August Thoughts

To quote:

[(?)we]'ve got a lot on the table here. I'll try to keep in more or less coherent chunks

Have you read Maitland yet? If not, let me know when you get to him, and I'll try to track him down as well. I saw your references to Blackstone on your blog. I may take a peak if I have time (can you tell I'm procrastinating?)

Digression on Images

I've read Understanding Comics. I feel like I wrote about it not so long ago – I think in a dispute with Quiet Man over on WikiFray. Yeah, it's in the comments, here. You are right that he is arch in his readings of our visual cues.

I think the readers of the Aachen Gospels would have understood the image. That's a very small audience. And the point is, that they might have understood it so completely that they thought it commonplace. Or, no, not commonplace, because books weren't commonplace, but they might have thought it an image that required no particular elaboration. They may or may not have seen it as summing up their political culture. Kantorowicz is very much interested in the image because of its relationship to later images.

That being said, I agree it's a stunning work. It's economy in depicting a kingship, a cosmos, an eschaton – it made me want to go to the Met. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow.


I was trying to come up with something equally complex – you may be right that our visual culture is far more one-to-one than medieval iconography. But our metaphors of power remain rich. In my now-lost post, I talked a little about the recurring theme of many movies – that the protagonists would be okay if only they could escape the strictures of deadening convention. Think "Footloose," "Titanic," or virtually any costume drama. Or it may be that future generations look back at our architecture – the pre-fab house, the Seattle Space Needle, Epcot Center. Or think of the various Fray post invoking various obligations of motherhood. I don't mean to sound mystical -- I know my argument would be better if I took the time to trace some of the political valiances. All I'm saying is… it''s pretty complex, and the apparent simplicity of our logos and charts shouldn't mask the tricky work of naturalizing hierarchies that's happening all over the place.

Medieval imagistic thought and speech – I'm sure you're right. Medievalists in general have the reputation for paying closer attention to such things than modern historians. I saw a great talk by Carolyn Walker Bynum about blood, which I sadly can't remember very well, but she paid close attention to depictions of blood, and of what blood meant for religiousity, piety, kingship, and gender. We're getting into the period when people start flagellating themselves and the like. It definitely opened my eyes to the fruitfulness of that kind of history. Also a famous book on the history of childhood by (I think) Aries.

So while I agree that the Middle Ages get a bad rap, I think medievalists do very well for themselves.


I'm going to skip the Chinese stuff for now – too much to explain. I'll come back to it.

You asked a question that intrigued me:

If medieval thought represented a thoroughly different trajectory from Greco-Roman rationalism (and I suspect it did), might we better be able to comprehend our post-modern world with a self-conscious medievalism?

Well, clearly the answer is yes. In college I read a great essay by LeGoff – "Toward an Extended Middle Ages." Think of our great fears: the plague and the infidel. Think of the vast encroachments on public interest by private (yet corportate) entities (wondering how Haliburton relates to the fief. And let's face it, the Renaissance is the Middle Ages. There's really no difference – the revival of antique precedents was a near-constant activity from Otto to Napoleon. Can fundamentalism be understood outside the Reformation, and what is the Reformation but a peculiar form of the waves of piety that overtook people throughout the medieval period. I think we learn a great deal about ourselves from the Middle Ages.

And also from our medievalisms – that is to say, our ways of understanding the period. I'm going to move to some general criticisms/questions about Kantorowicz, and then go to some particular textual matters.

Some General Thoughts

I've read to page 192, and a couple of things have struck me.

Rulerships
I've been wondering a great deal about the Anglo Saxons, and more generally about images of kingship and rulership. What of the tribal chiefton, the military hero, the iconography that would have been summed up with a Black Bear rather than a Roman Lion? Kantorowicz is self-conscious in his selectiveness, but I wish an introductory chapter had given me a better sense of the possible range of images out of which we were finding our two bodies.

Context
He does, to be fair, mention the Investiture's Controversy. But beyond that, there's very little said about the developments that might have influenced, for example, the shift from Christ-centered to Law/God-the-father-centered kingship. I have to confess I get rather lost at times. Who is Braxton writing for? Is his audience the sorts of folks who forced John to sign the Magna Carta, or was he writing for a special class of jurists?

Legal History
I think legal history is to law as history of science is to science. Each seems designed to confound lawyers and scientists. A classic move in legal history is to show that similar laws lead to different outcomes, thus flummoxing the claim of (a few?, some?, fewer and fewer?) lawyers that law determines outcomes. The closest E.K. has come to this move is in the chapters contrasting Frederick II and Bracton. I see the divergences, but again the why of the divergences remains a question for me.

Presentism?
Every once in a while, Kantorowicz seems downright prophetic. His analysis of a "public sphere" seems to anticipate Habermas. His interest in time seems to share a great deal with the German historian Reinhart Koselleck.

O screw it, no point in name dropping. What I'm dancing around is that there are passages when Kantorowicz seems to me a little too rooted in the twentieth century. There's a difference between res publica and a public sphere (p. 191 "the king as supra-individual administrator of a public sphere"). And even more so – the notion that he is recording a secularizing tendency. "Secular" is the wrong word here.

Okay, well, I've marked some passages for closer examination, and I'm sure you have a few as well. I'll examine and post.

(I should point out here that I can't read Latin. If you can, any insights would be welcome).

I've found your comments very, very thought-provoking. I haven't responded to all of them because there's so much to say, and I'm really only just sinking into the heart of the work. I'll try to keep actively posting through the weekend. After Tuesday next week, I start teaching again and my pace will slow, but I'll certainly be around.