The Addison Independent
August 25, 2011
Every historian strains his or her eyes looking carefully at the sources, milking them for all they are worth. Documents in medieval handwriting in particular wreak havoc on your eyesight: I still have no trouble with distance vision, but my close vision prescription just keeps getting stronger. Occupational hazard – does workman’s comp cover things like this?
But any historian needs to use another eye as well: the mind’s eye, which uses a different kind of lens. What I study is so very distant that I need to use my imagination to negotiate all the differences of time and space. It’s like a puzzle, but there is no copy of the picture on the cover of the box.
Lots of people ask me if I enjoy working in “dusty archives,” and if “dusty archives” were all it was, I don’t think I’d enjoy being a historian nearly as much as I do. Sure, there can be dust, spiders, and the occasional crotchety archivist. But as I read and look ever closer, the pieces come together in unexpected ways. They come alive.
Once upon a time, I spent several months reading a 14th-century notary’s register from the southern French city of Montpellier (not Montpelier!). Notarial registers seem like the very definition of dry and dusty: imagine a medieval property lawyer’s datebook combined with the first drafts of all his legalese, and then imagine it written in the very worst of a doctor’s handwriting. In Latin.
But little by little, my mind’s eye began to fill in the spaces in Johan Holanie’s life: he was just beginning his career, his office was in a relatively unsavory part of town near the horse market, and now and again, he probably drank a little more of the strong local wine at lunch than was good for him – or at least his handwriting. I learned who his neighbors were, since they appeared many times as witnesses to completely unrelated acts. I could imagine him holding the very register that was in front of me, dipping his pen into some ink, writing down his clients’ names and business. I touched the paper he touched, and I saw where he scratched out one word to replace it with another – a flash that revealed a moment of indecision or absentmindedness. I was even pleased for him when it appeared that business was looking up and he began to attract wealthier clients.
The world around him began to be visible as well. Whenever the archive was closed, I walked for hours around the town, matching up streets and neighborhoods with those in the register. With the help of a book on the development of medieval Montpellier and another on its medieval houses, I began to see the streets in their medieval form, stripping away the seventeenth-century facades in my mind. My other senses engaged, and I touched the stone, listened for the voices, tasted the cheese, and even tried to imagine the smells. I didn’t try too hard with that one: Johan Holanie’s clients did a lot of business in sheep stomachs and it appears that there was a not very reputable tripery near his office. I didn’t really want to know what that smelled like.
Over the course of those months, Johan Holanie became a kind of friend, albeit a distant one. There are many things I will never know about him, of course. What did he look like? Was he tall, or short? Was his hair dark or light? What did he like to eat? Could he carry a tune? What did his laugh sound like? What did he care about and believe in?
These questions are unanswerable. But even just posing them sharpens the vision of my mind’s eye and brings Johan Holanie’s humanity into sharper focus. I learned to care about my diligent notary by reading, looking and wondering. I have a sense of responsibility towards him to get things right; I believe that caring about someone so entirely distant and foreign makes me a better historian. People who seem foreign to us don’t have to remain so if we only use our mind’s eye to imagine, and see.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Sunday, August 7, 2011
A label can color your point of view
The Addison Independent, July 28, 2011
I consider myself incredibly lucky in that I get paid to do exactly what I love most: study medieval heretics. I find their ideas fascinating, their ingenuity engaging and their tenacity inspiring, even if their fates are often a bummer. “How was your day at the office, dear?” “Twenty-two heretics got burned at the stake. If you don’t mind, I’d rather postpone that barbecue until tomorrow.”
But what’s a heretic? It’s not generally a word people call themselves, but a label attached by someone else. The 13th-century English bishop Robert Grosseteste had a nice definition for heresy: “an opinion chosen by human perception, contrary to Holy Scripture, publicly avowed and obstinately defended.” But who gets to decide what is “contrary to Holy Scripture”? It wasn’t always easy. Let me tell you the stories of two religious leaders.
Once upon a time, there was a wealthy merchant in a southern European city who was profoundly moved when he heard a traveling jongleur recounting the life of a saint. He had someone translate the Gospels into his local dialect so he could read them, and was so struck by the advice Jesus gave to a young man who wanted to obtain eternal life that he quickly followed it to the letter: “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me” (Matthew 19:21). Soon, he had abandoned his family and all his worldly goods and became a traveling preacher who lived by begging. He attracted followers all over Europe. When he came to the attention of the pope, he went to Rome to ask for papal approval of his mission. His name was Waldo of Lyons, and Pope Alexander III declared him a heretic at the Third Lateran Council in 1179.
And then there’s the other fellow. He was the dissolute son of a wealthy merchant who was inspired by the same passage in the Gospels to sell his family’s goods and also become a mendicant traveling preacher. In one of the most famous and dramatic scenes in history, he stripped off all his clothes in front of the people of his hometown in order to reject his father and embrace poverty. He attracted so many followers that he, too, sought the pope’s approval, and Pope Innocent III endorsed his group in 1209. We know him as Saint Francis of Assisi.
Alexander III rejected Waldo in 1179; Innocent III embraced Francis in 1209. The Franciscans are a respected order of friars, while the Waldensians were prosecuted and often executed as heretics until the time of the Protestant Reformation. Why?
The eyes of faith see the answer as simple: Francis is a saint in Heaven enjoying the Beatific Vision because of his innate virtues recognized by the Church, and Waldo is a heretic lamenting his unorthodox ideas and practices in the fires of Hell.
The historian’s eye might instead consider the personalities of the popes who encountered the two men: was Innocent bolder and more risk-taking than Alexander? (this might be why Innocent III is the only medieval pope I know available as an action figure) Or we could look to social history: the end of the 12th century saw the tremendous growth of towns in medieval Europe, and it may well be that the leaders of the Church recognized the increased need for new forms of piety and preaching to minister to townspeople. It may have been strategic: the popularity and success of the Waldensians prompted Innocent to seek out a safe alternative, and Francis’s ragtag but enthusiastic group looked like they fit the bill.
Was Francis really so very different from Waldo? Things might have gone the other way.
But that’s not what happened. Two popes made different decisions, and thus Waldo’s label reads “heretic” and Francis’s “saint.” Those labels shape our understanding, because we respond to “heretics” in one way and “saints” in another.
Try changing the labels: when I imagine the life of “Saint Waldo,” I learn something new about him and his movement. Nor does it just work for heretics and saints. If you take an “enemy,” and think of him as a “friend,” you’ll see him with entirely new eyes.
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
I consider myself incredibly lucky in that I get paid to do exactly what I love most: study medieval heretics. I find their ideas fascinating, their ingenuity engaging and their tenacity inspiring, even if their fates are often a bummer. “How was your day at the office, dear?” “Twenty-two heretics got burned at the stake. If you don’t mind, I’d rather postpone that barbecue until tomorrow.”
But what’s a heretic? It’s not generally a word people call themselves, but a label attached by someone else. The 13th-century English bishop Robert Grosseteste had a nice definition for heresy: “an opinion chosen by human perception, contrary to Holy Scripture, publicly avowed and obstinately defended.” But who gets to decide what is “contrary to Holy Scripture”? It wasn’t always easy. Let me tell you the stories of two religious leaders.
Once upon a time, there was a wealthy merchant in a southern European city who was profoundly moved when he heard a traveling jongleur recounting the life of a saint. He had someone translate the Gospels into his local dialect so he could read them, and was so struck by the advice Jesus gave to a young man who wanted to obtain eternal life that he quickly followed it to the letter: “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me” (Matthew 19:21). Soon, he had abandoned his family and all his worldly goods and became a traveling preacher who lived by begging. He attracted followers all over Europe. When he came to the attention of the pope, he went to Rome to ask for papal approval of his mission. His name was Waldo of Lyons, and Pope Alexander III declared him a heretic at the Third Lateran Council in 1179.
And then there’s the other fellow. He was the dissolute son of a wealthy merchant who was inspired by the same passage in the Gospels to sell his family’s goods and also become a mendicant traveling preacher. In one of the most famous and dramatic scenes in history, he stripped off all his clothes in front of the people of his hometown in order to reject his father and embrace poverty. He attracted so many followers that he, too, sought the pope’s approval, and Pope Innocent III endorsed his group in 1209. We know him as Saint Francis of Assisi.
Alexander III rejected Waldo in 1179; Innocent III embraced Francis in 1209. The Franciscans are a respected order of friars, while the Waldensians were prosecuted and often executed as heretics until the time of the Protestant Reformation. Why?
The eyes of faith see the answer as simple: Francis is a saint in Heaven enjoying the Beatific Vision because of his innate virtues recognized by the Church, and Waldo is a heretic lamenting his unorthodox ideas and practices in the fires of Hell.
The historian’s eye might instead consider the personalities of the popes who encountered the two men: was Innocent bolder and more risk-taking than Alexander? (this might be why Innocent III is the only medieval pope I know available as an action figure) Or we could look to social history: the end of the 12th century saw the tremendous growth of towns in medieval Europe, and it may well be that the leaders of the Church recognized the increased need for new forms of piety and preaching to minister to townspeople. It may have been strategic: the popularity and success of the Waldensians prompted Innocent to seek out a safe alternative, and Francis’s ragtag but enthusiastic group looked like they fit the bill.
Was Francis really so very different from Waldo? Things might have gone the other way.
But that’s not what happened. Two popes made different decisions, and thus Waldo’s label reads “heretic” and Francis’s “saint.” Those labels shape our understanding, because we respond to “heretics” in one way and “saints” in another.
Try changing the labels: when I imagine the life of “Saint Waldo,” I learn something new about him and his movement. Nor does it just work for heretics and saints. If you take an “enemy,” and think of him as a “friend,” you’ll see him with entirely new eyes.
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
Open your eyes to see the obvious
The Addison Independent
June 30, 2011
Last week in this column, I declared that I, a professor of medieval history, believed in magic. You're probably expecting me to say this week that I also believe in fairies, but since the Tooth Fairy failed to make an appearance when I had my wisdom teeth out and the Laundry Fairy gives my house a wide berth, I've given up on the entire fairy kingdom.
Instead, I’d like to consider three words encountered in a 14th-century inquisitorial deposition: “intellect,” “subtlety,” and “philosophy.” They are a perfect example of the funny little detail that just seems wrong – the person who used them to describe his revelations (a man named Limoux from a tiny town in the Pyrenées) had no business using such a sophisticated vocabulary. It’s the kind of anomaly that has the power to shift paradigms and can turn a whole world of understanding upside down.
I take the idea of anomalies and paradigm shifts from an influential book by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn proposed the idea that science does not progress linearly, but by means of revolutions. In what he calls “normal science,” our understandings are shaped by a particular paradigm, and we solve problems and puzzles inside the paradigm.
But in the course of “normal science,” anomalies appear: phenomena that just don’t fit the paradigm, no matter how hard we try to make them fit, or tweak the paradigm to fit the new evidence. At first, we are completely blind to the anomalies, because we aren’t expecting them. They are there, but we do not see them.
Kuhn cites a psychological experiment as an example of how anomalies can be completely invisible. J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman published a study in 1949 that used an ordinary deck of cards with a few anomalous cards, like a red six of spades. When the subjects of the study were quickly shown one card after another and asked to identify them, at first they “saw” either a six of diamonds or a six of spades. After being shown more and more of the anomalies, the subjects got ever more confused. Kuhn writes, “And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!”’ It’s a light bulb moment – in reverse.
My light bulb moment took me almost sixteen years – and even then, I needed help. I first read Limoux’s description of his revelations in the fall of 1993, when I was working on another project. I put it aside, but it kept niggling me, and I puzzled over it time and again. There was something wrong. The paradigm I was trying to fit the deposition into was that of heresy, my field as a historian. Limoux was interrogated as a heretic, was condemned as a heretic, and was burned as a heretic. Therefore, when I looked at him, that was what I saw.
But when my colleague Paul Monod listened to me describe Limoux’s beliefs in the fall of 2009, he heard (or saw) something completely different. What if Limoux wasn’t describing religious heresy at all, but alchemy?
“My God!” The light bulb. My Limoux was indeed an alchemist, something like a cross between a magician and a chemist. “Intellect,” “subtlety” and “philosophy” occur over and over again in magical texts and alchemical texts from the Middle Ages, and detail after detail in his deposition checks out: Limoux had been seeking the Philosopher’s Stone and wanted to create the Elixir of Life. He was a scientist in his experimentation, and a magician in his language and understanding. I am now working on uncovering his sources, his methods and his collaborators. But I had to learn to see in order to even begin.
I may not believe in fairies, but I do believe in miracles. Sometimes, the blind really can learn to see – and so can we.
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
June 30, 2011
Last week in this column, I declared that I, a professor of medieval history, believed in magic. You're probably expecting me to say this week that I also believe in fairies, but since the Tooth Fairy failed to make an appearance when I had my wisdom teeth out and the Laundry Fairy gives my house a wide berth, I've given up on the entire fairy kingdom.
Instead, I’d like to consider three words encountered in a 14th-century inquisitorial deposition: “intellect,” “subtlety,” and “philosophy.” They are a perfect example of the funny little detail that just seems wrong – the person who used them to describe his revelations (a man named Limoux from a tiny town in the Pyrenées) had no business using such a sophisticated vocabulary. It’s the kind of anomaly that has the power to shift paradigms and can turn a whole world of understanding upside down.
I take the idea of anomalies and paradigm shifts from an influential book by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn proposed the idea that science does not progress linearly, but by means of revolutions. In what he calls “normal science,” our understandings are shaped by a particular paradigm, and we solve problems and puzzles inside the paradigm.
But in the course of “normal science,” anomalies appear: phenomena that just don’t fit the paradigm, no matter how hard we try to make them fit, or tweak the paradigm to fit the new evidence. At first, we are completely blind to the anomalies, because we aren’t expecting them. They are there, but we do not see them.
Kuhn cites a psychological experiment as an example of how anomalies can be completely invisible. J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman published a study in 1949 that used an ordinary deck of cards with a few anomalous cards, like a red six of spades. When the subjects of the study were quickly shown one card after another and asked to identify them, at first they “saw” either a six of diamonds or a six of spades. After being shown more and more of the anomalies, the subjects got ever more confused. Kuhn writes, “And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!”’ It’s a light bulb moment – in reverse.
My light bulb moment took me almost sixteen years – and even then, I needed help. I first read Limoux’s description of his revelations in the fall of 1993, when I was working on another project. I put it aside, but it kept niggling me, and I puzzled over it time and again. There was something wrong. The paradigm I was trying to fit the deposition into was that of heresy, my field as a historian. Limoux was interrogated as a heretic, was condemned as a heretic, and was burned as a heretic. Therefore, when I looked at him, that was what I saw.
But when my colleague Paul Monod listened to me describe Limoux’s beliefs in the fall of 2009, he heard (or saw) something completely different. What if Limoux wasn’t describing religious heresy at all, but alchemy?
“My God!” The light bulb. My Limoux was indeed an alchemist, something like a cross between a magician and a chemist. “Intellect,” “subtlety” and “philosophy” occur over and over again in magical texts and alchemical texts from the Middle Ages, and detail after detail in his deposition checks out: Limoux had been seeking the Philosopher’s Stone and wanted to create the Elixir of Life. He was a scientist in his experimentation, and a magician in his language and understanding. I am now working on uncovering his sources, his methods and his collaborators. But I had to learn to see in order to even begin.
I may not believe in fairies, but I do believe in miracles. Sometimes, the blind really can learn to see – and so can we.
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
In history or magic, seeing is believing
The Addison Independent
June 23, 2011
I believe in magic. Do you?
I have recently returned from a weekend in Kalamazoo, MI, a town of 75,000 that sees its population augmented by 3,000 people on the second weekend of May every year. People? Well... medievalists, my tribe: other folks who think Peter Abelard was dreamy, Pope Boniface VIII was a villain, and jokes in Latin are funny. Every year we gather to listen to each other give papers, snatch up bargains at academic presses, sip dreadful wine while schmoozing and making friends, and dance. Yes -- dance. The Saturday night dance is legendary. Haven’t you ever yearned to see a senior Ivy League professor rock out?
This year, I found myself frequenting a different crowd. I'm working on a man from southern France who was burned at the stake in 1329 as a heretic, but I happen to know he was practicing alchemy. So the Societas Magica was my new haunt, a group of scholars who do not cast spells themselves, but study the magicians who did. They take the rituals and the incantations and the people who wrote and practiced them seriously. They believe them.
Certainly, there were charlatans in the Middle Ages, just as there are charlatans now. When some people conducted rituals designed to conjure up demons or angels to help their clients with lost items or an unhappy love affair, they were just trying to make a quick buck. And suckers have been being born every minute since well before P. T. Barnum, so there were many who were effectively deceived. One of my students analyzed a learned manual of necromancy from the fifteenth century this spring and determined that the three most popular spells were for knowledge of the liberal arts, for procuring a horse or other means of transport, and for the love of a desired woman. The desires of university students have changed very little since the Middle Ages: good grades, a car, and a girlfriend.
Our modern scientific perspective insists that we see these people all as either “marks” or charlatans – but I cannot agree. Some were passionate believers, and moreover, they achieved what they were looking for! Let's take the case of an elaborate ritual found in a magical manuscript known as the Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes that probably dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Its goal? Achieving the Beatific Vision: seeing God face to face in Heaven.
The ritual is intense. It takes 28 days of nearly full-time prayer and fasting: reciting prayers, psalms, litanies, and the Names of God in languages ranging from Latin to Hebrew to Aramaic to gobbledygook. Finally, on the last day, the magician must bathe, wear special clothes (including a hair shirt) and pray and sleep on a mattress of hay, with the 100 Names of God written in ashes all around. Finally: “Then sleep and say no more, and you shall see the Celestial Palace and the Majesty of God in all his Glory.”
First question: is this magic or religion? It bears too many resemblances to other magical rituals to be truly religious, but its goal is so religious that we can hardly call it “mere” magic. The Church explicitly banned this ritual several times, but it circulated in samizdat for centuries and pops up in the writings of figures from the 14th-century poet John Gower to philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600.
Second question: did it work? Scholar Robert Mathiesen has observed that such a constant, extended period of ritual repetition on short commons could easily have neurobiological consequences, resulting in what he calls “extraordinary experiences.” These experiences can mark the practitioner so firmly that life is never the same again. Any successful practitioner could rightfully believe that his ritual actions had brought him to the Face of God before his time. If that isn’t magic, then I don’t know what is.
Seeing is believing. For the historian, that may require a conscious leap of faith, where we take on the experience of another and see the world through another’s eyes. Nor can we stop at magic: belief systems not our own – whether from times past, or places far away, or right next door – ask us to do the very same.
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
June 23, 2011
I believe in magic. Do you?
I have recently returned from a weekend in Kalamazoo, MI, a town of 75,000 that sees its population augmented by 3,000 people on the second weekend of May every year. People? Well... medievalists, my tribe: other folks who think Peter Abelard was dreamy, Pope Boniface VIII was a villain, and jokes in Latin are funny. Every year we gather to listen to each other give papers, snatch up bargains at academic presses, sip dreadful wine while schmoozing and making friends, and dance. Yes -- dance. The Saturday night dance is legendary. Haven’t you ever yearned to see a senior Ivy League professor rock out?
This year, I found myself frequenting a different crowd. I'm working on a man from southern France who was burned at the stake in 1329 as a heretic, but I happen to know he was practicing alchemy. So the Societas Magica was my new haunt, a group of scholars who do not cast spells themselves, but study the magicians who did. They take the rituals and the incantations and the people who wrote and practiced them seriously. They believe them.
Certainly, there were charlatans in the Middle Ages, just as there are charlatans now. When some people conducted rituals designed to conjure up demons or angels to help their clients with lost items or an unhappy love affair, they were just trying to make a quick buck. And suckers have been being born every minute since well before P. T. Barnum, so there were many who were effectively deceived. One of my students analyzed a learned manual of necromancy from the fifteenth century this spring and determined that the three most popular spells were for knowledge of the liberal arts, for procuring a horse or other means of transport, and for the love of a desired woman. The desires of university students have changed very little since the Middle Ages: good grades, a car, and a girlfriend.
Our modern scientific perspective insists that we see these people all as either “marks” or charlatans – but I cannot agree. Some were passionate believers, and moreover, they achieved what they were looking for! Let's take the case of an elaborate ritual found in a magical manuscript known as the Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes that probably dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Its goal? Achieving the Beatific Vision: seeing God face to face in Heaven.
The ritual is intense. It takes 28 days of nearly full-time prayer and fasting: reciting prayers, psalms, litanies, and the Names of God in languages ranging from Latin to Hebrew to Aramaic to gobbledygook. Finally, on the last day, the magician must bathe, wear special clothes (including a hair shirt) and pray and sleep on a mattress of hay, with the 100 Names of God written in ashes all around. Finally: “Then sleep and say no more, and you shall see the Celestial Palace and the Majesty of God in all his Glory.”
First question: is this magic or religion? It bears too many resemblances to other magical rituals to be truly religious, but its goal is so religious that we can hardly call it “mere” magic. The Church explicitly banned this ritual several times, but it circulated in samizdat for centuries and pops up in the writings of figures from the 14th-century poet John Gower to philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600.
Second question: did it work? Scholar Robert Mathiesen has observed that such a constant, extended period of ritual repetition on short commons could easily have neurobiological consequences, resulting in what he calls “extraordinary experiences.” These experiences can mark the practitioner so firmly that life is never the same again. Any successful practitioner could rightfully believe that his ritual actions had brought him to the Face of God before his time. If that isn’t magic, then I don’t know what is.
Seeing is believing. For the historian, that may require a conscious leap of faith, where we take on the experience of another and see the world through another’s eyes. Nor can we stop at magic: belief systems not our own – whether from times past, or places far away, or right next door – ask us to do the very same.
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
A Fresh Perspective
Addison Independent, May 5, 2011
It’s a little-known trade secret that teachers learn as much from their students as their students learn from them. A fresh set of eyes can cast new light on an old problem, not to mention the fact that young eyes often see further than old eyes. And sometimes, the students are just wiser than we are. It’s about perspective.
Per-spective: from the Latin roots per (“through”) and specio (“look at”). Perspicuity (“mental penetration; insight”). Perspicacity (“clearness of understanding or insight; great mental penetration; discernment”). All of these words show us how much how we understand is related to how we see.
There are plenty of new perspectives and fresh eyes in my seminar on the history of science, technology and magic in the Middle Ages this semester. Though it is a history class, we meet in McCardell Bicentennial Hall (the science building), and several of the students in the class are in the sciences, not in history. When a chemistry student looks at a medieval alchemical recipe, she can compare it to a lab report. My science students make a discussion on inductive vs. deductive reasoning in alchemical theory and practice infinitely richer. And when I ask the question “is alchemy more like magic or pre-modern chemistry?” the scientists enter the discussion from a different place, and their non-historical perspective enlightens us all.
Sometimes those young eyes are truly perspicacious. One of my students, Zachary Fenster, participated in the Middlebury College Student Research Symposium recently, presenting his research on a particularly fascinating cache of medieval documents known as the Cairo Genizah. Zach took the session title “Negotiation of Difference” and turned it into a way of thinking about History writ large: interpreting the past is all about negotiating differences of time and of space.
I had never thought of my discipline quite that way before. As a historian, it is indeed my job to negotiate my difference (and difference’s opposite, similarity) with the subjects of my inquiry. Time is the difference that is most obvious, but space is no less important, especially since it changes so radically over time.
Think about Vermont. Jan Albers’ book Hands on the Land showed many of us how much the Vermont landscape has changed: what are now forests used to be pastures that used to be forests. Think of the vanished hamlets like Hillsboro, Old Brandon, and Bingo. What was it like to live there, work there, or love there? When you see a stone wall, or a line of maples along a road, or a bunch of apple trees lost in the woods, imagine the historical people who built, cultivated, and planted them.
The differences that surprise you may be the most important. The beautiful two-story Lampson School on the hill above River Road in New Haven Mills is an example I pass by all the time. Why would such a large schoolhouse be located in such a tiny community? The 1868 Lampson School is one of the few structures that outlived the series of disasters (most especially the devastating flood of 1927) that destroyed the mills and decimated the population of New Haven Mills. Now, when I look down at the river just there, I see not just a swimming hole, but a place where people worked and lived. If we listen to our eyes, they can teach us to negotiate the differences of space and time – the history – all around us.
Zach taught me to think about history as negotiating difference. The students in History 400 teach me to see history through the eyes of scientists. It was a student who told me stories about Bingo, and another who told me about discovering Old Brandon on a walk through the woods behind Otter Valley High School. A former student helps me to edit this column. My students are so often my teachers.
As Rabbi Hanina said in the Babylonian Talmud: “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, most from my students.” Amen.
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
The Historian is a Necromancer
The Addison Independent, April 8, 2011
I am a necromancer: I bring the dead back to life and make them speak. Generally speaking, I do not utter mysterious incantations at a crossroads at midnight with an eviscerated hoopoe tucked under my arm. But my discipline, medieval history, has a secret language (Latin) written in an indecipherable script (medieval handwriting), rituals to separate out the initiates and a secret handshake.
The rituals required to obtain a medieval manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France are particularly arcane. First, you must bow to the guardian of the gates in order to receive the key to the repository of all forbidden things (pens, cell phones, scissors, razor blades..). Once the gatekeeper has given you the green token of your assigned place for the performance of the ritual, you can exchange it for the red talisman held by the keepers of the Holy of Holies, the manuscript storeroom. If you have performed the dance correctly and have been judged sufficiently worthy, they will bring to you the object of your desire -- but only for a limited time, dependant on your level of virtue. But beware! Should you attempt to leave the magic circle without performing the ritual in reverse, you will never recover the green token with which to appease the voracious Cerberus at the gate. And without this sign of your submission to the spirits of the library, you will be condemned to spend eternity perched uneasily on the elegant but hellishly uncomfortable Louis XIII chairs of the manuscript room. Many a medievalist has failed the test, and has been forced into the purgatory of the Service of Reproductions, there to await a mere simulacrum (a microfilm) of the desired manuscript.
But I digress. The historian's necromantic ritual is much simpler, and consists of identifying documents, reading them with a critical and careful eye, and following each of their threads wherever and as far as they may lead. In the course of my recent research, I have spent time in the library in sections as diverse as those of the history of religion and chemistry, have poured over maps, walked the streets of medieval cities, learned about the mordants used in medieval dyeing, calculated the date of Easter for the year 1315, interrogated the hunters and old men of a small town in the Pyrenees, and have even asked a pregnant friend to boil her urine. Medievalists have more fun!
And why? Because I have a responsibility to the people of the past. If I am going to disturb the dead, I must make their journey to the present count. They have lessons to teach us, if only we can understand them. I need to pay attention: to look for the detail that sticks out and to listen for the word that seems odd, because either one might lead me in an important new direction or provide a precious key to understanding their lives and their world.
Nor is it enough merely to listen: I need to hear. To look, but most especially to see. It is too easy to listen without hearing and to look without seeing. We wear prejudices that blind us, and the din of our own noisy self-preoccupation drowns out the voices that are trying to speak to us. We don't even listen to the man ranting on the street corner, and we too often fail to see the loneliness in a neighbor's eyes. When was the last time you really saw a stranger or heard what she had to say? When we can so shamefully ignore those who are here with us, how much easier is it to brush aside the men and women from that foreign country called the past?
The people of the past may be foreigners, but they are also our distant brothers and sisters, with minds and hearts and souls and bodies not all that different from our own. The historian, the necromancer, must conjure up both their difference and their similarity, careful not to exaggerate either one. Having rudely disturbed their eternal slumber, we owe them that respect.
(By the way, I was kidding about the secret handshake)
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
I am a necromancer: I bring the dead back to life and make them speak. Generally speaking, I do not utter mysterious incantations at a crossroads at midnight with an eviscerated hoopoe tucked under my arm. But my discipline, medieval history, has a secret language (Latin) written in an indecipherable script (medieval handwriting), rituals to separate out the initiates and a secret handshake.
The rituals required to obtain a medieval manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France are particularly arcane. First, you must bow to the guardian of the gates in order to receive the key to the repository of all forbidden things (pens, cell phones, scissors, razor blades..). Once the gatekeeper has given you the green token of your assigned place for the performance of the ritual, you can exchange it for the red talisman held by the keepers of the Holy of Holies, the manuscript storeroom. If you have performed the dance correctly and have been judged sufficiently worthy, they will bring to you the object of your desire -- but only for a limited time, dependant on your level of virtue. But beware! Should you attempt to leave the magic circle without performing the ritual in reverse, you will never recover the green token with which to appease the voracious Cerberus at the gate. And without this sign of your submission to the spirits of the library, you will be condemned to spend eternity perched uneasily on the elegant but hellishly uncomfortable Louis XIII chairs of the manuscript room. Many a medievalist has failed the test, and has been forced into the purgatory of the Service of Reproductions, there to await a mere simulacrum (a microfilm) of the desired manuscript.
But I digress. The historian's necromantic ritual is much simpler, and consists of identifying documents, reading them with a critical and careful eye, and following each of their threads wherever and as far as they may lead. In the course of my recent research, I have spent time in the library in sections as diverse as those of the history of religion and chemistry, have poured over maps, walked the streets of medieval cities, learned about the mordants used in medieval dyeing, calculated the date of Easter for the year 1315, interrogated the hunters and old men of a small town in the Pyrenees, and have even asked a pregnant friend to boil her urine. Medievalists have more fun!
And why? Because I have a responsibility to the people of the past. If I am going to disturb the dead, I must make their journey to the present count. They have lessons to teach us, if only we can understand them. I need to pay attention: to look for the detail that sticks out and to listen for the word that seems odd, because either one might lead me in an important new direction or provide a precious key to understanding their lives and their world.
Nor is it enough merely to listen: I need to hear. To look, but most especially to see. It is too easy to listen without hearing and to look without seeing. We wear prejudices that blind us, and the din of our own noisy self-preoccupation drowns out the voices that are trying to speak to us. We don't even listen to the man ranting on the street corner, and we too often fail to see the loneliness in a neighbor's eyes. When was the last time you really saw a stranger or heard what she had to say? When we can so shamefully ignore those who are here with us, how much easier is it to brush aside the men and women from that foreign country called the past?
The people of the past may be foreigners, but they are also our distant brothers and sisters, with minds and hearts and souls and bodies not all that different from our own. The historian, the necromancer, must conjure up both their difference and their similarity, careful not to exaggerate either one. Having rudely disturbed their eternal slumber, we owe them that respect.
(By the way, I was kidding about the secret handshake)
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
A 14th-century visionary's words intriguing still
From The Addison Independent, March 10, 2011
In early February 1315, a 50-year-old man named Limoux decided that he wanted to fast for forty days and nights like Jesus. Lacking a desert, he took himself off to an isolated cave north of his small town in the Pyrenées, with no provisions. He had managed to keep to his fast for 10 days when he finally stumbled down the mountain too hungry to continue, and ate.
In that very moment, he had a sudden, brilliant flash of insight; a revelation. “God put this intellect into his heart that now he asserts that he has, this subtlety and philosophy.”
This matter-of-fact story is found in the summary of Limoux’s confession that was read aloud to the crowds who witnessed his death on the stake almost fifteen years later. It is so spare and precise that it might have come from the Bristol police log. Religious revelation (vexed, controversial and deeply personal) does not generally make the pages of our local newspapers, however. If we are to understand both what happened to Limoux that day and what it means, we must investigate this story like detectives attempting to solve a crime.
One detail of Limoux’s story checks out. With the help of some hunters and old men at a café in the center of St. Paul-de-Fenouillet one evening last February, I was able to identify Limoux’s cave based on his description. The mountain just north of town is known locally by the name he provided (“ruppe Cabronia,” now the Serre Cabroune), and has an ideal cave that has been much used by hermits over the centuries.
With this concrete, tangible information in hand, I can actually believe Limoux, just as a student of mine said she believed another visionary who had walked arm and arm with the Holy Trinity. I do not have to believe that God was the source of his sudden inspiration, but I would bet my red patent pleather boots that something profound happened that day. (It really is “pleather,” not leather. These boots are vegan.) He told the truth: he had had a revelation.
There is an obvious modern interpretation of his experience: a psychotic break. Mark Vonnegut, whose memoir The Eden Express documents his descent into insanity, describes his sudden moments of insight, how everything began to make sense. The universe was full of meaning, and he was full of joy and fear and wonder at seeing it for the first time. Everyone called him crazy. But he was sure that he knew the truth, or even The Truth, and said, “for me to have sat around calling crazy stuff ‘crazy’ would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done.” Vonnegut, a religion major at Swarthmore, suddenly understood the very meaning of life. What did Limoux understand, and what does that teach us about him?
It is here that we need our imaginations. So I asked myself the question I ask my students: What was surprising?
Limoux’s three words stood out: “intellect,” “subtlety” and “philosophy.” Ordinary words for us, but extraordinary in the mouth of nearly anyone in the 14th century outside a university. Plowmen, fullers and shopkeepers did not speak this way.
If Limoux spoke of a new “intellect,” “subtlety” and “philosophy,” that is because those words were part of his life before his revelation. He was no simple tanner or itinerant shepherd, but someone who had pondered philosophy and used his intellect in subtle and mysterious ways. Our text is silent about his past before that February day, but if we historians, the detectives, use all the skills and tools at our disposal, there is much we can learn. With imagination, this opportunity need not be wasted.
I see Limoux as the man on the street corner holding the sign that says “The End of the World is Here.” Who and what was he before insanity struck him? What stories does he have to tell? But just as for Limoux, if we really want to understand and to see the man on our street corner, we need to use not only our intelligence and our imaginations, but also our compassion.
Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).
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