lower diagrams remain visible. Each is coherent; together the intersecting perspectives build up a full and nuanced picture. The reader who prefers to take these chapters in a different order to the one in which I have arranged them will find ample cross-referencing between chapters but no repetition of definitions, regnal dates, and so forth.
This is a new cultural history of Europe in several ways. Admittedly a loosely conceived genre of historical writing, the expression ‘new cultural history’ commonly refers to a diverse cluster of historiographical approaches, many of which have influenced my work. In the first place, it signals an engagement with ‘culture’ in its widest sense, as the expression of meanings, perceptions, and values by means of which people construct their understanding of reality, organize their experiences, and determine their actions. By implication, this approach prefers to endow the men and women of the past with agency, instead of understanding historical change as a series of forces, trends, or movements that reduce individuals to passive pawns in the grip of impersonal processes. Secondly, new cultural history is founded upon sensitivity towards language. It emphasizes the uncertain relationship between texts and the historical ‘reality’ they purport to represent—or that some historians aspire to find. While that sensitivity sometimes verges on denial of any relationship, I adopt a more moderate position but nevertheless draw readers’ attention to some of the textual problems encountered by historians working on this epoch. There 6 introduction follows the proposition that culture is in the service of power, whether it occludes, displaces, or legitimizes its brute realities.
Thus cultural history, so the argument goes, contributes to unmasking the realities of power, and revealing strategies of domination for what they are. Finally, it stems from each of these points, individually or in sum, that new cultural history evinces scepticism of grand narratives. In their place, it substitutes a belief in the value of micro-history and a healthy respect for the pluralism of historical experience. For these reasons, this is a book not about European culture but about Europe’s cultures. My approach allows repeated emphasis to be placed on three interpretative threads, all equally central. I have already indicated my insistence upon recognizing early medieval particularities from many different perspectives. The second is the attention I bring to the role of the Roman heritage in early medieval constructions of power. Whether in Rome’s former provinces or in regions that were never within the imperial boundaries, I argue that the reception, reinterpretation, or abandonment of that inheritance made a formative contribution to all the cultures of early medieval Europe. The trace of the former political frontier, marked on Figure 0.2, influenced how that occurred: in cultural formation as well as historiographical periodization, the Middle Ages presuppose Antiquity.
They cannot be sundered. The third is the dynamism of early medieval societies. The demonstration that the Europe of 1000 was very different from that of 500 is not an argument for any evolutionary grand narrative, but a recognition that, wherever and however one looks, change and fluidity are evident. Decline, stagnation, and rise have no place here; instead a kaleidoscope of multiple transformations, continuities, innovations, permutations. One artefact sums up this book more eloquently than an extended introduction could do. At some point in the late eighth or early ninth century, a master sculptor fashioned a large box-shaped structure (177 cm wide, 90 cm deep, and 70cm high) for the royal Pictish church of Cennrígmonaid, in eastern Scotland. Its carved panels of local sandstone slot together to form an object of disputed but indubitably Christian function—perhaps a tomb, an altar, or a shrine.
Its richly carved front depicts the Old Testament scene of David wrestling with the lion, represented here in his Christian interpretation as king and saviour (see Frontispiece). He is flanked by an ancient eastern symbol of royalty, a lion-hunter on horseback, and an unmounted huntsman with his dogs, in pursuit of Scottish deer. Artistically, it offers a sophisticated amalgam of distinct stylistic traditions: Eastern Mediterranean, Roman, Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and Pictish.
By the time of its manufacture, Roman rule in Britain had receded to a distant and shadowy memory in the minds of an educated few, and even when, in the middle of the second century, it had briefly reached into southern Scotland, the site of future Cennrígmonaid (modern St Andrews: see Figure 1.1) lay beyond the imperial frontier. Nevertheless, an urban religion originating on the eastern fringe of the Roman Mediterranean, Christianity, had become integral to the northern political, social, and imaginative world of the Picts. The so-called St Andrews sarcophagus thus represents my three themes of local identities, cultural dynamism, and the reception of the Roman heritage.
It stands as an icon for the issues addressed here in a second way. The Picts were typical of the many peoples of the Atlantic and North Sea regions of Europe north of the Roman frontier whose polities all had fundamentally different and rather simpler internal socio-political organizations than those of the Roman Empire. From a Roman perspective, the contrast was one of civilization and barbarism, of a divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ based upon ancient Mediterranean beliefs that urban communities and the civic culture that they sustained were inherently superior to technologically and politically less complex, rural, warrior societies. From a twenty-first-century perspective, the artificiality of this categorization is painfully evident. ‘Civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ are subjective referents based upon perceptions and traditions designed to legitimize one group at the expense of others by affirming a hierarchy of cultural difference and moral worth. The sculptor of Cennrígmonaid associated a classically robed David with a traditionally armed Pictish warrior in a way that quite negates any antithesis between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’. European historiography too needs to transcend this ancient polarity: this book offers a contribution to that endeavour.
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