From Professor Gaposchkin:
Recently I happily read William Chester Jordan's latest book, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint Denis in the Thirteenth Century (Princeton, 2009), a great journey through thirteenth-century political and religious history through the eyes and experiences of two abbots, Richard de Ware and Matthiew de Vendome, close advisors of, respectively, Henry III of England and (Saint) Louis IX of France. The other book I would highly recommend (as someone who teaches the crusades) is our own Christopher MacEvitt's The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Penn, 2007).
From Professor Simons:
Incredible as it may seem, I sometimes get away from the Middle Ages. Recently I picked up Peter Demetz, Prague in Danger, The Years of German Occupation, 1939–45: Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), and I had a hard time putting it down. Demetz, an emeritus professor of German literature at Yale, reviews his World War II experiences as a curious young man in Prague, barely sixteen when Great Britain, France, and Italy signed away the Sudetenland to Hitler in the infamous Munich agreement of September 1938, thus paving the way for the collapse of the young democratic Czechoslovak republic and six years of Nazi rule. Part personal memoir, part essay in political and cultural history, the book offers a marvelous glimpse of a lost world in which young people passionately discuss democracy, nationalism, fascism, communism, and the arts against a backdrop of sheer terror. His own family neatly encapsulated Prague’s multicultural years before the word was coined: his mother came from a Jewish middle-class family driven to the city by pogroms in rural Bohemia, while his father’s ancestors were Ladin peasants from the South Tyrol who arrived in Prague in the 1880s by way of Upper Austria, largely abandoning their Ladin language for German but sticking to a “baroque” Catholicism that took for granted Jewish ritual murder of Christian boys—which made for a lively household whenever the two sets of grandparents met. Young Peter was interested in “politics, girls, movies, and jazz (in that order approximately),” he tells us, but one gathers that somewhere along there, the question of his own ethnicity clamored for attention, not in the least pressed by circumstances in which, for most people, it meant the difference between life or death. The description of his saying goodbye as his mother boards a train to the camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt) in 1942 is typical for the detached, understated tones he reserves for his feelings: “I have tried many times to recall what she said and what I said then and there but I do not remember much, if anything: the dark brown color of the sturdy valise, my mother’s hair streaked with a little gray, a few children running around, and some old people, all alone.” (She perished, as did virtually all of his Jewish relatives). Demetz dispenses similar shockers in between a lively discussion of Prague’s literary and political underground. I shouldn’t divulge here how his friend Eva said her adieu to him and their fellow students upon receiving her transport order to Terezín and will only say that it’s quite unbelievable, and yet upon reflection seems so natural and humane. As a half-Jew, Demetz slipped through the net for a while and even had a romance with a ”Wagnerian” German girl who died in the Allied bombing raid of February 1945—at a time when he himself was barely surviving in various labor camps. The story of his liberation is both hilarious and nauseatingly tragic.
Marginally closer to my own field, Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), now out in paperback, traces the ways in which “modern” France in the nineteenth century started to explore and map out its myriad regional traditions, discovering in the process physical places as well as whole areas of thought and practice virtually unknown to Parisians and elite culture. Readers of Fernand Braudel’s multivolume The Identity of France will find some similarities here, but Robb’s approach, more narrow and journalistic than Braudel’s broad structuralism, works quite well, too, especially, I imagine, if you read it while drinking Pastis in your Provençal summer home (the one that is now for sale). France’s scientists, cartographers, railway builders and littérateurs resemble intrepid internal anthropologists, as alien and enchanted as the tourists who now flood the Auvergne every summer. The book offers wonderful old photographs of shepherds on stilts in the Landes, a shantytown east of Paris, a man who looks like the village crank “who must be seen to be believed,” dressed up in the clothes of his Chouan ancestors rebelling against the Revolution and for the monarchy, somewhere out in the Vendée.
Finally, onto a subject I actually know something about: the Franciscans! For years I have been using in my first-year seminar on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose a magisterial book by David Burr on The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). The book is now also out in paperback. It caps a career of research on the conflict over the interpretation of St Francis’ ideals by his followers in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Francis famously instructed his brethren to live in the strictest poverty, individually as well as collectively. But what did that mean, exactly? Enter a colorful cast of characters forming the “spiritual” branch of the Order, inspired by Joachim of Fiore’s view of history and the role therein of a “spiritual” vanguard for the Apocalyptic battles against the Antichrist. Spiritual Franciscans rejected all ownership, wore “skimpy” habits (if you wonder what they looked like, go to Assisi, where you can see Francis’s own tunic) and increasingly fought the “conventual” or “community”-oriented majority which argued, reasonably enough, that a friar without books and a place to live is unlikely to be an effective preacher. The debate careened from the ridiculous (In what sense do I own the food that I have in my stomach?) to the profound (Can a true Christian call anything on this world really his own?) but around 1300 acquired broader implications (Did Christ and the Apostles have dominion over the things they used? Should the Church be without possessions?) which threatened the entire edifice of the Church and the Pope’s authority in particular. Burr expertly navigates us through this complex material, and, while I sometimes miss the connections to the concrete world in which all of these characters lived, the book will remind us of major societal trends in “high” and late medieval Europe: the rise of early commercial capitalism, the revival of Roman law, the transformation of scholastic theology into a tool for sophistry, and above all the clash between an increasingly centralized, institutional Church and charismatic religion.
