Relic rage

Come on, people, I thought we’d sorted this one already? The latest debunkers of the Shroud of Turin have now demonstrated that given only medieval methods and materials, the relic could have been created inside about a week, backing up the long-standing claim that it was probably a 14th century forgery. Those who still say such an act of fakery would have been unthinkable in this 'age of faith' seriously underestimate the resourcefulness of medieval people when it came to acquiring relics.

Relics, after all, were big business for popular pilgrimage spots, bringing in the punters to make their donations to the shrine itself and then spend up large on tourist trinkets like pilgrimage badges. Competition amongst the various shrines was fierce, and late medieval texts by both religious writers and laymen refer to avaricious monks making forgeries and condemn or mock the proliferation of sham shrines and relics (though most didn’t disavow that miracles that could be produced by the genuine article).

The lengths to which some people were prepared to go to secure a relic could be pretty extreme. One of my favourite stories is that of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (later St. Hugh). On a pilgrimage to the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy, he asked for a piece of the arm bone of St. Mary Magdalene – the abbey’s most precious relic – to take back to England with him. His request denied by the monks (you can imagine the haggling: ‘The index finger? No? How about the pinkie? Come on, chaps, I’d settle for the tip’), our quick-witted bishop seizes on the relic and takes a bite – a chunk! – out of the poor lady’s arm. I can just picture the undignified scuffle that must then have ensued, with the monks trying to wrestle the bit of bone out of Hugh’s mouth and the bishop, jaws tightly clamped, fiercely resisting them. (Hugh later tasted a bit of his own medicine when his head was stolen from its shrine in 1364.)

I had my own close encounter with a saintly skeleton at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pierre d'Hautvillers, which is nestled in a hilltop village overlooking some of the best vineyards of Champagne. Here, boxed up in this somewhat neglected-looking reliquary on one side of the abbey church, are the bones of St. Nivard, Archbishop of Reims (655 – 669) and brother-in-law of the Frankish king Childeric II. He was the founder of the abbey, but we bubbly-quaffing pilgrims now know it much better as the final resting place of friar Dom Pérignon.

Riffling through Margaret of York's library

I’m not much of a social butterfly. I tend to quickly run short on patience when I’m stuck talking to people who don’t have much of interest to say. I find one way to predict the potential boredom factor of pending conversations is to stealthily scope out what people like to read. I do this all the time when I visit people’s houses. If they have a shelf full of Mills & Boons – or, even worse horrors, NO BOOKS AT ALL! – chances are our social intercourse is probably going to be pretty brief and unfulfilling. If, on the other hand, the shelves reveal some classic fiction or a sprinkling of lovely, gory whodunits, well then, things are looking up for our relationship. And if there’s some history and philosophy there as well, it’s possible I may be your new best, ear-bending friend.

So I wonder, how would I have got on with Margaret of York (1446 – 1503), whose personal library has been catalogued as part of LibraryThing’s I See Dead People’s Books project? Margaret, whose library represents the oldest collection so far catalogued, was the Duchess of Burgundy by marriage, and sister of Edward the IV and Richard III. Like many noblewomen of her period, she was an intelligent and skilled politician, using marriage alliances to manoeuvre her way through the byzantine politics that marked fifteenth century relations between the ruling houses of Europe. (Not least of her problems, of course, were the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York.)

It’s no surprise to find titles like Les faits d'Alexandre le Grand by Quintus Curtius Rufus or Les chroniques des comtes de Flandre amongst Margaret’s books of history and philosophy, and the classical authors Seneca and Justinus are also represented. For lighter reading, there is courtly romance in the form of Raoul Le Fevre’s The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy. This was the first book printed in English and Margaret’s copy is the only one that survives. A well-educated and cultivated woman, Margaret’s patronage supported numerous artists and writers including the printer William Caxton. The title page of this book features an engraving of Caxton presenting it to her.

By far the bulk of Margaret’s library comprises religious and meditational works. Her lifetime was a period of great religious turmoil in Europe, marked by fierce debates over the authority of the papacy, the corruption of the Catholic Church, and the emergence of heretical sects like the Lollards. Literacy was increasing as the development of printing was making books cheaper and more accessible, and the trade was partly fuelled by demand for works of devotion and meditation written in English and designed for a lay readership. Such books promoted an interior, personal relationship with the divine, thus helping lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. One of the central tenets of Lollardy, for example, was that the faithful should come to know God by reading scripture for themselves. The Oxford Doctor John Wycliffe, who is usually considered the sect's founder, translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into vernacular English in 1382. Like many proto-Protestant sects, the Lollards rejected the validity of the Catholic hierarchy of priesthood and Pope mediating between the people and God, and also denounced many of the ritualistic elements of Catholicism, such as saints and pilgrimage.

Amongst Margaret’s books are some texts that are characteristic of this new form of literate lay devotion, including The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis and The Mirror of Sinners (both medieval bestsellers, and The Imitation of Christ is still in print today). But from what we know of her, Margaret remained conventionally Catholic, and this is reflected in her collection of saints’ lives and her Guide to the pilgrimage churches of Rome. Like all good English nobles, she had a Life of St. Edmund the Martyr, and she also had several works by Jean de Gerson, theologian, chancellor of the University of Paris, and rabid persecutor of heretics.

On the moral responsibility of the historian

(and other such heavy-duty ponderings...)

I’ve just been on another residential seminar at the university for the paper I’m taking in Advanced Historiography. Basically, this is the study of how historical knowledge is generated and transmitted, and incorporating a soupçon of methodology and a tasty portion of philosophy. This is a required paper for postgraduate students and a number of my classmates were having a good old moan about it, expressing the desire to just do history, without having to think about how and why they’re doing it the particular way they’ve chosen to do it.

To each their own and all that, but I’m actually really enjoying this paper. I’ve discovered some interesting (if sometimes irritatingly pompous) late-nineteenth and early twentieth century writers that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise, and I’ve gained a better insight into French culture and politics by engaging with the work of the Annales school. In particular, I’m really enjoying wrestling with poststructuralist approaches history, in both their ‘standard’ and overtly feminist guises.

Poststructuralism’s challenges to the claims empirically grounded knowledge are inherently and deliberately destabilising, so they make many people (including most of my classmates at this seminar) deeply uncomfortable. And, as usually happens when people start questioning the possibility of eliciting objective truths about the past or questioning the politics involved in creating knowledge, it’s not long before the phrase ‘moral relativism’ gets an airing, closely followed by a reference to the David Irving case.

Fear not, I’m not about to get into the ins and outs of that story here. But what interested me when we discussed the case in class were the questions raised about whether historians have some sort of moral responsibility in society (over and above their responsibilities as professional scholars). Lord Acton, Cambridge Regius professor and first editor of the Cambridge Modern History, certainly thought so, advocating “it is the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things.” (Incidentally, he was also the guy who said “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” in a debate over whether popes and kings should be judged by the same standards as us mere mortals.)

The question of the historian’s moral role is one I find somewhat difficult to resolve myself. For a start, it’s much easier to suspend moral judgement and remain neutral when it comes to issues and actions in the distant past – whether or not Richard II betrayed the people after the Peasants' Revolt, for example – than it is when it comes to much more recent historical debates, in which there seems to be much more at stake for those of us living now.

When this discussion came up during our seminar, I was also struck by the question of ‘whose morals?’ At first, there seemed to be an implicit assumption amongst the other students that we all shared a common moral standard, broadly based on a Judeo-Christian belief system. When I pointed out I was not a Christian – indeed, that I didn’t believe in any god – that created a plenty of consternation. It seems to be a widely held belief that if you don’t at some level believe in a god (and in my experience, the assumption generally seems to be a Christian god), you have nothing on which to base your morality. (And as an aside, I find it deeply strange that people feel they’re free to talk to me about going to church, god etc., but if I say I’m an atheist, they get very uncomfortable all of a sudden. It’s a real conversation-stopper.)

I find the idea that you can’t be moral without a god to be bizarre, and frankly, a bit offensive. But then I end up struggling to find some philosophical position from which to argue for a fundamental human morality that doesn’t require god as an enforcer. I tend to end up with three options. The first is that humans are naturally and inherently altruistic (perhaps we could call this the Jean-Jacques Rousseau theory), but frankly, looking at the world around me (and human actions throughout history), I have some trouble really accepting this. The second is what I guess falls into the category of evolutionary theory, whereby we assume that humans, as social animals, can only survive by helping each other more often than we hurt each other. This seems a bit too essentialist to me, and doesn’t leave much room for individual or group agency, or for any higher ideals above purely survival of the species. It also smacks of sociobiology, which I’m keen to avoid like the plague for all sorts of political and practical reasons.

So finally, I’m left with falling back on the values of liberal, secular humanism, but I recognise that these ideals are historical products of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment west. I’m also aware that while on the surface, they may seem (at least to many of us in the west) flawless in theory, if not in practice, their history means they carry their own problematic meanings and associations.

Eh, I guess I’ll be pondering this for a good long while, and may even resort to reading something like this. (Though the reviews aren't that promising. Any other suggestions most welcome!)

In the meantime, I think I'll leave the last word to Ricky in Trailer Park Boys: “I’m not a pessimist, I’m an optometrist.”

(And if this post made your head hurt, here's some more Rickyisms to alleviate the strain.)

An Easter w(h)ine

It’s Easter Friday and I’ve been working on my essay on nineteenth-century historiography all day. Between the autumnal nip in the air and seven straight hours spent in the company of Messieurs Ranke, Macaulay and Gibbon, I’m craving a big ol’ glass of red (much as Gibbon makes me laugh). My local shop carries a decent selection, including the truly delish Mt. Difficulty Pinot Noir, but can I buy one? Can I hell. Because in this secular, rationalist twenty-first century nation, you still can’t buy booze on Easter Friday in deference to a fable. A charming fable to be sure. Betrayal, torture and human sacrifice – hey, what’s not to like? The irony in this, of course, is that this is a holiday that’s all about the wine (or blood-drinking, depending on which branch of the Christian superstition you happen to support).