Thanks, Brandon, for putting us on this course. I've now read the introduction and the essay on marvels. As a relative latecomer to the study of wider European history of the first 15 centuries of the 'common era' (having looked at the span of time mostly through a Scandinavian lens for the past 25 years), I am happy to see facile periodization disrupted. The threads of history have always seemed more tangled than the standard periods would have them to be. The idea of the long middle ages (paralleling the long twilight of antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean) makes sense, and his determination to cut the Renaissance down to size is particularly welcome.
I am also glad to see another intellectual set of categorical straight-jackets challenged as well: the boundaries of the contemporary academic disciplines. From page 3: "The academic disciplines are scandalously specialized...This poses obstacles to interdisciplinary research, making all but inevitable failures to which those who have done everything in their power to make success impossible then point with unseemly amusement." (The same can be said of interdisciplinary teaching as of interdisciplinary research, unhappily for us all.) So I applaud this work and its focus in imagination.
Turning to the chapter on marvels, I am intrigued, though again very much aware of my status as a novice in the field. I have read just enough marvelous material in saints lives and passions, and in vernacular texts and histories, to recognize and affirm several of his distinctions. And his sense of development and social location of the marvelous also seems reasonable against the limited set of examples I can call to mind. So I guess the value of the essay as given is that it helps to frame the extent and the social location of marvels across several centuries. So far so good. I'm still left wondering what to make of the baby saint (name escapes me) who came out of the womb demanding baptism and preaching conversion before dying three or four days later. I wonder how the perfect stone coffin showed up for Ætheldreda in the swamps of Ely, or how Cuthbert made the fires go out. I wonder about these things from a material standpoint, but I also wonder about them in terms of what the people of the time period made of them--how they understood them, and how they made use of them in navigating through life. So Le Goff has been intriguing, the essay provides a good basis for framing questions and observations, but happily, I am left with more questions than ever!
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Great thoughts.
Like you, I'm glad to see Le Goff breaking down some barriers:
1) In addressing a "long" Middle Ages--something that eradicates the silly notion of a lightbulb suddenly illuminating the world in what we've come to call "the Renaissance;" and
2) In his interdisciplinary scope--what appears to actually be interdisciplinary, not merely imitative of it. I hope to reach this level of interest and scope in my own work, branching into as many fields as I can to bring them together in recreations of the time period culturally rounded, as they are handed down to us in their broadest manners.
I think the marvelous is what has most fascinated me for so long--especially in literature (though by no means only medieval). Seeing Le Goff tackle it in terms of research has sparked my mind to wondering more about it self-consciously. Perhaps my favorite thing about the essay on the marvelous is his categorical listing and discussion--what he calls "A Preliminary Catalogue of the Marvelous in the Medieval West." While it is Continental-centric (I noted places where more from OE and ON could have been added), I would love to see a non-preliminary list like this. What sorts of studies could be born out of the groundwork and ideas Le Goff has presented? Certainly this idea of the marvelous (esp. its relation to religious attitudes--pagan, Christian, and the intersections) is one I would like to pursue in my future studies.
Above all, though, like you, MLP, I also wonder: what did these ideas of the marvelous mean to the medievals, and how did they appropriate such fabulous elements into their worldviews? How did these marvelous elements fit into their psyches? We most probably will never know--except as we can speculate about our own concerns with the marvelous.
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