A Few Kalamazoo Thoughts

I’m recently back from a conference in DC which confirms what I’d strongly suspected; that I will not be attending Kalamazoo this year. I’ve made the last four in a row, a personal record, and hopefully I’ll make it in 2014. Booksellers, don’t go into mourning or anything, I’m still buying, just not in that kind of bulk quantity.

I had time to visit the Holocaust Museum and then Gettysburg on my way back but neither of those are remotely medieval. Instead, for those of you attending Kalamazoo for the first time, I’ll point you to my pre-2012 post which includes some tips and links to more comprehensive, earlier comments. As usual, there are a couple of significant edits. First, Wi-Fi was available in most of the dorm rooms last year and the snack bar in Schneider was open through Saturday. Not to say that the selection is great but you can ingest calories.

Of course if you want to read more than you could ever want, there’s my main Kalamazoo page which has quite a few posts covering the last three years.

Hopefully I’ll get back to more regular posting soon but no promises. Things are a bit crazy right now, though it’s a good sort of crazy.

 

I Could Never Give a History Paper

I’ve attended enough Medieval Conferences by now, mostly Kalamazoo but occasionally others, to recognize that papers given at these conferences are very different from those I deliver. In fact, what I do would not be considered giving a paper at all but making a presentation.

I’m a pretty decent presenter. When I know my topic I can get on a roll. I use a lot of humor, usually try to throw up some entertaining images and try to keep people engaged. Bill Caraher posted some advice on giving papers which shows me how very far off base I would be and why I have always, when asked (yes, it has happened) if I’d be interested in giving a paper at Kalamazoo, I have said no. My explanation has traditionally been that this is vacation for me and that sounds like work and while that’s a bit of it, of equal or greater importance is due to my knowing that my paper wouldn’t be very good.

Part of this is that for the most part when I present, I’m not delivering an argument to a group of my peers but providing information to people who are less knowledgeable about something. Occasionally this will include detailed concepts, for example in discussing guidelines for developing emergency management capacity within a community to care for animals during a disaster (math combined with a hazard analysis here), but keeping it entertaining, not entertaining through argument, is one of my goals. I’ll echo one statement of his as it’s a peeve of mine. I don’t care what the purpose of your presentation/paper is; NEVER read from your powerpoint. If you’re going to do that you might as well just give each of us a copy and save everyone some time.

Yes, it’s true – I use this image when I give talks about the value of planning (more specifically about what can happen when you fail to plan).

I’ve gotten decent at evaluating the historical arguments of others when I make sure I pay close attention. But constructing an argument myself? I am not trained in doing that and wouldn’t dream of trying to present one to a group of trained historians. I’ll stick to trying to figure out what others are saying and now and then explain why I think an aspect of history is interesting, fun and exciting. That much I can handle.

My apologies for my recent lack of activity. Another period of being absolutely swamped. I have another ten days or so of the same and then it looks as if I’ll have a bit more time.

 

Repost: Marginalia; An Online Review Journal

There may be a way to do a full repost in WordPress but evidently I haven’t figured it out yet(I knew how in Blogger). Anyway, I read this on The Heroic Age and thought it sounded excellent. Then I clicked on the link for the current issue and thought it was even better. Thanks to Larry Swain for the original post.

Marginalia

Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to proudly announce the launch of Marginalia: A Review of Books in History, Theology and Religion. As publicity assistant to the Editorial Board at Marginalia, I would be grateful if you could pass along this notification to your institution’s press department and / or mailing list, as it will doubtless be of immense interest to students and academics across the disciplines of history, theology and religion. I also attach our latest press release.

Marginalia is an international review of academic literature from a range of disciplines along the nexus of history, theology and religion, providing timely, open-access reviews of the highest scholarly calibre. We hope to raise the standard of the academic book review, publishing only the most incisive and thoughtful reviews. Reviewers should expect their reviews in Marginalia to be easily discoverable by Google and other search engines, and so to have more visibility and accessibility than in some traditional print-based journals. We encourage reviewers to give careful thought not only to the content but also to the presentation of the review, and hope to see the academic review in theology and religion move closer to the standard of the Times Literary Supplement or the New York Review of Books.

Since Marginalia is a wholly devoted to the review of academic literature, we would also like to make a call for future contributions, the guidelines for which can be found here.

Finally, a walk-through of the website and introductions to our fine editorial board can be found on our Youtube channel.

 

Reading Christianity Interregnum Number 1: Yup, I was wrong

This isn’t much of an admission as I’m frequently wrong. However in this case I have achieved two different levels of wrongness. One is that what I knew ain’t so. I’m OK with this. I even made a subtle reference to this when I started a concerted effort to learn more about early Christianity. I’m accustomed to wrongness when it comes to history. If I knew everything that would take the fun out of it. I’ll get to that part of the post in a minute.

From a blogging perspective I’ve also been wrong. In my opening Apocrypha post on The Acts of Peter I included several qualifiers. However I left out an essential one. In order to truly study Apocrypha, they should first be examined separate from other evidence. I’ve mentioned before that something I read in Guy Halsall’s Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568 had a large influence on me. This particular passage emphasized the need for each piece of historical evidence to be examined on its own terms, without consideration of or being influenced by other evidence. Only then should you begin to compare and contrast it with other evidence.

I knew this when I started my Acts of Peter post but neglected to mention it. From a historical methodology perspective, how I made, and will continue to make, my Apocrypha posts is wrong. In each of those posts I deliberately compared and contrasted the apocryphal accounts with canonical texts as well as what came to be viewed as Orthodox Christian belief. I’m not going to apologize for this. One of the goals of blogging is to make posts interesting and one way to do this is to relate what I post about to something the reader will be familiar with. These posts are targeted for those of you who have not extensively read up on Apocrypha to try to help you learn a bit about them and, possibly, read up on a few yourself. Most of you will be familiar with the New Testament canon and Orthodox Christianity to some extent. I also enjoy relating things I learn which surprise me and the content of some of the Apocrypha does this, quite often when I think of how different what they say is from Orthodoxy (or what would become Orthodoxy). I have and will continue to compare and contrast Apocrypha with Orthodoxy and Canonical Scripture; I think it makes the posts more interesting. However I should have included this qualifier in my initial post.

Now to return to my first, and less objectionable, level of wrongness. One of the reasons I wrote that massive Early Christianity Reading post was so I could recall what I thought when I started this and hold myself accountable for areas where what I believed initially was incorrect. In this case, I’m going to focus on this statement from that post:

Prior to 300 the Church, starting out as an underground sect of a minority religion, was a collection of fairly loosely organized, related groups geographically located primarily in urban clusters throughout the Empire. While most of these clusters did communicate with one another, the lack of any sort of rigid social structure and hierarchy meant that Christian worship looked very different from one place to another, a situation which would cause a great deal of conflict later.

This is either wrong, or woefully incomplete.

The implication from this statement is that of a common, shared beginning for Christianity. From an inspirational perspective this is very broadly true. Any group which might be considered Christian – believing in a divine or divinely-inspired Jesus – had as its origins the life of Jesus. Or what they believed about the life of Jesus. The problem is that in a fragmented society 2000 years ago, the various beliefs about the life of Jesus and what it meant were so diverse as to be virtually unrelated. To illustrates this, in one belief system Jesus is God who suffered and died for the sins of mankind while in another Christ is a divine spirit who never physically existed on Earth and in fact is seen disembodied and laughing during the crucifixion. And it’s become apparent to me that these non-Orthodox belief systems did not necessarily develop as offshoots of what would become mainstream Christianity (the Pauline-Clement-Ignatius-Polycarp-Irenaeus-Origen tradition) but originated on their own based on very different stories of, and/or understanding of what those stories meant, regarding Jesus’ life. These were often parallel, unrelated developments. We’re not left with a single trunk of a tree with multiple branches but with several trees, most of which later died (and many of these trees developed their own branches which in some cases later merged with the mainstream tree).

The situation from my initial post did exist. Groups which started out in the “proto-Orthodox” camp may have developed different belief systems partly due to geographic distance and a lack of organizational coherence. But it’s far from the whole, much more complex, story. Various groups, some of which I intend to talk about in future posts, appear to have originated independent of mainstream (or what would become mainstream) influence. Some of these derived their inspiration, or at least part of it, from non-canonical texts which may have been written as early as the Gospel accounts or even Paul’s letters. Other groups based their belief systems on different interpretations of Canonical texts. Some used a combination of the two. Then you have other factors such as existing belief systems, outside influences, contemporary local situations that can often only be hypothesized – I could go on. The origin of Early Christian thought is a complex and diverse topic. And very interesting. There’s a reason I’m spending far more time on this than I originally thought I would.

I’ve also allowed myself to forget one additional caution from my Influential Books Post. Chris Wickham in Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 talks about the need to examine developments on a local geographic basis rather than making broad statements such as I did above. This gets very difficult as the surviving evidence for how various geographic areas developed Christian thought, at least through the third century, isn’t very good. However research in Early Christianity has started to increasingly focus on epigraphic evidence (inscriptions). These survive more frequently than texts and were less susceptible to later redactions, burning (didn’t happen as often as some folks think but it did happen), or simply a failure to copy them so that they survived.

This is good as I’ve learned something important – essential really – about Early Christianity. I’ll expand on these origins as I make additional posts but I wanted to throw in this addition to my initial set of qualifiers and it serves as a nice opportunity to talk about something I’ve learned.

Halsall, Guy, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2008). ISBN: 9-780521-435437.

Wickham, Chris, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2006). ISBN: 9-780199-212965.

 

That Dead Richard III Fellow in a Parking Lot

Or Car Park, whatever that is exactly.

I wasn’t going to post on Richard III. What do I know about him other than that the date of his death has sometimes been used, erroneously, as the dividing line between the Medieval and Early-Modern periods? 1 He’s 800-1200 years later than my period and other than knowing Laura Blanchard, former head of the US branch of the Richard III Society(shameless name-dropping here), from usenet I have next to nothing to offer. But there’s just too much entertainment going on with this and I want to get in on the fun.

The kicker was when I started asking myself, “What does this discovery tell us, historically?” I mean, yeah, his bones have been found so you can confirm he’s dead but since he was born 560 years ago I think we knew that already, without physical proof.

Richard III is ALL dead, unlike the middle guy in this picture

OK, his skeleton shows a spinal curvature but not so much as to call him a hunchback but from what I’ve read on him (admittedly not much) historians had pretty much figured out that he wasn’t the withered cripple portrayed by Shakespeare. It would have been tough for a guy who was that messed up to have ridden into battle and almost gotten within striking distance of Henry Tudor.

 Richard III, portrayed on stage by Steven Weingartner. As he died in his early 30′s, based on this picture he must have led a hard life.

His height was about 5’8″ which doesn’t make him a giant but does put him above average for the period. I think the analysis of his bones to determine his diet is interesting but mostly confirms what everyone already knows; that kings ate better (if by better we mean a diet higher in total calories and saturated fats) than the bulk of the population.

His remains showed that he died violently. Not quite the dream of dying in bed surrounded by grandchildren but far better than Edward II’s (reputed) sorry end. His corpse was somewhat abused after his death and unceremoniously buried. Again, this could have been worse; at least pieces of his body weren’t sent to various places to be hung on posts which has been known to happen to deposed monarchs. It confirms that his body wasn’t thrown in a river but from my limited reading, all this seems to have been deduced by historians already.

It doesn’t shed any light on what happened to the princes in the tower, or explain why, if he didn’t kill them, he didn’t parade them around to demonstrate his innocence when rumors of their deaths started to circulate. It doesn’t tell what kind of man he was, how he was viewed publicly, or much of anything that people didn’t already know. But it has provided a great deal of humor, as the links at the bottom of this post by Historian on the Edge indicate. Katy Meyers at Bones Don’t Lie has one of the funny car park images in a recent post. I’ve seen others and won’t post them here though I think my favorite is the one of the reenactors at the site with a dialogue script, “I think we left him around here somewhere.”

And I can’t believe nobody’s done this yet (maybe they have but I haven’t run across it) so I’ll present my own offering:
For want of a nail …
I had to find a new place to park my car which made me late for work so you see why this really shouldn’t go on my performance evaluation, right?

The most significant aspect of the find, to me, is that it creates interest in the period, in history, in how the Tudors demonized Richard III to legitimize their claim, and in how Shakespeare picked up on this a century later and thought it would make a cool play. This find may result in a new movie about him. We’ll have to see if it’s historical, historically based, or ends up being something which, other than using his name, is so distanced from reality as to only be incidentally related to history. Whatever it does, it’ll need to fill seats.

There are all kinds of uses of this including showing what archaeology can and can’t do, providing a further example of how care needs to be used in interpreting sources (what’s nice in this case is that the examples are so obvious which provides a good teaching point for beginners – and then you can compare this with more subtle examples). But from a historical perspective re adding to what was already known, I’m not seeing a lot. Still, it’s interesting and people are having a bit of fun with it.

1 OK, maybe 1485 makes as much sense as any other date. I’ve commonly gone with 1517 and Martin Luther nailing some complaints against The Church on the door of a church in Wittenberg (or not doing so since said nailing is in question). Any of these arbitrary dates are mostly useful as discussion points. I’ve just tended to date my Medieval period as from 312 to 1517 as an era of a single Christian religious institution which was, IMO, the most influential social movement of the era. Of course Christianity really didn’t become the official religion until 380 and it was another decade or so before Luther’s movement resulted in another church – I’ve gone with the symbolic rather than the actual here. And now I’m arguing with myself. In a footnote.

 

2013 Congress Registration Up and Book Buying II

I really must update my Book Buying Posts. I’ve made way more than two of these but didn’t decide to number them until recently.

In any case, the first part of this post is to mention that the online registration for the 2013 International Congress on Medieval Studies to be held May 9-12 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is now open. And yes, I was almost weepy when I saw this. Chances are good I won’t make it this year. I won’t know for sure until April and my attendance is possible, but unlikely. Still, I’ve had a run of 4 years straight, the best I’ve done since I started attending back in 2001.

In order to make this up to myself I just bought six books from an Oxford University Press Sale. Only one of those was something I’d previously wishlisted but I bought all of them at 50% or 65% off. Not bad.

Here’s the list:

• Architects of Piety: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Cult of the Martyrs by Vasiliki Limberis (this was my wishlisted book)
  
• Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium by Bart D. Ehrman
  
• Foreign Cults in Rome: Creating a Roman Empire by Eric Orlin
  
• The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 C.E. – 350 C.E.: Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context by Marc Hirshman
  
• The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy by Paul F. Bradshaw
  
• Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity by Shelly Matthews
  

My version of comfort food.

 

Tales From Apocrypha 2: The Acts of Andrew or When Christianity Goes Off the Rails

Some Apocrypha, such as The Acts of Peter, are just plain good stories. Others show a very different form of Early Christianity, what came to be known as heresy. And then there are those which were likely considered Orthodox (or trending toward what would become Orthodox) but while reading it I came across something which made me say, “What the wha-huh?” Or something like that. The Acts of Andrew(AA) is in this last category.

Based on Schneemelcher and Wilson(2003), The AA was likely composed around 150 in the Eastern Empire. It isn’t exactly a heretical text but was used by some groups such as the Manichaeans and Priscillianists due to its extreme asceticism and hints of dualism. Various folks were uneasy about its use including, eventually, the Decretum Gelasianum (ca. 492-96) where it is listed as banned due to its use by heretics. Despite this, it appears to have been popular and survives in several texts and Gregory of Tours included a heavily edited version in his Liber de miraculis (one of his books which I don’t have). Schneemelcher and Wilson(2003) use several texts to complete the story, including Andrew’s Martyrdom from the Passio Andreae. 1

In addition to heretical tendencies (or at least being the sort of book heretics thought they could use) it appears heavily influenced by Classical themes. In particular Andrew’s death resembles that of Socrates as he was visited by various friends and acquaintances and had conversations with them before he was crucified.

Statue of St. Andrew in Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The bulk of the AA takes place in Patra, Greece. Through his preaching in the city Andrew has converted Maximilla, the wife of the proconsul Aegeates. And not just converted; Maximilla has vowed to never again have sex which Andrew calls “a polluted and foul way of life.” 2 Unsurprisingly, Aegeates is angered by this and pleads with her to change her mind but Andrew meets with her regularly and urges her to stay strong and pure.

(from this point forward I’m recounting from the Passio Andreae)

So far so good. A married person withdrawing from the marriage bed is pretty far on the ascetic side of Christianity and not something the Church generally approved of but it’s not unheard of. Various passages of scripture such as Matthew 19:6, “Therefore what God has joined let no man separate” and 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 where Paul says, “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.” and, “Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set of time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again” support the idea that sex is a part of marriage and one in which each person was expected to participate. I believe that Gratian was the first to formally codify this, in the 12th century, but it was in effect long before that. However, though leaving an unwilling husband (or, more rarely, a wife) to pursue an ascetic lifestyle is at the edge of mainstream, it is sometimes found in Medieval literature, including hagiography.

However Aegeates is a powerful man, used to having his way, and isn’t about to give up easily. So Maximilla, helped by generous bribery, talks her maidservant, Eucleia, into sharing her husband’s bed and he (the AA doesn’t explain exactly how but the inference is that this is God’s will acting through Andrew) never realizes that this isn’t his wife. This goes on for eight months until Eucleia gets greedy, starts asking Maximilla for ever-increasing gifts, and brags to her fellow servants about who she’s spending her nights with.

However, “Maximilla, thinking that Eucleia was not gossipy but faithful because of the gifts she had given her …” (faithful seems a strange term to use considering she’s been shacking up with someone else’s husband for the better part of a year) is unaware that her plan is about to fall apart. 3 She returns to her home and is seized by some of the servants who threaten to expose the plot. Maximilla gives a thousand denarii to each slave who promises not to tell her husband about this. Despite this, the slaves tell Aegeates.

As you might expect, he’s not pleased. He tortures Eucleia who tells him everything, “slandering her mistress.” I’m reading this whole thing thinking, she tells him the truth under torture and it’s slander? Well, “As for Eucleia, he cut out her tongue and cut off her hands and feet, ordering that she be cast out and after some days without nourishment she became food for the dogs.” 4 Following this he returns to pleading with Maximilla to return to him. Urged on by Andrew, she refuses and Aegeates has the apostle thrown in prison.

Maximilla continues to visit Andrew every day and he urges her to continue as she has begun, “Let it be yours henceforth to keep yourself chaste, pure, holy, undefiled, sincere, free from adultery, unwilling for intercourse with the alien, unbent, unbroken.” 5 The remainder of the narrative is predictable. Aegeates, not getting his wife back, eventually crucifies Andrew (though Andrew does have an interesting conversation with the cross as if it were a person). Meanwhile Maximilla is called “pure,” “undefiled,” “holy” and “… supplied with the blessed love of Christ.” 6

So I’m reading this narrative thinking to myself, Is this for real? Seriously, even if asceticism is a good thing, how does Maximilla, and by proxy Andrew, come off good in this? Let’s list the transgressions:

1. Breaking the marital bond.
2. Lying and deception, and for eight months.
3. Prostitution (not sure what else to call Maximilla giving buckets of gifts to Eucleia to persuade her have sex with Aegeates)
4. Adultery – and a double whammy here as Maximilla fools her husband into being an unwitting adulterer and pays Eucleia to be an adulteress.
5. Bribery (in order not to get caught in a lie)
6. Responsible for Eucleia’s death – indirectly at least – and not a very pleasant one.

And so, IMO, this is an example where Christianity tried to go “out there”, well beyond what could be justified, even in the pursuit of asceticism. Some of this story strikes me as absurd. In the previous quote Andrew tells her to remain free from adultery but apparently it was OK for her to turn two other people into adulterers. This “pure” individual pays someone to have sex with her husband. With all this, the text continued to be used though there are versions without some of the more explicit details. In any case, I do not see how any group, whatever their belief system or values they tried to promote, could view the actions of Maximilla and Andrew as positive.

1 This is footnoted in Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003) as from, “Ed. Th. Detorakis, Acts of the Second International Congress of Peloponnesian Studies I, Athens 1981/2, 325-52.

2 From the Codex Vaticanus 808 version of The Acts of Andrew 5 in Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003).

3 Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003), from the Detorakis edition of AA, p 140 – this edition isn’t broken into chapters.

4 Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003), from the Detorakis edition of AA, p 141.

5 Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003), from the Detorakis edition of AA, p 145.

6 Schneelmacher and Wilson (2003), from the Detorakis edition of AA, p 151.

Coogan, Michael D., ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Edition With the Apocrypha, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2010). ISBN:9-780-195-28955-8.

Schneemelcher, Wilhelm and Wilson, R. McL., eds., New Testament Apocrypha Volume Two: Writings Related to the Apostles; Apocalypses and Related Subjects, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press (2003). ISBN:9780664227227.