Inversion and Convergence in the Formation of the Early Modern Witch Cult: A Construction and Deconstruction of Binary Opposition

Because it's October, and Hallowe'en is just a few weeks away, I think this would be the perfect month to post another series of writings on witchcraft. As many of you may know, I'm mildly obsessed with the history of witchcraft. My graduate writing sample, which has been posted here previously, was a comparison of the legal status of witchcraft and astrology in Western Europe between 1400 and 16oo and I am currently enrolled in a class on the social history of witchcraft in a global setting (primarily the greater Atlantic world). It's been just extraordinary so far, reinforcing the knowledge I had prior to enrollment in this course and clearing away a lot of erroneous information I had on the topic. In general, this class has elucidated for me just how complex witchcraft was and that it doesn't fit into too many molds that we as moderns can foist upon the past. I think I had a common misconception of witches entering this class: that they were simple scapegoats of society, upon whom any problem could be blamed, especially those problems that had no easily identifiable culprit (bad weather, dying crops, etc.); that this was an attempt by oligarchic male authorities to keep women in their socio-economic places; that witchcraft manuals such the Malleus Maleficarum were the most important factor in the identification, prosecution, and execution of a witch, and so on. But at least from what we've read in class, these seem to be the cases in some circumstances, but not in many others. For one thing, most of what I had read prior to this class focused mainly on the elite conceptions of witchcraft at the expense of what common people actually believed. I also, perhaps, focused a but too much on witchcraft as only a crime, when in fact many women (from folk-healers to simple charmers) actually believed themselves to have the power that they were later accused of. In any case, over the next month, leading up to Hallowe'en, I plan on writing five or six posts, based on the writings I've done in this class on various aspects of witchcraft such as the construction of the belief in early modern witch-cults, the structure of witchcraft accusations amidst the backdrop of the Reformation, the concept of inversions and subversions of societal norms versus the scapegoating instinct or "othering," gender as a causal factor, why the witch hunts subsided, and why European ideas jumped the pond to New England. Since these are modified versions of what I wrote in class, they might occasionally not make too much sense without the context. These are largely historiographical writings, critiquing and analyzing historians and their own writings on witchcraft. I'll try to include at least some hyperlinks that clarify where these historians stand on the issues on which they comment. So, here's the first of a few posts on various aspects of witchcraft in world history:

Perhaps the most contentious issue in the historiography of witchcraft is the question of its origins, and it is impossible to discuss these origins without examining the notion of the witch cult in both its elite and peasant conceptions. This dichotomous relationship is key to understanding how the persecutions unfolded. The literate, ecclesiastically and judicially powerful elite, beginning in the late fifteenth century and culminating in the most intense persecutions between 1570 and 1630, envisaged witchcraft primarily as a crime against God and the Church. It began with a pact with the devil, included a subversive sabbat and a denial of the Christian faith, and gave the witches, through the devil, a variety of maleficent magical powers. However, for the average non-literate peasant in late medieval and early modern Europe, the witch inhabited a very different reality. Peasants, among whom the vast majority of witches were to be found, were far more distressed by the practical harm that could befall them if witches succeeded in conducting this magic, and the origins of this power were of little concern compared with the need to stop it. Thematically, Simpson, Midelfort, Clark, Pócs and Ginzburg emphasize the importance of these oppositional models in constructing a dynamic view of the relationship between a witch and society. For some, it is a merger of these schemas that produced a cohesive premise upon which elites and peasants could agree. For others, it is the differentiation and edification of these binary oppositions that constitute the raison d’être for persecutions in the consciousness of both elite and peasant classes.

This begs several questions. When persecutions started from below and were initiated by peasant communities, how important was the witches’ sabbat at all in identifying and demonizing a witch? Conversely, when the elite authorities were at the helm, how did peasants respond to the idea of a sabbat? Did they respond at all? Each scholar comes to distinct conclusions. I will argue that the structuralist theory of binary opposition—demonstrated especially by the peasant/elite, social/antisocial, order/disorder, and Christian/un-Christian dichotomies—serves as a mold for understanding the subversive and antagonistic models in which witches were situated. In considering this oppositional nature of the witch, the aforementioned scholars have constructed the idea of the witch by defining and delineating these oppositions or by deconstructing and merging them entirely.

The dichotomy of peasant versus elite conceptions of witchcraft and the existence of a witch cult is best evinced by the sabbat. Sabbats included promiscuous and indiscriminant copulation with other witches and the devil himself as well as a wide range of other reprehensible activities regarded as perversions of the Christian faith. The sabbat, along with the pact with the devil, formed the backbone of the heretical harassment that defined authoritarian witch hunting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, according to H.C. Erik Midelfort, most peasants in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, where the largest witch persecutions occurred, had no conception of the sabbat, the pact with the devil, or any other activities designating a witch in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities. He contends that the lay populace had to be coerced into believing that these were legitimate threats. The peasant population regarded witchcraft as a communal crime since the witch, through acts like crop destruction and weather manipulation, disrupted the shared life of the community. With authoritative input from the elites, witchcraft was oppositionally reconstructed as a solitary offense against God and by association the Church—the better to track down and single out individuals for the crime. In a sense, these authorities made the terrestrial witch phantasmagorical by inserting demonological elements into common witch cult structure. Éva Pócs, by contrast, disagrees and argues that peasants, at least in Hungary, did have a notion of the witches’ sabbat independent of these authorities, though it was decidedly different. Here, if the persecutors had an impact, it was in converting the phantasmagorical, which for the peasant was the “alternate world” of the witches’ sabbat existing in another dimension, into a dangerously real terrestrial occurrence. In both cases, we see oppositional models tuned on their heads in order to merge what were heretofore incompatible visions.

Stuart Clark addresses this chaotic restructuring directly and is the most binary in his construction of the witch cult. He sees the inversion of social norms and the idea of “misrule” or “disorderly behavior” on the part of the witch at the very heart of the witch cult. For Clark, the elite understanding of the sabbat assigned to witches certain ideals diametrically opposed to the Church and Christian faith, and the idea of the witches as demon-worshiping, illicit magic using criminals served to define them as and confine them to the out-group of society. Witch cults were not “bad” because they somehow subverted society but because they supplied an exact reflection in reverse of how a healthy Christian society should function. Thomas Aquinas had centuries earlier addressed the problem of evil in a similar fashion by affirming that evil exists because without it, good would have no reason to assert itself. Clark points to the prefiguring of a witches’ apostasy in the religious example of demons themselves, who in the Christian tradition are fallen angels. And, as an historical example contemporaneous with the height of the witch hunts, he cites James I of England, who remarked that to understand something, one must first understand its opposite. This is not simply a “know-thy-enemy” mentality but an interpretation of the evil of the witch cult as anything diametrically opposed to the supreme good as displayed by the Christian religion, the Church, and the elite secular powers.

Even Margaret Murray, whose scholarship is rightly questioned, emphasized that since witches were accused of causing impotence and destroying crops, this must be an inversion of what were once the opposite rites of a fertility cult. Jacqueline Simpson plays devil’s advocate to an extent and argues that the much maligned Murray, despite her failings as a scholar, attempted to form a middle ground in early twentieth century witchcraft historiography by reconciling the credulous religious viewpoint that the supernatural witch cult was a reality with the skeptical rationalist denial of its existence at all. These uncritical supernaturalists tended to accept the statements and records of prosecutorial authorities at face value. This included the Reverend Montague Summers, an English translator of the Malleus Maleficarum, who by and large believed the very words he was translating represented an accurate account of the witchcraft culture on which it commented. By asserting that witches did engage in religious acts harkening back to an ancient fertility cult but that these acts were not in any way supernatural, Murray attempted to understand this inversion as evidence of a widespread European witch cult dating back to ancient times. Murray contends that the crimes of witches—causing impotence, the destruction of crops, the conjuring of bad weather—were really inversions of their true intention in these fertility cults.

A post-structuralist might ask where this opposition contravenes itself and important questions certainly arise with this model. If Clark’s misrule can be considered a “mockery” or “parody” and necessary to reaffirm the existing social structure, why did witchcraft take on such a heinous form rather than a more benign festival of inversion like Saturnalia in which Roman masters served their slaves? Clark contends that misrule strengthens or subtly protests a social structure; therefore, the power structure in late medieval and early modern Europe must have been especially well established and inflexible. Ginzburg offers a more deconstructionist interpretation of these oppositions and demonstrates a major contradiction in this idea of inversion: it has explanatory power only insofar as the elite viewpoint is concerned because many of those involved in perceived witch cult activities regarded themselves as acting on behalf of Christ. Like Pócs, Ginzburg stresses that it was the elite process of merging extant peasant practices with preconceived notions of the witch cult and sabbat that created a homogeneous prosecutorial classification. For Ginzburg, this amalgamation of ideas is best epitomized by the benandanti, an agricultural fertility cult in Friuli, Italy, who regarded themselves not as an inversion of the social norm but as a weapon on the side of Christianity against the evil forces of witchcraft. It would take the Inquisition to conflate the benandanti’s own concept of a “night battle” with that of the sabbat and thus equate them with the very evil they were attempting to exterminate.

Pócs and Ginzburg, however, fall into Murray’s trap of selective narrative and they both rely too heavily on narrow case studies to demonstrate any pan-European explanation of why witch cults represent either inversions of social norms or conflations of elite and peasant ideas. Pócs’ thesis may be true of Hungary in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and Ginzburg’s of Friuli during the height of the witch craze, but they both examine only a microcosm of witchcraft beliefs. Clark is more a literary critic than a documentary historian, and his inflexible division of witchcraft into black and white bifurcations obscures and disregards its dynamic complexities. Midelfort is more promising if only because his thesis rests on a study of the geographic locus of the largest persecutions. In any case, the exploration of the meaning of the witch cult in terms of the construction and deconstruction of binary oppositions is a hardy formula for understanding the inversions and mergers of it ever changing nature.

Potential Paper Topics

I thought I'd go ahead and throw out some paper topics that have been rattling around in my mind for the past few weeks. One of the biggest differences between being an undergraduate and being a graduate student is in the amount of writing that is required of you. In sense, we have less writing, considering that we have fewer total papers to write than undergrads, but of course the papers that we are required to write are thirty, forty, fifty pages, not counting the thesis, which we are theoretically supposed to be working sporadically on for the next two years. The big project for my historiography class is a paper comparing the differences in method, theory, and approach to historical writing of two historians, examining especially how their own historical time periods shaped them and how their biases or their their time periods' biases shine through in their works. Our professor encourages any historical comparisons, but the idea of the project is to compare a historian that we've actually read in class with someone in whom we're personally interested. He also advocates choosing historians that belong to different historical eras and different nationalities as this highlights national as well as periodizational comparisons. In any case, most of the class seems to have settled on a topic and while I haven't exactly, I have a couple of ideas that I feel merit further exploration:

A Jungian Analysis of the Archetypal Hero in Eusebius' Life of Constantine and Einhard's Life of Charlemagne

To me, Eusebius and Einhard, though they don't demarcate any bookends in terms of historical writing, both write about figures who did bookend a historical period that truly demonstrates the emergence and culmination of the Christian Romano-German synthesis and the creation of a distinct European culture. Eusebius certainly belongs to the ancient world even if he was a Christian writing for a primarily Christian audience, and, like Augustine and Jerome, he certainly bridges the gap between ancient and medieval: he relies on the rhetorical style of writers like Cicero but is philosophically grounded in Christian thought (though, interestingly, he held a moderate position between Orthodox and Arian Christianities). Einhard is certainly a typical medieval chronicler but by virtue of his proximity to the Emperor Charlemagne, he had recourse to write about a man who was arguably the most powerful Christian ruler on the Continent since Constantine. Many scholars, Henri Pirenne, Alouis Reigl, and notably the inimitable Peter Brown, have remarked that the tripartite periodization of European history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras is obviously simplistic and does not account for the transitional politico-religious realignments, but replacing these ossified categories is a difficult task even for the most of eminent of historians. Brown argues for the use of a "bridging" period between the 2nd century imperial crises and the Islamic conquests through the 8th century. Norman Davies, in his monumental general history Europe divides the ancient (Roma) and medieval (Medium) periods with his Origio on the cultural birth of Western civilization rising from the ashes of the Greco-Roman world, and it is telling that he dates this period from 330 (the founding of Constantinople) to 800 (the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor). In any case, politically, Constantine and Charlemagne provide convenient markers on either side of the "late antique divide" that one could point to as cohesive Christian polities unifying vast culturally and ethnically diverse landscapes, the latter consciously modeling on the former. In terms of the historians who wrote on these figures, I'm interested in looking at the archetypal models on which Eusebius and Einhard based their "characters" of Constantine and Charlemagne and whether or not, for example, they used Biblical precedent and/or the ancient Greco-Roman biographers of the kings, consuls, and Caesars (Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc.) Since Jung himself compared the idea of "archetypes of the collective unconscious" to the Platonic world of forms, it seems fruitful to also examine the impact of Platonic thought on these compositions, especially because Eusebius was likely familiar with his work and Einhard was not (I'm actually not sure of this supposition; it's just an educated guess).

Pirenne and Brown: The Problem of Periodization in Late Antique and Early Medieval Historiography

Following the aforementioned difficulty in historiographical periodization, another related topic which very much interests me is that of the origins of the Middle Ages. This may strike any casual reader as a purely academic debate (and it is), but it is certainly important from a historiographical standpoint insofar as it is the in this period that what think of as Western civilization is really born--a messy combination of Roman law and institutions, Germanic and Latin-based languages, Germanic customs, and the Christian religion. The traditional date for the beginning of the Middle Ages is often marked as 476, the year of the deposition of the ironically named Romulus Augustulus and the end of the Roman Empire as completely independent from Germanic kings. In most general history books, the Middle Ages typically starts ca. 500 because it is a nice round number and because the year 500 in much of Europe is certainly quite different politically from the year 400 or any other "round number" from this era. Two historians have been at the forefront--one in early 20th century and one in mid to late 20th century--of a movement to change this traditional view. Brown, who I have mentioned, is among the popularizers of the "Late Antquity" model, positing a distinctly different time period between the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the Islamic conquests and reorganization of Europe into feudal kingdoms. Pirenne, who wrote earlier, was among the first historians to really challenge the 18th and 19th century enlightenment/positivist viewpoint of the Middle Ages as a dark time in Western history with little to no progress of any sort. The famous Pirenne thesis argues that the true beginning of the Middle Ages is not until the late 8th century after the Islamic conquest of the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia cut off Europe from the major trade routes of the Mediterranean, and Pirenne gives ample evidence of continued trade throught the 6th and 7th centuries when merchants and traders saw their life change little and in some instances may have actually seen improvement. Both these points of view are endlessly debated and considering that both these historians challenge long held tenants of Western historiography, I think a comparison of their approaches to defining the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval would be interesting.

The Church and Science: Late Twentieth Century Reassessments of the Draper-White Conflict Thesis of Medieval Science

This is the paper I'm currently leaning towards. This is a topic that has really driven my historical interest in the Middle Ages for the last couple of years, and I think it is among the most current and important modern issues in the historiography of science. I've written about the debate elsewhere and won't get into the details. Suffice to say, from a historiographical standpoint, this debate is very applicable to our current cultural climate where science and religion are pitted against one another as mortal enemies. The 19th century in general is such a bipolar age with regards to this topic in that the century saw both the rise of secular education and the belief, especially among European intellectuals, that empirical rationalism would soon supplant religious faith. It is also important to note that the late 19th century also witnessed the birth of Christian fundamentalism as we know it today. Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper both wrote of the great war raging between science and religion and of the modern triumph of enlightenment ideas over the superstition of the Middle Ages. It would take nearly a century for modern historians such as David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers to really argue against this viewpoint. It is certainly still very much popularly believed to be the case today. If I do end up writing on this topic, I'll be sure to post my research.

On Organizing a Personal Library

"Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one."

~Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, "Book Buying"

Despite the fact that I have been reading regularly since I was five or six and have been collecting books since I was at least a sophomore in college, I have never really sat down to organize my library or really put much thought at all in to how I arrange my books. Up till now, it's mostly been an issue of aesthetics, arranging books based on how well they looked on a particular shelf in a particular room; or on logistics, fitting an ever growing number of books onto ever shrinking shelf space. This may surprise some people since I tend to be a compulsive list-maker and categorizer, but I am, in general, an unorganized person, so developing a really well-planned-out library has never been at the top of my to-do list. It's been nearly three years since I have had all of my books in one location, and even when I did have them all together at my parents' house, the structure of the house was not terribly conducive to getting all of them in one place and shelving them on the basis of subject. Unfortunately, I was not able (nor really willing) to transport all of my collection from Indiana to South Carolina and ended up bringing down a little over a third of the books I own. I haven't been so anal as to count every book I own in two or three years, but at last count I had just short of 1600 and I'm sure I've accumulated at least another hundred since then. God bless Archives Book Shop and Curious Book Shop in East Lansing for providing me with an inexpensive, relatively wide array of books from which to choose. For obvious reasons, the books that made the cut are primarily non-fiction humanities and social sciences. Some major books left behind include almost my entire science fiction collection, most of my general and classic fiction and poetry, and even a fair amount of history not germane to my focus, such as the many general histories of the United States and World War II now whiling away in storage at my parents' house. It's always a tough decision to make, but after heaving the tenth or eleventh enormous box of books onto and off of the U-Haul I felt vindicated in leaving behind Page Smith's eight volume People's History of the United States and three years worth of Asimov's Science Fiction magazines.

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

So the real question is, how does one arrange a personal library? Using an existing method, such as the Dewey Decimal system or Library of Congress? The way a bookstore would arrange by genre? Or something a little more personal that really underscores my own mental arrangement of information? I opted for the personal, since I feel a library is at best a material representation of one's education and knowledge base, but with some important advice from the previous tried and true systems. For one thing, it doesn't make too much sense to use, say, the Library of Congress system to the letter when the vast majority of my books fit into only a few of their categories. Something much broader, but also more specifically tailored to my collection is important. I'm probably making this sound like it was a lot bigger an ordeal than it actually was, but I have to admit that I spent a fair amount of time staring a the stacks of books scattered about the floor completely flabbergasted as to how I was going to arrange all of these on the limited bookcases I possess.

"Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money. "
~John Lyly

First off, I essentially eliminated anything that did not fit roughly and broadly into the categories of history, political science, philosophy, religion/mythology/folklore, science (mostly human perspectives on), language, and psychology from the equation. About 95% of all the non-fiction I own can be categorized as such, and I used them as my macro-categories. Anything not in those categories went to the miscellaneous shelf in our bedroom. I arranged philosophy and religion together partially because I think they are (or at least can be) facets of the same inquiry but also because Clemson groups them both into the same academic department and because many of the philosophy books I have are on the philosophy of religion. Mythology and folklore are in the same bookcase buffered by psychology, as most of the psychology books I own pertain to an exploration of the collective unconscious, Jungian and non-Jungian, and the greater sociological factors related to cultural anthropology and group psychology. I have about a shelf's worth of language studies, mostly dictionaries and grammar books for French and Latin, but also a few works in these languages as well as Spanish and Italian dictionaries, a book on defunct ancient writing systems, several histories of the English language, and most of Kirsten's books on speech-language pathology, audiology, and communicative sciences and disorders. Political science was a difficult one to arrange, primarily because I have just enough to justify its having its own section, but not so many that it really distinguishes itself. I opted to include it as sort of an addendum to history, as I see it as related in the way that psychology is related to mythology, but I'm not terribly happy with its location and may change it in the future. History was paradoxically the easiest and the most difficult. It was easy, in that I arranged them chronologically by subject matter, but difficult in that it is by far the largest section and took me a long time to decide how to integrate primary sources and very specific topics that cover long periods of time not related to any particular chronological era (histories of witchcraft and astrology being the primary examples). It was also difficult to decide how I wanted to incorporate ancient and medieval authors. Do I put Plato and Aristotle in with philosophy or ancient history? If ancient history, do I put them in chronologically with all the secondary sources or do I group all ancient writers together in their own subsection? Needless to say, I put a fair amount of thought into what, in reality, are mostly trivial matters.

"Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh."
~Judah Ibn Tibbon

It probably sounds like I have a lot more books than I actually do after going through all of that. As I mentioned earlier, only a fraction of my books made it down from Indiana. I think somewhere slightly over one-third, or between 500 and 600 are here, so I may be a bit overzealous in calling it a "library". But Alcuin of York's library at the court of Charlemagne in the early ninth century, the envy of many a medieval scholar, reputedly had only a few thousand texts and the far flung monasteries at Jarrow and Lindisfarne even fewer and they were no less important to their owners. Perhaps one day when we own a house or at least have a larger study/office/library and I have a stronger back, I'll get all of them in one place finally. For now, I'm pretty content with what we have arranged. And, being in graduate school, I've already accumulated somewhere in the vicinity of thirty new books just in the month we've been here in South Carolina, and I'm sure that number will continue to grow. Happy reading all!

A Poetic Misunderstanding

Poetry is among the oldest arts in all the humanities. The oral culture of our pre-literate ancestors was one in which the most important mythological tales were told through bards who, in order to better facilitate memorization and rhythmic recitation, narrated their tales in meter. The earliest literature from the West and the Near East--the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey--has come down to us in verse, perhaps inextricably bound by what today we call mythopoeia, itself a self-conscious psychological interpretation of archetypes from our own collective unconscious. But the place of poetry in the 21st century, where not only the prose novel but also audio-visual media has lessened the impact of this once hallowed form, is not so highly regarded. Once the mark of an educated man, poetry, even among those of us ensconced in the arts and humanities, holds essentially no place in our curriculum. Since World War I, poetry has atrophied from the consciousness of the educated and is seen now as little more than a hobby or a habit.

However, if there's one area that poetry seems to exist in a particularly purposive way and in an especially decontextualized way, it is in politics. Certain poems, because of their rhythm, language, or form, have a certain ability to invoke inner emotional states that simple language often cannot. But what happens when, after so much decontextualization, after so often hearing the same phrases and words unattached from the themes of their author, that the meaning morphs, not beyond simply what the poet intended (I suspect most poets perfectly understand that the imperfection of language to convey abstract ideas will inevitably lead to their poems being read in ways other than that which they intend), but takes on a new meaning entirely independent from the poem itself. Politicians, and I suspect their critics even more so, make a career from taking things out of context and bending them to the will of their ideologies and political platforms. It is this misunderstanding that I feel has killed poetry far deader than the fickle vicissitudes of modernity.

I spent much of the morning watching Ted Kennedy's memorial service, and it is ineluctable that in the discussion of a Kennedy, whether deferring to the "curse" or not, someone feels the need to quote Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses's final line about striving, seeking, finding, and never yielding, if I may paraphrase, and it is almost always quoted, in the words of David Yezzi, of The Wall Street Journal, as a "buoyant rallying cry." And those who hear these words in this context are most often apt to think of them as such. But, though I am no literary theorist or critic, it bothers me as a fan of this poem, when these lines are uttered in triumph rather than in lament as they, to my mind, are meant to be read. The poem underscores Ulysses' realization that, with age, comes invalidity, decrepitude, and the feeling of uselessness accompanied by a greater understanding of the fragility of life. Tennyson describes Ulysses--who once ruled Ithaca, fought gallantly in the great Trojan War, and braved the Mediterranean Sea for over a decade before returning home--as an "idle king", a "man made weak by time and fate." "How dull it is to pause," Ulysses bemoans, "to make an end, to rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!" reminding us all not of his greatness, but that all greatness, no matter the heights, shall one day succumb to that which fells us all: the unalterable progress of time. The Kennedy's always quoted this poem (especially Robert, but also Teddy) to promote the drive and determination that so defined their political lives. And now, perhaps with Teddy's passing, it can finally take on the authorial intent of introspection into the fate which awaits us all. These themes are not the most romantic in poetry, but as the age of poetry waned, it became a theme all too common amongst her greatest children. T.S. Eliot, perhaps more than others, in his Gerontion and Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, understood that all that shines will one day burn out, the art of poetry included.

Perhaps, as Kirsten mentioned as she leaned over while we watched the service, the Kennedys really were aware of Tennyson's meaning all along and took Ulysses' advice to heart. Perhaps they understood that, with but one life to live, it is in striving and seeking and finding and never yielding that we find most fulfillment in life. And the tragedy that this family has endured has surely imparted to them the lessons of this reality. And that, in the end, when we are at the precipice, weak with age, deteriorated, our halcyon strength behind us, the words and deeds which we bequeath to our younger generations really are "buoyant rallying cries" and, in true Greek fashion from which the myth of Ulysses derives, it is our words and deeds which echo throughout eternity long after we have yielded to time. If Ted Kennedy's words and deeds do this, they may have been quoting Tennyson correctly after all.

The Move to South Carolina and the Clemson Graduate History Program

So, we're finally settled into our new home in South Carolina. The move went swimmingly and we had no snafus along the way. Kirsten and I ended up getting a place in Central, South Carolina, which is about two miles east of Clemson, back towards the Greenville direction. It's in fact no where near centrally located in the state and is called Central because it is exactly halfway between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. The town grew up here because it's right along the railroad line between the two cities. It is fairly small at only a few thousand people, and outside of the downtown area, it seems to be primarily a town for Clemson University upperclassmen and graduate students who commute to school. One other notable tidbit about Central: it's the hometown of Senator Lindsey Graham. So, yeah, there's that, too.

The first week of graduate school hasn't entailed a whole lot just yet. I currently feel like I'm living through the calm before the storm as I have my reading list (22 books long, plus 5 for my TA class, plus thesis research) and am theoretically supposed to start doing some preliminary research for my thesis this semester, which begins in earnest next January. So far, it's mostly been attending meetings and getting acquainted with the faculty, staff, and campus. I am taking three classes this semester, though in a sense one could argue that I'm taking as many as four or as few as two (ah, the grad school factual argumentativeness). I have Historiography, which is essentially a history of history, and this will explore historical methods, modes of historical inquiry, phases through which the idea of history has passed, and how past and present historians have regarded the craft, beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides and wending our way all the way to the 20th century. My "substantive" course is on witchcraft, and considering that I wrote my writing sample for the department, in part, on witchcraft, this felt like a natural choice. I have to admit I was a bit reticent about taking this course because it is taught by an American postmodernist historian of women and gender, and I am neither an American or postmodernist historian. However, after looking at the reading list, at least the first half of the course seems to focus on witchcraft's European origins and tracks its development from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe before it jumps the pond to America. This seems like it is, in a sense, going to be another historiography course, in that the methods and interpretations of witchcraft history will be studied even more than the content of the historical record, but for a topic with such scant historical evidence and even less historical consensus, I think this is a fair approach. The third "course" I have is thesis research, which is entirely independent research I'll do on my own about whatever topic I want my thesis to be on. Since I probably won't sit down with anyone to discuss this in any major way until January, this will be less like taking a class and more like gathering materials I may want to use down the road. Presumably, when I'm not reading and researching for my other two courses, I'll be scouring the library looking for resources for this future project. However, I have no idea yet what I want to write my thesis on (actually, I have several, but don't really know what I'll pick).

The final "course" is the course in which I'm a teaching assistant. It's a freshman level lecture called "The West and the World Part 1" and essentially it's Western Civ. meets world history from prehistory to about the late 17th century. So, this is exactly along my lines of interest, and since TA assignments tend to be random, I'm very lucky to have gotten it. The course looks like it will be, as its name implies, about integrating the traditional study of Western history within the global context and looking at its unfolding comparatively with much of the rest of the world. It's lecture-based (there are about 125 students) and the professor said that almost the entirety of the tests will be based around his notes. My role, along with the other TA, will be primarily supportive: attendance taking, paper and test grading, student advising, running review sessions, etc. So, I'll certainly treat it like a "real" class that I'm taking, in that I'll take notes and read all the books so as to better serve the students. Plus the reading list actually looks very interesting and includes brand new books on, among other things, the formation of the polis in ancient Greece, the most recent archaeological studies on the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the theological, philosophical, and political motivations behind the Gothic cathedral of Chartres.

Although I don't want this blog to turn into a "here's what I did today" type of blog, I think that I might be writing more of that in the coming months as the bulk of my time will be spent with my nose in a book and conducting research, for which this blog may serve as a "rough draft of thoughts" so to speak. Coming soon, I anticipate I'll write about the organization of my library, as it was an ordeal that was much more difficult than I thought it would be, and to bounce a few thesis topics around. And in the slightly more distant future, I will likely post some of my papers or versions/edits of them. So, if you don't like history, now would be the time to stop reading.

The Decline of Scholasticism and the Rise of Humanism: Late Medieval Thought and the Coming Renaissance

That Scholasticism was the primary mode of academic discourse in the medieval university system is an understatement. From the early 12th till at least mid 14th century, it was the only system within which reputable scholars and academics aired their ideas and theories. Just as the Church held a spiritual monopoly over Western Christendom, so too did Scholasticism, combined primarily with Thomist philosophy, hold sway over the scholarly mind, and this entrenchment, over time, led to a gradual erosion of original thinking until by the mid-14th century a serious crisis of stagnation entered Western thought. As we have seen, the "Latin Averroists" along with Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas managed to propel Aristotle to the forefront of the philosophical dialogue, and even though his ascension hit numerous snags along the way (being banned in 1210 and severely restricted in 1231), his preeminence, especially among the Dominican order and its followers, became obvious by mid-century. The inertness of learning did not come about purely because of the rigidity of the Scholastic method so much as by the tyranny exerted over the minds of the period by an authority which was never to be contradicted. Numerous scholars spent decades systematizing and synthesizing Aristotle's works until at last a body of ideas existed that held up both the revealed truths of the Church and the observed truths of nature. But nobody is perfect, and chinks began to appear in The Philosopher's armor as scholars began to find out that the ancient scholar was not always correct and some ideas could still be interpreted, even in spite of the synthesis, as heretical. It became evident that new paths of knowledge had to be explored if any advancement could be made. What was to result over the course of about a century and a half were two dynamically different modes of thought: one which sought to divorce faith and reason and one that brought a more secular and more humanistic approach to Western philosophy.

The status of "mandatory" conferred upon Aristotle in 1255 was to be a short-lived one despite the fact that his works were now readily accessible and nearly sacred in Western Christendom. While Aquinas had been rather reserved in his application of Aristotelian logic to Christian theology, some near contemporary scholars dared to go further, stating that Aristotle's philosophy proved such diverse ideas as the unity of all thought, coalescing in a godhead (such as Siger de Brabant, 1235-1282) and the idea that the individual soul was not immortal but that all souls merged into one upon death (Boetius of Dacia, 1230-1285). The next major test of the Aristotelian corpus came just 22 years later in 1277 when more charges of heresy came up relating to Aristotle's work. However, this time it was not the Philosopher himself, but merely his works that were to be held up for scrutiny. Rather than putting a blanket ban on him, Pope John XXI commissioned the Bishop Etienne Tempiers of Orleans to review Aristotle's writings and bring to his attention any precepts that specifically contradicted the Holy Scriptures. Fortunately for Tempiers, Thomas Aquinas had completed his great compilation of Aristotle fewer than four years prior. In less than six weeks, the bishop brought forth no fewer than 219 propositions which he claimed should be banned. These were taken into consideration by the Pope, and he upheld Tempiers' findings. This prohibition, unlike the one of 1210, would not be as far reaching and ended up applying only to the University of Paris. Many other universities used this to their advantage and several attracted students who would otherwise have gone to Paris, boasting that their university still allowed his teachings. Still, the effect was that some of Aristotle's thoughts would be forever tainted with a brand of heresy and scholars would have to tread into Aristotelian waters at their own risk. And in spite of the ban, the University of Paris continued to be the foremost theological school in Europe. Far from being an inhibition on the minds of medieval scholars, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the hold this philosopher exerted over them began to give way to a more open-ended way to reach new realms of knowledge.

One such way that this new academic freedom led the learned was in the direction of skepticism. This was not so much skepticism in the modern sense as it was in the a skepticism specifically of the entire enterprise of Aristotelian synthesis. Several major thinkers of the late 13th and early 14th century attempted to scrap Aristotle altogether, hearkening back to more Augustinian and Platonic notions of the self, the soul, and the metaphysical nature of the universe. John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), for example, claimed that since the human being was a perfect being made imperfect through sin, we could never truly trust our senses empirically, thus, the only sure path of knowledge was faith in revealed scripture. This did not , as some have suggested, mean that Duns Scotus advocated a complete denial of reason, but that the sphere of reason had no place being used in the arguments raging in the theological arena. This mode of thought was particular to the Francisan order, which found its philosophical inspiration from the likes of Augustine and the Middle Platonists rather than Aristotle and the Averroist, but by the early 14th century, the gap between faith and reason was certainly widening.

It was William of Occam, however, who put together a coherent argument against the use of the Scholastic method, and his critique attempted to completely overturn the technique of linking theological premises through reasoned analysis. Scholasticism had been about plurality--combining multifaceted and disparate ideas into one congruous form. Occam turned this philosophy on its head, stating that "plurality need not be posited without necessity." He viewed all of this reconciliation as unnecessary and posited that Scholastics relied on too many assumptions to link between Aristotle to Scripture. The best theory was the one that required the fewest amount of leaps in logic to validate it. This very simple yet profoundly powerful thesis was an enunciation of what would come to be called "Occam's Razor" or "the law of parsimony." According to Occam, the simplest explanation was always the best one--and of course, for Occam, the simplest explanation for nearly every tenet within the Aristotelian corpus was that God was in control of all action. Occam promoted the idea of the absolute power of God at the expense of almost any other reason-based explanation. This was the greatest affront to Scholasticism in that Scholastics, at their core, believed that one could through reason become closer to God. Occam did not deny the importance of reason, but stated, as Duns Scotus and others had, that it had no place in theology. This is an essential divorce between faith and reason that is still with us to this day, though it would not reach its full peak until the Scientific Revolution. The great irony of Occam's most lasting contribution to philosophy is that, today, the premise of Occam's Razor is often used to disprove the existence of God.

But what of the other direction philosophy was heading during the close of the Middle Ages? For all their differences in opinion, Duns Scotus and Occam, the two most towering figures of the early 14th century, were essentially still working within the Scholastic framework. The modes of thought that would begin developing to the south in Italy, laying the seeds of the Renaissance which would unleash itself upon Europe beginning in the 15th century, were trending in an entirely different direction. Philosophy in general was losing a great deal of consistency in the Later Middle Ages, as it was interrupted by what Barbara Tuchman has called the "calamitous 14th century" which was racked by peasant revolts, religious upheavals, a sharp rise in mysticism, the long and bloody Hundred Year's War, and most of all the Black Plague. The unity of the previous few centuries was long gone and people seemed to seek comfort and consistency in a plethora of areas. What happened in Italy is a subject for another philosophy lecture, but in many ways its roots are firmly planted in the Middle Ages. In terms of philosophy, there is one figure that truly stands out as the early Renaissance champion of a new secular and humanistic outlook on life: Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374).

Petrarch very quickly became disenfranchised by contemporary university professors who insisted on reading the glosses and commentaries of ancient texts as if they were the equal of the original and he complained that the eloquence of the original Latin and Greek (though he knew no Greek) were too muddied and vulgarized by the later writers. By simply asserting that the original texts be held in the highest regard and by demanding access to the unadulterated ones (as much as was possible) Petrarch began the process of rediscovery for which the coming period was named. This was a literal rediscovery: Petrarch became a papal secretary and physically scoured libraries across Europe looking for old and long forgotten texts--and for this, he is thought to be personally responsible for the discovery of no fewer than 10 histories of Livy, several orations of Cicero, and at least one text of Archimedes. What resulted was a much more human-oriented philosophy that emphasized a study of the arts and humanities in their original form, a rejection of the authority of the universities (including Aristotle), and the individual freedom of scholars to discover at will. It is also at this time that the first recorded uses of the term "Middle Ages" appears to describe the preceding period (from medium aevum, Latin for "in-between-age," coined in the early 1400s by humanist scholar Flavio Biondo). This was a disparaging term, implying that the thousand years "in between" the fall of Rome and the rebirth of its cultural, literary, and philosophical greatness in 15th century was essentially a time of little importance and learning. But, of course, the Middle Ages, though crude, were hardly "dark" and the illuminating light of academia shined on even in difficult times. And the modern word, thought to be so influenced by the humanism and secularism of the Renaissance, was in a very tangible way, influenced as much as by the Medieval period as those which followed it.

The Aristotelian Reconciliation: Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas

The primary goal of 12th and 13th century Scholasticism was to reconcile the natural philosophy of Aristotle with revealed truth of Christian scripture. The impact of Christian thought on the philosophy of the Middle Ages need not be mentioned, for not only was it the most important in terms of influence, it was indeed the entire framework within which medieval philosophers perceived the world. However, beginning in the early 12th century, a new force which had hitherto been unknown or at least obscure enough to escape the notice of all but those scholars lucky enough to have access to his work, began to exert its influence on Western thought. Much like the Bible, Aristotle needs no introduction and if the specifics of his philosophy do not precede him, his reputation does. Throughout the course of the 12th and 13th century, he would become so popular and so emulated that he came to be known simply as Ille Philosophus, "The Philosopher," and this is in large part due to the works of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who were able to resolve many of the differences between and synthesize both the corpus of Christian thought and the writings of the ancient thinker.

The path from obscurity to ubiquity for Aristotle's works in the Middle Ages was an arduous one and more complex than can be attempted here, but we may briefly track its movement. Aristotelian philosophy, like most other intellectual pursuits, gradually faded from the collective consciousness of Western Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire as there was a general dearth of scholars to carry on his work and the more academic nature of his writings did not lend itself to study in the generally difficult life led by most from 500-1000 CE. As we have seen, there were areas where his works were preserved: Boethius' translations formed the backbone of later Latin translations and copyists and scribes in the British Isles and in the Byzantine Empire preserved a fair amount in later centuries as well. But likely the greatest location for the preservation of Aristotelian knowledge was the Islamic world, which, if the Appropriation Theory is correct, managed to add to and improve. The greatest of these was the mid-12th century Muslim Spaniard Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who is often regarded as the founder of secular thought in Western Europe. Among Averroes' many accomplishments include his massively influential commentary on the writings of Aristotle, written in 1160, in which he simplified and summarized Aristotle's philosophy, made editorial comments on them to elucidate their oftentimes difficult concepts, and attempted to tease out the meanings behind Aristotle that may be conciliatory to the Islamic religion. What resulted was a sort of medieval Cliff's Notes version of the works of Aristotle that were read across the Islamic world and soon found their way into the hands of eager European scholars. Averroes was so influential that, for a time, Scholastics who were engaged in the process of synthesizing Aristotle with Christianity were known as Averroists.

To Medieval scholars, the most important ideas to be found in Aristotle's works were the ones related to metaphysics and natural philosophy. While too broad to detail here, some of his more notable theories include the concept of the four element (earth, water, air, and fire) composition of matter and their correspondent qualities, humors, zodiacal signs, etc.; the idea of nature as a "plenum," meaning that one could not reach the smallest portion of matter (the word atom comes from the Greek a tomos meaning "uncuttable"); the sphericity of the earth and the cosmos and the idea of a "natural place" for all elements (earth sank to the center, water on top of it, air rose above these two, and fire ascended to the heavens); the perfect circular motion of heavenly bodies and the difference in the nature of physics below the orbit of the moon (the sublunar sphere) and above the orbit of the moon (the supralunar sphere); and the logical hierarchy of "causes" in nature, among many, many others. It became clear early on, that not all of Aristotle's ideas meshed well with Christian doctrine, but Aristotle's authority was already too great and religious figures of the day likely could not have passed laws forbidding his teachings if they had wanted to. But try they did: in 1210 in Paris a council of bishops forbade the teaching of his works in the French university system and in 1231 in Rome Pope Gregory IX ordered a "clean-up" of Aristotle's works so they would become more palatable to medieval Christian sensibilities. The most notable of "The Philosopher's" beliefs that disagreed with Christianity included his assertion that the cosmos was eternal and had no beginning or end (this denied the Creation as well as the Apocalypse), that the soul and the body are interminably linked (this denied the immortal soul and the prospects for salvation and afterlife), and that miracles were impossible (this, of course, denied God's will). This is where Albertus and Thomas Aquinas enter the picture.

Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280) was a German Dominican scholar who was the first to attempt a Christian synthesis of Aristotle's ideas utilizing the same format as Averroes. Albertus, who would later be made a Doctor of the Church (one of only 33 people to hold this title in history), had a lifelong thirst for knowledge that never seems to have been satiated and ranged from theology and philosophy to alchemy and astrology, physics and metaphysics to metallurgy and phrenology. During his lifetime, he managed to compile the majority of Aristotle's known works, make insightful comments upon them as they related to the Christian world view, and preserve his work in a relatively complete form upon which later scholars could draw. However, Albertus is generally considered to have failed in truly creating a systematized Aristotelian corpus which could pass muster among the Church powers who insisted on a thoroughly Christianized philosophy. Albertus' greatest contributions to history were not to be his writings on Aristotle but his advocacy of an experimental method and of a compatibility between science and religion--perhaps broader realizations of his attempts with Aristotle. It is fitting that the scholar who succeeded in this more specific and more laborious task was Albertus Magnus' greatest student, Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) was originally from the country-side around Naples and the son of a minor noble who wanted Thomas to enter a Benedictine monastery as his uncle had done. Thomas' early education was at the state-sponsored University in Naples where he developed an early interest in theology. He was more receptive to Dominican ideals as they had placed a greater emphasis on empiricism and rationality and this eventually led him to Paris where he received instruction from the imminent Albertus Magnus. Where Thomas was able to succeed his master's failures was in the great organizational capacity and originality in his thinking. Thomas regarded Aristotle, not necessarily as an ancient pagan philosopher, but as a brilliant thinker who had the Christian-perceived misfortune of being born before the salvation of Christ. And he viewed Christianity not as an island of meaning, new and disparate from other philosophy, but as a completion and fulfillment of the knowledge originally, if only partially, realized by Aristotle. Aquinas was the first to distance himself from the Augustinian viewpoint of deduction: Augustine had explained everything by taking what was known universally (the existence of God, the salvation of Christ, the path to Heaven, etc.) and derived particulars from this. Thomas, on the other hand, using the quintessentially Scholastic tool of reason, began with what could be discerned rationally among particular cases (a particular murder being evil, arriving at a conception of God after reviewing his individual creations of plants and animals, etc.) and used these to arrive at universal conclusions. His verdict on Aristotle was, essentially, that reason and faith, being separate but complementary, could be used in service of one another--reason had helped Scholastic philosophers arrive at proofs and arguments in favor of the existence of God, and faith was now being used to contend that, as far as Aristotle's natural philosophy was concerned, it could not truly contradict revealed truth if the validity of his ideas were discovered in nature. For was not nature the very dominion of God and the expression of His will at creation? Aquinas would follow Aristotle very closely in this respect, and this would lead him on the path to reworking most of the Philosopher's ideas under the illumination of the light of Christianity.

His greatest work in this endeavor was his Summa Theologica, which would contain the entirety of his new philosophical system. Written between 1265 and 1274, it argued nearly every major point of Christian theology with appeal to reason, including especially the existence of God; the Creation; Man and his purpose; Christ and His life, death and resurrection; and salvation. The work is especially known for its enunciation of "The Five Ways" or quinquae viae, five arguments for the existence of God that have a certain Aristotelian ring to them. The first of the Five Ways can be, and has been, read as the most astonishing example of Aristotelian reconciliation in particular and with Scholastic logic in general. The First Way reads, "God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form." Aristotle had, as we have seen, argued for the eternity of the universe, but had conceded that if there was a beginning, it would necessitate the existence of a "prime mover" or a "first cause"--something that got the ball rolling. Aquinas linked these ideas thusly: To cause change is to bring into being that which had hitherto not existed and this can be done only by something that already existed (as fire is needed to cause burning in matter); a thing causing this change must remain constant itself during the change if the result is to be constant; therefore anything in the process of changing was caused by something prior to it; there must be a terminal point as there will be no original cause of changes if we do not; this first cause must be God. These words are essentially Aristotle's, with the phrase "prime mover" changed to "God." This is Thomist Scholasticism and Aristotelian reconciliation at its finest.

Thanks to Aquinas, not only was Aristotle reinstated in the European university system in the Middle Ages, it was made mandatory in 1255. His separation of natural philosophy from theology made the study of both easily compatible and this is viewed as a proto-attempt to reconcile science and religion. Aquinas himself, however, would leave his greatest work unfinished as he died while writing it in 1274. While celebrating Mass, Aquinas had a mystical vision which he would share with no one, but it obviously had a profound effect on him which changed him deeply. "I cannot go on," he said. "All that I have written seems like so much straw to me [mihi videtur ut palea] compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me." Aquinas died four months later. Modern observers believe he may have had a stroke or a nervous breakdown. Others that he received a mystical vision from God, providing him with an instant communion with the ultimate reality beyond logical comprehension, which no words could possibly attempt to describe. Whatever the case, even despite Thomas Aquinas' refusal to complete his opus, his new system of philosophy would dominate the remainder of medieval thought and would not find a replacement until the Protestant reformation 250 years later and the revival of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance. And he would almost single-handedly make Aristotle available for intellectual consumption on a broad scale for the remainder of the Middle Ages.