It’s been another rough week, but not for bad reasons.
First, I’ve actually had a couple of job interviews: two by phone, one via Zoom, and a fourth in-person. I also have heard back from a temp agency about two possible positions, and came back from the fouth interview to the news that yet another potential employer had left a message in response to an application. So even though I’m not working as of right now, I’m no longer feeling completely rejected and unwanted.
Second, it’s been heartening to see how many people have been marching, lobbying, and working for meaningful change. I haven’t been able to join their ranks for a variety of reasons, but actually seeing pushback against this monstrosity of an administration has been balm to the soul.
Third, I’ve been working on correcting what is probably best termed “home improvement as therapy.” That’s what I call the hideous botch I made of wallpapering my bathroom after my former husband, Wingding, walked out on me twenty years ago. I had no idea what I was doing, I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do the work for me, and the result was, well, less than attractive. I’ve therefore spent the last few weeks stripping the remains of the ugly old paper, cleaning, sanding, and patching the walls, and have finally begun priming the surface. It’s going to be awesome, and as sore and exhausted I am from clambering around with a steamer and a scraper and enough spackle to build an entirely new house, I’m pretty pleased.
Fourth, I splurged and had my old Singer Featherweight sewing machine cleaned, serviced, and rewired. The Featherweight is still considered the single finest portable ever made, and I’m pleased to report that the 1946 model I inherited from my mother still works perfectly despite being 74 years old. She only sews forward and back but she does it perfectly, and that’s all I need.
Finally, and this is the most important of all, a book I ordered a few weeks ago just arrived, and it’s been fascinating.
The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past, is a slim but valuable work by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant of The Public Medievalist website. This volunteer-run website is devoted to bringing solid, cutting-edge research to the masses in hopes of combating the misinformation and disorted view of the Middle Ages that have permeated everything from Game of Thrones to video games to popular history over the past several years.
In particular, TPM has been fighting against the racism and sexism that’s been creeping into medieval studies ever since white supremacists got it into their tiny little brains that medieval Europe was a lily-white, devoutly Christian, arrow-straight, patriarchal paradise for Aryans and their ilk. They’re officially non-partisan, but firmly opposed to the Very Fine People who turned Charlottesville, Virginia, into a battleground three years ago. To quote their FAQ:
That does mean that we will call out those in power who actively promote those hatreds. This is especially true when they are using a (mis)interpretation of the past to do so, or are doing so out of ignorance of the past. But we will never tell you how to vote (as if you would listen to a bunch of historians about that anyway), and we strive to be read by good people from a range of political persuasions.
Just not fascists.
I’m currently reading The Devil’s Historians and finding much to like. I already know quite a bit of this material — seriously, there were black and brown and gay people in medieval Europe, and not just in Spain or a few Mediterranean ports — but it’s great to see everything written down in a clear, lucid, accessible style. There’s also some excellent information on the influence of the Middle Ages on plantation culture in the antebellum South, the relationship between nostalgia and white nationalism, and the obsolete version of medieval life seen in far, far too many filmed and written depictions of medieval and medieval-derived stories. It’s well worth picking up, and I would urge anyone who wants to know just why the Very Fine People marched around carrying rune-bearing shields to read a copy post-haste.
Alas, inaccurate depictions of the Middle Ages are nothing new. Medievalists constantly have to deal with re-enactors and gamers who think that reading that fifty-year old history books they picked up at tag sales and seventy-year old costume manual reprints from Dover Press makes them experts. I once had to deal with someone online who kept insisting that patchwork originated when thrifty Puritan housewives saved their scraps and sewed them together, and a friend of mine later said he was in awe of how politely I took apart every single one of their references and alleged bits of proof. “It was what happens when someone who thinks they know everything runs into someone who actually does,” he said, and I simply smiled mysteriously and thanked him.
That aside, the problem of obsolete or inaccurate popular histories isn’t unique to the Middle Ages — just look at all the crappy Civil War junk online, for crying out loud — but it’s become particularly pernicious. Worse, some of the most commonly read books on the Middle Ages, by some of the best-known authors, are part of the problem.
Tonight I bring you not one, not two, but three Books So Bad They're Good. None of them are overtly (or even covertly) racist, none of the authors would have supported either Nazism or white supremacy, and all three are well written, entertaining, engaging reads. One has been a favorite for over a century, one was a massive best seller that won a major literary award, and the third is occasionally used as a high school text.
That doesn't mean that any of them gives a true portrait of the Middle Ages, helps break down the stereotypes about that era, or is of much use combatting today's misuse of medievalism. Worse, the fact that all three are still in print is itself a massive problem since the average reader is going to think “oh yeah, that's a classic”and finish the book thinking they now know all they need to know about the Middle Ages without realizing that they've basically read the equivalent of a 1960's astronomy textbook promoting the steady state theory of cosmology:
The Autumn of the Middle Ages, by Johan Huizinga — better known by its 1930's English title, The Waning of the Middle Ages, this perennial favorite goes into near-lascivious detail about the decadence of late medieval life in France and the Low Countries. Written by Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga during the Great War, this look at the Burgundian court and the Netherlands in the late 14th and very early 15th centuries is so relentlessly grim and relentlessly melancholy that it's rather like what would have resulted if Siegfried Sassoon had been a historian, not a poet.
You think I jest? Ha! Here are just some of the subjects Huizinga discusses in what he almost certainly thought was an objective work that wasn't influenced in any way, shape, or form by the slaughter in the trenches in nearby France:
- Saints who were canonized primarily for mortifying their flesh until they basically wasted away from self-abuse of the non-enjoyable kind.
- Elderly poet Guillaume de Machaut making a fool of himself writing love epics to a heedless young flirt in a late-stage perversion of the old courtly love tradition of men being elevated and civilized by the love of an unobtainable woman.
- Horrifying religious statues and relics, like the little statues of the Madonna and Child that open to reveal a crucifix.
- Hermits showing their devotion to the Holy Trinity by eating their apples in three bites, and never mind that this was probably a thought-experiment unless the hermits had miraculously gained the ability to dislocate their jaws like a snake.
- Filthy rich bejeweled aristocrats who all but beg to be messily slaughtered in street riots.
- Brutal warfare, unwashed peasants, and of course that all-time favorite, the Black Death, leading to an obsession with mortality that resulted in funerary art that still horrifies modern tourists.
It's all here, described in sober yet vivid prose that is surprisingly easy to read and hard to put down, even after a particularly unnerving passage about Pierre de Luxembourg's precocious religious fervor eventually killed him thanks to what one might call Holy Anorexia. There's also a great deal about the pastoral tradition in French poetry as contrasted with the actual life of the peasantry that makes the heedless aristocracy look rather like the Burgundian equivalent of Marie Antoinette milking cows into Sevres vases (or Austro-Hungarian aristocrats slumming at Central European spas in 1913, take your pick), and of course the expected digs at the delicious rot of the overly fashionable elite.
As disturbing as all this is, the major fault lies not with Huizinga, who was a respected scholar. The problem is that thanks to the title, several generations of readers have come to believe that The Autumn of the Middle Ages is a comprehensive look at a collapsing society that would soon be swept away by the scholarship and humanism of the Renaissance. That was never what Huizinga intended. He was writing about a particular area (Burgundy, France, and the Low Countries) during a particular time period, nothing more, and it's something of a shock to realize that Guillaume de Machaut’s poem Le Voir Dit was intended as a satire of silly court romances, not the medieval equivalent of Lolita. It’s even more surprising to learn that supposedly decadent Burgundy was the military power of its day, with a thriving economy, literate court, and a ruling family that was about as decadent as a gauntlet to the face.
Readable, even now? Yes. Enjoyable? Absolutely. Comprehensive and accurate? Well..…
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuchman — a more recent work in the same vein is Barbara Tuchman's legendary bestseller. Engaging and well-written, it tells the story of what Tuchman claims was a uniquely horrible time through the life of a single man, Enguerrand de Coucy, lord of a significant chunk of France (and briefly, England, during his marriage to one of Edward III’s daughters, Isabella). Wars, political turmoil, a mad king in France, the Black Death destroying between a third and half the population, religious conflict, the Great Schism, the Jacquerie, a French political faction known as “the Marmosets”...the list of horrors Tuchman documents in her briskly entertaining prose seems endless, and the average reader can't help wondering just how Western Europe managed to survive long enough for the Renaissance to sweep away all the ignorance, superstition, and barbarism.
Except that, as anyone who's actually bothered to read much about the Renaissance (or the Baroque, or the Enlightenment, or just about any other period in history) well knows, barbarism, superstition, ignorance, and general bad behavior not only didn't end with the glories of the Renaissance, they continue to this day. The 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion left large sections of France and Germany in ruins – the Thirty Years' War alone killed approximately a third of the population of what’s now Germany – industrialization, civil war, and cheap alcohol nearly ruined Great Britain a century later, and let's not even talk about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and the Huguenots from France two hundred years later.
Then there's the scourge of colonialism, which didn't exist in the Middle Ages but wrought tremendous damage worldwide during allegedly more liberal and enlightened times (see: King Leopold II of Belgium, whose statue should be burned to ashes and then fired straight into the Sun). Throw in environmental exploitation (see: pretty much everywhere), sexism (ditto), and of course the warfare of the 20th century (see: too many examples to count), and the idea that the Middle Ages were a uniquely awful time becomes untenable.
Now, it's possible to give Johann Huizinga or his translator a pass for believing that the late Middle Ages were uniquely awful. He was writing a century ago, after a horrendous war, and he did the best he could with the sources available to him. He was also analyzing a specific area, not writing a sweeping history of an entire century. It’s not his fault that generations of eager college students continued to read cheap paperback editions of his books long after their teachers switched to more recent texts.
Barbara Tuchman, though, absolutely should have known better.
In all fairness, she was avowedly attempting what seems to have been unconscious in Huizinga: write a book on the Middle Ages as a way of commenting on modern life. She genuinely saw the 14th century as a parallel to the 1960’s and 1970’s in the United States, a theme she continued in her next book, The March of Folly, and in some ways she had a point. The United States did some stunningly dumb things when I was a kid, and I have no doubt that Tuchman would be shaking her head and saying, “See, I told you so” if she were alive today.
At the same time, there’s no reason for a historian of her stature to rely so heavily on secondary sources, many of them out of date, and translations of medieval texts instead of at least making a stab at reading some of them in the original; Middle English isn’t that hard, for crying out loud, and Dante’s Italian is literally the basis for the modern language. Mainstream critics praised A Distant Mirror for its fine prose and grasp of the period, but medievalists were not nearly so impressed; Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, praised Tuchman’s writing, but called the book “curiously dated and old-fashioned,” which was (and is) a deadly insult in the field.
If that weren’t bad enough, Tuchman also made some egregious mistakes that a read-through from a medievalist would likely have caught. One particular passage about a Milanese feast still annoys me since Tuchman seems to fallen victim to the old saw that medieval cooks covered the taste of spoiled meat with spices, since she assumed that the “gilded meats” served to the guests were actually covered in gold leaf, not basted with an egg wash mixed with turmeric or saffron.
None of this prevented A Distant Mirror from soaring to the top of the bestseller lists, winning a National Book Award, and influencing at least two generations of readers. It’s still in print, over forty years after publication, and for a great many readers it’s the book on the Middle Ages. Even specialists admit that it’s probably Tuchman’s most readable and accessible book...but trust me. If you really want to know about the Middle Ages, try a general history from Oxford, Cambridge, or the University of Toronto, or one of the University of Pennsylvania’s splendid offerings. A Distant Mirror might be a good place to start, but it’s far from complete.
A World Lit Only by Fire, by William Manchester — Johan Huizinga may have given an overly gloomy picture of the Burgundian court, but his book proved a landmark in cultural studies despite some questionable interpretations. Barbara Tuchman may have relied primarily on secondary sources when she wrote A Distant Mirror, but with a few exceptions her book is least factual. A World Lit Only by Fire, William Manchester’s attempt at a history of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, is another matter entirely.
This should not surprise anyone who’s read Manchester. He originally trained as a journalist, not a historian, and his first profession is quite obvious if one takes a good, hard look at his work. He also was not precisely the most careful writer when it came to fact checking — his massive look at a leading Germany industrial family, The Arms of Krupp, was creamed by Time magazine for “swarms of errors” — and he never managed to shake a tendency toward melodrama and cliche. His searing look at the Kennedy assassination, The Death of a President, almost wasn’t published at all thanks to the Kennedy family’s attempt to remove certain passages that made it clear that they did not like Lyndon Johnson very much, and the prose has a distressing purple tinge that verges on the Victorian.
Manchester also shared a curious inability to conceal his dislike for Germany and the so-called “German character” with his fellow journalist-turned-historian William Shirer, although in Shirer’s case at least he’d actually known most of the leading Nazis and came by his loathing honestly. Manchester had served in the Pacific Theater during World War II and wrote an excellent memoir of his experiences, Goodbye Darkness, but that’s not quite the same as being on handshake terms with Hitler’s court jester, Harvard alumnus Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengel.
Regardless, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age, gets off to an inauspicious start when Manchester freely admits that the book “is, after all, a slight work, with no scholarly pretensions. All the sources are secondary, and few are new; I have not mastered recent scholarship on the early sixteenth century." This begs the question of why he wrote it in the first place, since there are literally dozens of equally potted, equally cliched books that completely misinterpret the Middle Ages.
You think I exaggerate? Here are just a few of the many, many, many reasons why professional historians blasted the book almost from the day the pre-publication copies arrived on their desks:
- The long-outdated assumption that the Middle Ages were a time of cultural, economic, and technological stagnation bookended by the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, and never mind that this particularly concept had been disproven by Charles Haskins in the 1920’s.
- A really, really stupid title, since the world was lit only by fire until, oh, the introduction of gas lighting in the early 19th century, or approximately four hundred years after the beginning of the Italian Renaissance and fourteen hundred years after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus.
- An insistence that the medieval Church was an oppressive behemoth that stifled every spark of creativity and theological speculation, which would have greatly surprised the Brethren of the Common Life, Dame Julian of Norwich, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and just about every single artist from Gislebertus on down, particularly the ones who carved naughty little farting monks on the church misericords.
- A nasty and historically unsupported passage about how the old German legend of the Pied Piper actually refers to a pedophile who managed to murder and dismember over a hundred children without so much as a single scrap of actual evidence...and before anyone tries to claim that this is probably because of the lack of surviving criminal records, well, we have at least two surviving transcripts of pre-modern serial killer trials (see: Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory).
- Cliches about medieval dress and diet that included (of course) the idea that medieval cooks used as many spices as possible to make spoiled meat palatable even though this would have killed large numbers of people thanks to that quaint concept called “food poisoning.”
- The underlying assumption that Middle Ages were unusually bloody, barbaric, diseased, etc., even though one would think that a World War II veteran would know better.
It’s little wonder that Speculum’s reviewer, the late Jeremy duQuesnay Adams of Southern Methodist University, wrote a scathing review that began with “This is an infuriating book” and went on to eviscerate Manchester for "some of the most gratuitous errors of fact and eccentricities of judgment this reviewer has read (or heard) in quite some time."
”Ouch,” as we say in the Common Speech of the West.
Despite this, mainstream reviewers loved A World Lit Only By Fire for its fine prose and excellent storytelling. It sold briskly, continues to do so, and is even sometimes recommended to AP History classes as an introduction to the Middle Ages. That college and graduate-level professors will subsequently have to devote significant time to correcting the book’s errors, or that the general public will pick it up and think that the Middle Ages was a millennium of unrelieved darkness, is, to put it mildly, exasperating.
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Have ever read The Autumn of the Middle Ages and gone ”EW EW EW” at the description of poor Pierre de Luxembourg? Worn out a copy of A Distant Mirror? Wondered just where the idea of the Middle Ages as the Age of Filth came from? It’s Saturday night, so put on a mask and come share….
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