Book Review – 1215: The Year of Magna Carta

1215: The Year of Magna Carta

by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham

Simon & Schuster 2004, originally published in Great Britian in 2003 by Hodder & Stoughton

ISBN 0-7432-5773-1

This is a fun book. The goal of the book, I think, is to help the reader understand what the Magna Carta really was, how it came to be, and what on earth it was talking about. [Quick! Why is it important that your recognizance of novel disseisin be held in your own county’s court?!  Yeah, I didn’t know either.  This is why we read *about* the Magna Carta in school, but almost never read the document itself.]

The books opens with very broad chapters setting the scene – what was life like in a medieval English castle, or town or farm – and gradually shifts towards the events leading to the Magna Carta itself. The details are fascinating, entertaining, and sometimes disturbing – the excerpt I posted last week is typical of the kinds of colorful anecdotes the authors use help build a vivid portrait of medieval life.

–> One of the most helpful  of the earlier chapters for me was on warfare (“Tournaments and Battles”), because I don’t think until this reading I had really understood quite how it all worked – most books on medieval warfare that I have read tend to dive into a single aspect – castles, or knights, or the winning of particular battles – this book finally gave me the broader picture.

The narrative is quick – the word ‘breezy’ comes to mind – flowing very quickly from one idea to the next, and dropping details and anecdotes wherever they can be fitted smoothly.   Examples of various practices jump around time and place, and often a character is introduced without any real context, so that it was hard at times to fully understand the meaning behind the anecdote. The complete absence of footnotes did not help. This complaint of mine applies primarily to the earlier chapters, though, and by the end of the book, as the authors unroll the month-by-month developments leading to the Magna Carta, it is much easier to follow the train of events and be sure of who is doing what and why they are doing it.

In all I found the book to be believably balanced in its view. History being what it is, you can of course always find an argument with the historian’s version of events, but I can’t remember any point where I thought the authors were overlooking an obvious explanation for some particular practice.   Generally I found the reading of people and events to be very real – very aware of the normal humanity of the people involved, not at all trying to make them into something other than what they were.  And of course, if you know very little about the Magna Carta, this book is just the remedy.

So my recommendation is: Check it out from your local public library. I wouldn’t urge you to buy it unless you are really at the point where what you need is a readable popular history of the topic – it is a good book, but the lack of footnotes is a real stumbling block for those who want to use it as a launching point for further study. (There is a bibliography, though, if you are the sort who uses those. Perhaps it will be enough for you.)

I do think it makes a good beginner (adult) book – someone who was jumping into medieval history for the very first time could probably read and enjoy, and come away the winner for it.  And that in itself is impressive — there are not many history books that are informative for intermediate readers and still approachable for beginners.  I should emphasize that although younger readers could understand and enjoy, you would not necessarily want them to do so.  Parental pre-reading strong advised.

I know, I know . . .

Running a bit behind schedule here – no drama, just a lot of ordinary life all at once.  Will try to put up the book review this afternoon.  If that doesn’t pan out, I haven’t the faintest idea when I will do it . . . but next week *looks* normal, so worst case scenario we miss a week and pick up with the schedule from there.

Christian Theocracy Unveiled

To read certain introductory works on life in the middle ages, you might get the feeling that medieval Europe was a strong-armed theocracy, where Stepford kings and Stepford peasants droned “Yeeess, Biiishop” as they together marched with glazed eyes towards the few courageous free-thinkers who’d been ferreted out of hiding and gleefully prepared for execution. Here’s an excerpt from Medieval Life (Dorling Kindserly, 1996, Bridget Hopkinson, editor), from page 30, “The Church”:

“The Catholic Church was at the center of the medieval world . . . it governed almost every aspect of people’s lives . . . For many, life on Earth was hard and short, but the Church said that if they followed the teachings of Christ, they would be rewarded in heaven. This idea gave the Church great power over people’s hearts and minds.” [Elsewhere on the page you can see the illustration of heretics being burned, with corresponding explanation.]

In contrast, spend an afternoon poring through the old four-volume Butler’s Lives of Saints, and you get quite the opposite picture – a Europe that is only barely Christian, and constantly forgetting what little of the faith it has learned. However much bishops and abbots might be entirely mixed up in the affairs of state, they are no more ‘in control’ than their secular counterparts in the constant struggle for land and power. (Contrary to myth, this edition of Butler’s Lives does not indulge in romantic revisionism. Where it reports legend, it will tell you very plainly what is legend, what is verifiable fact, and what is educated guess. You may be able to find a book that will retell history as if medieval Europe were a glorious interlude of catholic-paradise-on-earth, but Butler’s Lives is not that book.)

A book that explores the importance and the limits of church influence in pre-conquest England and Normandy is Queen Emma and the Vikings. This is a biography of the woman who managed to be queen to both her first husband king Aethlered of England, and to the Danish king Cnut who overthrew him. In telling the story, Harriet O’Brien also shows the tension between the desire for approval from religious leaders that lends legitimacy to a conquering ruler, and the confidence that said approval does not require a strict adherence to the less convenient bits of church teaching.

It is a surprisingly persistent tension. Witness today the insistence with which Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden claim their catholic heritage, all the while publicly rejecting elements of church teaching. There is nothing preventing either one from saying, “As a faithful Episcopalian it is my belief that . . .”, and yet they and countless other catholics cannot quite bring themselves to shake their catholic heritage*.

There must be something to this.  I wonder if there isn’t an inborn sense of a need for religious approval and belonging that transcends time and place and culture; an intuition so strong that rational agreement with the actual religion is no obstacle?  Even when there is very little at stake — contemporary American society is hardly a place where membership in a particular denomination is a prerequisite for public office.  Something to think about more.

Meanwhile, I’m reading 1215: The Year of the Magna Carta, a book for adults that I will review next week. One thing I am enjoying about the book is the exploration of the mixed-up situation of church and state, belief and practice, that characterizes the era in question. And here is an excerpt that illustrates that tension – the struggle of an ordinary sinner who is trying to find the way to keep to church teaching, but is all the same powerfully caught up in the values of the wider society to which he belongs. We read (p.17):

It was sign of status to be accompanied almost everywhere, even when in the bath or the privy. Even so, there were a few things that people preferred to do alone. According to the historian William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190’s, when the doctors advised a seriously ill archbishop of York that his only hope of recovery lay in having sex – many doctors believe in the restorative power of the sexual act – the archbishop took the young woman they provided for him into his private room (secretum). But when the doctors examined his urine the next morning they discovered he had not, after all, followed their advice. He explained to his friends that he could not break his vow of chastity – not even for medicinal purposes – and that he had pretended to do so in order not to hurt their feelings.

I can relate to the archbishop. And I think that ultimately when we talk about ‘the power of the church’ in any given time and place, we need to remember we are speaking of a church composed of millions of people, all of them in their own special spot on the scale of ability to follow church teaching – me and the troubled archbishop of York, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and St. Thomas Aquinas, Nancy Pelosi and King Cnut. Pick any one of us and convince yourself we are representative of all the other catholics of our time and place, and it might make for a fun horror movie, but it doesn’t really tell us much about history.

*I am not, by the way, the sort of catholic who wishes the less-practicing would shape up or ship out.  I do wish Pelosi and Biden would get on board with church teaching, but I’m not quite persuaded that sitting in Episcopalian pews will speed the conversion process.  Then again, maybe so.  A question for wiser minds than mine.

updated my homeschool blog link

Moved my homeschooling blog to a new location here on wordpress the other week.  Finally got the link updated today.

At the new location I’m also giving the blog a schedule.  I enjoy the way blogs lend themselves to sharing news & observations as they occur, but in practice, using the ‘spontaneous approach’ I always seem to end up composing posts in my head, but rarely getting them to you.   For better or for worse, the schedule here has been really helpful in getting me to actually write out more substantial posts than I would otherwise pretend I had time to write (you may be secretly wishing I wrote less substantial posts).

Anyhow, will try the same method for the homeschooling blog.  Three weeks out of four it will be miscellaneous homeschooling topics (about our school, about homeschooling in general, about what’s on our agenda); the other week is a ‘catholic’ topic.  As if I weren’t writing on enough catholic topics here.

Those tricky catholic topics, plus the education topics, means there’s a certain amount of overlap between the two blogs.  I do have logical plan for deciding what belongs on which blog, but at times it is a special kind of logic, not unlike the way I organize bookshelves, that is known to me alone.

In any case, if you haven’t found it yet, the new site is http://greencastlehomeschool.wordpress.com/ .  Enjoy.

A little satire for the season.

(FYI for curious readers, I’m an undecided voter at this time. That is, I of course cannot vote for Obama, no way no how until the democrats give up the abortion platform. But I’m not much of a Republican, either. I want to like the GOP, but it never seems to work out. As if puzzling out economic or environmental issues weren’t tricky enough, that whole war-n-torture thing just did me in.)

The living wage, health care costs, and structures of justice

When we talk about what a living wage should include, I think health care is the hardest to pin down. It’s fairly easy to know whether a person is clothed or has enough to eat. Housing is a bit more of a moving target – how much space does an individual *really need*?, we wonder; but still, “keeps me warm, dry, and safe” is a fairly straightforward criteria to assess.

Healthcare, though, is its own special world. Between the life-versus-death and quality-of-life type questions it poses, and the ever widening options for medical care, it is very hard to know and agree about what is the ‘right amount’ of health care. And if you don’t know how much your employees deserve, you can’t know whether you are compensating them adequately in this area.

Still, just because we aren’t ready to answer every question about health care doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to answer a few to get started. Doing so may, in turn, shed light on further questions.

The other week Darwin posted A Case Study on Costs and “Basic Health Care”, and I saved it in my bookmarks for linking here. If you haven’t read it, you need to go read it. If you already read it once, go back and read it again.

[BTW, having given birth four times in recent memory, I can vouch for the reality of the situation he describes — lest anyone dismiss this as an isolated or extreme example. No, this is the birthing business as usual, pretty much the new normal in the United States.]

Here’s a quote that summarizes:

As it stands, our medical system is built around the assumption that cost is no object. And doctors are very heavily penalized based on any “avoidable” injuries or deaths that occur on their watch. The result is that instead of providing good, high quality “basic” health care, and using extreme (and expensive) measures only when necessary, we often require extreme measures “just in case”. This makes it far, far more difficult to provide “basic” health care to all.

And here is what I want to say: Wake up Republicans! Health care reform is waiting for you! When I talked about ‘structures of justice’ this is exactly the kind of thing I meant. Do not labor under the illusion that a just society – one in which the poor are not trampled underfoot – is the sole province of the dreaded far left. There are good conservative solutions to these kinds of problems, and if we as a nation were to actually enact them, well, the left would have a lot less fodder for their tendency towards grand socialist fantasies.

The living wage is not a left- or right- wing ‘agenda’. It is a moral imperative. You cannot be a just person if your profit or your comfort depends on other people giving you their labor, and you not providing them the means to live in exchange. The good news is, that if we are willing to care about the people who are too sick or too in debt or working too long of hours to be actively engaged in the political process, we can come up with sensible, free-market-compatible ways to create a just society.

PSA: Text Size

I hate it when internet text is too small to read easily, and sometimes it seems like this blog is one of the offenders.  If you share that opinion, know that if you use Mozilla Firefox you can hit “ctrl +” (the control button and the plus button at the same time) to increase the text size.  Hit “ctrl-” to make the text smaller.

Sadly, my version of Internet Explorer is not so handy — when I tried increasing text size, it only enlarged the headings and titles, not the body text.  Good news is that Mozilla Firefox has been a great program and I highly recommend it.  I think you can download it here.

5th Friday – Time to build up the blogroll

5^th Friday this week, which means site maintenance. Had some unexpected goofing off to do these last couple days, seriously cutting into my internet time, so not getting to as many site improvements as I’d like. Nonetheless, here’s a collection of new links for the sidebar:

It’s not that I mean to be a Jeffery Smith groupie, it’s just that he puts together some really interesting blogs, I don’t care if he is a tad grumpy. Ever Ancient, Ever New is a quiet blog – at this writing, the most recent entry dates from April 2008 — but thought-provoking. If you like to think about what makes good church architecture, check this one out. Russian Art is exactly what it sounds like. The entries cover all eras, and I haven’t been disappointed with any of them.

Wish I could remember who it was that pointed me to No Question Left Behind: Teens Helping Teens. Another accurately-titled blog, this one is devoted to catholic teens answering questions from other [catholic?] teens. Good stuff. And a reminder for old people that teenagers do care about God and want to know the truth – even if, like older adults, they don’t always act on the truth as quickly and completely as the aged bystanders would like. [Or, conversely, make us uncomfortable by answering God’s call more thoroughly than considered appropriate in polite company.] And speaking of answering God’s call, there’s The Blog that’s all about RCIA. Just what it says.

Banner month for clearly-titled blogs: The Orwell Diaries is the publication of George Orwell’s, um, diaries. There for you who are literary types, and for the rest of us who sometimes get our feet wet, even if we’d never in a million years pass for Serious Literary Thinkers. I’ve stuck it on the ‘online books and audio books category’ for now, which is close enough to what it is.

Also into that category goes the Requiem Reader. Put together by Jim Curley, the author of one of my all time favorite blogs Bethune Catholic, this project of his publishes excerpts of books published by Requiem Press (which he owns and operates). Wide variety of genres. I guess I’m a Jim Curley groupie, too. Is it the ‘J’ names, or something else?

I’m sticking Taylor Marshall’s Canterbury Tales into the ‘history’ category, though like many of the links in the blogroll, it could fit in several places. Not a blog about Chaucer (though he’s probably in there somewhere), but does cover lots of church history and biblical history. I don’t read this blog as often as I ought, because I’m usually surfing for brain candy, and this is the kind of blog you have to concentrate on, if you are junior intellectual like myself. More advanced readers won’t have that problem.

And the final addition the blog roll this go round is In the Light of the Law, a canon law blog written by an actual canon lawyer. Fear not: Despite the fact that the internet overflows with bitter people who pitch angry snippets from the code canon law at anyone who dresses funny or sings poorly, canon law is really kind of fun, when held in competent hands. Dr. Peters looks at current events in the church, and helps the reader understand precisely how canon law does and does not apply. Fascinating and vitriol-free.

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And that’s it for this month.  I can’t for the life of me remember what it was I meant to write about next week for economics, so I can’t give you a preview.  You’ll just have to wait (and so will I).  Have a good week, and see you in September.

Lake Woebegone schools?

Picked up a book called Time to Learn by Christopher Gabrielli and Warren Goldstein; 264 pages of cheerleading for extended school hours. Here’s an interesting statistic from their introduction:

More than 60 percent of Americans (as measured by a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll) give the entire school system grades of C, D, or F. On the other hand, when it comes to their own community schools, or the schools their children attend, the grades improve markedly. Roughly half the respondents give their community schools an A or B, and 70 percent give the school their oldest child attends an A or B. We seem, in other words, to be convinced that the system as a whole is mediocre, while at the very same time we believe that the schools closest to us are just fine. Both cannot be true. We appear to have taken up residence in a town like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Woebegone, but one where all the schools are above average.

Gabrielli and Goldstien conclude that the parents are simply deluded. The *think* their children attend good schools, but in fact they do not. (And if only you do what the authors suggest, that will all be fixed. A topic I might look at next month.) Today I’d like to toss out an alternate theory for these apparently contradictory results.

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When I was in college I lucked into an awesome course. Award-winning professor teaching a class that was highly recommended by the students who had taken it, and which promised to be the kind of thing you would be glad, decades later, that you had studied. I can remember sitting in class thinking to myself, “this is a really good class”. And knowing that if only I could be bothered to pay attention to the lecture and then actually do the homework, I would learn a ton.

Naturally, slack student that I was, I did not do this. I did the bare minimum to skate through the course, and frankly I even misestimated that minimum, and thus did more poorly than even I had hoped. If you used my knowledge coming out of that class as a guage of how good the course was, you would be very sorely mistaken. My conclusion: You cannot judge that quality of the teaching soley by the achievements of the students.

I can fully imagine that many parents who give their children’s schools high marks know this too well. The teacher is wonderful, if only you could convince your child to actually do the homework. There’s a fabulous school library, too bad your kid never wants to check any books out of it. And so forth. You can lead the kids to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.

So that’s one element of my theory: The parents can see that their children attend good schools – they are being asked to rate the school itself, not to rate how much their children actually bother to learn at the place.

The second part of my theory is this: Quality of education varies within schools. Again, this is not a big secret. There can be really good teachers and really lousy teachers working in the same building. If your child is able to get into the better classes, you’ll have a better impression of the quality of the schools. Sometimes this is even very explicit: a certain sub-population of students participate in a special program (honors, magnet school, resource room, bi-lingual classroom, etc) that gets all the best the school has to offer. Parents of the program may not even know that kids outside the special program aren’t getting as much attention or as good of teaching, and will rate the school highly based on their own experiences.

And thirdly, it all depends on what you want. Does your idea of a ‘top notch sports program’ mean that most varsity players will go to college on athletic scholarships? Or does it mean that 90% percent of the students are involved in an intra-mural sport? Asked to rate your own school on a given subject, you might give it a high grade because you know that an excellent specialty program is available for those who qualify; but you might in turn give a poor grade to other schools, because all you see is the statistics on the general student population.

And that leads to a final, a very likely, cause of the disconnect: We don’t actually know what happens at all the other schools. We can see the statistics on student performance, school violence, drop-out rates and so forth. We might see a newspaper article featuring students or alumni of other schools. If these give an ugly picture, we conclude those other schools aren’t doing so well. Our own school, in contrast, we know very well. We can give a more nuanced evaluation, one that distinguishes the efforts of the teachers and the administration from the results of the students, and that balances strengths and weaknesses in giving an overall judgement.

I think that Gabrielli and Goldstein present some good ideas in favor of the extended school day, though I have several reservations about making it a universal practice. But I think the accusation that parents are simply incapable of knowing that whether their children are currently offered a good education is both patronizing, and based on a very narrow interpretation of the statistics they offer.

[Funny contrast: When given objective data on the results of homeschooling students, I think people get too good of an impression. If you compared homeschoolers only to children of parents who were actively interested in education, enjoyed learning, spent significant time with their children, and supervised the children’s educational efforts to ensure homework was done, tests studied for, and classes chosen carefully, I bet the results between public-, private-, and home- schooled children would be very similar. Despite what the statistics might lead you to believe, homeschooling will not turn your child into a genius. Good form of education? Yes. But no alchemy in it.]

3rd Friday – Book Review

Note before I begin:  Two things always seem to happen to me when I visit Las Vegas:  1) My baggage arrives on a different plane than I do, and 2) I end up borrowing a computer that causes strange formatting issues on my blog.  The first is resolved now, but the 2nd I’m not so sure about.  If this post is difficult to read, my apologies, and if need be I’ll try to fix it when I get home.

 

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Daily Life in Medieval Europe, Jeffery L. Singman (Greenwood Press, 1999)

Daily Life in Chaucer’s England, Jeffery L. Singman and Will McLean (Greenwood Press, 1995)

Daily Life in Elizabethan England, Jeffery L. Singman (Greenwood Press, 1995)

 

Summary: These are some of the better history books I’ve seen.  They may or may not be what you are looking for, but if you are interested in the topics they cover, I think they do a great job.  I can’t say there was never a single sentence that made me pause and go ‘hmmn’, but I don’t have any of the reservations I have about other very helpful but still flawed works on the same era.

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The SuperHusband brought two of these three home from our local library for me last fall. I was skeptical (judging the book by the cover and all that), but eventually boredom got the best of me and I cracked one open. Pleasant surprise.  [The three are part of a larger series, but I haven’t read any of the other titles in the series, which are by other authors.]  I made myself read the entirety of Medieval Europe last fall so that I could write a proper review; I think I read all of Elizabethan as well, or at least the bulk of it; Chaucer’s England I picked up the a few weeks ago when I went to fetch the others in order to prepare this post, and have skimmed it to see what’s there, but have only read snatches of it in any detail. I lump them together because they are all by the same author, and are very similar to each other in the kinds of information and comments they contain, and are all of similarly good quality.

 

As the titles indicate, these books deal with what ordinary life was like in the indicated time periods; if you want detailed accounts of kings, bishops, and battles, you’ll need to find some other book – though these do each open with a brief overview the history of the period, to help put the bulk of the book into context. In contrast, if you always wanted to know about how much it would cost* to buy a quart of ale in 16^th century England, or maybe you have some spare honeycombs sitting around and were looking for a nice medieval mead recipe to use them up, these books can help.

 

The goal of the series is to provide an entry-level to intermediate resource, but which is more substantial than most beginner’s histories. At this is fully succeeds. Something like this would be a good choice before trying to get into A Day in a Medieval City (which I reviewed last month). The reading level is adult, but not overwhelmingly complex or technical – a high school student shouldn’t have any difficulty with the books, and would probably really enjoy picking one out to read as part of a European History course.

 

I expect that younger students who are strong readers and highly interested in the subject would also find them accessible, and it is fairly easy to skip to the sections of high interest for those who don’t want to read the whole book. That said, parental guidance is always recommended – I can’t recall anything particularly objectionable, but I’m fairly sure I ran across some adultish topics, though if your children are already immersed in contemporary American pop culture (mine are not) I bet you’ll never bat an eyelash.  If nothing else the discussion of religion is one where parents may want to provide some perspective.

 

What I really love about these books is the respect with which they describe and speculate about the people living in medieval and renaissance Europe. The author comes from a living-history background, and I think this really shows through – people of the past are treated as ordinary people quite like ourselves. The three d’s of the gossip-method history writing – dumb, depraved, and disgusting – are refreshingly absent, and without succumbing to the opposite error of combining nostalgia and amnesia to gloss over the difficult realities of the time period.

 

Another strength is the avoidance of gross generalizations. Medieval Europe, the title most likely to succumb to that temptation, limits itself to the high middle ages – approximately 1100 to 1300 – and to northwestern Europe. In each of the chapters devoted to village, city, monastic and castle life, a specific location (one for which ample documentation is available) is chosen and examined in detail. Rather than pretending that you could possibly explain two hundred years and four countries worth of monastic life in a single chapter, for example, the book gives you a detailed look inside Cluny, thus giving you a general idea of what a monk’s life might have been by showing just how it was in that particular time and place.

 

All three books are geared towards helping the re-creationist get started. There are specific instructions for making clothing, as well period songs with sheet music, descriptions of how to play period games, specific recipes culled from historical sources, and so forth.   For that reason these books would make an excellent resource for planning a themed party, educational event, or costuming and set ideas for a play (or story) set in the relevant era.  Obviously Chaucer’s England is just begging to be read by anyone studying The Cantebury Tales, and Elizabethan England would likewise be a natural accompaniment to a study of Shakespeare.

 

Some differences between Medieval Europe and Chaucer’s England, in case you are wondering which title will better fit your needs:  As I mentioned above, the former covers the period from 1100 to 1300, whereas the latter focuses on the second half of the 14^thcentury.  Also, as one could guess from the titles, Europe covers a slightly broader geographic era than England.  In addition to the study of Cluny, the chapter on town life uses Paris (mining the data from the 1292 tax assessments for evidence) as its sample city.  The sections on castle and village life are based on locations in England.  Chaucer’s England leans very strongly in the direction of aid to the aspiring re-creationist; it lacks these detailed studies of archeological sites as found in Medieval Europe, but seems to have more material on clothing, music, games, and so forth.

 

*Answer: about a half-penny.