Call and Response

August:

(some responses)

Otto

We're not going to get anywhere with this. If you think the image was used as a teaching tool, fine. I think it's unlikely, just because of the rarity of books. Medievalists get away with this sort of thing because of the dearth of sources, but in other periods it is often possible to show how an image was used, how it circulated, who saw it when, etc. The work is no less stunning for the degree of commentary it did or did not require.


Legal History/History of Science

Another likely dead end. Lawyers tend to think legal historians are useless, and scientists tend to think historians of science are useless. Scientist talking about their own history tend to have a strong notion of progress (old mule Sal). Some are wish to maintain a stronger division between scientific facts and cultural constructs than most historians are willing to allow. I was thinking of a big controversy at the Institute where the scientists vetoed a historian of science from membership. But I don't disagree that lawyers have abused history terribly.

It was a throwaway line – sorry to lead off track

Your Question
I think you think you are communicating more than you are communicating. I agree with you, and then you disagree with me. It's like arguing with my wife (if I believed in smile emoticons I'd put one here) I'm going to overlook "The Renaissance leads to the Enlightenment."

Look, I think we have similar concerns about the Middle Ages – neither pretending that their ways of viewing the world were equivalent to ours, nor assuming that they were somehow trapped in an (inferior) intellectual straightjacket. If I misread your question, it's in part because "Greco-Roman rationality" seems to me as fully alive in 1200 as 1800.
As for novel vs. received knowledge – well, I'd expect you could find arguments for both at any given time (certainly King's Two Bodies has examples of both rhetorical strategies).

I haven't read either of the works you suggest. I'm going to try to make it to the library this afternoon (where the hell does my day go?). Hopefully I can at least skim a few things.

Means vs. ends. Let's return to this. I'm interested in what you have to say on the subject, but for now I think it's important to dig into Kantorowicz. I do think it's useful to have a pretty good idea of what each of us has invested in the book.

For my part, post-modernism hasn't caused me much angst. Maybe it's intellectual laziness, or maybe it's some weird quirk of my upbringing, but I like the idea that everything is rooted in language. I have a harder time dealing with certainty than doubt.
Hmm, that really does sound like intellectual laziness (I'll be quoting Andrew Sullivan if I'm not careful).

Hmm, let me turn to the text and see if I can't find something more interesting to say.


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Me:
I have an unfortunate habit of focusing in on small differences. I relish conversations such as this, despite the fact I often fear I'm listening past my interlocutor. Please do let me know when I'm being non-responsive or miss something.

The use of the image is unfortunately hard to gather from our vantage point - though as a Gospel, the book likely had liturgical significance. At the very least, I'd hope we could agree that manuscript illustrations likely had a didactic purpose among the literate.

On legal history, I meant to agree that E.K. isn't providing much context for why England diverges. But I think lawyers find legal history more useful than scientists do - which is precisely why they (we) debase it so badly. My prof has a nice term for it - "law firm history." Judicial opinions often involve intense scholastic debates about fine points of history, in which sources are deployed with scant regard for historical context to buttress contemporary arguments.

On post-modernity, I think more than I can say, so I'm not surprised if I'm communicating less than I should. If you take post-modernism seriously, it poses a serious challenge to modern academia. Here at law school, there's a small department dedicated to "Critical Legal Studies." The reaction to this field is best summarized by a book on legal philosophy I once read (I've seriously condensed a 4 page range here):

Before moving to a discussion of moral theory and its relation to legal theory, we shall pause briefly in order to consider a radical challenge that has recently been preseneted to the legitimacy of the traditional understandings of both of these enterprises. This is the challenge presented by Critical Legal Studies (CLS), including its feminist wing. [...] The basic ideas of CLS are best seen, at least initially, as an attack on the idea of neutral principles in law and morality. [...] If we took literally the radical value relativism and skepticism taught by some advocates of CLS and feminist jurisprudence, we would seemingly be deprived of any language through which those persons could attempt to persuade others to care about the issues they raise.

Not all advocates of CLS and feminist jurisprudence offer so facile a ralativism, and thus not all are so easily rebuked. There is more to be studied in these movements, and it should be studied in the writings of those sympathetic to them."

In my own education, I was constantly steering between ardent post-modernists and professors who argued that it lacked a methodology or purpose at all, and was hence a priori invalid. Its proponents struck me as flummoxed; its detractors struck me as anti-intellectual.

I've certainly fetishized language myself. But I think those of us raised in an intellectual climate tinged with post-modernism have a potential to build something very useful with our understanding, that is nevertheless very different from post-modernism itself.