Monthly Archives: November 2023

Seminar CLXXX: rehabilitating the Carolingian priest

Posted on 26 November 2023 | 4 comments

The first time I blogged about one of Steffen Patzold’s papers, he later told me, it came as rather a shock to him when one of his students pointed it out to him. The episode threw me into a temporary tiz about whether I should in fact be writing up these semi-public events, whether it was like tweeting a conference paper (then a hot controversy) and so on, and although I decided in the end to carry on on the same basis, still, now that I find myself wanting to write up another of Steffen’s papers I still pause. I hope that two things will keep him happy with this post; firstly, that this happened two and a half years ago so is kind of old news; and second, that it’s a highly enthusiastic write-up! But then, so was it last time…

Cover of Steffen Patzold, Presbyter: Moral, Mobilität und die Kirchenorganisation im Karolingerreich (Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 68, Stuttgart, 2020).

Cover of Steffen Patzold, Presbyter: Moral, Mobilität und die Kirchenorganisation im Karolingerreich, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 68 (Stuttgart 2020)

Those who don’t know Steffen except through my occasional outbreaks of praise for his work here, however, may get some idea of it from the fact that in 2008 he published a book entitled Episcopus which, just like that, became the definitive study of the evolution of the bishop’s office through the early Middle Ages, and then in 2020 followed it up with another called Presbyter doing the same for priests (with three other books in between just to keep busy).1 If Presbyter hasn’t yet had quite the impact that Episcopus had that may only be because, firstly, it’s still quite new and there was this pandemic in between; secondly, in this field there’s some strong competition for attention; and thirdly, obviously, there were lots more priests than bishops in the early medieval world and dealing with them as a phenomenon is consequently more complex.2 As part of that, Steffen has been deeply involved in a long-running project on local priests in the Carolingian world that I’ve been watching closely, which must keep bringing those complexities to his attention.3 Nonetheless, he is still capable of drawing big conclusions in the best traditions, rather than the worst, of institutional history, and this was what he was doing when on 24th March 2021 he spoke, virtually, to the Earlier Middle Ages seminar of the Institute of Historical Research. This was the first paper where I’d actually managed to navigate the IHR’s virtual ticketing system, mainly by mailing to beg for the link which for me never arrives, and it was well worth it.

The church of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, Seligenstadt

I had to cast around for a while for search terms for a Carolingian Eigenkirche (and on what that is see below), before it suddenly struck me that this, Saints Marcellinus and Peter in Seligenstadt, is one, albeit a big one: it was founded by a layman, who from whose letters we know controlled the appointment, and that there is almost no sign of episcopal control – but because that layman was Einhard and everybody loves Einhard it isn’t usually counted against him! But as we shall see, maybe counting things like this against people was a later concern anyway. Image by Jörg Braukmann, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 via Structurae

So having introduced Steffen himself I have to introduce his topic. His title was "Beyond Eigenkirchen: local priests and their churches in the Carolingian world". So what’s an Eigenkirche, you may justly ask? Well, it is a term coined by one Ulrich Stutz, who in 1895 published a book called Geschichte des kirchlichen Benefizialwesens (roughly, History of Church property in benefice, which could itself demand an explanation, so maybe just let me carry on).4 It set up a clear and persuasive theory of a long struggle by the Latin Christian Church to get itself clear of ownership by laymen, patrons who built churches but then expected to control them, their appointments and their revenues entirely. For Stutz that situation came from the adaptation of "Germanic" expectations about property and enduring rights in it to the clear separation of Church and state beginning in the Gospels, a situation that the Frankish super-king and then emperor Charlemagne tried to reform, but which his son Louis the Pious made worse again by letting lords keep tithes as an encouragement to build more churches. This was where the great outburst of concern about such issues in the eleventh century which we tend to know as the Gregorian Reform after Pope Gregory VII, one of its loudest voices, came from. Stutz’s book has been tremendously influential; it went into its fourth edition in 1995, a full century after its publication, something we could all wish for but few indeed hope for, even though it was technically never completed, and the essential narrative survives even in more recent work on the subject.5 And as Steffen delicately but definitively argued, it’s basically wrong.

Portrait of Ulrich Stutz

Portrait of Ulrich Stutz, from the Universitätsbibliothek of the Humboldt Universität Berlin. He does sort of look like someone’s just told him we were about to undermine his life’s work, doesn’t he? Sorry, Professor…

OK, big claim. On what does it rest? Well, firstly on the erosion of many of the accepted historical premises of the age in which Stutz wrote: that there was an ancestral "Germanic" set of expectations about property, a continual opposition of Church and state or at least Church and nobility even though the two groups were basically the same families, or that Louis the Pious was a weak ruler dominated by priests.6 But also, and this was Steffen’s main front of attack, on an equation between lord’s chaplains, what Stutz called because Carolingian legislation also calls "house-priests", whom Charlemagne, Louis and their churchmen regarded as dangerously free from oversight by bishops, often dangerously dependent on their lords (slaves given orders and that sort of thing) and certainly dangerously unqualified, and the more widespread and ordinary parish priest, or at least the local priest doing the ministry to the general population. For Stutz, since almost all churches were owned by lords and the priests their creatures, there was no meaningful difference. But since churches were built by many agencies, including the Church itself, but also their own future congregations, and in these places the bishops got to make appointments – we have very numerous records of bishops’ appointments of priests, so they must have worked somewhere – actually there were quite a lot of people doing that kind of work who were not running lords’ private churches, and these were the people on whom Steffen focused to make his case.

Some of these local priests were pretty major players in their own right and "local" is perhaps understating their importance, which was hardly one of being powerless flunkies. One guy called Erlebald, operating around the monastery of Lorsch, organised many donations there by a variety of people but also made some of his own, including numerous serfs and quite a lot of treasure. It’s hard to believe he was funnelling revenue to anyone else much, and maybe that was indeed a problem for his bishop, but not because he was under some lord’s thumb instead.7 However, these were the people on the ground for the Carolingian efforts to improve popular worship and belief, and we have lots of stuff written for and about them in the expectation of both their cooperation and effectiveness.8 Furthermore, there were lots of them: Julia Barrow asked for some numbers in questions and Steffen said that when the number of baptismal churches in some Carolingian dioceses was assessed numbers ranged from 50 to 230, each of which would have had several priests, each of whom would then have been set up as heads of new parishes, so, hundreds of priests in a diocese, thousands across the empire. As this implies, Steffen had argued that these reform efforts meant the Carolingians radically changing Church structures, breaking up big territories belonging to mother-churches with baptismal rights, which provided clergy to smaller less-privileged chapels (Italian pievi were mentioned, but I thought straight away of early English minsters9), and changing them into smaller structures centred on single churches with full rights over more limited areas (under the supervision of bishops, of course), the sort of thing we might call "parishes".

Theoldulf of Orléans's church at Saint-Germigny-des-Prés

Not an Eigenkirche but somewhere from where churches and priests were regulated and instructed, Saint-Germigny-des-Prés, built by Bishop Theodulf of Orléans, whose statutes for his priests we have. Image « Germigny des Pres » by user:Cancre — own work, licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

So at the end of this we had not just what looked like a death-blow to a century-old shibboleth of early European Church history and a rehabilitation of the genuine effectiveness of Carolingian efforts to expand and improve, maybe even "correct" but maybe not "reform" the Church, but a plausible argument for the origins of the European parish. It’s not a bad evening’s work! Naturally, there were questions. Ed Roberts asked if house-priests could become "local" priests, to which the answer was that they certainly tried and some presumably did; Peter Heather wondered where the 11th-century boom in church-building came from if it wasn’t lords hungry for tithes, and Steffen pointed out some other ways to get rich off Church patronage as well as the way people could also set up their own; Erik Niblaeus wondered how monasteries fit, as lords or as tools of the reform effort, and Steffen said that structurally they were lords but worried the régime less as their priests tended to be better qualified; and I asked if an impression I had that mother-churches remained the first step in frontier-zones, with parish fragmentation following only later (thinking of my work on Manresa), which Steffen thought unlikely.10 I may have to show he’s wrong (or that Catalonia’s weird, one of the two). But he doesn’t make it easy!

1. Steffen Patzold, Episcopus: Wissen über Bischöfe im Frankreich des späten 8. bis frühen 10. Jahrhunderts, Mittelalter-Forschungen 25 (Ostfildern 2008); then Patzold, Presbyter: Moral, Mobilität und die Kirchenorganisation im Karolingerreich, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 68 (Stuttgart 2020); between times, Patzold, Das Lehnswesen, Beck’sche Reihe 2745 (München 2012); Patzold, Ich und Karl der Grosse: das Leben des Höflings Einhard (Stuttgart 2013); and Patzold, Gefälschtes Recht aus dem Frühmittelalter: Untersuchungen zur Herstellung und Überlieferung der pseudoisidorischen Dekretalen, Schriften der Philosophisch-historischen Klasse der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften 55 (Heidelberg 2015).

2. I think here mainly of Julia Barrow, The Clergy in the Medieval World: Secular Clerics, their Families and Careers in North-Western Europe, c.800–c.1200 (Cambridge 2015).

3. I’ve probably missed some here, but the project has produced at least Steffen Patzold & Carine van Rhijn (edd.), Men in the Middle: Local Priests in Early Medieval Europe, Ergänzungsband der Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 93 (Berlin 2016) and Francesca Tinti and Carine van Rhijn with Bernhard Zeller, Charles West, Marco Stofella, Nicolas Schroeder, Steffen Patzold, Thomas Kohl, Wendy Davies and Miriam Czock, "Shepherds, uncles, owners, scribes: Priests as neighbours in early medieval local societies" in Zeller, West, Tinti, Stofella, Schroeder, van Rhijn, Patzold, Kohl, Davies & Czock, Neighbours and Strangers: local societies in early medieval Europe (Manchester 2020), pp. 120–149.

4. Ulrich Stutz, Geschichte des kirchlichen Benefizialwesens: von seinen Anfängen bis auf die Zeit Alexanders III. (Berlin 1895), 1 vol., online here. The title page says this is the "Ersten Band, erste häfte", but there seem to have been no more parts. The treatment is thematic rather than chronological, so what is argued is at least complete in itself. There is also Ulrich Stutz, Die Eigenkirche als Element des mittelalterlich-germanischen Kirchenrechts, Libelli 28 (Darmstadt 1955), non vidi, which given its date is I guess the key part on that subject extracted from the earlier work.

5. Stutz, Geschichte des kirchlichen Benefizialwesens: von seinen Anfängen bis auf die Zeit Alexanders III., ed. Hans Erich Feine, 4th edn (Aalen 1995), though as far as I can see all the new editions are just reprints with an extra essay at the beginning. Still, is four editions over a century even the top score to beat? We might instance Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Una ciudad de la España cristiana hace mil años: estampas de la vida en León, 21st edn (Madrid 2014), originally published in 1928, parts of which you can find translated as Claudio Sánchez Albornoz [sic], "Daily Life in the Spanish Reconquest: Scenes from Tenth-Century León", transl. Simon Doubleday, in The American Association of Research Historians of Medieval Spain Library (Toronto 1999), online here, but I don’t know which edition Simon translated! According to Steffen, meanwhile, the obvious new work to replace Stutz, Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford 2006), doesn’t change the picture on this score very much. I should obviously know, but…

6. See here especially Mayke de Jong, "Ecclesia and the Early Medieval Polity" in Stuart Airlie, Walter Pohl & Helmut Reimitz (edd.), Staat im frühen Mittelalter, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 11 (Wien 2006), pp. 113–132 and Mayke de Jong, "The State of the Church: ecclesia and early medieval state formation" in Walter Pohl & Veronika Wieser (edd.), Der frühmittelalterliche Staat – europäische Perspektiven, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 16 (Wien 2009), pp. 241–254. A broader introduction can be found in Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes & Simon MacLean, The Carolingian World, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge 2011), pp. 80-153.

7. For the abbey of Lorsch see Matthew Innes, "Kings, Monks and Patrons: political identities and the Abbey of Lorsch" in Régine Le Jan (ed.), La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne (début IXe siècle aux environs de 920) (Villeneuve de l’Ascq 1998), pp. 301–324, though right now I can’t so whether it mentions Erlebald or not I can’t tell you. He is mentioned in passing as a relative and associate of Abbot Baugolf of Fulda in Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: the Middle Rhine Valley, 400-1000, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th Series 47 (Cambridge 2000), p. 190.

8. We know this not least from the volumes of statutes they left behind which are now printed in Peter Brommer, Rudolf Pokorny & Martina Stratmann (edd.), Capitula episcoporum, Monumenta Germaniae historica (capitula episcoporum) 1-4 (Hannover 1984-2005), 4 vols, online from here.

9. On pievi why not see Rachel Stone, "Exploring Minor Clerics in Early Medieval Tuscany" in Reti Medievali Rivista Vol. 18 (Firenze 2017), pp. 67–97, online here? As for minsters, see John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford 2005), pp. 79-134, 246-367 and to be honest much of the rest of the book too, or for short, John Blair, "Minster Churches in the Landscape" in Della Hooke (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Settlements (Oxford 1988), pp. 35–58.

10. But not just Manresa, or that wouldn’t be a great example since it’s so late; I think we also see it at the definitely-Carolingian Sant Pere de Rodes. See Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power, Studies in History, New Series (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 93-97, and for proof of contemporaneity of at least the settlement with Louis the Pious, Imma Ollich, Montserrat Rocafiguera, Albert Pratdesaba, Maria Ocaña, Oriol Amblàs, Maria Àngel Pujols & David Serrat, "Roda Ciutat: el nucli fortificat de l’Esquerda sobre el Ter i el seu territori" in Ausa Vol. 28 (Vic 2017), pp. 23–40, online here.

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The dogheads explained?

Posted on 18 November 2023 | 21 comments

So here is, as they say, a thing. You know I do frontiers, obviously, and you may also be aware that there are more essay volumes by medievalists or including medievalists on frontiers, in which there is usually no explicit comparison between cases except by the volume editors, than anyone should ever have to deal with.1 Back in 2021 I was finally making my way through one of these that had been on my reading lists since early in my doctorate, Walter Pohl’s, Ian Wood’s and Helmut Reimitz’s The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians.2 I didn’t think as much of this volume as I might have hoped given the people involved, though there are a few thoughtful papers in there, but there was also one curiosity offered in passing in Ian Wood‘s own contribution that seemed like blog material.3

14th-century icon of Saints Stephen and Christopher as priest and dog-headed soldier

1700s icon of Saints Stephen and Christopher as priest and dog-headed soldier, Recklinghausen, Ikonenmuseum, Web Gallery of Art WGA23491, public domain claimed at linked site

You may be aware that there was a medieval, and indeed ancient, idea that somewhere out in the world, at the edges where the monstrous peoples live, were a race of men who had heads like dogs, the so-called Cynocephali. Unlike a lot of the so-called monstrous races, the Cynocephali got some Christian thought devoted to them because of a persistent idea that St Christopher might have been one of them, a proof that the power of the Gospel covered all the world and so on. As one of our occasional commentators, Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, knows very well since he’s written about it, this even got as far as imagining whole urban settlements of these Cynocephali, allowing Sam actually to publish a piece called "City of Dog", an achievement that perhaps even beats Rory Naismith’s "An Offa You Can’t Refuse" and other punning titles that editors with more taste might have vetoed.4 (My current other favourite of these is a piece about the eleventh-century anti-pope Clement III subtitled, "Ceci n’est pas un pape", but I digress…5) But where did this peculiar idea come from? Coming across an instance of it in his paper, Professor Wood offers a possible answer. He notes that Bruno of Querfurt, in recording the deeds of the missionary bishop Saint Adalbert, says that his mission to the (original) Prussians included him being jeered at by Cynocephali.6 Now, that’s odd, because usually the whole point of the monstrous races is that they exist beyond where you can reach, and even the civilised Cynocephali—Professor Wood follows this observation with a page and a half on the theological debate over the cultural frontier beyond which this questionably-human people might or might not live, concluding that the consensus was that they were sufficiently civilised that they must have souls and could go to Heaven—certainly don’t, Saint Christopher aside, live among normal identifiable accessible humans. You don’t just meet them among crowds of sceptical human pagans. People (other than maybe John Mandeville, professional fourteenth-century authorial fiction) don’t claim to have met monopods or similar. In this respect the dog-heads are unusual even among "monstrous" peoples. And yet, says Professor Wood, with my emphasis:7

"Bruno’s awareness of the cynocephali may not simply have been the product of an over-vivid imagination. Dog-headed beings are a recurrent feature of accounts of the southern Baltic, appearing in the eighth-century Æthicus Ister and, less exotically, in a letter of Ratramnus of Corbie to Rimbert of Hamburg-Bremen. Remarkably lifelike dogheaded masks from ninth-century Haithabu reveal that men did disguise themselves as cynocephali."

To which part of me responds, "Who says they were men, not women? We only got the masks!" but a more impulsive, less intellectual part goes, "I bet the Hedeby finds are online now, somehow." And so it transpires. This is a bit of a trip into the uncanny valley, I’m sorry, but, look at this:

Textile dog mask in the Hedeby Viking Museum

Textile dog mask in the Wikinger Museum Haithabu; photo by Klaudia Karpińska, presumed covered by CC BY NC 4.0 license of site of origin (linked)

Now, there is definitely a chicken-and-egg problem here. Even in his passing discussion Professor Wood pushes talk of the cynocephali back to the beginning of the eighth century and even then placed in the more distant past, and in fact it goes back at least to the Romans since it’s in Pliny’s Natural History. One can argue that Adalbert, or even Bruno, might well have expected dogheaded persons even before they got to the Prussians, and so seen what they expected even if somebody did mask up to greet the foreigners. One might also reasonably observe that Hedeby was at the other end of the Baltic from where the Prussians hung out, and that assuming that basically everyone in what would by the nineteenth century be German-speaking lands somehow shared this obscure cultural tradition, even the non-Germanic-speaking Prussians, has some problems. But still, there is this mask: someone at some point in the ninth century in a place connected with Hedeby was probably wearing a dog-face, and this isn’t the only one that’s been found there, despite the vast odds against textile survival from medieval contexts.8

So obviously it could all be nothing; this could just be a tool for a party trick or something from some really early theatre, or whatever. Even if more solemn in purpose, which we can’t necessarily assume, it might be evidence for ceremonial practice in this one Danish town that would not necessarily prove anything about what people were doing in tenth-century Old Prussia, and the story from Bruno of Querfurt could just be a way of emphasising how far beyond the known his subject had dared to travel for the propagation of his faith and not meant to mean that Adalbert really did see dog-headed people. Perhaps it’s even that Bruno, knowing himself of such Scandinavian practices, hoped that others would not when he wrote this up as a reference to the older legends. But it could, all the same, be as Professor Wood suggests: a future martyr fooled by pagans in dress-up into thinking he’d really met the cynocephali. It’s still quite a step from there to the delicately-floated suggestion that such Baltic-area practices, necessarily for this argument much older than our first records of them, were in fact the seed of the idea that dog-headed people were among the "monstrous races".9 But one can’t blame someone for making a suggestion which, before, no-one had thought of. If I’d been assiduous enough to read Sam’s piece maybe I would also know whether anyone has taken this up or further! But until I have, this is as far as I can go. I hope it’s of interest!

1. Oh, man, so many volumes. The ones I regularly cite are Robert Bartlett & Angus MacKay (edd.), Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford 1989); Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (edd.), Frontiers in Question: Eurasian borderlands, 700 – 1700, Themes in Focus 6 (Basingstoke 1999); Walter Pohl, Ian Wood & Helmut Reimitz (edd.), The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians, The Transformation of the Roman World 10 (Leiden 2001); David Abulafia and Nora Berend (edd.), Medieval Frontiers: concepts and practices (Aldershot 2002); and Florin Curta (ed.), Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: frontiers in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 12 (Turnhout 2005), just because they’re the ones I’ve read properly (and a couple of them are really good); and I’m currently adding Ulrike Matthies Green and Kirk E. Costion (edd.), Modeling cross-cultural interaction in ancient borderlands (Gainesville FL 2018), on JSTOR here, to that, which despite its title is substantially medieval or early modern in focus; but I should also be as aware of things like David Harry Miller, Jerome O. Steffen, William W. Savage & Stephen J. Thompson (edd.), The Frontier: Comparative Studies, 4 vols (Norman 1977), vols I & II, which have several medievalist pieces in; Wolfgang Haubrichs and Reinhard Schneider (edd.), Grenzen und Grenzregionen. Frontières et régions frontalières. Borders and border regions, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Saarländische Landesgeschichte und Volksforschung 22 (Saarbrücken 1993), online here; Dionisius A. Agius & Ian Richard Netton (edd.), Across the Mediterranean Frontiers: trade, politics and religion, 650-1450. Selected Proceedings of the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 10-13 July 1995, 8-11 July 1996, International Medieval Research 1 (Turnhout 1997); Walter Pohl & Helmut Reimitz (eds), Grenze und Differenz im frühen Mittelalter, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 1 (Wien 2000); Emilia Jamroziak and Karen Stöber (eds), Monasteries on the Borders of Medieval Europe: Conflict and Cultural Interaction, Medieval Church Studies 28 (Turnhout 2013), DOI: 10.1484/M.MCS-EB.6.09070802050003050405030506; A. Asa Eger (ed.), The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers: from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea (Louisville CO 2019); and Kieran Gleave, Howard Williams and Pauline Clarke (edd.), Public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands (Oxford 2020), to name but the ones I already have contents for. I’m less sure about Stanton W. Green and Stephen M. Perlman (edd.), The Archaeology of Frontiers and Boundaries, Studies in Archaeology (Orlando FL 1985); Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck (eds), War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages (London 1992); and Benita Sampedro and Simon R. Doubleday (edd.), Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers, Remapping Cultural History 8 (New York City NY 2008), whose contents lists do not draw me in so much – Goodman & Tuck is actually a sexily-titled set of studies of one particular Anglo-Scottish battle, for example; I guess their publisher decided deception was the only hope! – but they do help illustrate the size of the phenomenon. Once you start including non-medievalist stuff, it’s just incredible.

2. Pohl, Wood & Reimitz, Transformation of Frontiers.

3. Ian Wood, "Missionaries and the Christian Frontier", ibid. pp. 209–218.

4. Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, ‘City of Dog’ in Journal of Urban History Vol. 47 (Cham 2021), pp. 1130–1148; Rory Naismith, "An Offa You Can’t Refuse?: Eighth-Century Mercian Titulature on Coins and in Charters" in Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic Vol. 7 (Cambridge 2007), pp. 89–118.

5. Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, "Popes through the Looking Glass, or «Ceci n’est pas un pape»", edd. Umberto Longo and Lila Yawn in Reti Medievali Rivista Vol. 13 (Firenze 2012), pp. 121–136, DOI: 10.6092/1593-2214/340.

6. Wood, "Missionaries", pp. 213-214.

7. Ibid. p. 214.

8. Wood cites (ibid. p. 214 n. 36) I. Hägg, Die Textilfunde aus dem Hafen von Haithabu, Berichte über die Ausgrabungen in Haithabu 20 (Neumünster 1984), pp. 69-72.

9. I take this, at least, to be the implication of the sentence, "The cynocephali were, therefore, not simply a product of the fevered imagination of missionaries: they were constructed by alien peoples." (Wood, "Missionaries", p. 214). That must mean that Professor Wood thinks, or thought in 1998, that the idea of being a dog-headed person originated among the pagans, mustn’t it? I’d ask him when next I see him, but it wouldn’t help…

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Seminars CLXXVII-CLXXIX: animals in Byzantium, Christians under Islam, Byzantines in Israel

Posted on 12 November 2023 | 1 comment

As promised, this week I want to do a bit more old-style seminar reporting. I’m not getting out to seminars the way I once did, and wasn’t even in early 2021, our current point in my backlog, but sometimes if you’re in the right place the seminars come to you, and sometimes Leeds is that place…

Manuscript page showing "Isaac" Tzetzes offering his Scholia in Lycophronis to Christ

Heidelberg Universitätsbibliothek Cod. Pal. Grace. 18 fol. 96v, showing "Isaac" Tzetzes offering his Scholia in Lycophronis to Christ, this misnamed 13th-century depiction being the only one there is of our next subject

In the first instance that was slightly less surprising because the speaker was Dr Maroula Perisanidi, who had been working for us for some time by this point and was shortly to become an established member of our staff! But with that still in the future, on 26th January 2021 she was presenting to the Institute for Medieval Studies Research Seminar with the title, “Animals and Masculinities in the Letters of John Tzetzes”. I had not heard of this particular twelfth-century scholar before, but Maroula made him out as a very sympathetic character for an 21st-century western audience: he thought competitive warlike masculinity was silly (as do many of us who feel we would be bad at it, I guess, but that doesn’t always stop us responding to challenges…) and that real intellectual endeavour was a non-competitive and largely inward pursuit; and he was almost always short of cash or support.1 Furthermore, and Maroula’s key point, his letters are full of the love of animals: he hated hunting; he kept pets and mourned them when they died (and pointed to significant warleaders who had done likewise as proof that this was a perfectly masculine thing to do); and he argued that animals were better than people in lots of ways, not limited to but definitely including their superior senses. I did notice that in Maroula’s instances Tzetzes seemed most ready to liken himself to the phoenix, the lion, the kite, etc., rather than the mouse, louse or rabbit, but that doesn’t make his positions any less striking. Questions were naturally raised about whether he was weird, and to that Maroula reckoned that rejecting hunting was quite common but that in the rest of it he might be more unusual. Emilia Jamroziak reminded us of the trope in saints’ lives (and before, with Androcles and that) of the animals which help the worthy, but Maroula thought Tzetzes gave the animals their own agency in making his points; it was their normal animal life he used, not their narratively-necessary bits of interaction with humans. There was lots left to work out, and I guess that is still going on, but as what we might call "serious entertainment" this was a winner of a paper.2

The next paper I want to record was one that it’s possible I caused. At least, back in the days of physical meetings and the Institute for Medieval Studies Public Lectures, which went away during the high pandemic for obvious reasons and never came back, I put on one of the feedback sheets they used to hang out something to the effect of, “What about Janina Safran?” No-one subsequently mentioned this to me, but when I later learned that on 23rd February 2021 Professor Janina Safran was in fact presenting to the same seminar, with the title, "Reading Fatwas into History: ‘Let Every Religious Community Have its House of Worship’", I couldn’t help but wonder. In any case, Professor Safran, whose work on divisions and interactions between religious and social groups in Islamically-ruled communities has been quite important over the last few years, was doing some more of that, and her specific questions were about Christians and Jews being allowed to rebuild churches or synagogues, respectively, or indeed build new ones, where Islam ruled.3 It’s all too easy now to look this up and find someone citing that rather difficult pseudo-document, the Covenant of ‘Umar, as proof that this just wasn’t and isn’t allowed.4 But as Professor Safran quickly showed, there has never been agreement across Islam about this issue (or about what the Covenant of ‘Umar is, for that matter), and even if there had been, the mass displacement of communities from the collapsing Muslim states in the Iberian Peninsula to Africa and vice versa in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries (CE) would have brought the issue to a head as existing community resources were swamped or abandoned in each case.5 Professor Safran had found a range of Islamic scholars each with a different opinion: about the only thing they all agreed on was that bell-ringing was not allowed, but for some there was neither building nor repair allowed because Christians were a treacherous fifth column (apparently the opinion of Ibn Rushd, even though modernity loves to love him), for some repair but not expansion (al-Burzulī), for some necessary expansion but not new building (Ibn al-Hajj, Professor Safran’s main source for the paper) and for some even new building was allowed if no Muslims were there to see it (and likewise the only places bells were OK were where there were no Muslims to hear). And of course, all of this was coming before jurists because the thing was happening anyway and people were consulting them over whether it was legal, or we’d not have the fatwas (rulings); but that also means people weren’t sure. Since each specific pact with a Christian community was individually negotiated at conquest, as long as they had surrendered, there was even the question of whether general legal rules could or could not overrule particular concessions, and most agreed that they could not. We lost Professor Safran to internet patchiness before we got to the conclusion, but recovered her for questions and had by then already accumulated quite a rich picture of the bitty, cumulative and sometimes contradictory way in which Islamic law developed and develops. People who get worried about the iron force of sharīʿa might take some comfort from medieval illustrations like these of how it actually got and gets worked out in practice.

Mosaic floor in the 3rd-century synagogue at Kibbutz Ein Gedi

Mosaic floor in the 3rd-century synagogue at Kibbutz Ein Gedi, image from the Madain Project and linked through to them

Lastly, not a medieval paper at all but one which turned that way suddenly in questions, on 24th February 2021 another Leeds colleague, Dr Nir Arielli, was presenting to the School of History Research Seminar with the title, “Life Next to the Dying Dead Sea: a social-environmental micro-history of Kibbutz en-Gedi”. This, I attended largely because some months before Nir and I had warmly agreed that there needed to be more work on land use in the School of History and thus I felt that, when he was then doing that, I should probably support. The land use in question, however, is at great risk because of the way that the Dead Sea has shrunk over the last few decades, largely if not entirely because of extraction for industry from the River Jordan by many countries.6 The pictures were dramatic and worrying, but the hook for this medievalist listener came from the fact that, among its other work on the site, the Kibbutz has found and attempted to frame itself as the revival of a Roman-period Jewish village. This rang bells for me because of the work of Dan Reynolds about the historicization to political purposes of Roman- and Byzantine-period use of lands in these areas, but I restricted myself to asking how long the Roman settlement had lasted and what was known about it by the Kibbutz community.7 Even that was quite interesting: the site had a synagogue, with a mosaic floor that you see above which very handily identifies itself, a Cave of Letters connected with the Second Jewish Revolt whose records include the court cases of a a litigious second-century woman called Arbatta, among the other victims of the Roman suppression of the rebellion, and other remains that indicate the place was occupied until the seventh century. I don’t know what happened then and all likely answers would probably be bad at the moment, but it was certainly easy enough to understand why the modern community had built themselves a museum for this stuff and interesting that the past was so literally central to the place and its settlers’ identity. There were lots of other more relevant questions as well, of course, but I felt as if I’d got the medieval to show itself in my modernist colleagues’ work for a moment and therefore went away well satisfied as well as more educated. Which, I suppose, is ideal for a day in a university environment!

1. If one is in need of an introduction to Tzetzes, other than the man’s own X feed already linked of course, one might try Enrico Emanuele Prodi, "Introduction: A Buffalo’s-Eye View" in Prodi (ed.), Τζετζικλι Ερεϒνλι, Εικασμος: Quaderni bolognesi di filologia classica, Studi online 4 (Bologna 2022), pp. ix–xxxv, online here, but I admit I haven’t so can’t be sure what you’d get.

2. If you can’t wait till this emerges, you could sate yourself meanwhile with Maroula Perisanidi, "Byzantine Parades of Infamy through an Animal Lens" in History Workshop Journal Vol. 90 (Abingdon 2020), pp. 1–24, DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbaa019; and the phrase "serious entertainments" is famous to me because of Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago IL 1977).

3. Professor Safran was known to me when I scrawled that request for work such as Janina M. Safran, "Identity and Differentiation in Ninth-Century al-Andalus" in Speculum Vol. 76 (Cambridge MA 2001), pp. 573–598, DOI: 10.2307/2903880; Safran, "The politics of book burning in al-Andalus" in Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 6 (Abingdon 2014), pp. 148–168, DOI: 10.1080/17546559.2014.925134; and Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca NY 2015).

4. See for example David J. Wasserstein, "ISIS, Christianity, and the Pact of Umar" in Yale University Press Blog 16 August 2017, online here.

5. Further doubts about the application of the Pact can be found in Norman Daniel, "Spanish Christian Sources of Information about Islam (ninth-thirteenth centuries)" in al-Qanṭara Vol. 15 (Madrid 1994), pp. 365–384, which includes apart from anything else a demonstration that there is no evidence for the Pact being known in al-Andalus.

6. See for more Nir Arielli, "Land, water and the changing Dead Sea environment: A microhistory of Kibbutz Ein Gedi" in Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture Vol. 40 (Abingdon 2022), pp. 235–256, DOI: 10.1080/13531042.2022.2186311.

7. Daniel Reynolds, "Conclusion: Post-Colonial Reflections and the Challenge of Global Byzantium" in Leslie Brubaker, Rebecca Darley and Daniel Reynolds (edd.), Global Byzantium: Papers from the Fiftieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Publications of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 24 (London 2022), pp. 372–409, DOI: 10.4324/9780429291012-20 at pp. 376-391.

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I said ‘yes’ to too many things…

Posted on 4 November 2023 | 3 comments

I can already see that my blogging plans for this week are going to fall by the wayside, so I thought I should at least offer an explanation. It’s basically the one of the title: at some point over the summer, perhaps emboldened by the union-mandated freedom from marking, I started thinking about things like Rethinking the Medieval Frontier again and getting in touch with colleagues elsewhere and so on. And this is always risky, because the likelihood is, as we have noted here, that doing that will get you asked to give a paper. In recent years I have been saying ‘no’ to such requests, yea even unto the International Medieval Congress itself, but I must have had some sequential moments of weakness or over-confidence and now somehow I am giving two papers next week. One is good to go, the other not so much, and so I must spend the remainder of the weekend on it, good old unpaid research… but even that is a step forward from where we have been.

Screenshot from Jonathan Jarrett's work on a paper, including David Graeber's book Debt and notes on it

Composed screen-shot indicating what is currently taking up my metaphorical screen

Still, I can at least tell you about the papers. First up is an online paper for the University of Leicester’s Medieval Research Centre, this Tuesday coming at 17:00, on Teams. My title is "Frontier? Who Says? (Early) Medieval Classifications and Exploitations of Frontier Spaces in Iberia and Elsewhere", and if that interests you there is a link to join it, as well as the rest of their interesting-looking programme, here.

Then, on Friday, at the good ol’ University of Leeds, there is a full-day workshop entitled The Myth of Barter: Perspectives from the Global Middle Ages, organised by our Affiliated Research Fellow Dr Nick Evans. Here there is no webpage to link to, since it’s a closed event (mainly to protect Nick’s catering budget!), but if you are desperate to come along and hear, among other things, me unwisely talking to the title, "Exchanging Goods in Post-Monetary Societies: Back to Barter?", then a mail to Nick might still be effective. Other speakers are Nick himself, Professor Caroline Goodson and Dr Robert Bracey. So that’s why I have to come up with something good… I’ll check back in with you about some other stuff which happened at Leeds already, once this too is in the past!

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Posted in Currently reading..., Next paper is due..., Now working on...

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