No excuse for tardiness. Moving on.

Marvelous.

I have just finished reading [rereading most of it as I went] the essay on the Marvelous in Le Goff. I am still not entirely sure where he is coming from or where in the world he may be going. True, in the first circuitous definition of imagination, he picked and pulled to at least form an idea, if not a solidified concept, but in this chapter I felt as though he did actually define the marvelous quite clearly. Somewhere between the words, perhaps, slipping behind a handy h right when you turn to look, like that spook behind the pillar next to you.

The one connection I managed to maintain is that the marvelous is something natural, something old. It is not magic because magic, in the Christian sense at least, has been sourced outside the world itself to Satan [who then could be sourced to God but a bastardization of holy power and everything kind of jumbles itself around in a mental tussel with no clear winner in my head, but that is unrelated to this conversation]. It is not miraculous because that, too, has the implied source, though in God. So marvels are of nature. How does one then define nature and manage to diferentiate between when something that happened was either miraculous or marvelous?

I was interested in his dredging up of the literature and lore of the knights and lower nobility, which brought to mind Once and Future King, The Faerie Queene, and Dante [yes, in that order, though the first and second are hardly as applicable as the first and the latter two are both based in some overt form of Christianity. I did not see fit to include Phantastes, though it also was sluiced in], bringing with them the images [which Le Goff believes is also an important part of the marvelous] of a sword coming from a lady in a lake, and a tree that is bleeding.

And here is where my thoughts trailed off into bafflement...comment. Question. Answer. Something.

Medieval fish sticks--not again!

Nothing changes more than history. The reputation of the Vikings seems to be in a state of constant flux. Thanks to archaeologists of the codfish trade (another in the ever-expanding set of niches for medieval geneticists), it begins to appear that some of the poor Norse were just long-distance fishmongers (think Amazon grocery delivery a-la 10th century). This opens a whole new set of possibilities for interpreting the prayers for protection from the Northmen! It's interesting, but as an explanation for Viking mobility in general, well, it sounds a little fishy.

Yea, I've been to Vinland, only it should have...

I had never heard of novelist Thomas Holt, but I picked up his Meadowlands in some Swedish-American bookstore somewhere (probably at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis) because of its subject. Meadowlands is a novelization of the Vinland Sagas told from the perspective of two 'regular guys' who crewed the ships of 5 voyages from Greenland to Vinland. They recount their adventures to a Greek civil servant whom they are accompanying, as members of the Varangian Guard, on a trip across Greece.

The re-telling is pretty faithful to the accounts in the Sagas and is pretty effective in getting the reader to think in some detail about the lives that are sketched so sparingly in the source material. What was it like to sail on small ships packed with people and material? What was it like to be cooped up in a turf-built house throughout the dark winter? How did the regular folks view the families in charge? What would it have meant to be part of the fatal, fraught last expedition? The narrative voices sound a little like 20th century English working-class types, but that's as good a way to get into the social space as any, I suppose.

The frame and some of the dialogue between the narrators and their Greek auditor are good reminders that the Norse of the 11th century were connected both to the end of the European-known world and to the most sumptuous center of European power; they were culture watchers as well as travelers and traders, and Holt, the author, seems to have done his homework well. He represents the Norse view of the world and of human significance in contrast with the Mediterranean; the reflective moments challenge the question of interior considerations (motivation) versus the consequences of actions. Holt also plays with the problem of oral transmission; both narrators are eye-witnesses, and should have virtually identical perspectives, and yet...

The book has an interesting 'what could have been, if only' twist at the end when Harald Sigurdson (the silent junior member of the Varangian trio of guards) weighs the potential risks and benefits of conquering England or settling Vinland. Recommended for pleasure reading.

For what it's worth, I hate Thomas Holt. He was born in the same year I was and has written nearly 40 historical novels. Ah well, fate goes always as it must! mlp

Not dead yet!

After a week of the creeping misery [also known as a sinus infection of sorts], I have finally regained my mental prowess [though none more than already had, don't expect much] and thusly am finally approaching the bench for a report on Le Goff [whose name still makes me giggle inwardly]. I apologize for the delay. And the fact that this is just a bit on the intro, as my brain still has no focus power, and I didn't make it to the Marvelous just yet.

Anywho.

Let me join both of Mark and Brandon in congratulating/thanking Le Goff for poking out of the historical boundaries into a broader realm. There is great truth behind his statement that "the life of men and societies depends just as much on images as it does on more palpable realities...the imagination nourishes man and causes him to act" (5). It brought to mind a quote from Lewis in which he states that "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." To imagine and create is an imperative for man, for whatever technical or philosophical reason and to separate any examination of man that goes beyond the physiological from such a thing would be silly. Incomplete, as it were. As Le Goff says, "a history without imagination is a mutilated, disembodied history" (5). [I liked page five.]

Outside of that, I would just like to attempt to clarify his definition of the imagination as, though he provided three "nots," he did not set it outright for me to see. Kind of like trying to set up a square pasture with three fences--the proverbial cows are guided in a direction but are set roaming after a certain point. Or maybe it is just me. Bear with me as I basically walk through what he says.

What is imagination, then? Le Goff sets it next to three similar concepts with which it may be confused and proceeds to separate them. The first was "representation" which he defined as "the mental image of an external reality" (1). Put simply enough, it is a mental construct of something in the physical reality, his example being our idea of a cathedral as gleaned from art or literature. Imagination, he states, "is more comprehensive than representation. Fantasy is nto limited by the intellect" (1). Symbolism [add the lisping, elongated s there, Brandon!] is applied when the object in question is used to make "reference to an underlying system of values," a process possibly involving the imagination, but not imagination itself (1). Lastly is ideology, the imposition of a conception of the world, possibly upon an image of some sort. Ideology and imagination again are simlar with a fuzzy boundary, but ideology is a preformed notion that will, when applied to either, distort temporal and imagination based reality.

My conclusion is that this reality he is attempting to describe is one completely created through the "inner" sensibilities, which he notes are often linked to the divine or supernatural (6). The presentation of these worlds are creations are unique historical realities in and of themselves; "aesthetic values and ideas of beauty are in themselves historical constructs" (4). These, being their own self-contained entities, cannot be interpreted through the same lens as techincal historical documents, which may still have small applications of the imagination through set up and presentation, etc.

Does this make sense, and can you help further the concretization of these thoughts with comments, gentlement [and Mandy, if she has time]?

I am looking forward to see how all this comes together in the essays. And I again apologize for my tardiness and incomplete reading. [sheepish]

The marvels of history

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!

Getting our Leg Off the Ground*...

Well, since we've finally chosen a book to tackle together, and since I know that Mark and Leslie have them by now (for a few day), I thought I would start some thoughts here about the introduction to Jacques Le Goff's The Medieval Imagination.

Among Le Goff's definitions and beginning to sort out his use of imagination as a methodology to think about history, I found it striking how he saw it so central to human thought.
was the following:

The images of interest to the historian are collective images as they are shaped, changed, and transformed by the vicissitudes of history. They are expressed in words and themes. They are bequeathed in traditions, borrowed from one civilization to another, and circulated among the various classes and societies of man. They are a part of social history but not subsumed by it.... The imagination nourishes the man and causes him to act. It is a collective, social, and historical phenomenon. A history without the imagination is a mutilated, disembodied history. (5)

In its eloquence, this passage struck me, but, more than that, it also informs some of the discussions we've had about the collectivity of history and literature. It thrilled me to see a scholar embracing such a definition as the core of his methodology in searching for the past. All of this also points toward his strong sense of interdisciplinarity--using literature, art, historical documents, philosophy.

Another aspect that I found fascinating is Le Goff's sense of time and the medieval period, as he writes, "when one takes a broad view of human evolution, it is clear that certain slowly developing systems or phases persist for relatively long periods" (9)--an idea he uses to justify the long Middle Ages and his even longer approach to history of the period (further developed in his first chapter). I'm interested in your thoughts about his views here and in the first chapter "For an Extended Middle Ages."

No doubt there are myriad other concepts to focus on--for me, I'm also greatly pulled toward Le Goff's examination of the marvelous, since I've always gravitated toward that sort of aspect of history and literature. Hopefully that's enough to get us started!


*Again with the punny title, I know. Please continue in your forgiving attitudes.

Books and links.

No Brandon, I haven't done the meme yet, but I'm working on it. Sort of.

Since we have created this plot to read Le Goff's The Medieval Imagination, I stopped by Borders to see if they had it [a. because of the general immediacy of a book store and b. I currently have a 40% off coupon...I'm so shallow]. For some inexplicable reason, however, they did not. Instead of walking away upon discovering this, as would have been the bright thing to do, I allowed myself to drool over the following three books:

Mysteries of the Middle Ages [which I did not buy for price's sake]
History of the Franks [which I did not buy for the fact that it is amply available online]
and, to cap it off in a veritable pool of mental drool [gross, but to the point]
Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition [which I did not for the fact that I own at least two copies not in anthologies already, if not three]

There were a number of other books I would love to mention, but for now these are the titles I remembered and desired to share.

Mainly that last one.

It's really pretty.