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.

 

2nd Friday – History

It’s time to put together my 08-09 curricula for the kids, and in doing that I made my annual visit to the education section of my local public library (the 370’s per Dewey Decimal, FYI) to borrow a couple books I always find helpful in that process.

While there I came upon Educating Deaf Students: From Research to Practice (Marschark, Lang & Albertini; Oxford University Press, 2002), and of course I had to take it home, because, well, it looked interesting. Not a topic I have any real pressing need to master, any more than one needs to master, say, knitting, or Latin, but a subject about which I know very little and think it would be neat to learn a little more. As it happens I’m only on page 31 and holding, so I can’t tell you whether the book is any good, though it looks promising.

I’ve never seen the topic of educating deaf people show up in a regular history book, so I wanted to share a few interesting bits from this book:

“Saint Augustine’s descriptions of a conversation between hearing and deaf persons suggest that such communication [via a form of sign language] was commonplace. This may indicated that converastion among deaf people in late ancient Roman society was not only familiar, but that deaf people were not as isolated as some have surmised.” (p. 18)

“In the late 1400’s, Agricola described a deaf person who had been taught to read and write.” (p.19)

The book goes on to list four distinguished renaissance artists, one of whom studied history and the scriptures in a monastary, and was known to have communicated using signs with his parish priest, who had no difficulty understanding. And then we learn about the work of the spanish benedictine monk, Pedro Ponce de Leon:

“It was in 1578 that Ponce de Leon described how he had taught the congenitally deaf sons of great lords and other notables to read and write, attain a knowledge of Latin and Greek, study natural philosophy (science) and history, and to pray. Ponce de Leon’s students included the deaf brothers Pedro and Francisco de Velasco, and the congenitally deaf Fray Gaspar, who later became a priest.” (p. 20)

The history continues into the modern era (shifting to England and then the United States), for those who are interested in learning more.

I wish bits of information like this were included in more general-purpose works of history. I do realize, of course, that editors have a need to pare down and pick and choose what makes the final cut in a history text. On the other hand, I think these little reports really add to our understanding of life in ancient Rome or renaissance Europe.

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Curiously, the authors observed about the middle ages: ” . . . we find little biographical informtion that might help us understand how deaf people lived. It seems likely, however, that the Dark Ages were especially dark for deaf persons.” (p. 18)

I’m not entirely convinced myself of that conclusion — what evidence the authors offer supports the ‘little information’ assertion and not the ‘especially dark’ assumption. I tend to be more optimistic than not, I suppose because of the reports from the eras immediately before and after. But since neither of us have any information, there’s no telling what the real story is.

Book Review: A Day in a Medieval City

A Day in a Medieval City, Chiara Frugoni

University of Chicago Press, 2005 ISBN: 0-226-26634-6

(Originally published as Storia di un gionro in una citta medievale, Laterza, 1997)

Chiara Frugoni is a professor of medival history at the University of Rome, and this book builds on articles written by her father, Arsenio Frugoni, who died in 1970 and who was also, in his time, a professor of medieval history at the University of Rome.

The book begins with an introduction consisting of Arsenio Frugoni’s original work, which vividly captures the feeling of life in an eleventh or twelfth century Italian city, as well a brief perspective on how it reached its medieval form. Chiara Frugoni adds seven chapters that explore various themes ( “Inside the City” “Childhood Learning”, etc.) in more detail. It seems to me she draws the majority of her examples from the late medieval period (14^th and 15^th centuries).

The book is written for adults, both in reading level and content, but is very approachable for the hobbyist-historian. Someone who has never studied medieval history at all might be more comfortable reading some more introductory works first, and going to this one as a sort of ‘intermediate’ level text. Detailed endnotes add another layer of depth.

This is a book I can’t help but like, despite several reservations I’ll mention below. The vividness of detail is positively delightful, and with little to none of the gee-whiz snappiness that plagues many popular works on medieval history. For example there is an exploration of the role pigs played in the city (as garbage collectors), including period accounts of pig-related incidents. If you are looking for illustrations of medieval dress and furnishings, there are 153 images available for your perusal.

The most compelling feature of the book is this enormous collection of (period) illustrations it contains, and the explanations that go with them. A typical medieval history book might have a caption that gives the title, author, date and place of creation. Chiara Frugoni puts detailed descriptions in the text of the book, often describing a work panel by panel, to help draw the eye to details the reader would otherwise overlook or perhaps not comprehend at all.

[A note of caution: the illustrations include all aspects of medieval life. Including, say, the torture and execution of captured enemies. Not for the faint of heart. On the other hand, haven’t you always wanted to see a little toilet-related artwork, and the discover the story that goes with?]

One of the weaknesses of the book, though an understandable one, is that it flits back and forth through a broad time frame, even within paragraphs. Topics are arranged by theme (medicine, education, religious belief, etc), and often the entire medieval period is treated in the aggregate. It is helpful to have studied the timeline of medieval history elsewhere, so that you can parse apart references that mix and match centuries.

This is probably one of the first works on specifically Italian medieval history that I’ve read, and I think I probably missed a few jumps between cities as well. I liked the work because it dealt with a region I hadn’t previously studied (most lay-accessible english-language books on medieval “Europe” tend to focus on England), but as a result, I really didn’t have the capacity to know just how alike or different, say, Venice and Milan might have been at the time, and whether an anecdote from one city reliably shed light on the other.

Last in my list of complaints, there were moments when I thought the generalizations needed a little more documentation. For example, at one point the author writes in a passage on women reading, “They used reading stands made for the men of the house (it is difficult to imagine that they were built to meet the particular needs of women)”. Now this may be entirely true, and yet it is a terribly bold statement to make – here we are looking at illustration after illustration of women reading, and we are to believe that in this time and place men didn’t give their wives gifts related to their daily activities? It may well be the case, but any time you accuse whole gender of utter selfishness towards their own family members*, it would seem appropriate to present a bit of evidence.

Likewise there were times when I wanted a little more context for a quotation. I found myself wondering, Is this preacher condemning something that is widely practiced, or is he largely “preaching to the choir”? Is his opinion widely held in the church, or was his sermon preserved because of its unusual nature? I also wish the references to witchcraft had been footnoted – so many excellent footnotes elsewhere had me spoiled, I suppose.

And I think these last examples sum up my mixed feelings towards the work as a whole. It’s a beautiful book, a splendid look into a region that isn’t as well known to English-speaking readers, full of detail after vivid detail about medieval life. But it is a book you would want to read with a bit of salt handy – hold onto the treasure trove of illustrations and anecdotes, but be prepared to want to question some of the interpretation.

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*In our home the accusation tends to be kind of the reverse. “Oh honey, how thoughtful! A reading stand? For me? It’s just what you’ve always wanted!”

Squeamishness

Next week I’m going to be putting up a review of Chiara Frugoni’s book A Day in a Medieval City. One of my cautions about that book is that it includes a number of very graphic images (all period) of the brutality of that era. She focuses on Italy in the late medieval period, and from reports I’ve heard elsewhere, it was a particularly nasty moment in the history of warfare. It was in reading this book that today’s topic came together.

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When Mr. Boy was preparing for his first holy communion, the question of eucharistic miracles arose. We looked up a few, and as often happens when learning about miraculous events of the past, I found myself asking, “Why no more? Why then and not now?” I contented myself with the standard response, that God will send what is needed to those who need it, and if those miracles were what would really help our faith today we would have it, so on and so forth.

More careful thinking gave me another answer: Because it would make us vomit.

You can believe in the assorted miracles associated with the holy eucharist or not (regardless of whether you are catholic), but the sordid truth is undeniable: we are squeamish people these days, not of the type to find our faith fortified by seeing the sacred host turn into a slab quivering flesh and blood.

For the average American today, exposure to gore tends to be an all or nothing prospect. Either you’re in one of the corpse-tending professions, or you aren’t. Either you deal with raw sewage for a living, or you don’t deal with it all. The occasional small farmer excepted, slaughtering animals is either what you do all day long, or what you expect to be long since completed before ever your dinner makes its way to grocery cart.

When we look at history, it is important to remember this. We who live the sanitized life are the exception, not the rule, to the human experience. We’re kidding ourselves if we think every one else throughout the millenia were the ones who were so disgusting; rather we should remember that our special label in history is going to be “those really wimpy people”.

I sometimes think our underexposure to gore – in particular, the shortage of brutality that we modern americans run into in day to day life – is a good thing. Perhaps because we are more sensitive to the yuckier parts of human existence, we are more sensitive to human suffering, and thus more compassionate, more peaceful, more kind to others. But lately I think not.

Rather I think that we’ve gotten ourselves into the habit of whitewashing. It isn’t that we mind abortion – and now torture – it’s that we don’t want to see images of it. So long as these practices are hidden from view and referred to with euphemisms, the same way we use modern plumbing and clever nicknames to gloss over our excretory functions, we are, as a society, really okay with them. The offensive person is not the one who supports the right to abortion or torture, but the person who has the nerve to discuss what those procedures actually entail.

There is an important distinction here for those of us who enjoy studying history: the acceptance of brutal practices, verses the acceptance of the viewing of that same brutality. If two societies both rejoice in the executing of enemies, it doesn’t make much difference whether the one rejoices at what happens in a discreet prison room far from view, and the other rejoices when it happens in the public square where everyone can see. Either we execute our enemies or we don’t; either we derive a certain pleasure from it, or we don’t; whether or not our stomachs are strong enough to view the actions we so approve is rather besides the point.

If we can be honest with ourselves about our own societal weakness, we can have more compassion on our ancestors and their particular versions intolerable brutality. Not to excuse them, but to see their world through their eyes and at least have a little pity on them, the way hopefully they are having pity on us.