Saluting Aron Gurevich: Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects

Saluting Aron Gurevich

Later Medieval Europe Managing Editor

Douglas Biggs University of Nebraska – Kearney

Editorial Board Members

Kelly DeVries Loyola College

William Chester Jordan Princeton University

Cynthia J. Neville Dalhousie University

Kathryn L. Reyerson University of Minnesota

VOLUME 5

Aron Gurevich, 1924-2006. Photo courtesy of Elena Gurevich and Peter Gurevich.

Saluting Aron Gurevich Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects

Edited by

Yelena Mazour-Matusevich Alexandra S. Korros

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration: Modern miniature of Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich © Drawing by Francisca I. Shilova This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Saluting Aron Gurevich : essays in history, literature and other related subjects / edited by Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, Alexandra Korros. p. cm. — (Later medieval Europe, ISSN 1872-7875 ; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18650-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Middle Ages—Historiography. 2. Gurevich, Aron Iakovlevich. 3. Historians— Russia—Biography. 4. Medievalists—Russia—Biography. I. Mazour-Matusevich, Yelena. II. Korros, Alexandra Shecket. III. Gurevich, Aron IAkovlevich. IV. Title. V. Series. D116.S25 2010 909.07092—dc22 2010020321

ISSN 1872-7875 ISBN 978 90 04 18650 7 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Foreword: Aron Gurevich: A View from India Harbans Mukhia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Introduction: Saluting Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich: Studies in History, Literature and Related Subjects Yelena Mazour-Matusevich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Gurevich, the Person April 1970: Gurevich’s Attitudes toward the Soviet Academic System: a Personal Memoir Alexandra S. Korros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Gurevich in the Context of Soviet and Western Historiography A. Ia. Gurevich’s Contribution to Soviet and Russian Historiography: From Social-Psychology to Historical Anthropology Roger Markwick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Aron Gurevich’s Dialogue with the Annales Peter Burke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Muscovite Russia Russia Between East and West: Diplomatic Reports During the Reign of Ivan IV Charles Halperin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Healers and Witches in Early Modern Russia Eve Levin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Scandinavia and Northern Europe Individuals, Friends and Kinsmen in Medieval Iceland: The legacy of Aron Gurevich Eva Österberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Medieval Ireland and Iceland—Worlds Apart? Michael Richter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Heroic Violence, Individual Identity, and Community Reflection Andrew Cowell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Christianity and Medieval Popular Culture L’émergence de la compassion dans le regard sur la Passion au moyen âge: Franciscanisme et mentalité populaire Jean-Pierre Delville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 The Bleeding Host of Dijon: Its Place in the History of Eucharistic Devotion Thomas Izbicki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Some Aspects of Aron Gurevich’s Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin on Medieval Popular Culture Yelena Mazour-Matusevich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Gurevich and the New Generation of Russian Historians Chess as a Metaphor for Medieval Society Svetlana Luchitskaya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Aron Gurevich’s Medieval Individual Yuri Zaretsky and Boris Stepanov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

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Gurevich in his Own Words Salute to Aron Gurevich Jacques Le Goff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aron Gurevich Yelena Mazour-Matusevich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Aron Ia Gurevich: Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 Names Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381 Concept Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors especially thank Janos Bak (Central European University, Budapest) for his continuous, generous assistance in writing the introduction to the volume and for his help in its general preparation. We are also grateful to Aron Gurevich’s daughter and grandson, Elena and Peter Gurevich, for providing us with a set of his photographs and valuable information. We hope they will enjoy the volume. Our volume would not be the same without its beautiful and original cover created by the Russian artist Francisca Shilova. Thank you. Finally, we would like to express our appreciation to Julian Deahl (Brill) for his initial encouragement for the project as well as for his exceptional professionalism and personal kindness, which made our work so pleasant. The editors would also like to thank The Russian Review and Blackwell Publishing for their permission to reprint the Markwick article. Similarly, we express our appreciation to The Journal of Medieval History for its cooperation with us in reprinting the Gurevich interview.

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aron gurevich: a view from india

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FOREWORD: ARON GUREVICH: A VIEW FROM INDIA In 1969-70, some five years after his demise, a new university was established in New Delhi, named after India’s first and legendary Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the primary mandate of which was to experiment with innovative academic courses. After a full year of intensive discussions among its faculty, the history courses instituted at the Centre for Historical Studies made several departures from the prevailing pattern in Indian universities, and indeed from those in many British universities on which Indian higher education is modeled, where early in their careers students select a narrow field of specialization. Among the Centre’s experiments was a set of four survey courses required of all students enrolled for the two-year Master’s degree irrespective of specialization: Ancient Society, Feudalism, Capitalism and Colonialism, and Historical Methods. The first three were to be surveys of what were then perceived as socioeconomic structures around the world. In those decades Indian academia was obsessed with the notion of structures and the transition from one to the next. Over time, this mood of experimentation with innovation spread to other Indian universities as well. Gradually, the obsession with structures began to yield to a more fluid notion of “formations” in which emerging modes of historical scholarship and explorations of new themes, such as mindscapes and everyday life, became integral. One indicator of the growing fluidity in our own experience was the broadening of the course on Feudalism to a new one, “the Medieval World.” If land, labor, production, and distribution had comprised the core of the earlier course outline, the material in the “Medieval World” also encompassed family, households, notions of time and space, attitudes towards the human body and towards nature, and so forth. It was this expansion which, sometime in the 1980s, brought us into contact with the writings of Aron Gurevich, along with other towering figures such as Jacques Le Goff, Georges Duby, Carlo Ginzburg, Michel Vovelle, and many others. The result was amazing—vast new horizons began to open up before our students, for as the study of history moved away from impersonal “structures” to a

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more humane, almost close personal experience of life in the past; it came alive. As it happens, most Indian scholars could access Gurevich’s (and others’) work only in English translation, with the exception of those few who could also read French. But even this limited familiarity with his works was sufficient to draw us to the awesome grandeur of his path-breaking explorations. Gurevich’s sway over the arena of culture, which he always explored in depths beyond the obvious and superficial, was forever an inspiration to us as well as a sort of lamp post. Sometimes implicitly, often overtly, Gurevich questioned received knowledge from giants in the field. In The Origins of European Individualism Gurevich stood on its head the notion that individualism was best understood in the backdrop of post-Enlightenment and that the medieval world was characterized by collectivities as the social unit. Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages was a masterly collection on a spectrum of themes, with each essay setting out ever new landscapes in historical exploration. According to Gurevich, in medieval society the end result of carnival, laughter, and parody reinforced rather than challenged existing structures of authority. His approach contradicted not only Marxist interpretation, but also challenged Bakhtin’s pervasive arguments. Medieval Popular Culture sensitized the reader to the adoption of folkloric practices of magic by priests even as they denounced these activities in their sermons. Categories of Medieval Culture brought historians face to face with the most significant conceptual tools of their craft. Reading these works was a scintillating experience. Every time. The launch of The Medieval History Journal in 1998 marked one manifestation of India’s growing interaction with emerging scholarship in medieval studies around the world. The journal was an experimental venture that, edited and published in India by SAGE Publications, sought to encompass the study of medieval history—in its broadest possible reach—in whichever region of the world such studies are pursued. We invited Aron Gurevich to serve on its Editorial Advisory Board and he very graciously and readily accepted the invitation. Several years later, our great reward came when we received a message from Yelena Mazour-Matusevich inquiring whether the MHJ would like to publish a long interview with Gurevich. We were aware that Gurevich was physically a step beyond his prime and had virtually lost his eyesight. It was therefore a great privilege to be offered this opportunity. As it turned out, the inter-

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view, published in MHJ (7, 2, 2004) accompanied by a beautiful, warm tribute by Jacques Le Goff, “Saluting Aron Gurevich,” covered an enormous range of themes, both academic and personal. Intellectually, it was a veritable tour de force, in which Gurevich discussed his long journey in the profession; at a personal level it let us, ever so gently and movingly, into the enormous suffering heaped upon him by the Soviet regime for being a Jew and for his rejection of conventional “Marxist” careerism, i.e., toeing the Party line for personal aggrandizement. The courage and conviction of this lone individual and his will to pay any price for integrity left the reader feeling very humble. I count it among my misfortunes that I was never able to meet Gurevich and that my personal contact with him was confined to some very touching messages exchanged via e-mail when we were publishing his interview. Two years later we received the very sad news of his passing away in Moscow. It was very heart warming to learn from Yelena Mazour-Matusevich that a collection of essays from scholars around the world to commemorate Gurevich was in the offing and it is very satisfying to be a witness to the resounding success of her efforts. In a very small measure this volume seeks to repay a fraction of the debt the profession of history owes to one whose overwhelming intellectual presence was matched only by his very genuine humility. Harbans Mukhia Professor of Medieval History (retired) Centre for Historical Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

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Modern miniature of Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich © Drawing by Francisca I. Shilova

saluting aron iakovlevich gurevich

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INTRODUCTION: SALUTING ARON IAKOVLEVICH GUREVICH: STUDIES IN HISTORY, LITERATURE AND RELATED SUBJECTS YELENA MAZOURMATUSEVICH

Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich, a unique phenomenon in Soviet historical scholarship, produced a corpus of work which established him as the premier internationally-recognized Russian historian of the late twentieth century. He acquired his international reputation through translations of his work, the first of which appeared in 1974. His Categories of Medieval Culture (trans. into English by G. L. Campbell, London, 1985) and Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (trans. into English by P. Hollingsworth & J. M. Bak, Cambridge, 1988) have been published in fourteen languages. These books, together with Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages (trans. Jana Howlett, Chicago,1992) became classical references for scholars and students of the Middle Ages continuing to gain popularity and renewed interest among the newest generation of historians and medievalists. Our volume, made possible through the collaboration of fifteen scholars from the USA, Russia, Australia, India, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary, Germany, and the United Kingdom, seeks to commemorate Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich’s contribution to medieval studies as well as his personality as a scholar and intellectual. We believe that Gurevich is important for two major reasons: first as a great historian and second as an individual who managed to become an innovative and independent-thinking scholar despite the circumstances of his life and the obstacles to unorthodox historical scholarship in the Soviet Union. The volume combines a variety of contributions by scholars of diverse backgrounds including medieval history, art history, Soviet historiography, Russian and Eastern European studies, comparative literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies and cultural theory. With a high degree of consistency, all the articles relate to Gurevich’s work, influence or life and are organized around Gurevich’s central themes: the medieval individual, popular versus

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yelena mazour-matusevich – introduction

elite culture, medieval popular Christianity, medieval Scandinavia, his dialogues with the Annales school and with Mikhail Bakhtin. I met Aron Iakovlevich late in his life, in January 2003, and I count this meeting among my greatest blessings. This event was preceded by several years of studies of his works, starting with Categories of Medieval Culture, which I first read as a graduate student. I remember the excitement I experienced in the reading room of the public library in Aix-en-Provence when I discovered this book, which was so different from what I previously had read about the Middle Ages. The book made sense to me as all the sporadic facts and information I had learned suddenly came to life and acquired meaning. Only later did I realize that Categories of Medieval Culture was not the first of Gurevich’s books I had read. I recognized the same Gurevich as author of Problems of the Genesis of Feudalism in the Western Europe, a tiny worn-out book I found at the Fundamental Library of my undergraduate alma mater, the St. Petersburg Herzen Pedagogical University.1 I still recall the book’s appearance because of the bewildering and refreshing impression it made on me. In his book Gurevich questioned the validity of Marxist analysis and called the concept of “classical feudalism” a “logical mistake.”2 Problems of Genesis of Feudalism was met with a strong opposition. Gurevich recalled, “I remember when, in 1970, I published my small book on the origins of Western feudalism … it was severely criticized as anti-Marxist, revisionist and so on.”3 Together with Yuri Bessmertny (1923-2000),4 Gurevich was scorned for anti-Marxism and “structuralism.”5 Indeed, at that time Marxist ideas were objects 1 A. Ia. Gurevich, Problemy genezisa feodalizma v zapadnoi Evrope, [Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe] (Moscow, 1970). This book has never been translated into English. 2 Ibid., 10: “Therefore, the theoretical notion of feudalism is a model produced not so much by generating of large data, but by the elevating of concrete material based on the studies of the history of one region in France to the norm…” (My translation). 3 A. Gurevich, “Annales in Moscow” in Le Goff and Medieval History, Miri Rubin, ed. (Rochester, NY, 1997), 242. 4 Yuri Bessmertny, disciple of Evgeny Kosminskii and Alexander Neusykhin, was a colleague of Gurevich’s at the Institute of Universal History of the Russian Academy of Science. He was the author of Live and Die in the Middle Ages (Moscow, 1991). For more information, see the website the Department of Russian Literature, Tartu State University: file://\\Len106\user\Ruthenia.htm. 5 This “accusation” has nothing to do with these historians’ actual views. The word “structuralism” was used in the same manner as “Trotskyism,” “cosmopolitanism” etc., in other political witch-hunting campaigns.

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of faith, not analysis, and any deviation from the sole acceptable approach was considered an ideological crime fraught with heavy consequences. From the very beginning of his professional career, Gurevich was relegated to the provinces, denied even the humblest teaching position in his hometown of Moscow, and forced to take a teaching position in Tver’ (Soviet Kalinin) from 1950 to 1966. Even after his return to Moscow, he was often ostracized, harassed and reprimanded for his challenging, original scholarship. Only someone who lived under the draconian Soviet academic regime can fully appreciate the resilience of spirit and intellectual stamina which Gurevich displayed to preserve his scholarly integrity in those not-so-distant times. Considering the degree of hostility and omnipresent anti-Semitism of his homeland, such a stance is particularly astonishing. Gurevich’s experiences represent a particular kind of dissidence within the academic community because he successfully resisted the temptation to compromise his ideals and ideas with Soviet ideology to make a career. Although Gurevich’s work was met with hostility in the official Soviet academic milieu, he found encouragement and support abroad, particularly among prominent French historians of the Annales School of historical anthropology, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Georges Duby, who wrote the preface to the French edition of Categories of Medieval Culture. On Le Goff’s invitation, Gurevich authored The Origins of European Individualism.6 At the time of his death in August 2006, Gurevich’s name was known to all medievalists. He was a Corresponding Fellow of both the British Royal Historical Society and the Medieval Academy of America. He was awarded honorary doctorates at the Universities of Lund and Poznań, and was elected as a member of the national academies of Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands. Lamentably and shamefully, the Russian Academy of Sciences failed to grant him its highest title: “Academician.” Yet in his homeland Gurevich did not create in a vacuum. In addition to Yuri Bessmertny, the initial co-editor of the annual Odyssei [Odysseus], he found an attentive reader in Vladimir Solomonovich Bibler (1918-2000), philosopher, poet and organizer of unofficial

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A. Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism. Katherine Judelson, trans. Oxford, UK & Cambridge, MA, 1995).

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yelena mazour-matusevich – introduction

home seminars on philosophy of culture.7 Bibler wrote particularly interesting comments for Gurevich’s book Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception.8 Until the eve of the fall of the Soviet regime, Gurevich was never allowed to travel abroad to the West and, according to his own words, could never even dream about it. However, despite the isolation, his trajectory as a scholar bore similarities to those of his colleagues living in the “free world,” particularly to his French counterparts of the Annales School of historical anthropology. Indeed, many leading French historians began as scholars of rural life but later turned to the history of mentalities. Another similarity consists in Gurevich’s rejection of Marxist methodology in historiography. This parallel can only be understood if we recall that Marxist ideas dominated the humanities not only in the Soviet bloc but to a great extent in Western Europe as well. Yet, while Gurevich rejected the Marxist explanation of history once and for all, French historians of his generation detached themselves from Marxism gradually and, according to Aron Iakovlevich, often not entirely, with some elements of Marxist philosophy still perceptible in their works.9 Evidently, living within a 7 V.S. Bibler is yet another “unknown philosopher and thinker” that “the West is not always alert and sensitive enough to detect.” (Julia Kristeva, “On Yuri Lotman,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 3, 109 (May, 1994) 376.) Bibler was another victim of the “anti-cosmopolitan” and, in reality, anti-Semitic campaign. He was exiled in Stalinabad (now Dushanbe) and taught many years at the Tajik State University. From 1959 he was allowed to return in Moscow where he taught at the School of Mining and later in the Institute of Universal History where he met Gurevich. From 1965 he started unofficial seminars on philosophy of culture at his home. Bibler developed Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogue of cultures and published very extensively on this subject: Ethics. Culture. Modernity (Moscow, 1988); From Scientific Worldview to the Logic of Culture: two philosophical introductions to the 21st century (Moscow, 1991); Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin or Poetics of Culture (Moscow, 1991); On the Margins of Logic of Culture: selected articles (Moscow, 1997). 8 Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture. Problems of Belief and Perception. Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth, trans., (Cambridge, UK, 1988, reprint 1993.) On Bibler also see S.S. Neretina and A.P. Ogurtsov, Vremia Kultury [Time of Culture] (St. Petersburg, 2000). 9 Gurevich was always vigilant in promptly noticing any arguments with “Marxist flavor”. He detected them in Georges Duby, “the most Marxist of all French medievalist” (see the interview) and even in Jacques Le Goff who explicitly disengaged himself from Marxist historiography: “We can adopt one of two tactics. Firstly it is possible, as Jacques Le Goff insists, to look for the reasons for this mental and religious development in the changing conditions of social and economic life. But it is possible to discuss the causes of intellectual transformations in relation to religious and mental attitudes without reducing them to economic and social determinants. It

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“communist paradise” prevented the Russian historian from perceiving communism as the “projet culturel” with which French and European intellectuals flirted for so many years. Besides, the disillusionment of French historians with Marxism mostly occurred following the fall of the Communist system in the early 1990s, while Gurevich’s disenchantment with it dated from the 1950s. To Gurevich and other Russian oppositional scholars, the fall of communism also came as a surprise, although in a different sense: they knew the regime was doomed but could not imagine that it would implode so quickly and during their lifetime. Suddenly the Moscow academic world turned upside down, as in a Bakhtinian carnival. The privileged official historians of the Marxist-Leninist brand became unwanted while Gurevich, well known in the West, emerged as a celebrity and leading light of Russian historical studies. In 1989 his change of fortune was consecrated: it was Aron Gurevich who presided from the high podium at the International Moscow Colloquium for the anniversary of the Annales, while his former persecutors sat in the audience. Now Gurevich represented Russian historiography in the world. He found himself popular, sought after and invited simultaneously to several universities abroad. From that point onwards he could travel and establish face-to-face contact with his French colleagues Le Goff and Duby. It was a change without transition, a personal revolution that occurred when he was in his sixties— the age when, as Gurevich said, “respectable people retire.” Janos Bak, Gurevich’s long time friend and translator who then taught in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, was among the first able to welcome Aron Iakovlevich abroad and witness the happiness of a bird released from his cage. Bak commented that unfortunately, only a few years after Gurevich could first see his beloved Scandinavian sites and the rest of the world outside the Soviet Union, he lost his eyesight. Towards the end of his life, Gurevich spent much time reflecting on the fate of historical scholarship during the Soviet period, emphasizing the distortions, vulgarizations and falsifications that had substituted for genuine scholarship. In his autobiographical Story of a Historian (Istoriia istorika, Moscow, 2005) Gurevich wrote about his own professional motivation, experiences as well as the sources is not necessary to return to the idea of ‘basis and superstructure’ which is concealed, I believe, behind such reasoning.” (“Annales in Moscow,” 246).

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yelena mazour-matusevich – introduction

and methods of his scholarship. He also criticized colleagues for their lack of candor in describing their own lives and the conditions of scholarship under Communist rule. His frankness offended many. As his daughter, Yelena, put it in a conversation with me, “Gurevich was disturbing because of his uncompromising position. What’s more, many local historians still resent the unmerited, according to them, popularity of his books in the West.” From the early years 2000, the atmosphere in the country and in Russian academia began to change for the worse. The Russian establishment now desired to present the Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods as one continuous and everglorious history of a great Russia. Gurevich’s highly critical opinions challenged this new nationalistic agenda. He considered the state of Russian humanities research “provincial in the worse sense of this word,” and believed that it was this provincialism which has often been mistaken for “our scholarly originality, which, in the majority of cases, conceals nothing but intellectual poverty.”10 He insisted that Russians should humbly “learn from the West” and that it would take years to catch up with the rest of the world.11 Such unflattering criticism from the intractable historian who insisted on discussing questions so few were willing to address and who persisted in unearthing the past precisely at the moment when it was in the a process of being carefully refurbished, could do nothing but irritate contemporary Russian officialdom. Feeling the change in the ideological wind, his enemies had resurfaced, and, as he put it in his very last interview, “decided to shake at Gurevich their oversized fists so that he shut up.” Nevertheless, even at the end of his life, he would not do as they wished, “Yes, I have been uncompromising when it concerned my scholarly views. If I did not have such a nasty character, I would have given up long time ago and my life would have been so much more comfortable: I would have been an Academician. But I do have a nasty character and I stand on it!”12 Thus, even in death, Gurevich’s position in Russian historiography has remained, as Bakhtin would have put it, “ambivalent.” Loved by many, envied by many more, Gurevich has already been turned into 10 Gurevich’s last interview, “I could no longer remain neutral,” June 11, 2006, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 81 (2006): http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2006/81/ int10.html 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.

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a classic while remaining a highly controversial figure. Yet, no matter how Russian history and historians choose to perceive him, Gurevich has become an authority with whom every Russian medievalist must contend. He has become inescapable. Two articles in our volume will further contribute to understanding of the Russian historian’s personality and life. Alexandra Korros’ autobiographical essay, “April 1970: Gurevich’s Stance toward the Soviet System,” illuminates Gurevich’s personal stamina and courage as it recounts her personal observations of Gurevich’s reactions to efforts to punish his lack of orthodoxy. The biographical and personal approach continues, this time in Gurevich’s own words, in the reprint of his interview, with a preface by Jacques Le Goff, initially published in India in the Journal of Medieval History. Although Gurevich became known and identified himself as a “branch” of the Annales School of historical anthropology, his work had an undeniable originality. Janos Bak, who visited Gurevich regularly in the early 1980s, recounts how intensely curious he was about the work and personality of his colleagues abroad, commenting that “at that time, people like Le Goff were merely written words for him, and he inquired about their appearance, habits, ways of teaching and writing, with unhidden jealousy for their liberty.” Yet though he greatly admired his French colleagues and their methods, he often challenged their views. Peter Burke discusses Gurevich’s rich and complex relationship with the Annales School, including comparisons and contrasts between Gurevich’s work and that of the French historians, as well as his reactions to them and theirs to him. According to Gurevich, his ability to develop a fresh approach to the medieval West and to challenge some of the traditional concepts of European medievalists was largely conditioned by his initial training as a specialist in Scandinavian studies. Although Gurevich later focused on the larger picture of the medieval worldview, he never lost his enthusiasm for his beloved European North. His work on Scandinavian history is highly esteemed in Scandinavia and Russia but is yet to receive similar recognition elsewhere due to the lack of English translations. The article “Individuals, Friends and Kinsmen in Medieval Iceland: the Legacy of Aron Gurevich” by the Swedish scholar Eva Österberg introduces the reader to this aspect of Gurevich’s work while elucidating his analyses of the complex contribution of Icelandic saga heroes to the rise of the concept of the individual in medieval Europe.

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yelena mazour-matusevich – introduction

The Scandinavian and Icelandic connection is also explored in a provocative article by the German scholar Michael Richter “Medieval Ireland and Iceland—Worlds Apart?” Using Gurevich’s “holistic” and anthropological approaches to the study of culture and recent research in the field of human genetics, the author argues that Irish literature and Irish presence in Iceland may have had a formative influence on early Icelandic literature and culture. The Germanic theme continues in Andrew Cowell’s chapter presenting a discussion of past readings of medieval heroes, focusing on the issue of the vision of the hero and his implicit ability or inability to respond to the changing circumstances around him within the text. It draws in particular on Gurevich’s analysis of the Old Norse figure of Gunnar, developed in his Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, as emblematic of a certain type of Germanic heroism in which the hero consciously engineers his own triumphant death. Cowell discusses the medieval hero’s conception of consciousness more generally in light of the various anthropological approaches applied to the medieval chanson de geste and the medieval hero. Australian scholar Roger D. Markwick pursues the theme of historical anthropology, albeit in the Soviet intellectual and political context, in his study “A. Ia. Gurevich’s Contribution to Soviet and Russian Historiography: From Social Psychology to Historical Anthropology.” Markwick argues that in Russia, Gurevich almost single-handedly laid the ground work for historical anthropology, one of the most vibrant trends in contemporary historiography. The article also places Gurevich’s research into the larger context of the emergence of Soviet socio-historical psychology in the late 1960s and early 1970s and into the development of the Tartu-Moscow school of “culturology,” or cultural semiotics. The latter is very important for this volume because this innovative and influential school of cultural theory, known in France thanks to the efforts of Julia Kristeva, has unfortunately gotten little recognition in North America. The study by two Moscow historians Yuri Zaretsky and Boris Stepanov, “The Medieval Individual in Aron Gurevich’s Historical Anthropology,” contributes further to our understanding of Gurevich’s place and role in Russian historiography and in humanities in general. The authors approach their subject both synchronically and diachronically, elucidating Gurevich’s evolution on the subject of the individual in medieval culture by providing an exhaustive review of Russian sources and contemporary scholarly debates completely

saluting aron iakovlevich gurevich

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unknown to the Western reader. Another Gurevich’s student and later his colleague, Svetlana Luchitskaya, recognizes her indebtedness to Gurevich’s ideas in her article “Chess as a Metaphor for Medieval Culture,” where she seeks to illustrate the connection between the growing popularity of the social metaphor of chess with real social changes in the medieval society of the thirteenth century. Awareness of Gurevich’s close intellectual connection with groundbreaking discoveries in the theory of culture explains why his contribution to medieval studies appeals not only to specialists in medieval Europe, his area of expertise, but to historians and humanities scholars in general. Perhaps the most important aspect of his work was its conceptual innovativeness. The questions he asked for the first time were original, new, productive and stimulating even for those researchers, like Charles Halperin, whose area of specialization (13th to 16th century Russian history) lies outside Gurevich’s scope of sources. It is now obvious that many specialists in medieval Russia have had the same reaction to Gurevich’s work, which is extremely significant for the evolution of modern historiography. Gurevich’s ideas quickly acquired a life of their own. Thus, as Halperin argues in his article “Challenging Aron Gurevich’s View on Russia: Diplomatic Reports from the Reign of Ivan IV,” reading Gurevich can help shed a new comparative light on the field of medieval Russian history. In her article “Healers and Witches,” Eve Levin carries on the theme of medieval Russia, examining the practice of folk healers as a form of popular Christianity rather than as a form of surviving paganism. In giving prominence to the Christian elements in this practice, she follows Aron Gurevich’s conceptualization of the intertwining of Christian and non-Christian elements in popular culture. Three other articles deal, though in completely different ways, with the subject of medieval Christianity and popular culture. Thomas M. Izbicki, in his study “The Bleeding Host of Dijon: Its Place in the History of Eucharistic Devotion,” uses Gurevich’s ideas on medieval Church symbolism, where the most holy was united to the profane, in order to explicate the unusual phenomenon of the Dijon bleeding host relic. Belgian historian Jean-Pierre Delville’s article on the emergence of compassion through the visualization of Christ’s sufferings on the cross explores the connection between popular devotion and Franciscan piety in light of Gurevich’s views on historical anthropology. While the former article examines the higher and the latter the lower components of medieval culture, together, although absolutely

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yelena mazour-matusevich – introduction

independently, they provide complimentary views on Gurevich’s ideas about medieval Christianity as an inspiration for further research into medieval culture. The theme of medieval popular culture and Christianity resumes in my own (Yelena Mazour-Matusevich’s) contribution, “Aron Gurevich’s Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin: Medieval Popular Culture.” Providing a general review of the current state of Bakhtinian studies in Russia and in the West, as well as of existing studies on Gurevich’s criticism of Bakhtin, the article elucidates Gurevich’s position vis-à-vis Bakhtin’s concepts in the new light of their respective attitudes toward the medieval Catholic Church and its role in medieval culture. Janos Bak related that during discussions on problems of translation with Gurevich, who was, justifiably, rather unhappy with some of the early German and English versions of his work, “finding the proper word or phrase for what Aron wished to convey, led often to private mini-seminars on the conceptual development of historical anthropology and related disciplines, especially in the AngloAmerican world.” These discussions, “interrupted only by consuming the incomparable cheese dumplings fried by Gurevich’s wife Fira, taught both sides a great deal about the need for understanding across, as it were, artificial boundaries within the respublicca scholarum.” Our volume definitely aims at pursuing this objective.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 11

APRIL 1970: ARON GUREVICH’S ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE SOVIET ACADEMIC SYSTEM A PERSONAL MEMOIR ALEXANDRA S. KORROS

Second generation American Jews whose parents emigrated from Eastern Europe generally still had relatives living “in the old country.” My family was no exception, for each of my parents had siblings who had been left behind. Whereas my father had left his native Rowne (then in Poland, but a part of the Russian empire when he was born) to study engineering and then geography in Vienna, my mother’s family were refugees from the Russian Revolution who had escaped from Gomel’ in Byelorussia to Vienna via Poland and then to the United States. When I arrived in Moscow for the first time in April 1970, I had two purposes: researching my dissertation in the Lenin Library and meeting my family—a great aunt on my father’s side and especially, my mother’s nephew, my first cousin, Arik–Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich, and his family. When my mother’s family left Russia in 1921, my mother’s oldest living brother Iakov, who had been sent to Siberia to buy supplies for their soap factory, was left behind. Unable to return to Gomel’ in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution, my uncle remained in Siberia, married, and in 1921 following the end of the Civil War, moved to Moscow. Unfortunately, by 1925 my uncle had succumbed to tuberculosis leaving behind his wife and infant son, Aron, who had been named for our late grandfather. In 1928, my grandmother managed to visit her daughter-in-law and grandson in Moscow, but since that time until my visit in 1970, no one else from our immediate family had been able to make face-to-face contact. It was a momentous event for me as well as for my Moscow family. From the moment Arik opened the door, looked at me, and asked rather incongruously, “Are you the tallest?” I found myself surrounded by a loving, attentive, and wonderful family.1 1 I think Gurevich was surprised at my height—I am about 5’ 9”, but I was wearing high heeled shoes which made me closer to six feet. My grandmother had five grandchildren—four males and me. My American cousins were all taller than I. My

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This article is not intended as a scholarly examination of an episode in Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich’s life. Rather, it is my personal memoir of the month I spent in Moscow when I first came to know the Gurevich family which coincided with one of the more serious episodes in Gurevich’s academic career, the attempt to discredit him because of his book, Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism.2 The weeks I spent with the Gurevich family indelibly colored my views on Soviet society, but also may be a vehicle for those who have admired Gurevich, the scholar, to get a glimpse of Gurevich, the person. Readers unfamiliar with Soviet academic life may not realize the close relationship between an individual’s character and his professional life; I hope that this snapshot will shed some light on the peculiar character of academic life during the Brezhnev era. Although I utilize a number of sources in the article, much of it is really a personal recollection that I hope will allow readers to appreciate the warmth and courage of a great historian who remained throughout his life an honorable man (chestnyi chelovek), the highest compliment Aron Gurevich could bestow on another human being. **** My cousins and I had an immediate connection because I was the daughter of the beloved aunt who had always tried to keep in touch. From the time of my grandmother’s death in 1940, my mother had accepted the responsibility of maintaining contact as best she could with her Moscow nephew. Disrupted during World War II, contacts with Gurevich were limited in the years following the war because of the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign associated with Stalin’s henchman, Andrei Zhdanov.3 In 1965, when Gurevich’s father-in-law, mother attributed the height in the family to my grandfather for neither she nor her brother and sister were particularly tall. Gurevich was about 5’ 7”, indeed he was the “shortest” of all his first cousins. I think that my height epitomized the sense that Gurevich’s American family had benefited from capitalist prosperity rather than Soviet scarcity. 2 A. Ia. Gurevich, Problemy genesiza feodalizma [Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism] (Moscow, 1970). 3 Zhdanov’s policies, clearly instigated by Stalin, were initiated at the conclusion of WWII. They included a strong xenophobic element, epitomized by the so-called “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign which assumed that any Soviet citizen with contacts, including family, outside the USSR was a potential traitor. This policy had a particular impact on the Jewish community, where families such as mine were the rule rather than the exception. For further information see, for example, Ronald G. Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York and London, 1997).

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 13 Israel Shifman, received permission to visit close relatives in New York, we were able to resume regular contact with the family. At the time of his visit, Shifman brought many photos of our Moscow family and through him we managed to send packages for Arik, his wife Fira, and their daughter Lena. Almost five years later, in 1970, having completed four years of graduate study in Russian history at Columbia University, like my fellow graduate students I departed for Europe and Russia to complete my dissertation research. My plan was to spend two months in London followed by four weeks in Moscow working in the Lenin Library and then three days in Leningrad prior to departing for three months in Helsinki, Finland. On my first morning in Moscow, Shifman came to my hotel to take me to the Gurevich apartment. From that day on, until my departure for Leningrad, I spent every single day with my family—Arik, Fira, and Lena—meeting their friends, sharing their food and learning about Soviet life. When I visited the Kremlin churches and museums for the first time, Arik accompanied me; Fira took me to visit Kolomenskoye, the country estate of Ivan IV, the Terrible, along the Moscow River; Lena and I visited the Tretiakov Gallery4; we all went to the Bolshoi Theater to see the great ballerina Ma’ia Plisetskaya dance in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. One of the many things I learned that first evening was that Gurevich faced “difficulties” or “unpleasantness” at this particular time in his career. He recounted his problem in what I came to realize was his typical fashion, clearly explaining the situation, but tingeing his remarks with a cynical humor indicating that facing “difficulty” was a regular part of his life. For some Soviets, difficulty meant that it was not easy to get decent housing or certain kinds of staple foods, but by Soviet standards, the Gurevich family enjoyed good housing. Moreover, they had more than enough money for food and other necessities since his “zarplata,” or state salary, was over 400 rubles per month because of his status as a “professor” and “doctor”—the highest academic degree offered by the Soviet scholarly establishment. For Arik, difficulty meant confronting challenges to his scholarly work. Compared to Soviets who were still living in communal apartments where several families shared a kitchen and bathroom, the 4

Moscow’s Tretiakov Gallery houses many of Russia’s greatest artworks, including invaluable medieval icons, and paintings by major Russian and Soviet artists.

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Gurevich family lived in relative comfort in 1970. They had recently moved into a large brick apartment block on a street off Prospekt Mira (The Avenue of Peace), one of the busiest main arteries in north Moscow. Their apartment had three rooms plus a kitchen where we spent most of our time. Each member of the family had his or her own room with a Scandinavian style sofa which turned into a bed when the cushions were removed. Fira’s room was the living room, the largest in the house. Arik’s room was his study where he worked and which was filled with bookcases, many of them enclosed by glass doors where photographs and art work were displayed. Fira’s room also had bookcases with similar photos and artwork. Among the photos in Arik’s bookcases was one of Marc Bloch, the French historian whom he most admired. Arik’s room also contained a short-wave radio crucial to him for listening to foreign broadcasts and classical music which he loved. Twelve-year-old Lena’s room, closest to the kitchen, was also full of books. In 1970 the family did not own a television; however, by the 1990s, the television was located in the kitchen where “entertainment” rather than work took place. The family had moved into the building, especially constructed for teachers, in the previous two or three years. I recall that when I first entered the building’s vestibule, I noticed that the elevator which took me to the twelfth floor had sixteen buttons although the building had only fourteen floors. On the other hand, the second elevator in the building had the correct fourteen buttons. I used to wonder, partly because of Arik’s sarcastic suggestion that there were never any faults in Soviet construction, whether pressing button sixteen would release a Soviet secret weapon. Arik also often joked that the thirteenth floor was rapidly becoming the twelfth floor as the building settled. Their apartment had a long hallway, and my first lesson in Soviet etiquette came when I was asked to remove my shoes and put on “tapki” or slippers while I was in the apartment. While in the West a guest might be invited into the living room, we all immediately entered the kitchen and sat around a small table where we drank tea, ate meals and discussed everything. The new apartment meant privacy for the entire family in contrast to their previous communal apartment shared with strangers. Because they had saved money to join a cooperative building especially for teachers, the Gurevich family inhabited a larger apartment than most other Muscovites. In contrast to those whose hardships were mostly material, almost every Gurevich difficulty stemmed from the same source—his fiercely

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 15 independent approach to the study of medieval history and strong sense of personal integrity. As he tells us in his memoir, Istoriia istorika [The History of an Historian], the late 1960s, especially the period following the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia to end the “Prague Spring,” marked a hardening against dissenting ideas. Actually, for intellectuals, the end of what the Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg had so aptly named “the Thaw” following Stalin’s death,5 began in 1966 during the trial of Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel6, with much closer monitoring of published ideas for their adherence to Marxist orthodoxy.7 Although Gurevich did not view himself as a dissident attempting to gain the attention of the authorities, he nonetheless sought to practice history in the manner he thought appropriate. He certainly did not seek notoriety. He expressed his position two decades later in an autobiographical essay which appeared in Odyseei: Chelovek v istorii [Odysseus: The Individual in History], an annual journal which he edited. In discussing whether or not he viewed himself as a dissident, Gurevich admitted his conscious decision to avoid politics. I tried to avoid so-called “public work” [obshchestvennaya rabota— often translated as public service] and at the first opportunity I left the Komsomol.8 It seems to me that there was no question of joining the KPSS [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], and when there were attempts . . . to get me to join the Party, I declined them using a variety of pretexts . . . The principle of my public deportment was nonparticipation. . . This principle guided me later [in life] as well. I was never a dissident, nor did I participate in the human rights movement. When, with time, my loyalty began to arouse suspicion in somebody or other, it applied specifically only to me when Party and academic functionaries who kept me “under their wing” either prohibited me from traveling abroad or dismissed me from my work. For this reason, in answering the question, “was I a citizen?” I must confess I was a passive subject, for the sense of not belonging and not participating, 5

Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), Soviet journalist and writer whose novel, Ottepel [The Thaw] gave the name to the period following Stalin’s death, especially during the Khrushchev era (1955-1964) during which de-Stalinization occurred. 6 In 1965 Andrei Siniavski and Iulii Daniel were tried for publishing their work abroad. Their trial became a cause celebre, and for many Soviet dissidents and intellectuals it marked a new and harder line following Khrushchev’s ouster from power in 1964. 7 A. Ia. Gurevich, Istoriia istorika [The History of an Historian] (Moscow, 2004), 148. 8 The Komsomol was the Communist Youth Organization to which most secondary and many University students belonged.

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alexandra s. korros was hardly the suitable position. When they pursued dissidents, when they hunted Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, where were we? We sympathized with them, but in a cowardly manner, silently, thus granting arbitrary power the permission it needed. We can argue that “almost everyone conducted himself in this manner,” but not every single person. Moreover, and this is important, each individual has to answer to his own personal conscience, and relying on herd instinct does not serve as an excuse.9

While the Gurevich household did not participate directly in the dissident movement, I quickly learned that in their home opinions critical of the regime were voiced regularly and discussed openly, including in front of Lena; however, outside the house, it was necessary to take great care. Whereas for the adults explicit warnings were unnecessary, the burden of their Janus-like lifestyle was embodied in Lena Gurevich. For me, Lena’s arrival from school that first day symbolized the duality of their lives most eloquently. The front door opened, Lena undid her red Pioneer10 neckerchief and threw it into the apartment ahead of her, then entered. I was always fascinated how even at twelve, she understood that she led two lives—one at home where she could speak freely and hear all kinds of dissenting ideas about the world in which she lived; one outside, where she had to repeat the correct ideological answers at school to get the good grades she needed to receive a higher education while never revealing that her home was filled with people who discussed Soviet affairs in a totally different manner. Lena was street savvy in a manner I had never encountered even as a native New Yorker. On one occasion, at the end of our visit to the Tretiakov Gallery, I was totally exhausted. It was a chilly, rainy afternoon and all I could think of was getting back to the apartment as quickly as possible for hot tea and a chance to relax. As we stood outside the Tretiakov waiting for a cab, I wanted to take the first one I saw, although we would have to share it with someone else. Lena grabbed my arm, whispering softly to me, “Sandra, we don’t share cabs, you never know with whom you might be riding and what the results could be.” That day 9 A. Ia. Gurevich, “‘Put’ priamoi, kak Nevskii Prospekt’ ili ispoved’ istorika,” [“A Straight Path like the Nevskii Prospekt or the Confession of an Historian”] in Odyssei: Chelovek v istorii. [Odysseus: The Individual in History] (Moscow, 1992), 10-11. 10 The Pioneers were the Communist school children’s movement in which all grade school children were required to participate. Unlike Red Pioneers, the Komsomol, the Communist youth movement was a group to which an individual applied and was selected for membership.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 17 my young cousin had transformed into my protector from the hazards of Soviet life. Despite his efforts to keep a reasonably low profile, Gurevich’s intellectual honesty and willingness to explore new methodologies attracted attention not only in the USSR, but abroad. In the early 1960s, following Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress, historians, along with intellectuals of all stripes, took advantage of “the Thaw” to explore new historical methodologies, a process in which Gurevich participated enthusiastically. Consequently, Gurevich’s first notoriety in the west occurred not among his fellow medievalists, but at the hands of scholars of Soviet history looking for deviations from traditional Marxist ideology. Early on, perhaps even the first evening I visited, Arik suddenly asked me why Arthur Mendel was trying to “knock the nails into his coffin.” Mendel was a professor of Russian history at the University of Michigan whom I did not know personally but whose scholarship on Legal Marxism I had consulted in writing my masters essay.11 I was not acquainted with his other scholarly publications; however, as it turned out, Mendel was one of the first to call the work of A. Ia. Gurevich to the attention of western scholars. In “Current Soviet Theory of History: New Trends or Old?” published in the prestigious American Historical Review in October 1966, Mendel reflected on the “curious discussion” regarding historical methodology that had begun to spring up in the USSR since the thaw.12 While the author expressed a certain amount of skepticism as to whether genuine changes in methodology were really occurring, he admitted to a certain amount of optimism as he cited at least one individual whose ideas marked a major move away from Marxist dogma. The most explicit and elaborate example that I have found illustrating this attempt to liberate the study of concrete historical facts from submission to Marxist laws and generalizations is contained in a promi-

11 Legal Marxism is a term referring to the publications of several late 19th century Russian Marxist scholars including Peter Struve, Michael Tugan-Baranovsky, and Vladimir Lenin. See, Arthur P. Mendel, Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism (Cambridge, MA, 1961). 12 See, Arthur Mendel, “Current Soviet Theory of History: New Trends or Old?” American Historical Review 72 (1966), 50-73.

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alexandra s. korros nently placed article by A. Ya. Gurevich, one of the most thoughtful contributors to the discussions.13

Although Mendel cited several other historians, significantly, he returned time and again to Gurevich’s two articles published in Voprosy istorii [Problems of History] in 1964 and 1965. Not only did Mendel cite the articles, but both in his text and footnotes, he praised Gurevich extensively for their forward-looking content, emphasizing both explicit and implicit criticisms of Marx and Engels. As Arik explained to me, Mendel’s timing was particularly unfortunate, for it drew Gurevich to the attention of Party authorities who were anxious to minimize the influence of those who did not conform to Soviet norms of historical inquiry. There was no question in Arik’s mind that Mendel’s article had played a role in creating difficulties and adding new layers to the scrutiny to which his work was already subjected.14 We cannot answer whether Mendel’s article actually brought Gurevich to the attention of his antagonists, but my impression in 1970 was that he believed that praise from abroad only added to his troubles at home. On the other hand, I knew that had my parents known about the prominent positive mention Arik had received in an American scholarly publication, they would have been very proud; I am not sure that it would have dawned on us that it could be damaging to his career. By April 1970, Gurevich had been under attack for his work for almost a year. He told me about a critical article in the journal, Kommunist’, which accused him and other historians of violating 13 Mendel, 54. Mendel’s citations include, A. Ia. Gurevich, “Obshchii zakon i konkretnaia zakonomernost’ v istorii” [General Law and Concrete Regularities in History], Voprosi istorii 8 (1965), 14-30. and later “Nekotorye aspekty izucheniia sotsial’noi istorii” [Several Aspects of the Study of Social History], Voprosi istorii 1 (1964), 51-68. 14 In his Istoriia istorika, 105, Gurevich wrote about Mendel’s attentions in a much kinder manner. His remarks, written in 1973, reveal a greater interest in the fact that students discussed his work and Mendel’s article in the U.S. He attributes this information to a female student from Columbia University—likely me, since my friends from Columbia who visited him subsequent to my visit in 1970 were all male—but I have no recollection of any of the events he describes and which he attributes to me recounting to him. I might have said that such an article would stimulate conversations about him in University settings, but probably no more. On the other hand, my close friend and colleague, Charles Halperin, recalls my telling him about Gurevich’s concern about Mendel’s article, but I am sure it occurred upon my return to the U.S. in September 1970. It is possible, therefore, that on my subsequent visits to Moscow in 1972 and 1973, I may have transmitted this information to him.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 19 Marxist principles in their approach to history. Not too long after the appearance of the article, he had been fired from his position at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Science. It had taken Gurevich many years to find employment in Moscow. Following the completion of his candidate’s dissertation (the equivalent of the American Ph.D), he had taught for sixteen years in Kalinin (presentday Tver), a time which he called his “period of exile.”15 It was only in 1966 that he had been able to find full-time work in Moscow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Losing his Moscow job must have been devastating after so many years of commuting to Kalinin three days a week. It took him several months, but in the fall of 1969 Gurevich had found a new position as a senior researcher (starshyi nauchny sotrudnik) at the Academy of Science’s Institute of Universal History. In his memoirs he does not mention the anxiety his dismissal must have caused him, although he does discuss his concern for feeding and housing his family.16 Moreover, by the time of my arrival he would simply say, “I managed to find a new position in another institute.” The author of the Kommunist’ article, historian A.I. Danilov, was a fellow medievalist who had studied with Gurevich’s teacher, A. I. Neusykhin. Danilov represented all that Gurevich abhorred; he was a careerist who sacrificed his integrity to moving ahead. According to Gurevich’s description, Danilov was a highly competent historian who decided to specialize in western interpretations of medieval history, a sure path to advancement. Instead of working on his own original research, he criticized the work of others. Danilov had risen through academic and Party positions until he became the Minister of Enlightenment (Education) and then was Rector of Tomsk University. As Gurevich recounts the story, he was secretly notified that Danilov planned to give a major address at a Moscow State University congress devoted to problems of historiography in which he criticized several historians for their “revisionism, structuralism, and every other kind of ‘isms’,” with a special emphasis on the work of Aron Gurevich.17 15 See Istoriia istorika, 54 ff. Gurevich titles chapter III of his memoir, “Exile to Tver.” Gurevich refers to the period between 1950 and 1966. Beginning 127 ff. Gurevich discusses how he was able to obtain a place at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow. 16 Istoriia istorika, 141. 17 Ibid., 137.

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alexandra s. korros The meeting took place in 1969. Post factum the details became clear. Danilov did not wish to appear by himself, he needed scholarly support which he obtained from Academician S.D. Skazkin. Skazkin was a kind, soft person absolutely intimidated by all who had a connection to power or authority and who made him tremble—for it was easy to frighten him. Danilov had come to an agreement with Professors E.V. Gutnova and A.N. Chistozvonov regarding their presentations at the meeting, thus with the intention of broadening the front, he went to his teacher, A.I. Neusykhin, who was very ill at the time . . . asking him to participate. Since Alexander Iosifovich had difficulty even traveling to work at the Institute of History, naturally he declined, all the more so when Danilov began to reveal his cards claiming that from a principled Marxist position he “would give their due” to A. Ia. Gurevich, Iu. L. Bessmertny, the philosopher [M.A.] Vitkin, as well as to our most distinguished specialist in ancient history, Ye. M. Shtaerman, also M.A. Barg, and our well-known specialist in Russian history, L.V. Danilova. Alexander Iosifovich understood that supporting Danilov was the last thing he wanted to do for he would be mixed up in a totally unacceptable matter. Neusykhin declined, but it did not bother Danilov, who in his presentation (I later became acquainted with his text, although they did not invite me to the meeting, nor would I have attended such a “rite.”) cited Neusykhin claiming that “these structuralists and revisionists” raised their hands against the achievements of Soviet scholarship, specifically that of A. I. Neusykhin.18

Danilov accused Gurevich and his fellow transgressors of revising the fundamental propositions of Marxism based on the Western bourgeois concept of “structuralist theory” which “eliminates history” and ignores class struggle. When he read Danilov’s condemnation, Gurevich was inclined to ignore it—as he writes in his memoirs, “Why should I argue with him? He accused me of not being a Marxist; can I prove to him . . . that I am a Marxist?”19 In the wake of Danilov’s presentation and subsequent articles, Gurevich was informed by its new director that the Institute of Philosophy was reorganizing and was no longer in need of his services. Although he did not anticipate getting his job back, he was also no longer willing to ignore Danilov’s accusations.20 In self-defense, he 18

Ibid., 137. Ibid., 140. 20 In discussing his dismissal and reaction to it, Gurevich asserts that to defend himself, he had to go on the attack. “I decided to respond to Danilov, naturally it 19

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 21 wrote a long letter to the editorial board of Kommunist’ with a copy to the editors of Voprosy filosofi [Problems of Philosophy] refuting each of Danilov’s accusations point-by-point, suggesting that Danilov’s was the genuine anti-Marxist position because he treated Marx in a one-sided manner, oversimplifying his ideas according to the worst Stalinist traditions. Gurevich wrote without any expectation that his letter would be published.21 The journal acknowledged his letter declaring that the editors continued to support the opinions they had published; however, to his surprise, during August he received an invitation from the editor of Kommunist’ to discuss the letter. Apparently, having received some kind of orders “from above,” Kommunist’ was instructed to invite Gurevich to write an article regarding the possibility of adapting structural methods to historical research. Precisely at this time, Gurevich also found a new position at the Institute of Universal History.22 As I recall, and as he notes in his memoirs, he did not know how or who soured on Danilov’s attack, but the mysterious instructions from above enabled him to find a new academic post. Needless to say, during spring 1970 he was not very sure of how secure he was in his new position. In addition, for the first time in his career he was also teaching in Moscow, not at the university, but at the special school preparing interpreters. Problemy genesiza feodalizma [Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism] was published in early 1970 on the heels of the Danilov articles. By the time of my arrival in Moscow, it had sold out and generated enough controversy that once again Gurevich, who had so recently escaped one attack, found himself faced with yet another. Arik explained that he had recently been informed that a formal academic discussion, obsuzhdenie, of his new book was being scheduled by his critics in the department of history at Moscow State University. I can only conclude that in the midst of these troubles, my arrival either provided a welcome distraction or another possible avenue of meant descending from the heights of science onto that ring where I would brandish my boxing gloves against the Minister of Education.” Istoriia istorika, 140. 21 Gurevich argued that Marx could be interpreted in many ways and that despite Marx’s enthusiasm for sociology and economics, he nevertheless proposed that historical development fundamentally occurred within an anthropological context. The idea of placing the individual within his emotional world was not alien to Marx. Istoriia istorika, 141. 22 Ibid., 142-43.

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accusation. While some others might have tried to shy away from spending so much time with a foreign graduate student, obviously no one in the household even considered trying to keep me at a distance. As I look back on it some four decades later, I realize that the act of welcoming me entailed a great deal of courage. They did not try to keep my regular presence private, (although they did not advertise it either), for on several occasions, close friends—usually other academics—visited and at least once or twice we went visiting as well. I was a bit concerned because in the entrance to many Moscow buildings, including apartment houses, there sat the on-duty person (dezhurnyi), usually an elderly pensioner, who scrutinized everyone visiting the building. Arik assured me that the “on-duty” person was accustomed to the Gurevich family having foreign visitors, so that he did not consider my constant presence a problem. I accepted his assurances, but still worried whether my almost daily appearance might not be more suspicious than usual. My life in Moscow acquired a certain routine. Every morning the telephone in my room would ring at around 7 a.m. The Minsk Hotel did not provide wake-up calls; rather it was a wrong number. I quickly became familiar with the Russian idiom for “you have the wrong number,” because I used it so often. One of my fellow graduate students explained to me that because prostitutes could not street-walk in Moscow, they acquired all the room phone numbers in hotels and called them regularly to solicit business. I must have been a great disappointment! Following breakfast in the hotel dining room, I would gather my research materials and head off for the Lenin Library where I worked in the First Reading Room [Pervyi Zal] which was reserved for the USSR’s highest ranking academics and visiting scholars, whether senior professors or lowly graduate students. Working in Pervyi Zal meant guaranteed access to the check room for hanging coats and leaving briefcases—a process mandatory for all library users. Without the claim-check entry to the library was forbidden. While library users relegated to the other reading rooms had to wait for an empty hook in the check room before getting into the library, and then had to find a desk, I never had to worry about these details. Frequently, Arik came to do work in the Lenin Library (something he did not usually do) so that we could go out to lunch and then go shopping for books. He often pointed out some of the other people working in the reading room. For example, Vyacheslav

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 23 Molotov sat at a desk in a corner apparently compiling information for his memoirs!23 More important to me, Arik introduced me to A. Ia. Avrekh, a scholar specializing in late imperial Russia whose work played an important role in my research. When I had to arrange meetings with Soviet scholars who worked in my field, Arik urged me to be cautious about what I said to them. He often warned me that Soviet academic life was filled with people did not meet his standards of integrity. He had good reason to believe that there were too few chestnye liudi [honorable or honest people] in the Soviet academic establishment. Moreover, he explained that there were ways of detecting whether someone was a careerist willing to sacrifice others to advance his or her own career. Obviously, reading their published work was one way of evaluating the integrity of their scholarship, but Arik suggested looking for other signs. For example, in 1970 the USSR celebrated the centenary of V.I. Lenin, and loyal Communists sported a Lenin centennial lapel pin. Although he admitted there were individuals who were forced to wear the pin or face serious consequences, Arik claimed that academics who wore the pin were less likely to meet the Gurevich integrity test for they were the ones willing to sell themselves to the system and sometimes sell others out. I took his words seriously and recall that when I met with E.D. Chermenskii, a noted scholar from MGU specializing in the history of the late imperial period, the first thing I noticed was the Lenin pin in his lapel. Although we discussed my plans to research a work on the State Council, I recall being very wary in his presence, listening politely to his suggestions regarding my time in Moscow. Our meeting was very brief, and I sensed that Chermenskii was not particularly interested in my topic or me. I attributed his lack of warmth and cursory manner as part and parcel of the lapel pin—I was not someone worth the time because as a foreign grad student, too long a discussion with me could be a detriment to his own career, particularly because I was not in Moscow as part of the regular treaty exchange. I have to admit, that the infamous lapel pin did not endear Chermenskii to me either for it made me cautious in my answers.

23 V.M. Molotov (1890-1984), a close associate of Joseph Stalin held many important posts in the USSR including Commissar of Foreign Affairs (1939-1946). By the early 1950s his influence began to wane and he was probably saved from a show trial by Stalin’s death in 1953. A persistent adversary and critic of Nikita Khrushchev, Molotov lost his party membership in 1962 and retired from party politics.

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Yet, when I met the many scholars who were close friends of the Gurevich family, it was a different story altogether. The great Byzantine specialist, Alexander [San’ia] Kazhdan24 and his wife Mus’ia reminded me of the many educated Jewish couples who inhabited my parents’ circle of friends. Arik told me their son, David, was a brilliant mathematician who strongly identified himself as a Jew and was becoming increasingly involved in Jewish issues. When San’ia and Mus’ia came to visit, the conversation was animated, full of questions about me, graduate life in the U.S., my dissertation and research interests, and of course, how the Gurevich family had fared in the U.S. On another occasion, the guests were Alexander [Shura] Kan and his wife. This time I learned all about the Scandinavian section of the Institute of Universal History where Kan was Gurevich’s department head. Again, the conversation was open, friendly, and affectionate. However, when Kan left, Arik commented that although he really liked and admired his friend, he was not always sure that Kan would have the courage of his convictions to defend against the consequences of the upcoming obsuzhdenie. As it turned out, Kan stood up for his friend, making me think that either Arik picked his friends with unerring judgment or that high standards of integrity were contagious in certain circles. On another occasion, a Saturday or Sunday, one of my fellow Columbia students and I arrived at the Gurevich apartment to meet the distinguished Russian medieval scholar, Alexander A. Zimin’25 whose work we had studied in one of our medieval history colloquia. Zimin’, a specialist on 15th and 16th century Muscovy, was a charming man whom Arik admired as one of the few scholars specializing in Russian history who was willing to raise controversial issues in his work. As we sat in the kitchen drinking tea and/or vodka, Zimin’ too was as interested as Arik in recent western scholarship which cited his own work. He demanded we tell him what we knew about Harvard professor Edward Keenan and why Keenan had set out to attack Zimin’s own work on the correspondence between Ivan IV, “the terrible,” of Moscow and the ren24 Alexander Kazhdan (1922-1997), one of the most prominent Byzatinist scholars of his time studied at MGU with E.M. Kosminskii, along with Gurevich. Kosminskii was also Fira Gurevich’s teacher at MGU. When Kazhdan’s mathematician son, David, emigrated from the USSR to the U.S. and took a position at Harvard, Kazhdan’s Soviet career ended despite his enormous prestige. In 1979 he and his wife arrived in the U.S. where Kazhdan worked at Dumbarton Oaks until his death in 1997. 25 Gurevich writes about his admiration for Zimin’ in Istoriia istorika, 148.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 25 egade boyar, Andrei Kurbskii, claiming that the exchange of letters was a 17th century forgery.26 This time, at least, my fellow grad student and I were acquainted with the debate although neither of us knew enough to explain Keenan’s research or his motives. The discussion was animated, focusing on how much we relied on a limited number of sources to shape our views of a sparsely documented past. We agreed with Zimin’ that if Keenan was correct (which Zimin’ was convinced he was not), then the extant primary sources available for 16th century Muscovy would have been seriously diminished. Again, I was impressed by how personally Soviet scholars took western scholarship, especially when it called attention to their own work in a manner they did not appreciate. Vitaly A. Rubin was probably the most fascinating of all the close friends whom I met. A friend of Arik’s since university days, a specialist in Chinese philosophy, Rubin was also directly associated with dissident circles. Rubin supplied Gurevich with samizdat—forbidden manuscripts circulated clandestinely, which were often type-written to avoid Soviet censorship—while bringing him news of events in dissident circles. He told the most interesting stories which helped to explain his skepticism. Rubin recounted how he had just completed his first year as a student in the history faculty at MGU in spring 1941 when he joined the university units at the front. After his capture by the German army, the Wehrmacht, in its march towards Moscow, Rubin escaped after three days and rejoined the army. Unfortunately, Rubin wrote about his good fortune in a diary which was read by medical personnel when he sustained injuries somewhat later on. Because according to one of Stalin’s infamous decrees, all escaped Russian prisoners were assumed to be spies, Rubin found himself imprisoned at hard labor for some 18 months before his release because of ill health. When he returned to Moscow, he was allowed to complete his degree in Chinese history, but denied admission to graduate school. Nevertheless, he persisted by working as a research assistant and eventually completed his dissertation in 1960. By the time I met him in 1970, Rubin had published many articles and books on Chinese history and philosophy, but was increasingly open about his hostility to the Soviet regime. In 1972 Rubin applied for 26 See Edward L. Keenan, The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: the Seventeenth-century Genesis of the “Correspondence” Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV (Cambridge, MA, 1971). Keenans had already presented his ideas at conferences creating great controversy among specialists in Russian medieval history.

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permission to immigrate to Israel, which resulted in his expulsion from his job at the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences. When I visited Moscow in 1972 and 1973, I learned that Rubin was receiving support from various American educational institutions. I was especially proud that my university, Columbia, had offered Rubin a position as visiting lecturer in hope of pressuring Soviet authorities to grant him a visa. In the years that followed our meeting, he became one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent dissident refuseniks. What made him unusual was that he was involved both with dissidents struggling for democracy like Andrei Sakharov and prominent refuseniks like Anatoly Sharansky.27 A sparkling conversationalist, Rubin displayed a wonderful sense of humor, which like Arik’s was based on cynicism and fascination with the absurdities of Soviet life. I recall his asking me what I had found most interesting in my visit so far, to which I answered “blat,” or the process of using connections and bartering services to obtain things that were hard to get. Blat was something to use or lose. In a society of scarcity, blat was an important resource which the Gurevich family used on a regular basis. Obtaining anything “po-blatu” (through connections) was preferable to doing things through regular channels. For example, when I indicated an interest in going to see the Bol’shoi ballet’s production of Swan Lake with Ma’ia Plisetskaya, I offered to go to Intourist, the Soviet tourist agency, and ask to buy four tickets. “Nonsense,” I was told, “we will get them because we have a friend whose close friend works for Intourist and she should be able to obtain really good seats for us. Why spend dollars when you can get even better seats for rubles?” Our seats were located in the first tier of boxes. As we settled ourselves, Arik pointed to the imperial box which had been the place from which the tsar watched performances and was still used for heads of state and the Kremlin leadership. In short, for me blat was a revelation and an important insight into Soviet society. Rubin was so impressed by my answer that he immediately offered to introduce me to his close friend, Andrei Amalrik, the author of the sensational essay, “Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?”28 Rubin claimed he had suggested using 1984 to Amalrik because of the sig27 For information on Rubin, see for example his obituary in the New York Times, October 21, 1981. 28 Andrei Amalrik (1938-1980) was a major leader of the dissident movement. A founder of the Soviet Democratic Movement, Amalrik led protests at the trial of

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 27 nificance of George Orwell’s novel of the same name. My cousins both declined Rubin’s offer immediately. It was one thing for us to visit with an old friend like Rubin, but quite another to meet with someone under constant KGB surveillance, namely Amalrik. Fira and Arik were not afraid for themselves for they often met Amalrik when visiting Rubin, but they feared if I met him that I might find myself in trouble with the authorities. I relate this story in part because while Gurevich claimed not to be a dissident himself, this episode indicates that he was not so distant from these circles because some of his closest friends were active in them. Clearly, he and his family regarded their dissident friends as “chestnye liudi” for whom they had the greatest respect and admiration. Moreover, he and Fira did not hesitate to help such friends when they lacked the means to support themselves. Thus, while not engaging directly in the political dissent of the 1970s, the Gurevich family continued to admire and support their friends who did. When friends visited to meet me, they also came to strategize with Arik regarding the upcoming discussion of his book. As we sat around the kitchen table, the obsuzhdenie was often a major topic of conversation. Although the discussions were intense they were also filled with sarcastic humor and punctuated by “anecdotes,” short, funny stories or jokes that proved a point. During the course of conversation, Arik would abruptly pause, interject the word, “Anekdot!” and proceed to tell the story or joke.29 The one I recall always arose when we talked about the impossibility of travel abroad or, that permission to travel entailed playing along with authority, giving up a certain level of integrity. When someone discussed the conditions imposed on travel abroad, Arik would say “opiat’ khochu v Parizh” [I want to go to Paris again]. The actual joke goes this way:30 A lady sighs: “Opiat’ khochu v Parizh’” [Ah, I want to go to Paris again!] O, you have been to Paris? No, but I have always wanted to go!

Siniavsky and Daniel. In 1970 he published an essay, “Will Russia Survive Until 1984?” which gained great notoriety in the West. 29 One of the joys of reading Istoriia istorika comes from the fact that it is a transcript of Gurevich’s talks before an audience. Throughout the book, he punctuates his points with appropriate anecdotes. 30 I thank my colleague Yelena Mazour-Matusevich for supplying the correct version of this famous Soviet joke.

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The point of the joke was obviously that the best someone could do without compromising his integrity was to wish to travel, not actually get to go abroad. Despite the humor, Gurevich took the upcoming discussion very seriously. During my time in Moscow, Arik was constantly trying to determine if he would be permitted to defend himself with the help of others or whether he would be on his own during this so-called “academic discussion.” One day he told me that he thought he would be able to bring at least one or two prominent historians to speak on his behalf. Several days later he was informed that these individuals were not members of the department and therefore ineligible to participate. Moreover, he also could not determine exactly when and where this event was scheduled to take place. Naturally I was very concerned about what might happen as a consequence of what we assumed would be a formidable attack on his work. To my surprise, Arik told me that while he might encounter some negative effects, he was even more worried about his editor who had decided to publish Problemy genisiza feodalizma. He explained to me that while he could be unreliable and unorthodox in his ideas, editors were responsible for recognizing such flagrant deviations and taking action to prevent their publication and dissemination. Moreover, because the publishing house, Vyshaia shkola [Higher Education] published textbooks, both he and the editor could be criticized for trying to corrupt the minds of students. As Gurevich revealed twenty years later, his worst fears for the editor were fulfilled. For example, at the very time when the Danilov “blow up” against historian-structuralists appeared in Kommunist’, my book, Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism was being proof-read at the publisher, Vyshaia shkola. The chief of the editorial board did everything necessary to make the book appear regardless of the unpleasant circumstances. It was published in 1970 untouched by the censor. The chairman of the editorial board lost his job following “a work-up”.31 I am deeply indebted to him and several other editors who literally saved my manuscripts.32

As for himself? There was no question in Arik’s mind that he could save himself if he would appear at the discussion, admit his errors, 31 The term “prorabotka” or work-up refers to the “scholarly” attacks on scholars at Party behest. They were ugly occasions designed to ruin an individual’s career. 32 “Put’ Priamoi,” 18.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 29 and recant. I do not think the thought ever crossed his mind although others may have suggested it to him. “Creative work was not entirely suppressed; the degree to which it could appear depended, above all, as it did at all times, on the scholar, on his character and his ability to withstand pressure.”33 For the Gurevich family, withstanding pressure meant living every day as if it were an ordinary day rather than constantly worrying about an event over which it became increasingly evident that they had no control. I recall that in April 1970 a huge shipment of Valencia oranges arrived in Moscow from Spain. Since the Franco regime did not have diplomatic relations with the USSR, those oranges were very unusual. On a number of days when I visited, Arik brought home at least six precious oranges in the little net bag he carried in his briefcase for just such occasions—should he pass a line of shoppers waiting for some commodity new to Moscow. The oranges always occasioned the following debate: with whom should we share the oranges? One orange went to me, I was to take it with me to my hotel and eat it for my health;34 as for the other five—at least two went to someone else, perhaps Fira’s parents or to her sister. As a privileged westerner, I learned the lesson that in a society of scarcity, at least in the Gurevich family, sharing something worthwhile was as important as having it. I also recall how much I enjoyed participating in the evenings with friends who came to visit. Drinking tea and vodka, eating the oranges, we all sat around the small kitchen table for hours discussing a variety of topics which sometimes included the forthcoming obsuzhdenie, but which also seemed designed to explain Soviet society to me. For example, I learned how when Gurevich lost his position in the Institute of Philosophy, he was able, with the help of his friend Alexander (Shura) Kan, to find a place in the Institute of Universal History where Kan was the director of the Scandinavian Section. I also got the impression that whatever happened in the obsuzhdenie, Kan expected that Arik would be able to keep his job. As it turned out he was correct, but obviously we did not know it at the time. As 33

“Put’ Priamoi,” 18. Every evening I took the orange back with me to my hotel and ate it because I knew that my family expected me to do so as well as because I realized that for them it was a precious gift. I would carefully wrap the orange peel in a paper napkin and put it in the waste basket in my room. The next evening, upon my return to the hotel, I would find the orange peels floating in my toilet. To this day, I don’t know if the maid dumped all the contents of the waste basket down the toilet or simply used the orange peel to deodorize the bathroom. 34

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he recounted the story in his memoirs, Gurevich connected his new position to the publication in Kommunist’ of his rebuttal to Danilov. However, his description of the Institute in Istoriia istorika adds to the oddity of the situation. At that time, it was rather difficult for a historian to get a job in the Institute of Universal History because it was viewed as a kind of privilege. In part, the Institute was a refuge for the children and relatives of people of high station. A whole collection of former ambassadors, ministers, secretaries of the Central Committee settled themselves in the academic institutes making it next to impossible for a mere mortal such as I to go there. . . . The Director of the Institute, Academician [E. M.] Zhukov, informed me of my appointment to the Institute of Universal History . . . In truth, the director immediately informed the head of the Scandinavian group to which I was assigned (there never was any discussion with me or with my fellow medievalists then, earlier, or afterwards, about entering the sector on Medieval history): no structuralism! My supervisor was a simple soul (we must accept this term in quotations marks, the word ‘soul’ in particular). When he transmitted these words to me, I replied, “You did not say this to me; I did not hear it; nor am I prepared to accept such directives.” So it was following the attacks upon me and the accusations of structuralism, revisionism, and, all kinds of other “isms” in general, that I found myself in the fall of 1969 as a research fellow of this savior of an institute where I have spent the past thirty years.35

During the last two weeks of April, it was difficult for Arik to make plans because he expected that he would be notified of the discussion of his book at any time. However, just as he kept getting mixed messages about whether he could bring colleagues with him to defend his positions, neither was he able determine the exact date of the event. In a sense, the obsuzhdenie hung over him, like a sword of Damocles, the entire time I spent in Moscow. Clearly, those who were trying to attack him sought to do so by keeping him off balance, but they did not succeed. Instead of waiting by the phone, as I observed above, the family went about life as usual with my presence as an incentive for adding to their activities. For example, because I observed Passover, Arik asked his father-in-law to get matzo for me at the synagogue, the only place it was available in Moscow, and on the first night of Passover, for my benefit, the Shifman and Gurevich families celebrated a kind of a Seder meal together. For Arik the best part of the Seder was the four cups of wine (or more) required of 35

Istoriia istorika, 144-45.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 31 each participant. It was, to say the least, a happy occasion. On another evening, we went to the theater. Through connections, Arik obtained two tickets to Moscow’s most popular and sensational play, “St. Petersburg Dream,” an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Everyone in Moscow, including me, but not necessarily Arik, wanted to see the play because of its unusual lighting—so daring in the officially atheist USSR. In a certain scene an illuminated cross appeared over the head of the devout prostitute, Sonya, who convinced Raskol’nikov to repent. We agreed that the play’s sensational lighting trumped its dramatic value. Finally, just before my departure for Leningrad, we all went to the aforementioned performance at the Bol’shoi to see Swan Lake. In short, the face Gurevich presented to the public was one which did not show any fearfulness of the upcoming “discussion.” By the end of April, as I prepared to leave for Leningrad, Arik still had not heard about when or where the obsuzhdenie would be taking place. Moreover, although he had lined up his defenders, he was unsure whether they could accompany him. When I arrived in Leningrad, I immediately visited my family there. I had learned from Arik that my mother’s first cousin lived in Leningrad with one of her daughters, Irina Pevsner, a former soloist in the Kirov Ballet and a teacher at the Uchilishche Vaganova (the Kirov’s ballet school), who had married the prominent Soviet choreographer, Leonid Benyaminovich Yakobson. When I visited the Yakobson household in their huge apartment on Ulitsa Vosstanie (Uprising Street) just off the Nevskii Prospekt (Nevskii Avenue, St. Petersburg’s most important street), I asked to call Moscow. When I called, Arik told me that he had not heard anything new. Three days later, on May 2 or 3, before my departure for Helsinki, I called again. This time, Arik recounted that he had received word about the obsuzhdenie on the same day it was scheduled. When he asked if he could bring colleagues with him to speak on his behalf, he was told that they could not speak for they were not members of the history faculty at Moscow State University. Arik claimed that he decided not to attend as well because he was not a member of the history faculty either and because he had tickets for a Bach concert, an event he would enjoy far more than this particular

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discussion of his book. Apparently, the discussion was postponed for several weeks and actually took place on May 22, 1970.36 In his memoir, Gurevich offers a somewhat different version of these events, claiming that the obsuzhdenie was originally scheduled for May 22, 1970 and was then cancelled and reconvened several months later in the MGU high rise which did not permit access to the public. Further, in his memoir, Gurevich declares that he “naively” believed that the “discussion” would be a serious debate rather than a political hatchet job. If that was indeed the case, by the time of my arrival in April, he certainly did not believe that the purpose of the discussion would be clarification of scholarly issues; rather he anticipated an all-out attack on his methods of scholarship.37 Since he never attended the actual discussion of his work, Arik left it to me to read for myself. Not too long after my return to the U.S., I received from him the September issue of Voprosy istorii, the major scholarly history journal. Under the heading, “Chronicles of Scholarly Life,” I found an article titled, “On Textbooks, Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe (information on the course of the discussion of the book of A. Ia. Gurevich).”38 Once again Academician S.D. Skazkin was enlisted for the attack. His opening remarks made it clear that the purpose of the discussion was to determine whether the scholarly level of Gurevich’s book was 36

Gurevich wrote about the sequence of events quite differently in Istoriia istorika. “On the specified day in May, as the public assembled at the building on Mokhovka, Gurevich did not arrive, for they had telephoned and informed me that because of technical reasons the discussion had been postponed for another time. The public left disappointed.” He continues with the following: “Several months passed and I was notified that the discussion would take place nonetheless, but now it was no longer located at the same venue, rather it would be held in the tall building of MGU on the Lenin Hills, where entry was only by permission. Participation in the meeting was limited to members of the medieval history department and the department of the history of Russian feudalism; I would be permitted no supporters. However, they said to me, we invite you, Aron Iakovlevich, to participate. I responded, and to this day consider myself entirely in the right, that I could not participate under such conditions, because the scholarliness and objectivity of such a discussion aroused the most serious suspicions within me (which were substantiated in their entirety).” Istoriia istorika, 155. 37 Istoriia istorika, 155. 38 S. L. Pleshkova, “Ob uchebnom posobii Problemy genizisa feodalizma v zapadnoi Evrope (informatsiia o khode obsuzhdeniia knigi A. Ia. Gurevicha),” [On the textbook Problems of the Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe (information on the course of the discussion of A. Ia. Gurevich’s book)] Voprosi istorii [Problems of History], 9 (1970) 154-167. According to the transcript, the actual discussion occurred on May 22, 1970.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 33 a text suitable for use in history departments at institutions of higher education. In Skazkin’s opinion, Gurevich’s book contained many controversial problems and muddle-headed formulations. From the viewpoint of historical materialism, the author [makes] an effort to weaken or completely alienate the meaning of economics in the worldhistorical process. . . Based on all this, A. Ia. Gurevich’s book arouses doubt in the correctness of its acceptance of the basic premises of historical materialism which might be a subject of academic scholarly discussion, but under no circumstances can it be recommended as a text book.39

In comparison to those who followed, Skazkin’s remarks were relatively mild. The general tenor of the discussion was aimed at proving that Gurevich had betrayed the standards of materialism, the mandatory methodology of historical scholarship, and that exposing students to his ideas was a dangerous undertaking. For example, M.T. Beliavskii’s wide-ranging comments included statements which directly attacked Gurevich for violating Engels’ and Marx’s conception of history. A. Ia. Gurevich attempts to convince us that the establishment of feudalism was not tied to the development of productive forces. . . However, we have seen that he practically denies the meaning of productive inter-relationships as fundamental criteria . . The appearance of such a book is hard to understand, but it is even harder to comprehend how the editor and publishing house could have worked on it. And it is entirely impossible to understand how A. Ia. Gurevich’s book could have been published as a text for student use. It can only confuse them, implant in them doubts in the primacy of Marxist-Leninist methodology in studying any given problem. The creation and publication of such a “textbook” is a gross mistake which must be corrected.40

Although Gurevich expressed anger at those who sought to stifle his work, some thirty years later he also showed sympathy for those who were good scholars in their own right but who were forced to act unethically. He was particularly sympathetic to Skazkin, about whom he commented, Sergei Danilovich was a very manageable person, and it was easy to frighten him. I ask you to understand me correctly, my words contain no offense. This is a verification of human fact, which was also a social, societal factor. During the course of their lives, for decades beginning 39 40

Ibid., 154. Ibid., 157-59.

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alexandra s. korros in the 1920s, people of Skazkin’s generation, the same as that of our parents, were subjected to uninterrupted lethal Leninist-Stalinist political and ideological radiation to whatever degree necessary. Because of this pressure, their tenacity and ability to resist were broken. Sergei Danilovich was always surrounded by people who were interested only in abusing his personal weakness and authority to direct the department and the Medieval sector of the Institute of History in his name. These people and most likely, someone else higher up, exerted certain pressure on him. They, apparently, let him know what they expected from him in this closed discussion.41

The immediate result of the obsuzhdenie? Gurevich lost his teaching post in Moscow, but remained in the Institute of Universal History. In short, the attack did get him out of the classroom, but it could not prevent his continued scholarship. Moreover, it did not intimidate him into “toeing” the ideological line. In his 1973 memoirs, he noted that it had chilling effects on some colleagues, for he was not alone as the subject of attacks for non-Marxist scholarship. For example, he thought his fellow medievalist, Iu. L. Bessmertny “began to distort” his doctoral scholarly work which he was preparing for publication in 1970. He also noted that his supervisor and friend, Alexander S. Kan, was unnerved when he was asked to organize a similar “discussion” of Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism at the Institute of Universal History. To his credit, Kan refused, but also felt compelled to declare that if Arik were to lose his job, he, Kan, would also quit. Fortunately for both of them, Gurevich noted in 1973, Kan did not have to keep his promise. Fundamentally, Gurevich wrote in 1973, the discussion was not really about him, it was about how others reacted to the book and what that reaction meant about their own behavior. The matter is absolutely not about me. I repeat: I learned to regard the past and the present “from the side,” with a big dose of indifference. However, the issue is not how my colleagues conducted themselves in relationship to me or my friends, but towards themselves. As individuals they were faced with the necessity of making a choice, not necessarily one that is fateful, not, so to say, existential, but simply whether to act decently or indecently. Their choice does not leave me indifferent. Moreover, not for anything does someone allow these transgressions before his conscience! Objectivity if understood as dividing into “ours” and “yours”—can be cowardice which has to be justified in the eyes of others as well as one’s own. Finally, there is baseness, 41

Istoriia istorika, 155.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 35 which in its turn, necessitates camouflage and hiding ideas—alas, more than one individual takes this path.42

If anything, the results of the obsuzhdenie strengthened Gurevich’s character, and in the following years he became even more productive. However, despite his growing recognition abroad among historians, in the USSR he remained at the sidelines. I was able to visit Moscow several more times in the subsequent four years and found my family very much the same as in 1970. Among Arik’s greatest frustrations was his inability to travel abroad and meet the Western historians who were such important inspirations for his work. He told me that invitations to international conferences often came to the Institute and that he rarely or never actually saw them. Instead, someone would reply on his behalf that he was unable to accept because of illnesses that he did not know he had! When I asked why he could not travel, he speculated that if he were permitted to travel, then his literally “unorthodox” views would put his Soviet colleagues to shame for their unquestioning allegiance to an ideologically determined methodology. When I returned to New York in the fall of 1970, my mother and I became even more determined to maintain our contacts with the Gurevich family. Fortunately, I had many friends who were traveling to Moscow for extensive periods to pursue archival research. Our mission was to send medicine for Arik’s ongoing battle with glaucoma. Because he was not someone on whom the regime bestowed its favor, he, like the vast majority of Soviet citizens, had no access to certain types of medicine easily available in the West, but available only to the privileged in the Soviet Union. All my friends willing to do it carried “tymoptic,” the common treatment for glaucoma, with them. In some cases, bringing of the medicine was also the beginning of a friendship between Arik and the messenger. My mother also returned to Russia for the first time in fifty years in 1971 and the again in 1972, getting to meet her nephew for the first time. I returned to Moscow leading tourists for three or four days at a time in 1972, 1973 and 1974, bringing with me whatever we thought they needed that I could carry. However, following my last visit to Moscow in summer 1974, I did not see my Moscow family for another fourteen years.

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Istoriia Istorika, 158.

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Throughout this period, during that nearly decade and a half, Arik became the internationally celebrated scholar he deserved to become. However, he was never really able to travel abroad until the late 1980s when Gorbachev’s perestroika [restructuring] transformed the situation. During those intervening years, another cousin took up the slack and visited Moscow at least twice, while we received letters from the Gurevich family in Moscow post-marked from London, Stockholm, and Paris mailed for them by scholars visiting them from abroad. These tenuous communications changed drastically in the mid1980s with the onset of perestroika. In 1988, Gurevich began to travel to Western Europe, first to Italy, and then to the United States where he worked for a year at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. When he first arrived in the U.S., Arik was by himself, relying heavily on Getty Center staff to assist him in all travel arrangements for New York or Washington, D.C. While my husband, daughter and I could travel to visit, my elderly mother was no longer able to travel to Los Angeles. Yet, by a wonderful coincidence, the December 1988 annual meeting of the American Historical Association occurred in Cincinnati, Ohio—where I live—because our city was celebrating its bi-centennial. In attendance, as one of the AHA’s honorary foreign members, was Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich! In between the dinners and lunches to which he was invited and to which I regularly accompanied him, Arik came to visit at my house where he met my husband and daughter. That evening Arik recounted the story of how he received permission to travel, a story he includes in Istoriia istorika. The episode underlines the arbitrary character of decision-making that played such an important role in determining the success of a scholarly career. When he recounted his tale, we laughed at how ironic it was, yet had he not taken his fate into his own hands, he might never have been able to travel abroad. In the spirit of perestroika, in 1987 Gurevich saw an opportunity to discuss problems in the organization of his institute and wrote a memorandum making suggestions on the topic. Although he had participated in a meeting of the Institute’s Party organization discussing what he considered its amoral decisions regarding colleagues, his director understood his protest differently. The director, Z.V. Udal’tsova, called him to a private meeting at which she declared that she believed he wrote his memorandum because he could not

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 37 receive permission to travel abroad. While rejecting her argument, since she had raised the issue, Gurevich asked why his requests had been denied. “The KGB,”43 she replied. Having received his answer, Gurevich decided to pursue the matter further, writing a letter of inquiry to the KGB asking for information as to why the police opposed his requests to travel abroad.44 I was a typical Soviet person and did not expect any answer. After all, many people like me wrote letters to all the lowest, middle, and highest instances . . . and it was never obligatory for the Soviet regime to hurry to satisfy us with answers. Nevertheless, several weeks later an answer to my letter arrived in the form of a telephone call. [Gurevich received an invitation to meet with a KGB major the next day at their headquarters at the Lubianka.] . . . Major Erofeev invites me to his office and reads the following text: “You were correct to write our director a letter. In such matters lack of clarity, double meaning, and lack of agreement are not permissible. I am officially authorized to inform you: the Committee on State Security has never in the past, and to this day has no objections to your departure for abroad upon the invitation of scholarly organizations or universities”. I did not ask if this was true, I accepted it at face value realizing that he was going to say exactly what was considered necessary, so I said: “I recently received a very important invitation from the University of Rome to give some lectures in January 1988. And, as usual, this invitation could just as well have been written on blank paper because neither in the Sector of External Relations in the Academy, nor in the directorate of the Institute has anyone lifted a finger to move this matter. Could I possibly get a written reply from you to my letter? Perhaps someone can give me a piece of paper on the basis of which I would be able to get my way?” “No, we are unable to give you a document. If you had been repressed, then prior to your release you would receive a document. However, no one has ever investigated you. I repeat, Aron Iakovlevich, the KGB did not have and does not have any prejudices against you. “ “So what am I to do?” “Don’t let it worry you. Submit the papers, and if something is not just so, then here is my telephone number, call me.”

43 Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti [the Committee for State Security], the Soviet secret police. 44 Istoriia istorika, 254-55.

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alexandra s. korros The ice had melted . . . something occurred. He articulated what was in my view the key phrase: “You have been invited by the University of Rome, but not they. Your books are translated, but theirs are not. Are you familiar with the emotion of envy?” “I hear you,” I replied, “a novel was written under the same name.” “Here is the solution to your riddle. They are trying to blame us, shall we say, for preventing your departure.”45

Needless to say, when he submitted the papers Gurevich received permission to travel abroad, beginning with the trip to Rome and then to many countries outside the Eastern bloc, including his ten month sojourn at the Getty Center. By the following June, the whole Gurevich family had arrived in California. Fira arrived in January 1989, bringing with her Lena’s son Peter. Lena joined the family for a month in June. We scheduled our visit to California to coincide with being able to see everyone. Although he was now a celebrated historian who spent the next five years after 1988 traveling to many countries as an honored guest and the recipient of many international awards, Arik had not changed in one very important respect: he never lost that extraordinary sense of integrity and commitment to the importance of teaching students in Russia to open their eyes to other forms of historical methodology unfettered by ideological constraints. Many of his friends now lived in the United States and I believed that because he had close blood relatives living in the U.S., the family could immigrate under family reunification. I tried to convince him to consider leaving Moscow for the U.S. “What,” he asked, “could I possibly do in the United States?” I tried to argue because he was such a distinguished scholar that many universities would find a place for him. I laid out the case that Lena too would find a university position and his grandson, Peter, would be able to attend university without fear of being drafted into the Russian army where conditions for recruits, particularly Jewish draftees, were abominable and sometimes life-threatening. Arik finally explained the real reason for his reluctance, by asking a rhetorical question, “If all of the first rate scholars emigrate, who will be left to teach a new generation of students to think about history in new ways?” “Surely,” he declared, “someone has to stay behind!”

45

Istoriia istorika, 254-56.

april 1970: gurevich’s & the soviet academic system 39 He did. He went on to found Odyssei, to teach at the Russian Humanities University, to write several additional books and to inspire a new generation of Russian as well as Western scholars through his achievements. He also understood that changing how history was taught meant starting at a much lower educational level than the university. Some of his work was aimed directly at educating the youngest Russian students. When I was in Moscow in 1995, I stayed with Fira, for Arik, Lena, and Peter were in Germany where Arik held a Humboldt Fellowship. 1995 was a very unstable period with very few Russians having confidence in institutions such as banks. At the behest of George Soros’ foundation, the Open Society Institute, Arik and his friend and fellow medievalist, D. E. Kharitonovich, had written a medieval text book for the sixth grade.46 They wrote hoping that by teaching Western medieval history, they could influence the way students and teachers learned all sorts of history, including Russian history. The first printing already adopted for the Moscow school district would number half a million copies. One Saturday afternoon, Kharitonovich and his son delivered Arik’s payment for writing the text; thousands of rubles packed in brown-paper wrapped parcels which they carried on the Metro for no one would put any money into a Russian bank! Twenty-five years later, I was still learning about Russian life in the Gurevich household. Without a doubt, Aron Gurevich was a great historian, but to me, he was my beloved cousin through whose eyes I learned to understand Soviet society and who taught me that Shakespeare’s line, “above all else, to thine own self be true,” could be lived with courage, humor, and integrity. In retrospect, I realize that he was correct to stay in Russia rather than emigrate. While his last years would have been lived out in the West surrounded by scholars who respected him greatly, his continued presence in Russia had a greater impact. I am convinced that the manner in which Aron Gurevich led his life was as important to the future of Russian scholarship as were his contributions to our understanding of medieval culture and society.

46 A. Ia. Gurevich and D.E. Kharitonovich, Istoriia srednikh vekov: Uchebnik dlia srednei shkoly. [The History of the Middle Ages: A Textbook for Middle School] (Moscow, 1994).

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A. IA. GUREVICH’S CONTRIBUTION TO SOVIET AND RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY: FROM SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY TO HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY* ROGER D. MARKWICK

It is a testimony to the caliber of the scholarship of the late A. Ia. Gurevich that he almost single-handedly sustained social psychology and mentalité as vibrant, if fine, filaments within Soviet historical scholarship, which not only survived the draconian Soviet academic environment of the Brezhnev years but re-emerged as driving forces of post-Soviet historiography, particularly in the guise of historical anthropology. Gurevich’s research and writing on medieval Europe during the late-Khrushchev and early-Brezhnev periods was a crucial conduit both for long-standing Russian traditions in cultural history and for transmitting international historiographical developments, particularly the French Annales school. The resurgence and strength of the cultural orientation of much contemporary Russian historical writing has its roots in the fields of historical-psychology and mentalité for which, from the mid-1960s onwards, the renowned medievalist Aron Gurevich so eloquently articulated and argued. *** The demise of the Soviet Union and with it Marxism-Leninism as the officially endorsed paradigm for the social sciences in general and historical research and writing in particular left a yawning theoretical and methodological gap facing post-Soviet historians in Russia and elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite the material and intellectual obstacles to historical careers and scholarship during the 1990s, some younger historians began to fill this paradigmatic gap with new approaches at a time when there were unprecedented opportunities for archival research, particularly on the Stalin era. While many historians of the Stalin period quickly embraced the “totalitarian” model largely derived from Western political science, others turned to researching Soviet cultural history, viz., popular perspectives, attitudes and behavior under Stalinism. Such research has proceeded * This chapter is a slightly revised version of ‘Cultural History under Khrushchev and Brezhnev: From Social Psychology to Mentalités’, The Russian Review, 65 (April 2006): 283-301. The author is grateful for permission to republish this revised version of the article. Particular thanks to Dr. Joachim Hösler, Phillips-Universität Marburg, for comments and suggestions and to Professor Elena Seniavskaia, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, who generously supplied much of the Russian language bibliography.

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under a number of rubrics: “everyday life,” “historical psychology,” “mentalité” and, increasingly, “historical anthropology.”1 Among the foremost practitioners of this genre of cultural historiography are Elena Zubkova, author of Russia After the War, and Elena Seniavskaia, author of The Front Generation.2 Research of this cultural genre is not quite as new as it might seem. In the late Khrushchev and early Brezhnev years there was increasing and innovative thinking among some Soviet historians about social subjectivities that, although thwarted and marginalized, prefigured and undoubtedly has influenced much current historical thinking and research. A. Ia. Gurevich was foremost among these historians. This chapter looks at his place in the origins and development of Soviet historiography in the fields of historical psychology and mentalités in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the degree to which these fields and Gurevich’s work in particular, laid the groundwork for contemporary historical anthropology. *** Marxist cultural analysis, as it emerged in post-war Western and Eastern Europe, was a reaction to the tendency within Soviet-style Marxism to treat culture as a mere secondary epiphenomenon of economic relations, of classes and of modes of production. Western European Marxists led the way. The humanist Marxism of the New Left, which first emerged in the late 1950s, increasingly engaged with anthropological conceptions of culture that emphasized human agency: language, communication, experience and consciousness. By the 1960s and 1970s Western cultural Marxism was engaged in a 1 A. I. Kupriianov, “Istoricheskaia antropologiia. Problemy stanovleniia,” Istoricheskie issledovaniia v Rossii tendentsii poslednykh let [Historical Anthropology: Problems of Formation, Historical Research in Russia, the latest trends], G. A. Bordiugov, ed. (Moscow, 1996), 366-85. 2 E. Iu. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy 1945-1964 [Society and Reforms] (Moscow, 1993), published as Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957, Hugh Ragsdale, trans. & ed. (New York & London, 1998); Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: politika i posevednost’: 1943-53 [PostWorld War II Soviet Society: Politics and Every Day Life] (Moscow, 2000); Zubkova, ed., Sovetskaia zhizn’ [Soviet Life]: 1945-1953 (Moscow, 2003); E. S. Seniavskaia, 1941-1945: Frontovoe pokolenie: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie [The War Generation: Historico-psychological Study] (Moscow, 1995); Seniavskaia, Chelovek na voine: istoriko-psikhologicheskie ocherki [Man at War: Historico-psychological Essays] (Moscow, 1997); Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke: istoricheskii opyt Rossii [The Psychology of War in the 20th century: Russian Historical Experience] (Moscow, 1999).

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dialogue with structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics.3 In the Soviet Union the emergence of cultural scholarship, partially under the influence of these Western developments, was later, more tortuous and less widespread, largely due to the draconian Soviet intellectual regime. Since the Stalin era, Soviet Marxism-Leninism had virtually outlawed historiographical concerns with social and individual subjectivities. Invoking the primacy of material factors in history, towards the end of the 1920s Stalinist ideologues had declared war on “bourgeois” approaches to psychology, psychoanalysis and human consciousness, particularly Freudian conceptions, which allegedly privileged idealist, subjective and individualistic approaches above materialist, objective and class approaches.4 This crude, materialist determinism was ruthlessly reinforced in the field of history in 1938 with the publication of Stalin’s ‘Short Course’ History of the Soviet Communist Party. The Short Course imposed the notorious “piatichlenk,” the five successive socio-economic formations that were alleged to have defined human history, viz., primitive-communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. The deterministic socio-economic problematic of the Short Course ruled out of court any engagement with subjective factors in history. History was simply the unfolding of a law-governed, materialist, objective process in which human consciousness and agency played little or no role.5 Any concessions to human agency threatened to subvert this Stalinist teleology, according to which Soviet socialism was the lawful culmination of human history. Ironically, however, at the very moment that Stalin’s Short Course was being imposed, a Soviet historian, B. A. Romanov (1889-1957), was embarking on the only example of research into Russian mentalités produced during the Stalin era: People and Morals in Ancient Rus.’ Finally published in 1947, People and Morals was a study of “everyday” and “inner” life in Kievan Rus’ of the 11th to 13th centuries. Published as it was on the eve of the fiercely chauvinistic “anticosmopolitan campaign,” it was criticized for its “national nihilism” 3 Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, “Introduction: The Territory of Marxism” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson and Grossberg, eds. (New York, 1988), 11-16. 4 Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks. Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven and London, 1998), 110. 5 Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography in the Soviet Union, 1956-1974 (Basingstoke, UK and New York, 2001), 44.

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and its excessively “subjective,” “pornographic” depictions of private life.6 A student of the St. Petersburg historian A. E. Presniakov, Romanov and his study were living links to pre-revolutionary historiographical traditions stretching back to the beginning of the 20th century—notably, the school of historical linguistics in St. Petersburg.7 The St. Petersburg/Leningrad school was to be an important fount for the emergence of “socio-historical psychology” in the mid-1960s. Even with the discrediting of Stalin and his Short Course in the wake of the 1956 Twentieth Communist Party Congress, the socioeconomic problematic of Marxism-Leninism remained paramount. Despite the somewhat liberalized environment of Khrushchev’s “thaw,” historians were still essentially required to do little more than illustrate the already established “laws” of historical materialism concerning the transition from one socio-economic formation to another. True, the successive editions of the official Communist party of the Soviet Union that replaced the Short Course gave renewed emphasis to the role of “people” in history, but this was strictly within the bounds of the “lawfulness” of historical development. Nevertheless, the Twentieth Party Congress spurred two fundamentally divergent revisionist tendencies within Soviet historiography in the 1960s. The dominant revisionist tendency, primarily around figures such as Viktor Danilov and Mikhail Gefter and his fellow “new direction” historians, sought to challenge the predominant, deterministic Marxist-Leninist paradigm from within, essentially adhering to a Marxist socio-economic problematic, but a non-determinist one that allowed for “alternative” courses in history.8 In the main, the revisionist Marxist-Leninists drew their inspiration from domestic Soviet sources, primarily through a re-reading of the Marxist classics, especially Lenin. It was this neo-Leninist revisionism that spawned a Marxist “social psychology,” although this 6

I. N. Danilevskii, “B. A. Romanov i ego kniga… ”, B. A. Romanov, Liudy i nravy drevnei Rusy: istoriko-bytovye ocherki XI-XIII VV [People and Customs of Ancient Russia: Historical Essays] (Moscow:, 2002, previously published 1947 and 1967), 5-13. 7 A. L. Iastrebitskaia, “Povsednevnost’ i material’naia kul’tura srednevekov’ia v otechestvennoi medievistike,” [Everyday Life and Material Culture of the Middle Ages in Russian Medieval Studies] Odyssei [Odysseus], A. Ia. Gurevich, ed. (Moscow, 1991), 94; Alter L. Livin, Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia. A View from Within. John L. H. Keep, trans. and ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK and New York, 2001), 27-8. 8 This tendency is the focus of Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia.

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proved less fruitful historiographically and shorter-lived than the minority revisionist “culturological” tendency led by Gurevich. Marxist social psychology It was only towards the end of the Khrushchev period, which had witnessed intense discussions about the nature of ‘historical science’ but rarely its subjective dimensions, that platforms were provided to discuss social psychology and other methodological issues in history. The formal decision in 1964 by the Social Sciences Section of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences to give priority to the methodological renewal of Soviet history saw the establishment of a number of bodies dedicated to this task, among them the “Group for the elaboration of philosophical problems” in the Institute of Philosophy, Moscow, and above all the Sector of Methodology in the Institute of History, Moscow. Established in 1964 under the leadership of Mikhail Gefter, under the Sector’s aegis a “Seminar on social psychology” was established, headed by the medievalist and sociologist Boris Porshnev (1905-1972). An ultra-orthodox Marxist-Leninist who fetishised the role of the class struggle in history, which he managed to combine with a quixotic quest to discover the “abominable snowman,” Porshnev was probably appointed to police the Sector’s activities. Nevertheless, he made an about face on the value of social psychology, having initially repudiated it. Under Porshnev’s supervision, the seminar proved an important, if short-lived, forum for discussing social psychology and history.9 Porshnev himself led the charge in 1966, exploring the issue along politically acceptable lines in a booklet entitled Social Psychology and History.10 Porshnev’s considerations were almost entirely based on Lenin’s thinking on social psychology, a topic Porshnev directly addressed further in a paper delivered in 1969 to a Leningrad conference on Marxist philosophy.11 Despite the title, Porshnev’s focus in his 1966 book was not so much history and mass social-psychology 9 A. Ia. Gurevich, Istoriia istorika: zerno vechnosti [A Story of a Historian: Kernel of Eternity] (Moscow, 2004), 26-8; Markwick, Rewriting Soviet History, 156, 166-67, 195. 10 B. F. Porshnev, Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i istoriia [Social Psychology and History] (Moscow, 1966). 11 B. F. Porshnev, “V. I. Lenin i problemy sotsial’noi psikhologii” [V.I. Lenin and Problems of Social Psychology] (Moscow, 1969).

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as psychology in terms of the individual and society, concerns that reflected Soviet political priorities as it allegedly entered its communist stage: the psychology of the “new individual” under communism.12 Porshnev, like Lenin, was only interested in the social psychology in history in the short term and then primarily at its critical turning points, that is, during revolutions. Hence, for Porshnev, social “mood” (nastroenie) was the crucial Marxist-Leninist category for social psychology. Hence too, according to Porshnev, Lenin’s continual recourse to “mood” and a host of allied terms to describe classes in conflict: “instinct,” “spontaneity,” “feelings,” “energy,” “passion,” “enthusiasm,” “tiredness,” “anger,” “hatred,” “apathy” and so on. Moreover, the revolutionary “mood” found its expression directly through the fleeting “emotions” and “shifts of consciousness” of mass “social interests”—“social aspirations, ideals, dreams, hopes”—not indirectly through “culture, customs and daily life” (concepts, it should be noted, that would become the focus of culturally-oriented scholars such as the mediaevalist Gurevich).13 While Lenin’s concepts in relation to class “moods” might have been a legitimate starting point for historians of revolution, there was little here for the historian interested in the culture and customs that prevailed for an entire epoch, as Gurevich later observed.14 Certainly, Porshnev the sociologist made no attempt whatsoever to address the methodological challenges confronting would-be historians of social psychology. These would be taken up by practicing historians. In this respect, an important step forward was made with the publication in 1971 of the anthology History and Psychology, co-edited by Porshnev.15 Going beyond an exegesis of Lenin’s views, the anthology reflected the range of scholarship in relation to these fields which had developed in the late-Khrushchev and early-Brezhnev years. As the title implied, this anthology was an interdisciplinary meeting ground between history and psychology, or more precisely, between “historical psychology” and “social psychology.” However, the editors 12

Porshnev, Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i istoriia, 9. Porshnev, Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i istoriia, 63-4, 89, 111-13. Porshnev credited the historian B. D. Parygin with the first complete study of Lenin’s views on social psychology in his 1961 kandidat dissertation: “V. I. Lenin on the formation of mood of the masses.” 14 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 26-8. 15 Istoriia i Psikhologiia [History and Psychology], B. F. Porshnev i L. I. Antsyferova, ed. (Moscow, 1971). 13

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declared, the quest for a “social-historical psychology” had nothing in common with anti-historicist psychological approaches. On the contrary, any processes in the life of a society either past or present combine the objective and the subjective, in which, however, the objective laws of social development play the determining role, but in which the subjective factors exercise a certain independence.16

Or, as Porshnev himself put it, “There is no such thing as history without subjects.”17 The editors coupled this affirmation of a Marxist subjectivity with a repudiation of “economic materialists,” a reference to Georgi Plekhanov’s polemics with 19th century Narodnik (populist) theorists who attributed “predominant importance to the economic factor in social life,”18 which could certainly have applied to the authors of the successive editions of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, while almost all the essays included an obligatory critique of non-Marxist approaches to psychological phenomena in history, the array of topics gives a good indication of the innovative concerns of the contributors, among them: “Counter-suggestion and History” by Porshnev, on the psychological devices employed by individuals to resist social domination, “Psychology as a Historical Science” by Aleksander Luria, “Social Mood (nastroenie) as an Object of History” by B. D. Parygin, “National Character” by I. S. Kon, “The Psychology of Russian Serfs” by B. G. Livak, “The Study of Historical Sources and Socio-Psychological Research on the Epoch of October” by G. L. Sobolev, and “The Idea of Time in Medieval Europe” by A. Ia. Gurevich. A further striking feature of the essays in this anthology is the degree to which they engaged with and at times drew on scholars and scholarship that were virtually anathema in the Stalin period. Particular attention was given to the outstanding Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotskii (1896-1934) and his disciples Aleksander Luria (19021977) and Aleksei Leont’ev (1904-1979). Vygotskii, whose 1925 doc16 “Ot redaktorov,” [From the Editors] Porshnev i Antsyferova, Istoriia i Psikhologiia, 5-6. This assertion represented a shift from his previous proposition, articulated in Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i istoriia, 118-9,195, 205-6, that the “objective laws” of history were the underlying cause of changes in social psychology. 17 B. F. Porshnev, “Kontrsuggestiia i istoriia” [Countersuggestion and history], Istoriia i Psikhologiia, 7. 18 G. V. Plekhanov, “The Materialist Conception of History,” in Plekhanov, Essays in Historical Materialism (New York, 1940), 11.

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toral thesis on the Psychology of Art was finally published in 1965, had established “the most important school of Soviet psychology,” at the core of which was a call, never realized in practice, for a science of psychology with an “historico-cultural” approach at its core,19 and for which he and Luria had been fiercely attacked in 1932.20 NonSoviet Marxist psychologists were also discussed, notably the French genetic psychologist Henri Wallon (1879-1962) and the historical psychologist Ignace Meyerson. In addition there were essays devoted to the theory of ‘heroes and the mob’ propounded by the Narodnik N. K. Mikhailovskii, ‘social psychology’ in the work of the Menshevik historian N. A. Rozhkov, and Sigmund Freud’s contribution to ethnography and the history of religion by the Hungarian scholar S.A. Tokarev. Overall, the objective of this anthology was, as one contributor put it, to dispel the “illusion” that social psychology was a “completely new branch of scientific knowledge” either in Soviet or pre-revolutionary historiography. Its precursors, it was claimed, went back at least to the great Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii (18411911).21 Nevertheless, these were new considerations for Soviet historiography, at least since Stalin’s time. Rather than the traditional SovietMarxist concerns with historical laws, the nature of social formations or property relations, the prevailing concerns in this anthology were language, thought, consciousness, symbols, gestures, perceptions, experience, feelings and moods. Further, an engagement with the conceptualization of social psychology and various approaches to it characterized these essays, with a few exceptions, rather than actual historical research. In his essay on “Psychology as Historical Science,” 19 Vygotskii’s major work, “The Historical Meaning of the Psychological Crisis” (1926-27), did not appear until 1982 within the first volume of his Collected Works. David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, MA, 1989), 253-4, 262-4, 454, argues that despite Vygotskii’s preaching ‘an “historico-cultural” approach to general psychology … he worked at the subject only belatedly and briefly” thereby avoiding a field that even in the 1920s was “charged with ideological and political passion.” 20 Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks, 107. 21 O. V. Volobuev, “Voprosy sotsial’noi psychologii v trudakh N. A. Rozhkova” [Questions of Social Psychology in Works of N.A. Rozhkov], Istoriia i Psikhologiia, 296-9. However, Kliuchevskii’s explorations of the culture of early Russian religious adherence, on the basis of rituals, tales, legends, words and gestures, seems to have more in common with the Annales mentalité than social psychology as such. Robert F. Byrnes, V. O. Kliuchevskii: Historian of Russia (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995), 129-30.

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Luria repudiated innate or biological approaches to the development of the human psyche in favor of a historical approach in which “changes in the psyche are stimulated by decisive socio-economic shifts.” Based on the results of research on the impact of collectivization and literacy programs on peoples of Central Asia conducted by Vygotskii and Leont’ev at the beginning of the 1930s, results that were not published until the 1960s, Luria concluded that the fundamental categories of the psychological development of the individual have an historical character and the psychology of the individual must be understood as a historical science.22

A perspective on social psychology based more on the psychology of groups, rather than individuals, was presented in an essay on ‘social mood’ by B. D. Parygin. He suggested that social groups and classes could manifest not only a political but also a social “cast of mind” (umonastroeniie), such as optimism, pessimism, doubt or denial. These moods, he further suggested, could be manifested in art or religion. For example, the Renaissance embrace of the arts of the ancient world could be seen as a symptom of a rising “anti-clerical social mood.”23 So-called “national character” was subject to a trenchant critique by I. S. Kon. Invoking a “Marxist sociology,” he repudiated any “ethnocentric” stereotypes derived from either biological or psychological analyzes. Instead, Kon argued for the necessity of a “socio-historical” approach to national communities which took into account class identification and cultural influences. In the latter regard, he acknowledged the importance of folklore and oral culture as sources: “Ancient legends and tales enable not only a people’s history to be understood but also to elucidate the character of its expectations and ideals as well as the structure of its moral and social values.”24 A similar approach to sources, if not Kon’s Marxist sociology, would be adopted by the cultural historian Gurevich.

22 A. R. Luria, “Psikhologiia kak istoricheskaia nauka (K voprosu ob istoricheskoi prirode psikhologicheskih protsessov)” [Psychology as Historical Science (Concerning the Question About the Historical Nature of Psychological Phenomena)], Istoriia i Psikhologiia, 36-62, esp. 47-8, 62, emphasized in the original. 23 B. D. Parygin, “Sotsial’noe nastroenie kak ob’ekt istoricheskoi nauki” [Social Mood as an Object of Historical Science], Istoriia i Psikhologiia, 90-105. 24 I. S. Kon, “K probleme natsional’nogo kharaktera” [Concerning the Question of National Character], Istoriia i Psikhologiia, 122-158, esp. 130, 135, 156-7.

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A rare proposal for socio-psychological analysis of Soviet history was advanced by G. L. Sobolev. Advocating a research agenda for the October revolution itself, Sobolev acknowledged the poverty of research on this crucial topic. The social psychology of the revolution, he charged, had at best been dealt with only in passing. Instead, researchers had focused on the economy, strikes or the nature of the working class, to the detriment of “the ideology, psychology and morale of the revolutionary masses in 1917.” Sobolev argued that increased access to archives in the post-Stalin era, and especially the elaboration of a “Marxist social psychology,” opened up unprecedented possibilities to research the “psychology of the working masses in 1917.” Hitherto historians’ priority had been the “political” and “ideological” characteristics of the mass movement, but Sobolev urged them to shift their focus to the development of ordinary people’s “political moods” and “religious morale,” how they “lived, thought and struggled,” and how events impacted on their “views, convictions, illusions and moods.” Here sources became crucial, bearing as they could “the creative material and spiritual imprint of past peoples.” In particular, Sobolev urged historians, not uncritically, to look to letters and memoirs as sources, publication of which had been thwarted in the 1930s, as well as the popular press, which was replete with “letters, songs, poems, tales, sayings, proverbs ... rumors and conversations.” Recourse to such sources would better enable historians to chart the “psychological shifts” in mass “consciousness” that had opened the way to the October seizure of power.25 Promising as this agenda for a Marxist historical psychology seemed at the beginning of the 1970s, it remained largely unfulfilled. The closure of Gefter’s Sector of the Methodology in 1969 and the death of Porshnev in 1972, followed soon after by the demise of his seminar on social psychology, signaled the death knell of this tendency. A seminar of methodology convened by the director of the Institute of World History, E. M. Zhukov proved a dead end.26 The demise of the earlier initiatives was reflected in the literature. A 1975 publication on “social psychology” had nothing to say on history but 25 G. L. Sobolev, “Istochnikovedenie i sotsial’no-psychologicheskoe issledovanie epokhi oktiabriia” [Historical and Social-Psychological Study of the October Revolution], Istoriia i Psikhologiia, 226-41, esp. 227, 231, 239. 26 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 247. Gurevich referred to Porshnev’s seminar on “historical psychology,” but this seems incorrect. Markwick, Rewriting History, 167.

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a lot about the “aktualnost’” of “Marxist social psychology” for the “building of communism” in the wake of the 1971 Twenty-Fourth Party Congress as well as the bankruptcy of “bourgeois social psychology.”27 Exposing the latter was also a primary aim of a mistitled book that appeared in the dying days of the Brezhnev period, allegedly dedicated to “historical psychology” but in fact focused on Soviet “social psychology” in the light of the 1981 Twenty-Fifth Party Congress.28 The vacuousness of this ideological commitment to a Soviet “social psychology” was mirrored in the practice of Soviet psychologists, even the Vygotskians, for whom an “‘historico-cultural’ approach to the mind” had long been little more than a mantra.29 Culturology The defeat of the neo-Leninist revisionists and the accompanying demise of Marxist social-psychology in the early Brezhnev years left only the other revisionist tendency—the “culturologists”—to continue the battle for historical psychology. Cross-fertilized by literary and linguistic studies, cultural historiography was almost exclusively represented by one historian, the medievalist Aron Gurevich. On the eve of Khrushchev’s ousting in 1964, Gurevich threw down a challenge. Surveying the emerging field of “socio-historical psychology,” he declared, still formally adhering to Marxist terminology that “no transition can be made from analyzing the socio-economic structure and basis of a society towards elucidating its ideology without taking account its socio-psychological atmosphere.” He concluded with the ringing declaration: “Social psychology must become an important dimension of historical research.”30 Gurevich was to be as good as his word. Effectively repudiating Marxism-Leninism in favor initially of “socio-historical psychology” and subsequently of “mentalities” in history, over the next three 27 Sotsial’naia psikhologiia. Kratkii ocherk [Social Psychology. A Short Essay], G. P. Predvechnyi and Iu. A. Sherkovin, eds. (Moscow, 1975). 28 I. G. Beliavskii and B. A. Shkuratov, Problemy istoricheskoi psikhologii [Problems of Social Psychology] (Rostov on Don , 1982). 29 Joravsky, Russian Psychology, 454. 30 A. Ia. Gurevich, “Nekotorye aspekty izucheniia sotsial’noi istorii (obshchestvenno-istoricheskaia psikhologiia)” [Some Aspects of the Study of Social History (social-historical psychology)], Voprosy istorii, [Problems of History] 10 (1964), 51-68. .

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decades Gurevich researched and wrote on the cultural history of medieval Western Europe, Iceland and Scandinavia. Striving to capture the “world-view” of medieval people, “the mentalité which lays its imprint upon the whole life of their society”—“attitudes and orientations,” “customs of thought,” “psychic instruments,” in short, “that stratum of the intellectual life of the society which was not fully realized and reflected upon by its members”—Gurevich delved into medieval ideas of space and time, law and language, wealth and labor, oral and written culture, clerical and popular religion, as well as Icelandic sagas and humor, Germanic poetry and Scandinavian giftgiving.31 Drawing not only on domestic Russian and Soviet historiographical traditions but also on West European ones, ultimately the mentalités approach Gurevich pioneered in the Soviet Union has proved to be among the most resilient and productive for post-Soviet cultural history. Gurevich demonstrated his determination to make his 1964 demand a reality in a series of articles which addressed the profound methodological challenge to the ruling Marxist-Leninist paradigm posed by “historical” social psychology.32 In a particularly important 1969 essay on social psychology and historical sources, Gurevich revealed how far he had travelled from Soviet orthodoxy in the previous five years.33 Whereas in 1964 his cry for a ‘socio-historical psychology’ had been qualified by the need for the “Marxist historian” to incorporate social class and material factors to “avoid idealism,”34 by 1969 he was insisting that a necessary starting point was to view 31 A. Y. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, G. L. Campbell, trans. (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), esp. 314; Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth, trans. (Cambridge, UK and Paris, 1989); Aron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, Jana Howlett, ed. (Cambridge, UK, 1992), esp. vii-xi. 32 Gurevich, “Obshchii zakon i konkretnaia zakonomernost’ v istorii,” Voprosy istorii, [General Law and Concrete Conformity of Law in History] in Problems of History, 8 (1965), 14-30; idem, “K diskussii o dokapitalisticheskikh obshchestvennykh formatsiakh: formatsiia i uklad” [Concerning the Pre-Capitalist Historical Formations: Formation and Socio-Economic Way of Life], Voprosy filosofii, 2 (1968), 118-29; idem, “Chto takoe istorichskii fakt?,” Istochnikovedenie. Teoreticheskie i metodicheskie problemy [“What is a Historical fact?” Study of Sources: Theoretical and Methodological Problems], S. O. Shmidt, ed. (Moscow, 1969), 59-88. 33 A. Ia. Gurevich, “Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i istoriia. Istochnikovedcheskii aspekt,” in Shmidt, Istochnikovedenie [“Social Psychology and History: Considering the Sources”], 384-426. 34 Gurevich, “Nekotorye aspekty iziucheniia sotsial’noi istorii,” [Some Aspects of the Study of Social History] 56, 67.

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society as a “network of diverse communication systems.” Now for Gurevich signs, symbols and language, in short “semiotic systems,” were key to understanding “the human content of a social structure,” especially in medieval culture where “symbolic language” in art and literature exercised such “enormous force.”35 This approach was manifest in Gurevich’s contribution to Porshnev’s 1971 anthology History and Psychology: “The Idea of Time in Medieval Europe.” In this essay Gurevich focused on the “independent cultural-historical problem” of the significance of the categories of time and space in the consciousness of medieval European society, pointedly remarking that these had been virtually ignored by scholars or treated only in passing, i.e., by orthodox Soviet historians for whom the socio-economic paradigm ruled. Cautioning against any attempt to impose contemporary conceptions of time on the medieval world, Gurevich drew on an impressive array of linguistic and aesthetic sources, what he termed a “conceptual and emotional ‘inventory’ of culture,” to explore the meaning of time for the medieval European personality. In doing so he showed an acute awareness of the distinction between high and mass culture. In addition to epic literature, he looked to chronicles, letters, legal documents, and lives of the saints, calling for careful study of the language in which they were couched. “Language is the most essential factor,” he asserted, “forming the concepts and organizing perceptions into a coherent picture of the world. Language is not just a system of signs—it embodies a definite system of values and conceptions.”36 Interdisciplinarity An interdisciplinary approach was to become a hallmark of Gurevich’s cultural history. In his essays Gurevich drew upon an extraordinary range of theoretical and methodological approaches from the human sciences, from both indigenous and foreign scholars, among them: Karl Marx’s early philosophical writings, Lucien Febvre’s and George Rudé’s social history, the Annales’ “collective psychology,” Claude Levi-Strauss’s “structural anthropology,” the economic anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss, Ferdinand de Saussure’s 35

Gurevich, “Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i istoriia,” 386, 390-2, 418-9. A. Ia. Gurevich, “Predstavleniia o vremeni v srednekovoi Evrope” [Concepts of Time in Medieval Europe], Istoriia i Psikhologiia, 159-98, esp. 159, 165. 36

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semiotics, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s “grotesque-carnival culture.” Gurevich’s increasing inclination to embrace such an array of approaches, rather than the customary Soviet reliance on the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, reflected his own intellectual odyssey. Gurevich never embraced Marxism and never became a member of the communist party. Nevertheless, as a student and then aspirant (graduate student) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he took Marxism “seriously” in relation to its approach to “society as system” and the “driving forces of historical development.” But he never accepted it as a “philosophy of history,” with its theory of lawful, successive, socioeconomic formations, the position espoused by the leading medievalist A. I. Neusykhin, whose seminar at Moscow State University he entered in 1944.37 Rather, Gurevich fell under the spell of German Neo-Kantianism which, with its idealist repudiation of a knowable, objective reality independent of the categories through which it is known, he regarded as the most “productive approach for the theory and practice of history in the XX century.” The Neo-Kantianism of Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband, coupled in particular with Max Weber’s “ideal type,” which Gurevich first encountered at the end of the 1950s, were powerful influences on his approach to historical “methodology, gnoseology and epistemology.”38 In embracing neo-Kantianism, Gurevich was tapping into Western-influenced, pre-revolutionary historiographical trends associated with the Moscow school of Kliuchevskii,39 in particular the historicism of N. I. Kareev (1850-1931), author of a landmark study of the nature of historical knowledge published on the eve of World War I.40 But Gurevich was also tapping into domestic intellectual sources, remnants of pre-revolutionary Russian historiographical traditions that had survived the Stalin era—the St. Petersburg school in particular, with its emphasis on source study bequeathed by A. E. Presniakov. Notwithstanding the Stalinist devastation of Soviet historiography, it had the effect of melding the Moscow and St. Petersburg traditions 37

Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 14, 89. Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 43, 103, and 109-10 where he counterposes the “a priori” approach of Marxism to Weber’s “ideal type” hypothesis. 39 Thomas Sanders, “Introduction: ‘A Most Narrow Present’” and Boris Anan’ich and Viktor Paneiakh, “The St Petersburg School of History and its Fate,” in Historiography of Imperial Russia. The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY & London, 1999), 5-6, 147, respectively. 40 Edward Thaden, “Historicism, N. A. Polevoi and rewriting Russian history,” East European Quarterly, 38, 1 (Fall 2004), 305-6. 38

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and of retaining elements of them both.41 In particular, scholars of medieval Europe—among them E. A. Kosminskii, A. I. Neusykhin, S. D. Skazkin, A. D. Liublinskaia and L. P. Karsavin—managed to sustain the rich methodological legacy of Russian medievalism, particularly its linguistic and literary orientation.42 For Gurevich, linguistics and literature became keys to unlocking medieval social “culture” and “consciousness.” In this regard, towards the end of the 1940s Gurevich came under the influence of the “outstanding” Leningrad philologist M. I. StelbinKamenskii, who nurtured Gurevich’s growing interest in IX-XIII century Icelandic sagas as sources for early Norwegian history. Through Stelbin-Kamenskii, Gurevich began to see the sagas not merely as a “reflection” of “reality” nor the voice of a “depersonalized ‘immediate producer,” as orthodox, economistic Soviet historiography would interpret them, but as a means of evoking a “living human being, who possessed, besides social functions, a psychology, thoughts, feelings, language. . . .” In short, Gurevich came to realize that “through the sagas a human being speaks as a subject.”43 Lev Karsavin (1882-1952), Leningrad philosopher and cultural historian of the “religiosity” of XII-XIII century Italy, was another early influence on Gurevich, who acknowledged, albeit critically, the importance of Karsavin’s recognition of the centrality of religious “symbolism” in medieval “consciousness.”44 In his studies of medieval everyday life, death and conceptions of space and time,45 Karsavin went beyond religion as “spiritual life” to conceive it simultaneously as a “social” question and a question of “mass psychology.” For Karsavin, the “craft of the historian” was to study “‘material being’ and everyday life as a specific sphere of social life” in a specific period. To achieve this, the historian necessarily had to “really penetrate into an alien culture and genuinely merge with it.” In the light of these objectives, Karsavin’s work can be rightly described as a precursor to the historiography of mentalités in the 1970s and its successor, “his41 Sanders, “Introduction,” Historiography of Imperial Russia, 11; Livin, Writing History, 29. 42 Iastrebitskaia, “Povsednevnost,” 86, but contrast Gurevich’s assessment: Stalin’s repression had “catastrophic” consequences for Soviet medievalism as a school, its “continuity was ruptured,” Istoriia istorika, 41-2. 43 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 67. 44 Gurevich, “Sotsial’naia psikhologiia i istoriia,” 420-22. 45 Sanders, “Introduction,” 10; Anan’ich and Paneiakh, “The St Petersburg School of History,” Historiography of Imperial Russia, 161, n.15.

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torical anthropology,” in which the relationship between the cultural and the material environment and the relationship between the historian and his/her “object” of study became pivotal concerns.46 Bakhtin’s “carnival culture” An even more powerful, homegrown stimulant for the resurrection of the cultural trend in Russian historical and philosophical thought and the establishment of historical psychology in the late Khrushchevearly Brezhnev period was the literary scholarship of Mikhail Bakhtin, another neo-Kantian influence on Gurevich.47 Overnight Bakhtin’s major monograph, Francois Rabelais and Popular Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, published in early 1965,48 had an extraordinary impact on literary and historical “culturology” both domestically and internationally, including on the French Annales school. A vital element in Bakhtin’s interrogation of the “carnival culture” of the medieval world and the Renaissance was an acute awareness of the gulf between contemporary and medieval culture. For Gurevich and like-minded medievalists, Bakhtin had hurled an “intellectual bomb” into the humanities that shifted their focus to “popular culture.”49 According to Gurevich, Bakhtin’s achievement was to illuminate the outlook of the ordinary individual embodied in popular “carnival culture of laughter” and to capture the subversive contradiction between it and the “serious” high culture of the Roman Catholic Church.50 Further, Gurevich argued, “exactly like” the Annales’ discovery of “mentalités,” Bakhtin had unearthed a “mighty layer” of medieval culture that was not the product of scholars or theologians but of “feelings towards the world (mirooshcheniia)” that were “lodged in human consciousness.”51 In doing so, Bakhtin advanced a “dialogical” perspective on the relationship between cultures present and past, a mutually enlightening, sustained 46

Iastrebitskaia, “Povsednevnost,” 87-90. See Craig Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics (London/Sterling Virginia, 2002), esp. 16-17. 48 M. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ia i Renessansa [in English translation Bakhtin and His World] (Moscow, 1965). 49 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 189-92, 224. 50 A. Ia. Gurevich, “Uroki Lius’ena Fevra,” in Lius’en Fevr: Boi za istoriiu [Lucien Febvre’s Lessons in Lucien Febvre: The Fight for History] (Moscow, 1991), 514. 51 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 191. 47

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conversation between cultures,52 as the method which distinguished the human from the natural sciences. Bakhtin’s “dialogical” approach particularly appealed to a medievalist such as Gurevich who opposed the “scientistic” paradigm of Marxism-Leninism and who saw the historian as an “intermediary between the present and the past.”53 The Tartu school Given the influence of the Leningrad tradition of literary studies, it is not surprising that in the late 1950s-early 1960s another vital tributary of historical psychology was the emergence of Soviet semiotics, which was to have an enormous impact on Gurevich. Semiotics, the study of signs and their signification, was in those years regarded as a dubious discipline, but was subsequently given formal status as the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school established by Boris Uspenskii and Yuri Lotman in the 1960s. Lotman’s seminal lectures on “structural poetics” in 1961-62 were first published under the same title in 1964.54 The Tartu school itself was, as Uspenskii later put it, the “extraordinarily fruitful symbiosis of two traditions: Moscow linguistics and Leningrad literary studies.”55 Emerging more or less in tandem with Bakhtin’s analysis of “carnival culture,” as Laura Engelstein has observed, the Tartu school shared Bakhtin’s “interest in the text’s internal structures and the attention to patterns that connect aesthetic forms with the cultural surroundings.”56 Given these interests, it is not difficult to see why Lotman’s “structural poetics” in particular would appeal to a cultural historian such as Gurevich. Structural poetics strove to interpret any “aesthetic fact” 52 Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present, Brian Pearce, trans. (London, New York, 1988), 278-9. 53 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 17; idem, Istoricheskii sintez i Shkola “Annalov” [The Historical Synthesis of the “Annales” School] (Moscow, 1993), 281; as a historian, however, Gurevich was not uncritical of Bakhtin’s extension of “carnival” into pre-Renaissance Europe. Istoriia istorika, 190-2. 54 Iu. M. Lotman, Lectures on Structural Poetics: An Introduction. The theory of verse (1964) 55 B. A. Uspenskii, “K probleme genezisa Tartutsko-Moskovskoi semioticheskoi shkoly,” Iu. M. Lotman i Tartusko-Moskovskaia semioticheskaia shkola [Concerning the Problem of Genesis of Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, Yuri Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics] (Moscow, 1994), 268. 56 Laura Engelstein, “Culture, Culture Everywhere: Interpretations of Modern Russia, across the 1991 Divide,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, New Series, 2 2 (2001), 389.

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not in isolation but in the totality of its relations with other “poetic elements” and it aimed to do so by recognizing that the contemporary reader was outside the given poetic culture. Accordingly, a “scientific” reading of a text necessarily entailed “reconstructing the artistic perception” of the reader in a particular literary culture. Further, one of the principal methods for doing so was to analyze the “semantics of literature, folklore and myth.”57 Likewise, a historian attempting to understand the social psychology of a particular epoch, in order to avoid imposing present-day conceptions on past cultures, must see the significance of its various cultural artifacts through the eyes of historical subjects of that time, a precept to which Gurevich would staunchly adhere in his scholarship. In the late 1970s Lotman and Uspenskii themselves attempted an analysis of cultural and social developments in the Russian empire, from the introduction of Christianity in the 10th century until the end of the 18th century. Interpreting culture as a “collective communication system that regulates human social relations,” they attempted to explain Russian cultural development as the product of a contradictory combination of “dualistic,” bipolar categories: “reaction—progress, old—new, Russian—Western, Christianity—paganism, upper class—lower class.”58 Whatever the limits of such a sweeping, purely cultural interpretation of Russian history, it is not accidental that this endeavor by the literary theorists Lotman and Uspenskii paralleled attempts by a historian such as Gurevich to analyze West European and Scandinavian medieval culture through their contradictory combinations of pagan and Christian culture. Gurevich’s own search as a historian for the “general ‘grammar’ of behavior and patterns of thought in a given epoch” was fostered by this “simultaneous” emergence in the late 1950s-early 1960s of semiotics and “historians of mentalities” in the fields of medieval and early modern history.59 The attraction of semiotics for a budding historian of culture is self-evident. As Gurevich put it in retrospect: Semiotics postulates contradictory and varied planes of expression and content. Semiotics analyzes texts. In order to understand the authenticity or otherwise of a text and its internal sense, it is necessary to pen57

M. L. Gasparov, “Predislovie,” [Foreword] Iu. M. Lotman, 14-5, 26. As summarized in Joachim Hösler, “Mentalität,” Studienhandbuch Östliches Europa. Band 2: Geschichte des Russischen Reiches und der Sowjetunion, Thomas M. Bohn und Dietmar Neutatz, eds. (Köln, Weimar, Vienna, 2002), 248. 59 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 116-7. 58

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etrate its external form concealing its inner meaning to reveal its hidden inner layers, hidden perhaps even from the author himself. In essence this entails a transition from researching literary and other texts to the study of structures of consciousness upon which a culture is based.60

But such an approach, with its profound methodological implications, seemingly dumbfounded most of Gurevich’s medievalist colleagues. Where Gurevich saw “mentalities” they saw “ideology,” which for them was a mere “encrustation or façade on the socioeconomic structure.”61 Gurevich was already well advanced on his semiotic journey when he was first invited to participate in the Tartu school at the end of the 1960s, on the eve of the publication of his own controversial Problems of the Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe (1970).62 Thereafter he contributed to their discussions, attracted by their “semiotic conceptions and the precision of their structuralist methods,” which, while they could not be simply appropriated by historians, could “guide historical thought.” Gurevich saw the Tartu school not only as an intellectual inspiration but also as a form of “opposition” to the stifling uniformity of Soviet intellectual life.63 For this reason, although the Tartu school’s roots lay in long-established domestic and Central European traditions, particularly the Prague Linguistic School, it developed an enormous influence internationally which facilitated a dialogue with similar Western intellectual trends.64 Likewise, Gurevich’s attempts to reinvigorate history derived much of its inspiration from Western historiographical thinking, unlike the neo-Leninists around Gefter who drew overwhelmingly from domestic sources, notably a re-reading of Marx and Lenin. In Gurevich’s case, a vital foreign tributary for the development of historical psychology was the French Annales school. Its input led directly to his shift from “socio-historical psychology” to “mentalities.”

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Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 117. Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 117. 62 Problemy genezisa feodalizma v zapadnoi Evrope [Problems of the Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe] (Moscow, 1970). 63 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 161, 171. 64 Thomas G. Winner, “How did the Ideas of Juri Lotman reach the West? A memoir,” Signs System Studies, 30,2 (2002) 425; Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000), 90. 61

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The works of the founding fathers of the Annales, March Bloch and Lucien Febvre, were little known in the Soviet Union until the 1960s. When Soviet historians did refer to them, it was generally to repudiate them as “bourgeois” historians. In 1958, however, the leading Annalyste, Fernand Braudel, had initiated biennial discussions with Soviet historians.65 Gurevich himself first encountered the Annales in the mid-1960s and they appealed to him because of their neoKantian repudiation of nineteenth-century fact-gathering positivism. For Gurevich, the Annales concept of “mentalités,” first articulated by Georges Duby in 1961, was a “Copernican revolution.” In particular, the work of Jacques Le Goff, especially his Medieval Western Civilization (1970), was a veritable “explosion.”66 Polish historians, among them Stanislav Pekarchik, Bronislav Geremek and Ezhi Topolskii, were conduits for the Annales into Eastern Europe.67 Likewise, after his visit to Poland in 1967, a “gulp of freedom,” Gurevich became a major conduit for the Annales into Soviet historiography.68 In 1973 he edited and wrote an introduction for a Russian translation of Bloch’s testimonial Apology for History, published as part of a series “Monuments of Historical Thought.”69 In his commentary Gurevich attempted to convey the meaning of mentalité, which went beyond historical psychology: This all-embracing term [mentalité], which cannot be reduced to a single meaning in Russian, encompasses “cast of mind,” “mental aptitude,” “psychology,” “mental make-up.” Perhaps it also encompasses 65 Braudel personally helped initiate a Franco-Soviet Symposium that met every two years from 1958 onwards and in which the Annales were regular participants. Iu. N. Afanas’ev, Istorizm protiv ekletiki. Frantsuzskaia shkola “Annalov” v sovremennoi burzhuaznoi istoriografii [Historicism Versus Eclectics. The French School of Annales in Contemporary Bourgeois Historiography] (Moscow, 1980), 245. 66 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 112, 133-4, 172-3. 67 Poland had a long history of humanist Marxist revisionism stretching back to Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911) at the beginning of the twentieth century, which saw considerable cross-fertilization with Russian revisionism such as that of Aleksander Bogdanov (1873-1928). In the 1960s, a new generation of Polish humanist Marxists emerged which had considerable influence on Soviet historiographical revisionism. See Andrzej Walicki, Stanislaw Brzozowski and the Polish Beginnings of “Western Marxism,” (Oxford, UK, 1989). 68 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 187-8. 69 Mark Blok, Apologiia istorii, ili Remeslo istorika [Apologia of History or The Craft of a Historian] (Moscow, 1973).

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that complex of conceptions about the world by means of which human consciousness in a given epoch fashions an ordered “picture of the world” from the chaotic and heterogeneous stream of perceptions and impressions. For this reason the sense of the French “mentalité” is closest to the Russian “mirovidenie” [worldview].70

For Gurevich, publication of Bloch’s Apology was a “breakthrough” in Soviet “historical consciousness,” the impact of which was still being felt more than a decade later in 1986 at the height of the perestroika furor around history, when a second edition was published to mark the centenary of Bloch’s birth.71 For Gurevich, on the rebound from what he saw as the positivistic obsession of Soviet social science with subsuming all historical phenomena under general laws, the Annales was a breath of fresh air. Like Bloch, Febvre and especially Le Goff, he believed history was a specific human science, requiring its own method to “reveal in every sphere of human activity the essential features of the individual, the ways in which he/ she perceives and senses the world, and his/her self-consciousness and behavior.”72 Le Goff, having witnessed as a student in Prague the 1948 Czechoslovak communist party seizure of power and in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, like Gurevich had distanced himself from the Soviet system and its dogmatic Marxism. Both Gurevich and Le Goff found in anthropology a way out of the dead end of economistic Soviet historical writing and eventually the basis for a new discipline: “historical anthropology.”73 Pursuing “parallel” paths with Le Goff in the late 1970s, Gurevich identified strongly with Le Goff’s studies of The Other Middle Ages 70 Quoted in L. N. Pushkarev, “Chto takoe mentalitet?” Otechestvennaia istoriia, [“What is Mentality?”] Russian History 3 (1995), 164. Pushkarev criticizes Gurevich’s definition as too “passive and contemplative. Mentalitet is, on the contrary, active and efficacious. ‘Dukhovnyi mir’ [mental and emotional outlook] … is a much more appropriate term.” 71 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 176-7. Academician A. L. Narochnitskii later observed that “translation and publication of Bloch’s book in Russian was a big political mistake.” 72 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 181-2. 73 In 1976-77 “Anthropologie historia” emerged as a separate sub-discipline, alongside history and social anthropology, in the seminar program of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, having begun as “Anthropologie culturelle” of medieval Western Europe on the initiative of Le Goff in 1973-74. Leonore ScholzeIrrlitz, Moderne Konturen historischer Anthropolgie: Eine vergleichende Studie zu den Arbeiten von Jacques Le Goff und Aaron J. Gurjewitsch (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 113-4 and n.3.

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(1977) and The Birth of Purgatory (1981). In this same period some of Gurevich’s major writings appeared notably Categories of Medieval Culture (1972) and Problems of Medieval Popular Culture (1981).74 Like Le Goff, aware of the gulf between the medieval and contemporary “perception of the world” (mirovospriatie), Gurevich was intent on scrutinizing anew the medieval world, with its “multifaceted, extremely complex, contradictory … culture.” Unlike Le Goff, however, and despite their shared historicist mission to see medieval culture in its own terms, Gurevich’s “model” of medieval culture allowed for a more complex “combination, intertwining and synthesizing” of barbarian and medieval culture, both “high” and “low.” In good part, Gurevich argues, his more complex cultural model derived from his focus on Scandinavian Europe whereas Le Goff, like the Annales as a whole, focused almost exclusively on Western Europe.75 In part, Gurevich’s sensitivity to the multi-layered nature of medieval culture was also a reflection of parallel debates among neo-Leninist revisionists in the 1960s about the “multistructuralism” (mnogoukladnost’) of pre-revolutionary Russian society—a term that Gurevich occasionally employed in relation to medieval society.76 Culturology and politics Undoubtedly the primary drive of the cultural trend in Soviet historiography, such as Gurevich’s, was scholarly. But in so far as it was a reaction against the imposition of the crudely deterministic, abstract sociological-laws of official Marxism-Leninism, it also represented, Gurevich admitted in the post-Soviet period, a “completely conscious” challenge to the “politicization” (angazhirovannost’) of the human and social sciences by the Soviet ideological system. The three principal impulses for the culturological trend—Bakhtin’s “carnival culture,” Tartu semiotics, and mentalités historiography—were all inclined towards what Gurevich somewhat ingenuously portrayed as the “de-politicization” (deideologizatsii) of Soviet historical science. Yet, as Gurevich himself observed, all three trends, by allowing for 74 Gurevich, Kategorii Srednevekovoi kul’tury (Moscow, 1972); Gurevich, Problemy srednevskoi narodnoi kultury (Moscow, 1981). For the English translations see footnote 31. 75 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 223-7. 76 Gurevich, Problemy genezisa feodalizma, 14-25.

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different “levels” within the cultures and texts they analyzed, counterposed unofficial to official cultures. It is obvious therefore that under such a draconian intellectual regime, these trends of necessity simultaneously constituted both an academic and political challenge. In his study of Rabelais, Bakhtin counter-posed the fearless “humorous popular culture” (“smekhovaiai narodnaia kul’tura”) to the “stylized” culture of the medieval church. Likewise, the Tartu semioticians penetrated the “subconscious” “subtexts” beneath the “‘ostentatious’ guises of ‘official’ life.” Similarly too, mentalités historiography “contrasted itself to the traditional history of ideologies … to reveal another, as it were, ‘concealed’ level of social consciousness.” These three primary tributaries of cultural enquiry, contrasting as they did the “unofficial, the elemental and the spontaneous” to the “official and the dogmatic,” were consciously corrosive to official Soviet ideology. In short, as Gurevich so bluntly put it, they were contrasting “living” cultures to the “dead.”77 The culturological challenge, like the neo-Leninist challenge before it, should be seen as part of a larger quest in the late-1960s and 1970s by the Soviet liberal intelligentsia for alternatives to the monochromatic worldviews of Marxism-Leninism. The crushing of the Prague “spring” in August 1968, and with it the suppression of neo-Marxist alternatives, fueled the quest for extra-Marxist intellectual perspectives, from culturology to national-religious Slavophilism. Where the latter derived almost exclusively from indigenous sources, the former tended to draw on Western intellectual sources, such as neo-Kantianism and the Annales, replicating the traditional Slavophil-Westernizer divide in Russian historiography.78 Increasingly, however, in the Brezhnev period such Westernizing intellectual innovations were seen as incompatible with official precepts. In 1969, Gurevich, along with his fellow mediaevalists Iu. L. Bessmertnyi, M. A. Barg and L. V. Danilova, came under attack from Russian Minister for Education A. I. Danilov. At a Moscow State University conference on “problems of historiography” and subsequently in Kommunist, the party theoretical journal, they were censured for revising Marxism. In particular, they were reproached for embracing bourgeois “struc77

Gurevich, Istoricheskii sintez, 9-11. For overviews of these developments see English, Russia and the Idea of the West, esp. chs. 3-4; John B. Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism ( Princeton, 1983), esp. ch. 2; Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, Part I, chs. 4-5. 78

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turalism” and Weber’s “ideal type,” for disparaging the “socio-economic formation” as a “logical construct” rather than a “reflection” of social reality, and, above all, for questioning the primacy of economic relations in pre-capitalist societies, which they allegedly suggested had a tendency towards “homeostasis.” In sum, these tendencies were viewed as a direct attack on the fundamental categories of Marxism-Leninism and the “Leninist principle of partiinost” in historical science and philosophy. Gurevich, in a letter to Kommunist, was apparently bold enough to counter-charge that Danilov, not he, was the “anti-Marxist” in the “worst Stalinist tradition”: “an anthropological approach, including the emotional world of the individual, was not alien to the early Marx at least,” he wrote.79 The conservative attack on Gurevich’s “structuralist” anti-Marxism was followed through in July 1970 when the Ministry of Higher and Special Education withdrew its imprint from his textbook, The Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe, concerned that it would “disorient students and teachers on theoretical questions.” Once again the principal charge was that Gurevich had undermined the primacy of socio-economic relations in historical materialism by positing that under feudalism personal relations of dependence, subordination and mutual obligation obtained, rather than relations of property and exploitation.80 The Soviet intellectual establishment was right, of course. Gurevich had long ago abandoned the Marxist concept of socio-economic formations. “Medieval” replaced “feudal” as the operative category in his two major books on medieval culture subsequently published in 1972 and 1981. By this time, the Brezhnevite counter-offensive was underway, taking at least one former colleague with it. In 1973 Mikhail Barg published Problems of Social History, which had in its Marxist sights the “crisis” facing “contemporary bourgeois medievalists,” not least illustrious representatives of the Annales such as Fernand Braudel.81 This was followed in 1980 by 79 A. Danilov, “K voprosu o metodologii istoricheskoi nauki” [Concerning the Question of Methodology of Historical Science], Kommunist, 5 (1969), 68-81; Markwick, Rewriting History, 182; Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 136-45. 80 Markwick, Rewriting History, 218-9. 81 M. A. Barg, Problemy sotsial’noi istorii v osveshchenii sovremennoi zapadnoi medievistiki [Problems of Social History in Light of Contemporary Western Medieval Studies] (Moscow, 1973). Nevertheless, Barg seems to have been a consistent advocate of the Marxist, materialist conception of history. His “Istoricheskii fakt: struktura, forma, soderzhanie,” [Historical Fact: structure, form, content] Istoriia SSSR, 6 (1976), 46-71, was a sustained critique of neo-Kantian “relativism,” which

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Iurii Afana’sev, the future high priest of the perestroika of Soviet historiography, in his not entirely unsympathetic analysis of the rise and decline of the post-Braudel Annales, hitherto at the cutting edge of “bourgeois” historical science.82 Historical anthropology The discrediting of Marxist-Leninist historiography in the former Soviet Union opened the floodgates for a wave of new approaches to historical writing, from political history to social and cultural history.83 “Mentalité” was a primary concept around which many culturally inclined historians initially rallied. In 1993-4 in Moscow alone there were three conferences dedicated to the history of mentalités in Russia. Characterized by an initially “fashionable,” superficial deployment of the concept and confusion over the most appropriate term—mental’nost’, mentalitet or mentalité?—younger historians turned in quick succession under its banner to social, mass and individual consciousness, everyday and private life, and gender history.84 Almost as quickly, “mentalité” was subsumed by “historical anthropology,” a discipline that has since come to the fore in Russian historiography.85 included the Annales’ Le Fevre. At the height of perestroika Barg, while acknowledging the achievements of Western anthropological historiography and the Soviet neglect of this dimension, wrote a sustained defense of a materialist approach to human subjectivity: “O roli chelovecheskoi istorii sub’ektivnost’ v istorii,” [Concerning the Role of Human History: Subjectivity in History], Istoriia SSSR 3 (1989), 115-31. This article could be interpreted as an oblique critique of Gurevich, “Istoricheskaia nauka i istoricheskai antropologia,” [Historical Science and Historical Anthropology], Voprosy filosofii, 1 (1988), 56-70. In his memoirs, Gurevich gave a most unflattering portrait of Barg’s alleged “duplicity,” saying one thing in public another in private, as “symptomatic” of the Brezhnev period. Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 209-11. 82 Afanas’ev, Istorizm protiv eklektiki [Historicism versus Eclecticism]. 83 See the survey in Istochnikovedenie noveishei istorii rossii: teoriia, metodologiia, praktika [Studies of Sources of Modern Russian History: Theory, Methodology, Practice], A. K. Sokolov, ed. (Moscow, 2004), 557-672. 84 See Rossiiskaia mental’nost’: metody i problemy izucheniia [Russian Mentality: Methods and Problems Of Research], A.A. Gorskii, E.I. Zubkova, eds. (Moscow, 1999). For a critique of superficial, ahistorical analyses of “the Russian mentality” (russkaiia mental’nost’) rather than a multiplicity of “mentalities in Russia’ (rossiiskie mental’nosti), completely divorced from the vast, complex and contradictory social and cultural make-up of Russia see Hösler, “Mentalität,” 249-51. 85 Kupriianov, “Istoricheskia antropologiia,” 367-77. V.V. Sharonov, Osnovy sotsial’noi antropologii [Fundamentals of Social Anthropology] (St. Petersburg, 1997);

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Although undoubtedly a vital catalyst for these developments was the extraordinary exposure to Western historiography facilitated by perestroika and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union,86 the oeuvre bequeathed by Soviet culturologists, Gurevich in particular, was a crucial precondition facilitating the flowering of mentalité and historical anthropology as a whole. His Categories of Medieval Culture, and to a lesser extent the works of Bakhtin, Lotman and Uspenskii, were the prime “stimulus” for younger historians. Gurevich himself, together with his new journal Odyssei, first published in 1989, and his 1993 book Historical Synthesis and the “Annales” School injected some conceptual clarity into the new discussions.87 As early as 1987, at the height of the perestroika debates about history, Gurevich had resuscitated Porshnev’s former “seminar on historical [sic] psychology” which had died along with him and Gefter’s Sector of Methodology. But Gurevich’s seminar convened under the banner of “historical anthropology” because “historical psychology” had proved an unwieldy concept: “Psychology had difficulty in employing historical criteria while historians had even more difficulty employing the categories of psychology.”88 Nevertheless, for Gurevich, the “socio-psychological method of historical investigation” remained essential to “historical anthropology,” the “science of Man” as he defined it in an important paper on this topic presented in 1987, at the height of perestroika. In his paper, Gurevich emphasized that illuminating the social-psychology, culture and mentalités of peoples in previous societies, including their “sub-conscious” strata, were vital, intrinsic objectives for “historical anthropology”:

E. S. Seniavskaia, “Voenno-istoricheskaia antropologia kak novaia otrasl’ istoricheskoi nauki,” Otechestvennaia istoriia [“Historical Anthropology of War as a New Branch of Historical Science,” ] Russian History, 4 (2002), 135-45; Voenno-istoricheskaia antropologia. Ezhegodnik 2002. Predmet, zadachi, perspektivy razvitiia, [Historical Anthropology of War. Yearly Journal 2002. Object, Goals and Perspectives of Development] Seniavskaia, ed. (Moscow, 2002). 86 On the impact of Western scholars and scholarship see Istochnikovedenie, Sokolov, ed., 683-713; R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1997), 218-220. 87 Kupriianov, “Istoricheskia antropologiia,” 369. Another medievalist, Bessmertnykh has pioneered a “new demographic history,” with a “cultural-anthropological orientation.” Istochnikovedenie, Sokolov, ed., 644, n.1. 88 Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 247.

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The essence of historical anthropology consists in revealing the human content of history in all manifestations of man as a social being and, above all, in achieving a new historical synthesis. This approach, naturally, highlights the subjective, psychological side of the historical process.… It is no accident that the study of mentalités is now in the forefront of historical research … first and foremost the Annales school…. Mentalité implies the presence of a common and specific intellectual equipment, a psychological framework shared by people of a given society united by a single culture enabling them to perceive and become aware of their natural and social environment and themselves. A chaotic and heterogeneous stream of perceptions and impressions is converted by consciousness into a more or less ordered picture of the world which sets its seal on human behavior. The subjective side of the historical process, the manner of thinking and feeling particular to people of a given social and cultural community thus becomes part of the objective process of history. One of the main tasks of historical anthropology is to reconstruct images of the world which are representative of different epochs and cultural traditions. This requires the reconstruction of the subjective reality which formed the content of the consciousness of people of a given epoch and culture.89

Post-Soviet historiography is still in flux, and “mentalité,” “historical psychology” and “historical anthropology” are fluid concepts about which there is still much discussion.90 There can be no doubt, however, that a proclivity towards a cultural-philosophical approach is deeply rooted in Russian historiographical consciousness. While external intellectual forces have undoubtedly fuelled the cultural ‘turn’ in Russian historiography since 1991, there can be little doubt that the ground work for theorizing and applying these methods and disciplines was well and truly laid by domestic intellectual developments back in the late-Khrushchev and early-Brezhnev years.91 It is a testimony to Aron Gurevich and his scholarship that he was a crucial driving force in these developments.

89 “Historical Anthropology and the Science of History,” in Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 3-4. 90 This was one of the themes of Istoricheskaia psikhologiia, Psikoistoriia, sotsial’naia psikhologiia: obshchee i razlichiia, Materialy XV Mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Sankt-Peterburg, 11-12 maia 2004 g. [Historical Psychology, Psychohistory, Social Psychology: Similarities and Differences, Materials from the 15th International Scholarly Conference, St. Petersburg, 11-12 May 2004] (St. Petersburg, 2004). 91 Engelstein, “Culture, Culture,” 364, 386, draws a similar conclusion.

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ARON GUREVICH’S DIALOGUE WITH THE ANNALES1 PETER BURKE

Like Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work he both admired and criticized, Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich was attracted to the idea of dialogue. Indeed, he described the study of history as a dialogue between the past and the present.2 In this article I should like to consider the relation between Gurevich’s nouvelle histoire and that of the so-called “Annales School”—which was actually more of a group, network or movement of scholars who shared certain general aims than a school in the precise sense of disciples following in the footsteps of a master such as Lucien Febvre or Fernand Braudel. The rather vague term “relation” in the previous sentence is used in order to include comparisons—and contrasts—between Gurevich’s work and that of the French historians, as well as a discussion of his reactions to them and theirs to him.3 I As an outsider, neither a Russian nor a medievalist, I have opted to attempt to place Gurevich’s achievement in a broad historiographical context. Let me begin with the general point that the Annales movement, even if it was the most famous and the most successful movement for the renewal of historical studies in the twentieth-century world, was not alone in this respect. There was, for example, a move1 I do not read Russian, so my discussion of the work of Aron Gurevich unfortunately depends on translations. I shall concentrate on four of his books, all available in English: Categories of Medieval Culture [henceforth CMC], (London 1985); Medieval Popular Culture [henceforth MPC], (Cambridge, UK,1988); Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages [henceforth HAMA], (Cambridge, UK, 1992); and Origins of European Individualism [henceforth OEI], (Oxford, 1995). 2 Quoted in Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz, Moderne Konturen historische Anthropologie: eine vergleichende Studie zu den Arbeiten von Jacques Le Goff und Aaron J. Gurjewitsch (Frankfurt, 1994), 70. See his invitation to French historians to engage in dialogue, discussed towards the end of this article. 3 See, Y. Lotman, “Dialogue Mechanisms” in Y. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: a Semiotic Theory of Culture (London, 2001), 143-50.

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ment for “The New History” in the United States at the beginning of the century, associated with scholars such as James H. Robinson and Charles and Mary Beard. Furthermore, we must take into account the global Marxist movement for historical renewal. It was particularly important in countries lacking Communist regimes, where Marxism was open rather than closed and took the form of heterodoxy rather than orthodoxy. For example, one thinks of Jan Romein in the Netherlands, or of the group around Studi Storici in postwar Italy, or in Britain of the founders of Past and Present, among them Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and—closer to the interests of Aron Iakovlevich—Rodney Hilton. Moreover, individual historians also pursued new kinds of history in their own way. For example, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga was inspired by Jacob Burckhardt, but went beyond his approach in important respects, thanks in part to his interest in anthropology.4 A less well-known example, the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre, a socio-cultural historian, was inspired in part by the anthropology of Franz Boas and in part by the “intimate history” practiced by the Goncourt brothers.5 When Fernand Braudel taught at the University of São Paulo in the late 1930s, he discovered Freyre’s work, and in his enthusiastic review, he recognized its affinities with the approach adopted by Bloch, Febvre and Braudel himself.6 I leave it to other contributors to this volume to discuss the intellectual biography of Aron Iakovlevich and the models that he may have followed early in his career. Was he, for instance, interested in the work of the eminent Soviet psychologists, Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria? What is obvious from his later books is the stimulus that Gurevich derived from three bodies of scholarly work, one of them Russian, another Anglo-American and the third French. In the first place, beginning at home, Gurevich was excited and inspired by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Vladimir Propp, Dmitri Likhachev and the so-called “Tartu School”—or shall we say, net4 Ilse N. Bulhof, “Johan Huizinga, Ethnographer of the Past,” Clio 4 (1974-5); W. Bergsma, Huizinga en de culturele antropologie (Groningen, 1981). 5 Edmond Goncourt (1822-1896) and Jules Goncourt (1830-1870), French writers, historians, and critics. 6 Fernand Braudel, “A travers un continent d’histoire,” Mélanges d’histoire sociale 4 (1943), 3-20; Peter Burke, “Elective Affinities: Gilberto Freyre and the nouvelle histoire,” The European Legacy 3 (1998), 1-10.

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work?—especially Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, whose work on semiotics drew on Bakhtin but also developed some of his ideas about language and culture.7 Gurevich once told an interviewer that Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais made a “great impression” on him when it was finally published in 1965. He took part in a forum organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Bakhtin’s defense of his dissertation on Rabelais, and defended him from the criticisms of Dietz-Rudiger Moser.8 His assessment of Bakhtin was both critical and admiring, correcting him on a number of points but also noting the need for “bold theories” like his.9 One might suspect that Gurevich felt an affinity with a fellow-outsider, a scholar for whom the Middle Ages were—among other things—an escape from the official culture of the Soviet period. Lotman’s concern with what he called “the poetics of everyday life,” the informal rules of a given culture, made him a kind of anthropologist. For his part, Gurevich described much of his own work as historical anthropology, drew on the ideas of early anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits and Bronisław Malinowski, and occasionally made references to the symbolic anthropology of Victor Turner (but not, as far as I know, to Clifford Geertz, although he would surely have appreciated his work).10 As for the French, Gurevich does not seem to have read Emile Durkheim (despite their common interest in the representations of space and time) but he was certainly stimulated by the work of Durkheim’s follower Marcel Mauss, especially his essays on the gift and the category of the person.11 He sometimes mentioned historians outside the Annales group such as Jean Delumeau (who shared his 7 For his view of Bakhtin, see Aron Gurevich, “Bakhtin und der Karneval,” Euphorion (1991). References to Propp can be found in Medieval Popular Culture, 90 and Historical Anthropology, 223; to Likhachev in Categories, 36, and Medieval Popular Culture, 19, 21; to the Tartu school, Historical Anthropology, 30; to Lotman, Medieval Popular Culture, 266; and to Uspenskii, Medieval Popular Culture. Gurevich contributed articles to collections published by the Tartu group from the 1970s to the 1990s. 8 Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, “Lachkultur des Mittelalters? Michael Bachtin und die Folgen seiner Theorie,” Euphorion 84 (1990), 91-92. 9 Scholze-Irrlitz, 77; Gurevich, “Bakhtin und der Karneval,”; Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton, 1997), 106n. 10 Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 179 (the potlatch, discussed by Boas), 180, 224 (Malinowski), Medieval Popular Culture, 77 (Turner). 11 Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 180-1, 224; Origins of European Individualism, 34.

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interest in historical psychology) and Louis Halphen.12 He was familiar with the work of French students of classical antiquity, notably Jean-Pierre Vernant, who shared his concern with the history of mentalities.13 However, it was the group of historians centered on the journal Annales from whom Gurevich learned most. As he explained later, they were the ones who most helped him develop his method, his “questionnaire” directed to the past.14 In the 1980s, he wrote a book about the group, though the text could only be published in 1993, and he presided over a conference organized in Moscow in 1989 to commemorate the sixtieth birthday of Annales. Among the Annales group, he often referred to scholars who worked on the early modern period, especially Lucien Febvre (about whom he published two essays) but also Fernand Braudel, Robert Mandrou, Philippe Ariès, Alphonse Dupront, Pierre Chaunu, Michel Vovelle, Roger Chartier and Robert Muchembled.15 In the case of Ariès and Chaunu, though, it should be pointed out that what he chose to discuss and criticize were their views on attitudes toward death in the Middle Ages. As might have been expected, Gurevich most often cited the Annales medievalists, beginning with Marc Bloch, whom he described as “the greatest historian of our century,” even “a historian sent by God,” and about whom he wrote on two occasions.16 He also made regular references to Georges Duby, though not, curiously enough, to his work on the history of values or to his Guerriers et Paysans (1973), despite the similarities between Duby’s approach to the medi12

Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, 219-20; Historical Anthropology, 5. CMC, 319: HAMA, 160; OEI, 257. 14 Aron Gurevich, “Annales in Moscow,” in Miri Rubin, ed. Le Goff (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 239-48, at 241; see also, Gurevich, Istoriia istorika [History of an Historian] (Moscow, 2004), 134-5. 15 A. Gurevich, “Prefazione,” to Lucien Febvre, Il Problema dell’incredulità (Turin, 1978); see also, Gurevich, “Uroki Lius’ena Fevr”[The Lessons of Lucien Febvre], in Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire, (Moscow 1991); Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, 108, 146, 149-51 (Vovelle); 120, 122 (Chaunu), 139 (Chartier), 267 (Muchembled). Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 21, 23, 27, 29 (Braudel); 42 (Dupront, Mandrou); 11, 41, 44, 69 (Vovelle). Gurevich knew Mandrou’s work on witch trials as well as his study of popular culture. 16 Quoted in Scholze-Irrlitiz, 77. A.I. Gurevich, preface to Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire, (Russian translation: Moscow, 1973); Gurevich, “Marc Bloch and Historical Anthropology,” in Hartmut Atsma and André Burguière, eds. Marc Bloch Aujourd’hui (Paris, 1990), 403-6. 13

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eval economy in this book and Gurevich’s own studies of wealth and gifts. His most frequent references, however, are to Jacques Le Goff, whom he called “the most gifted of contemporary French historians,” and who had exercised “a strong influence” on his own work. Gurevich discovered Le Goff’s general book on the Middle Ages, Civilisation de l’Occident Médiéval (1964), relatively early, was clearly impressed by it (above all, one imagines, by the ninth chapter on mentalities, sensibilities and attitudes), and began a correspondence with the author at the beginning of the 1970s. He also wrote an essay about Le Goff, who later returned the compliment.17 He met Le Goff—and Duby—for the first time in 1989.18 A fourth French medievalist to whom Gurevich regularly referred is a former student of Le Goff’s, Jean-Claude Schmitt.19 II So what did Aron Iakovlevich think of the work of these French historians? Through what lens or filter did he read it? To what extent and in what ways did he learn from it or criticize it? It was not the “scientific” or quantitative Annales which attracted Gurevich, still less its Marxist wing—after all, he was strongly antiMarxist himself. He discusses Braudel in only one essay, and rarely mentions Labrousse.20 He preferred the work of the first generation, that of Febvre and Bloch, and the third generation, that of Le Goff and Schmitt, to the quantitative economic and social history that came in between. What Gurevich found congenial in French scholarship was the history of mentalities, historical anthropology and the history of popular culture, three approaches with so much in common that they are difficult if not impossible to distinguish.

17 Quoted in Scholze-Irrlitz, 78; A. Ia. Gurevich, “Notes in the Margin of Jacques Le Goff’s Book,” Journal of Medieval History (1983); Jacques Le Goff, “Saluting Aron Gurevich,” The Medieval History Journal 7, (2004), 163-7. References to Duby in Gurevich’s books, like references to Le Goff, are too numerous to list here. 18 Roger D. Markwick, “Cultural History under Khrushchev and Brezhnev: From Social Psychology to Mentalités,” The Russian Review 65 (2006), 242-3. 19 Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, xvii; Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 42-4; Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, 253, 259, 267. 20 Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 41.

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Categories of Medieval Culture, published in 1972, was intended as a contribution to the history of mentalities in a broad sense, identified with the history of a world-view or Weltanschauung, the Russian mirovidenie.21 Gurevich discussed the idea of mentalité in an essay of 1983, focusing on studies of the Middle Ages in what he described as “the new French historiography.” Naturally enough, Duby and Le Goff received the lion’s share of his attention. As for historical anthropology, Gurevich was already referring to the work of anthropologists in the late 1960s. It is likely that his interest in medieval Scandinavia, a culture that was more archaic than that of medieval France or Italy, led him in this direction. In any case, by the 1980s, if not before, he was using the phrase “historical anthropology,” apparently interchangeably with “the history of mentalities,” to describe his approach to the Middle Ages. By contrast, French historians generally include the history of practices, the history of material culture and the history of the body in their concept of “historical anthropology.”22 One criticism that has been made of anthropology (historical or not) and also of the history of mentalities, as practiced by Lucien Febvre among others, is that it treats cultures as homogeneous and does not distinguish, for example, between clerical and lay or learned and popular culture.23 A similar criticism could be leveled at Categories. As if in response to such criticisms, Gurevich described his Medieval Popular Culture as at once the continuation of Categories and a compensation for it. “In my previous book,” he wrote in his foreword, “I was guided by the assumption that the notion ‘medieval man’ is a valid abstraction for scholarly enquiry [sic]. While this may suffice for a certain level of abstraction, this time I should like to differentiate between the culture of the elite and that of illiterate commoners”.24 He continued this investigation in a study of “the culture of the silent majority” in Srednovekovyi Mir, which has not been translated into English. In these studies he drew on Mandrou’s pioneering study of culture populaire, published in 1964, on Le Goff’s work on “tradi21

Markwick, 297. Gurevich, Historical Anthropology; See also, Gurevich, “Marc Bloch and Historical Anthropology.” 23 Peter Burke, “Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities,” History of European Ideas 7 (1986) 439-51. 24 Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, xiii. 22

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tions folkloriques” and Purgatory as well as the work of Philippe Ariès and Pierre Chaunu on the same topic, and on Schmitt’s book on the popular cult of the “holy greyhound” in medieval France. Where the Catholic Church claims that the doctrine of Purgatory —a place midway between Heaven and Hell for the dead to “purge” their sins—has always existed, Le Goff and Gurevich (like the Protestant reformers who rejected the doctrine) see it as part of history, a medieval “invention.” However, Le Goff concentrated on the writings of theologians. As a result he viewed what he called the “Birth of Purgatory” as a relatively sudden innovation, dating it to the second half of the twelfth century and explaining the rise of the belief as part of the transformation of “feudal Christianity.” He also noted that the rise of Purgatory formed part of a more general shift from binary to ternary models of thought. Society, for instance, was now seen as made up of three “estates” or “orders”—priests, warriors and workers (or ploughmen). Gurevich, on the other hand, concentrated on popular images of the next world as recorded in vision narratives and exempla (criticizing Ariès and Chaunu for neglecting these sources) and so placed more emphasis than Le Goff on gradual change.25 Another characteristic common to Gurevich and the Annales historians concerns change over the long-term, la longue durée as Fernand Braudel used to call it. In his own work, Gurevich examined some six hundred years of medieval culture, beginning with the Vikings and continuing until the thirteenth century. On occasion, he criticized the French longue durée as too short, contrasting this notion with Bakhtin’s idea of “great time” (bolshoe vremia). More specifically, he believed that the history of Purgatory went back much further than Le Goff claimed.26 In short, the elective affinities between the work of Gurevich and the French historians, as well as what he learned from them, did not preclude criticisms of their approach. For example, Gurevich sometimes described the work of the Annales group of his own day as too empiricist and as too fragmented, arguing the need for what he called “synthesis” or the elaboration of “a unified strategy of study” (by contrast he praised Bloch

25 Jacques Le Goff discussed the ideas of Gurevich in his Naissance de la Purgatoire (Paris, 1981), 496-7. 26 Gurevich, “Notes,” 71-3.

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for his sense of synthesis).27 As he remarked in Srednovekovyi Mir, he tried to see medieval culture as a whole, a complex and at times contradictory mixture of different elements, a culture within which different strata may be distinguished, but a whole nevertheless. In other words, popular culture was not autonomous.28 Towards the end of his life, in an interview—a genre in which the subject is likely to present opinions in an exaggerated manner but is also likely to express them more frankly than in written comments— Gurevich criticized Duby as too close to Marxism.29 As for Le Goff, “I worship him.” Yet he also criticized Le Goff more gently, because “even he cannot free himself from Marxist simplifications” such as associating the rise of the idea of Purgatory with the rise of the urban middle class.30 French or even British historians might be surprised to find that Gurevich described Duby and Le Goff as Marxists, or even quasi-Marxists, but from Gurevich’s uncompromisingly antiMarxist viewpoint, they had been contaminated by historical materialism. III What did the Annales historians think of the work of Aron Gurevich? It took them some time to discover his existence, not only because he was working in the Soviet Union and was unable to travel to the West, but also because he entered medieval European history through what might be described as the “back door,” the study of medieval Scandinavia. Nevertheless, Annales opened its pages to him on three occasions: the first in 1972, on attitudes to property, the second in 1982, on the image of the next world, and the third in 1993, on individuality in the Middle Ages. On the second occasion, his work was introduced by Le Goff.31 27

Gurevich, “Marc Bloch and Historical Anthropology,” 406; Scholze-Irrlitz, 77. I used the German translation of 1997. 29 On Duby’s relation to Marxism, Georges Duby and Guy Lardreau, Dialogues (Paris, 1980), 117-40. 30 Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Interview with Aron Gurevich,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2004), 128, 138. Le Goff discusses his own political attitudes, especially his rejection of Communism, in Pierre Nora, ed. Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris, 1987), 208-9 and J. Le Goff, Une vie pour l’histoire (Paris, 1996), 66-8. 31 Annales 27 (1972) 523-47; Annales 37 (1982) 255-75; Annales 48 (1993), 126380. 28

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Gurevich’s Categories appeared in French translation in 1983, published by the prestigious house of Gallimard with a preface by the equally prestigious historian Georges Duby. However, in his preface Duby was somewhat critical (especially of the use of Bakhtin) and also a little patronizing in tone, despite his remarks about Gurevich’s independence of mind. The book was not reviewed in Annales. What was the reason for this semi-negative reaction? The problem may have been one of timing. Insofar as the book followed a French model, it was that of the Lucien Febvre of the 1940s, concerned with the mentality of a whole nation rather than a particular social group. On the other hand, Gurevich’s Popular Culture appeared at a time when the Annales group was still very much involved with the topic.32 In any event, the original Russian edition of Gurevich’s book was reviewed favorably in Annales by the Byzantinist Evelyne Patlagean, while the German translation was recommended in the famous “pages bleues” of the journal.33 Even so, a French translation did not appear until 1996, well after the Italian, Polish and English versions. Some French medievalists such as Hervé Martin, a specialist on mentalities, make frequent references to Gurevich.34 However, interest in his work was and is most intense in the circle of Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt. Le Goff may indeed be regarded as Gurevich’s opposite number in France. He described him, more warmly than Duby ever did, as “the great Soviet medievalist” or “the renowned Russian medievalist.”35 He invited Gurevich to write a chapter on the merchant for a book of essays on the Middle Ages and a book on the origins of individualism for his series on “The Making of Europe.” As I already noted, the two men corresponded from the 1970s onwards. Coming from different directions, they converged on a number of topics, from the history of Purgatory to the history of laughter.

32 Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire aux 17e et 18e siècles (Paris, 1964); Jacques Le Goff, “Culture cléricale et traditions folkloriques dans la civilisation mérovingienne,” Annales (1967), 780-9; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le saint lévrier: Guinefort, guérisseur d’enfants depuis le XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1979). 33 The reviews in question can be found in Annales 40 (1985), 428; Annales 42 (1987) respectively. 34 Hervé Martin, Mentalités médiévales (Paris, 1996), makes ten references to Gurevich. 35 Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris, 1981) 496; Le Goff, “Saluting,” 163.

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All the same, they cannot have been so very close, for when Le Goff was writing his history of the idea of Purgatory, he did not know that Gurevich was working on the same topic, and had to add a note to his book at the last moment referring to a recent unpublished paper.36 They also had some disagreements, as noted above, regarding the chronology of Purgatory. To sum up, four general points may be worth emphasizing. The first is that the “dialogue” to which I have referred is unusual because it took place not between two or three individuals but between an individual and a movement. The Annales movement has lasted for at least three generations. Gurevich appreciated the first and the third generations, concerned as they were with mentalities and culture, more than the middle generation, that of Braudel and Labrousse, more interested in the economy and the material world. The second is that the relation between Gurevich and Annales was an asymmetrical one. He appreciated their work more intensely than they, with the exception of Le Goff, appreciated his. As late as 1990 he published a letter to French historians inviting them to participate in a dialogue. The letter was published in Paris, by the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, which suggests a certain good will on the French side, but the fact that Aron Iakovlevich still felt that he needed to call for dialogue is surely significant. At the end of his life he declared that he belonged to the school of Annales, but I doubt whether the French ever regarded him as one of them. As he noted, the “disdain toward anything North of France” is a common French characteristic.37 A third point concerns change over time. Gurevich’s move from the socio-historical psychology that interested him in the 1960s to the historical anthropology of his later years recapitulated in a single lifetime the shift in the Annales group from the psychologie historique of Bloch, Febvre and Mandrou to the anthropologie historique of Le Goff and Schmitt. Again, his turn from writing about peasants and landed property to writing about ideas parallels the move “from the cellar to the attic” on the part of a number of French historians,

36 Le Goff, Purgatoire, 496-7. Gurevich’s paper was published in French translation, “Au Moyen Age: conscience individuelle et image de l’au-delà,” Annales 37 (1982), 255-75. 37 Mazour-Matusevich, 142.

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including Duby. The parallel is all the more noteworthy given the difference between the political regimes of France and Russia. A fourth point concerns the history of reception. As often happens in such cases, in the prolonged and fruitful encounter between Gurevich and the Annales group, each side read the other through the filter of their own culture. To return to the metaphor with which this chapter began, intellectual dialogues are generally to some extent dialogues of the deaf, or more precisely, conversations between individuals who are hard of hearing, understanding something but only a part of what the other person is saying. Gurevich may have read his French historians (a number of whom, including Le Goff, were interested in French structuralism), through the lens of Bakhtin, Propp and the Russian school of semiotics. Conversely, the French generally read Gurevich as a kind of “fellowtraveller” with the Annales group or party, as they did in the cases of Bakhtin, the Polish historian Witold Kula, the Austrian historian Otto Brunner and the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre, with whom this chapter began. Duby, for instance, seems to have read Gurevich’s Categories, with its insistence on the wholeness of medieval culture, as a “wild” or naïve version of Annales history that failed to distinguish between the attitudes of different groups, whereas Gurevich’s defense of wholeness was a sophisticated reaction to what he considered an overemphasis by the French on social differences. Of course these statements need nuances. Le Goff, for example, recognized that “the principal impulse” to Gurevich’s new history “came from his personal endeavor.” It would have been interesting to ask Braudel what he thought of Gurevich, just as it would have been good to ask Aron Iakovlevich what he thought of the work of (say) Maurice Lombard, a medievalist in the Annales group whom he seems to have ignored. Unfortunately, both Braudel and Gurevich are beyond interviews. I should like to conclude with a contrast between two great medievalists. I was once fortunate enough to find myself seated at dinner next to Sir Richard Southern, and profited from the occasion to ask him what he thought of Marc Bloch. To my surprise, he expressed no enthusiasm and said that he did not think that Bloch’s work had had much influence on his own. In retrospect, I suppose I should not have been surprised. Southern, a deeply religious man attracted to the Middle Ages through its religion, probably felt that Bloch’s atti-

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tude to the medieval Church was too detached. Aron Iakovlevich was a strongly identified Jew who revered Marc Bloch. Perhaps this reverence was a sign of his intellectual generosity, perhaps of his fellowfeeling for a Jewish historian, perhaps his appreciation of a pioneer of historical anthropology—or all three things!

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RUSSIA BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: DIPLOMATIC REPORTS DURING THE REIGN OF IVAN IV1 CHARLES J. HALPERIN

As an official “opponent” at Andrei Iurganov’s defense of his doctoral dissertation, “Concepts of Russian Medieval Culture,” Aron Gurevich commented that the term “medieval” should not be applied to Russia, which had not been part of the Roman Empire and did not experience the Renaissance.2 He is also on record as stipulating that the “Middle Ages” were European and Catholic,3 which would likewise invalidate the concepts of “medieval Islam” and “medieval Japan.” Strictly speaking, Gurevich’s literal definition of “medieval” is completely correct. However, Gurevich’s insistence that countries that did not belong to Western European civilization cannot be called “medieval” inspires a question which he did not raise in this connection, namely, whether Russians living during this period identified themselves with Europe or Asia. During the reign of Ivan IV “the Terrible” (Groznyi) (1533-1584) Muscovy enjoyed a vast range of political and economic relations with polities, states and empires from east to west: commercial ties to Central Asia, political and military dealings with the Kabardinian Circassians4 and other petty rulers of the Caucasus, war, politics and diplomacy with the succes-

1 An earlier version of this article was given as a talk on April 29, 2005 at the Eighth Midwest Medieval Slavic Workshop at the University of Chicago. 2 A. Ia. Gurevich, “Iz vystupleniia na zashchite doktorskoi dissertatsii A. L. Iurganova (Kategorii russkoi srednevekovoi kul’tury])” [Excerpt from a Statement at the Defense of A.L. Iurganov’s Doctoral Dissertation (Categories of Russian Medieval Culture)], Odissei. Chelovek v istorii 2000 [Odysseus: The Individual in History] (Moscow, 2000), 295-302. 3 Mazour-Matusevich, Yelena, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aron Gurevich,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005), 125-127; definition on 127. 4 The Circassians were mountain tribes in the Caucasus. Ivan initiated an alliance with one group of Circassians, the Kabardinians, against the Crimean Tatars. In 1561, Ivan married a Circassian princess, Mariia Cherkasskaia, transforming the Kabardinian Circassian ruling family into his in-laws.

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sor states of the Juchid ulus,5 the khanates of Siberia, Kazan’, Astrakhan’, and the Crimea, as well as with the Nogai Tatars, religious ties to Orthodox Christian patriarchs and monasteries in the Middle East and the Balkans, diplomacy and trade with the Ottoman Empire, and intense relations on all levels with European powers, from Moldavia and Wallachia in the Balkans, to Livonia, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire in Central and East Europe, to Venice and Rome in the south, and to England to the northwest. How the Muscovites conceived of their place in this variegated and immense universe is another matter. A relatively new type of source from the reign of Ivan IV sheds an unusual light on this problem. The stateinye spiski, or diplomatic reports,6 were accounts of foreign diplomatic embassies.7 Academician Dmitrii S. Likhachev traces their origin to chronicle accounts8 during Kievan times of diplomatic speeches and later to the diplomatic dialogues in the tales of the Church Council of Ferraro-Florence in 1438-1439. The evolution of Russian diplomatic practice in the late fifteenth century inspired the creation of a more formal document-type or genre describing Russian embassies abroad.9 Iakov S. Lur’e wrote the pages of Likhachev’s article describing the subsequent evolution of the diplomatic reports.10 Otchety (summaries) of foreign embassies did not immediately take the form of those published in Puteshevestie, an account which was virtually a diary of the embassy. Under Ivan III the gramoty (charters) were not yet called spiski (short for stateinyi spisok). Although a 1495 embassy document was described as a spisok it was not yet a 5 The Juchid ulus, usually erroneously called the “Golden Horde,” was the successor state of the Mongol World Empire assigned to Chinggis Khan’s son Juchi. This state encompassed the East Slavic principalities and city-states. In the fifteenth century the Juchid ulus fragmented into its own successor states, with which Ivan had to deal. 6 On the derivation of the term stateinyi spisok [diplomatic report] see N. I. Prokof’ev, “Literatura puteshestvii XVI-XVII vekov” [Literature on 16th and 17th century Travels], in N. I. Prokof’ev, L. I. Alekhina, eds., Zapiski russkikh puteshestvennikov XVI-XVII vv. [Notes of Russian Travelers 16-17th centuries] (Moscow, 1988), 6. 7 Puteshestviia russkikh poslov XVI-XVII vv. Stateinye spiski [The Journeys of 16th-17th century Russian Envoys] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1954); hereafter Puteshestviia. 8 Chronicles were narratives organized by year (annals). 9 D. S. Likhachev, “Povesti russkikh poslov kak pamiatniki literatury,” [Tales of Russian Emissaries as Works of Literature] in Puteshestviia, 321-325. 10 Ia. S. Lur’e in Likhachev, 325-328.

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general account. Lur’e considers the description of the 1518 embassy of dvortsovyi d’iak (“court” secretary) Vladimir Semenov syn Plemiannikov to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I at Innsbruck to be the first stateinyi spisok.11 Plemiannikov’s report differed from previous embassy descriptions in that, like later stateinye spiski, it had a section on vesti (diplomatic intelligence information). However, it still lacked a travel itinerary to and from Muscovy. Plemiannikov’s report consisted almost exclusively of dialogue and was so short and empty of historical content as to lack historical interest.12 Yet, even Plemiannikov’s account was unusual until the 1560s. From 1518 to the 1560s, only charters and “news” sections survive, not diaries or itineraries. For example, during his decade-long captivity in the Crimea, Afanasii Nagoi sent to Moscow otpiski (memos) variously called gramoty, vesti, or sometimes spiski, once even razgovornyi bol’shoi spisok (conversational big account), but each always covered only a short interval, even with an itinerary. No overall account of Nagoi’s embassy was preserved. Given its duration, Lur’e suspected Nagoi never wrote a summary of his entire experience. Nagoi’s memos remain unpublished. Moreover, Lur’e did not consider each memo a “diplomatic account.”13 The only published account from the period of Nagoi’s detention in the Crimea is Semen Elizarev syn

11 Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii drevnei Rossii s derzhavami inostrannymi, Chast’ pervaia: Snosheniia s gosudarstvami evropeiskimi, Tom I [Monuments on the diplomatic relations of ancient Russia with foreign states; Part One: Relations with European states, Volume I] (St. Petersburg, 1851), Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii s Imperieiu Rimskoiu, Tom I. C 1498 po 1594 god [Monuments in Diplomatic Relations with the Holy Roman Empire, Volume I, from 1498 to 1594] [hereafter PDSDR, I]. Lur’e did not give page numbers. N. A. Kazkova Zapadnaia Evropa v russkoi pis’mennosti XV-XVI vekov (Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh kul’turnykh sviazei Rossii) [Western Europe in Russian Writings of the 15-16th centuries (From the history of Russian international cultural ties)] (Leningrad, 1980), 89; PDSDR, I: 343356. 12 Kazkova, 89 agreed both with Lur’e’s identification of this text as the first “diplomatic report” and his assessment of its lack of value. 13 Cf. A. V. Vinogradov, “Krymskie posol’skie knigi kak istochnik po istorii russko-krymskikh otnoshenii 60-70-kh XVI veka” [Crimean diplomatic books as sources for the history of Russo-Crimean relations in the 1560s and 1570s], in Vneshniaia politika Rossii. Istochniki i istoriografiia [Russian Foreign Policy: Sources and historiography] (Moscow, 1991), 28-31 describes eleven unpublished Nagoi documents as stateinye spiski. N. M. Rogozhin, U gosudarevykh del byt’ ukazano.... [It was decreed in the Sovereign’s Affairs. . . ] (Moscow , 2002), 72 cautiously observes that Nagoi’s retrospective report has not been found.

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Mal’tsev’s “speech” about the Ottoman-Crimean campaign of 1569.14 However, two model “diplomatic reports” appeared simultaneously in the 1560s, the Vorontsov mission to Sweden published in Puteshevie and the Umnogo-Kolychev mission in 1567 to Poland.15 Both are expanded tales containing a full account of itineraries, negotiations and vesti (located either in or after an itinerary). Therefore, even if the “diplomatic report” did not originate during the reign of Ivan IV, it perhaps achieved its final form then and definitely flourished at that time. It is not always obvious if the boyar (aristocrat), ambassador (posol) or an attached d’iak (secretary) or pod’iachei (under-secretary) actually composed the account.16 The texts themselves strongly imply that the report represented the work of the entire mission. Therefore, for convenience, I will perforce refer to the ambassador as the “author” of the report. Each report might contain as many as four elements: (1) an itinerary, (2) tourist information on places visited and sights seen, (3) diplomatic narrative per se, including virtually verbatim accounts of negotiations, and (4) intelligence information, both on the domestic situation in the countries visited and their foreign relations. It would be excessive to stress too much the formal characteristics of the diplomatic report, which could contain texts of international treaties. Moreover, these reports were not rough diaries, but edited, vetted accounts, more focused than diary drafts,17 14

Lur’e did not cite this publication (Lur’e in Likhachev, 327 n. 2), which is P. A. Sadikov, “Pokhod tatar i turok na Astrakhan’ v 1569 g.” [The Campaign of the Tatars and Turks on Astrakhan in 1569], Istoricheskie zapiski [Historical Notes] 22 (1947), 132-66, text 153-159. 15 Lur’e cited Sbornik russkogo istoricheskago obshchestva [hereafter SRIO] [Miscellany of the Russian Historical Society], 71 (St. Petersburg, 1892), G. O. Karpov, ed., Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii drevnei Rossii s derzhavami inostrannymi [hereafter PDSDR] = Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii moskovskogo gosudarstva s Pol’sko-litovskim [hereafter PDSMGPL] [Monuments of Diplomatic Relations of Ancient Russia with Foreign States = Monuments of Diplomatic Relations of the Muscovite State with Poland/Lithuania] 10 vols. (1560-1571), III: 521-554 at 523. 16 Ia. S. Lur’e and R. B. Miuller, “Arkheograficheskii obzor [Archeographic Survey], in Puteshevestviia, 348 argued that since ambassador Pisemskii went into a negotiating session without pod’iachei Khovralev, he must have written the account of that session in the report, meaning that the under-secretary did not compose the report by himself. Rogozhin, 69, asserts that the d’iak or pod’iachei composed the report, which was then corrected by the head of mission. Rogozhin’s theory is logical, but he presents no evidence to support it. 17 Lur’e and Miuller, 349-351.

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intended only for the personnel of the Posol’skii Prikaz (“ministry” of foreign affairs) and the Court, beginning of course with the tsar’ himself. They were official, confidential, in-house documents. Mostly the reports have been used for diplomatic history, obviously, or subjected to linguistic or literary analysis.18 The impersonal bureaucratese in which they are written does not impede their value. Although we do not know of any response to these reports from their recipients, we must assume that the members of these embassies succeeded in conveying to their superiors the necessary and appropriate information. The possibility that idiosyncratic, arbitrary or biased translators could distort the reports must be excluded. The system of checks and balances within a Muscovite embassy and the control exercised from the Head Office preclude such deviance. The reports were closely inspected before being archived. As a result, the reports also provide an unexpected perspective on the cultural perceptions of the diplomatic establishment19 of more fundamental but not consciously expressed attitudes toward Muscovy’s place in the world. Therefore, they constitute impeccable sources for the mind-set of the foreign-affairs—indeed the entire Court—establishment. Four extant and published diplomatic reports exist for the reign of Ivan IV. For reasons which will become apparent later, they will not be discussed in chronological order in this essay. The first was the mission to Sweden from July 1567-June 1569 headed by Ivan Mikhailovich Vorontsov, the second the 1567 mission to King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland-Lithuania at Gorodnia by boiarin Fedor Ivanovich Umnogo-Kolychev, the third the embassy to England in 1582-1583 headed by Fedor Andreevich Pisemskii, the fourth the delegation to the Ottoman Empire from January to September 1570 under Ivan Petrovich Novosil’tsev. These were hardly the only international sojourns by Muscovite diplomatic personnel during this period, or even the only missions about which there is detailed, published information. According to Lur’e, how18 On the diplomatic reports as literature, see Likhachev, 319-346. For an example of their use in linguistic analysis, see Gerta Hüttl Worth, Foreign Words in Russian. A Historical Sketch (Berkeley, 1963). 19 Joel Raba, “Das Weltbild der Mittelalterlichen und Frühneuzeitlichen russischen Reisenden,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 38 (1986), 20-41 appreciates the utility of the diplomatic reports for cultural history, but his survey of both lay and clerical travelers from the twelfth to the mid seventeenth centuries encompasses only post-Ivan IV stateinye spiski from Puteshestviia; he mentions Vorontsov in passing on 36.

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ever, the documentation from other embassies, such as Istoma Shevrigin’s journey to Rome,20 the merchant Vasilii Pozniakov’s trip to Alexandria and Jerusalem,21 or Prince Zakharii Sugorskii and d’iak Andrei Atsybashev’s embassy to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II in 157622 remained a pastiche of documents and instructions, without the overall consistency and polish of the three accounts of Vorontsov, Pisemskii and Novosil’tsev. Specifically, we will focus on the use of Russian or foreign vocabulary in reference to foreign social and political institutions. It is not germane to this essay whether this foreign vocabulary was known earlier in Muscovy than these accounts, as was undoubtedly often the case. The following discussion is undoubtedly not exhaustive since I (and even the editors of the texts) may have missed relevant words. Enough excerpted passages have been found to suggest a curious, perhaps even significant, pattern.23 Vorontsov24 traveled to Stockholm with Vasilii Ivanovich Naumov and the d’iak (secretary) Ivan Vasil’evich Lapin-Kurgan. Vorontsov’s account employs the following terminology and identifies the following people: a pristav (an official whose function in Muscovy was half bodyguard, half aide, usually translated “bailiff”) later identified as Siman Buzhbash, korolevskii boiarin (royal noble) Iurii Arter or Iarter (unidentified), kniaz’ (prince) Benter Fkhlytre (evidently Bängth Gyltta, a member of the State Council), the royal boyare (nobles) (p. 7 + n. 5) 20 Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii drevnei Rossii s derzhavami inostrannymi, X (St. Petersburg 1871) = Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii s papskim dvorom i s italianskimi gosudarstvami (s 1580 po 1699 god) [Monuments of Diplomatic Relations of Ancient Russia with Foreign States = Monuments of Diplomatic Relations with the Papal Court and the Italian States (from 1580 to 1699)], 5-38. 21 I. E. Zabelin, ed., “Poslanie tsaria Ivana Vasil’evicha k Aleksandriiskomu patriarkhu Ioakimu s kuptsom Vasil’em Pozniakovym i Khozhdenie kuptsa Pozniakova v Ierusalim i po inym sviatym mestam 1558 goda” [The Epistle of Tsar Ivan Vasil’evich to the Alexandrian Patriarch Ioakim sent with the Merchant Vasilii Pozniakov and the Travels of the Merchant Pozniakov to Jerusalem and various other Holy Places in 1558], in Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom Universitete [Readings of the Imperial Society for History and Antiquities of the Moscow University] 128, 1, (Moscow, 1884) I-XII, 1-32. 22 Kazakova, 168-169, labeled this account a stateinyi spisok. 23 Lur’e wrote the Commentary to the three accounts from Puteshestviia discussed here. 24 Text Puteshestviia, 7-62. Page numbers in parentheses in text; usually only the first appearance of a term will be noted.

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korolevskie boyare (royal nobles) Shten’ Irikiv (Sten Eriksson Lejonhufvud) and Gavril Kresternov (Gabriel Christiersson Oxenstjerna) (p. 7 + nn. 6, 7) another pristav Irik Gokonov, and korolevskie boiare kniazi (royal nobles princes) Shten and others (p. 9) kniaz’ (prince) Nilsh’ (Nils Gyllenstjerna) (p. 10) two korolevichi (sons of a king, korol’, here Erik XIV’s brother and brother-in-law), namely Karlus (Herzog Karl Sundermanland, the future Karl IX) and Magnush (Magnus, son of the German Herzog of Saxon-Luneburg, married to Erik XIV’s sister), bol’shoi boiarin (“big” or “senior” noble) Petr Bragde (Graf25 Per Brahe, admiral) (p. 11 + nn. 11, 12) the royal stolnik (courtier who waited upon table, stol, at court) Iunus Nilishev and a d’iak master (master secretary?) Mortin (p. 12) the King’s personoia (person) (pp. 13, 14, 15), royal sovetniki (councilors) (p. 13) gravy (Grafs) (p. 14) the royal dumnyi dvorianin (Duma gentry, lowest rank in the Muscovite “royal council” [Boyarskaia Duma26]) Gengur Skel’(unidentified) (p. 15) korolevskii zhilets (a lower Court rank of minor gentry who “lived” at Court, literally “an inhabitant”) Bener Knutov (Bent Knutson) (pp. 16, 17 n. 16) the udel’nyi korolevich grav (appanage royal Graf; appanage princes in Muscovy were members of the dynasty given separate estates) Shvantov syn Nilish (Svante and Nils Sture), a travant (German Drabant,27 bodyguard) with a gil’bard (halberd),28 boiarin (noble) Deonnis’ius Burbergus (Dionis Beurreus, Erik XIV’s teacher and a courtier) (p. 17 + n. 16) the blizhnye sovetniki (Privy Councilors, a Muscovite term for members of the Blizhniaia Duma, Privy Council), Swedish strel’tsy (the Muscovite term for arquebusiers, musketeers) (p. 19) the namestnik (Muscovite governor or administrator) of Stockholm (p. 20) 25

Hüttl Worth, 67. Specialists disagree about whether Ivan had a Royal Council or just Royal Councillors. 27 See Puteshestviia, “Slovar’,” s.v. with Slovar drobant, travant, 443, 448; Hüttl Worth, 71. 28 See Puteshestviia, “Slovar’,” s.v. gil’bard, 443. 26

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the doktor29 (here, medical doctor) treating Johann’s wife Katrina Jagelliona (p. 23) a distance in 3 mili (miles) (p. 25)30 another Stockholm namestnik (governor) Isak Mikolaev, the royal pechatnik (Muscovite Keeper-of-the-Seal) Irik Matfeev (unidentified) (p. 29) the Swedish dvoretskoi (Muscovite major-domo) Nilsh’ Riunnik (unidentified) (p. 31) the royal boiarin (noble) Iurii Petrov (Jöran Persson, procurator), another Stockholm namestnik (governor) Krush Vesutii (p. 33 + n. 24) Swedish boiare and other dumnye liudi (Muscovite Duma people, an inclusive term for holders of various Duma ranks) (p. 35) Petr Bag ammaral (admiral) (p. 40) Stockholm’s posadtskie liudi (literally “suburban people,” people who live in the posad, the standard Muscovite term for mostly artisans and traders living outside the fortress at the core of a city) (p. 50) a Swedish blizhnyi chelovek (singular of blizhnye liudi) of the King (p. 51) the Swedish koniushii (Muscovite Master-of-Horse or Equerry, the leading Muscovite political office for nobles, no longer concerned with stables; held by Boris Godunov under Tsar Fedor Ivanovich, Ivan IV’s son) Iugan Pukler (unidentified) (p. 55) Sweden’s three korolevichi Iagan, Karlus, Magnush (Johann, later King Johann III, the aforementioned Karlus and Magnus) (p. 58). What is striking from these extracted phrases is the degree to which the Muscovites projected onto Sweden Muscovite terms for social and political groups and institutions. One suspects that the usage of the terms “prince” and “appanage” might not have been entirely apropos. The true equivalents of Muscovite appanage princes were identified as korolevichi. Virtually the only exceptions are the title Graf and the office of Admiral. The generic “doctor” was widespread. This particular report did not contain any great musings about the city of Stockholm itself or descriptions of the country, pop-

29 30

Hüttl Worth, 70-71. Lur’e did not comment on this word; Hüttl Worth, 88.

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ulation or climate.31 It is worth noting that Vorontsov did not mention the Swedish Rikstag, Parliament or Estates General. In his report of his 1567 mission to Lithuania Umnogo-Kolychev32 mentioned: pristavy, pany (lords) (p. 524) Morshalok korolevoi (Royal Marshall), dvoriane korolevye (Royal gentry) (p. 525) podskarbei (Sub-Treasurer), pisar’ (scribe), derzhavets (lessee or benefice holder), podchaishei (sub-cupbearer?), stolnik (courtier who waited at table) (p. 526) biskup (bishop), kanztler (chancellor, a term foreigners often applied to Russians in charge of foreign affairs, like Ivan Viskovatyi), podkantsler (sub-chancellor), voevoda (commander), getman (hetman), starosta (elder), kosheliant or koshtelian (castellan) (p. 527) artikuly (articles in a written document like a draft treaty) (p. 531) Sigismund Augustus’ panstvo (“state”), the Rada (council) (p. 532) a zhalovannaia gramota (charter of privileges) from Queen Bona (p. 535) the Koruna Pol’skaia (Crown Poland) (p. 539) the Polish-Lithuanian blizhnaia rada (Privy Council) (p. 540) kraichei (drink-server at court) (p. 542). The Kingdom of Poland, and the Grand Principality of Lithuania even more so, were intimately familiar to the Russians. Indeed, Ivan IV has pretentious aspirations to much ethnic Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian territory under Polish-Lithuanian sovereignty. The strong Ruthenian linguistic element in “Lithuanian” political and social life complicates our analysis somewhat. Umnogo-Kolychev employed far more foreign Polish-Lithuanian terms than native Russian. Given the diplomatic reports’ audience, a travelogue would have been superfluous, so Umnogo-Kolychev’s account lacks any tourist description. It does not mention urban self-government institutions such as the voit (a rural official) or Ratusha (urban council), or any hint of the Sejm (Parliament). Nor are most Polish social terms repeated, such as szlachta (gentry) or boiarstvo (a lesser social category than the boiare in Muscovy). The narrowness of UmnogoKolychev’s account unfortunately makes it rather unsuccessful as a 31

Likhachev, 329. In the discussion of Umnogo-Kolychev’s account alone, page references in parentheses in the text refer to SRIO, vol. 71. 32

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meaningful articulation of Muscovite knowledge of its closest neighbor and most powerful enemy. Still, what is striking is the prominence of Polish vocabulary, including notable words of Latin origin. Intriguingly, Umnogo-Kolychev did not take advantage of numerous obvious opportunities to use Russian terms instead of those employed in Poland-Lithuania: gosudarstvo for panstvo, kaznachei for skarb, d’iak for pisar’, vel’mozhi for pany (since pany included bishops, boiare could not be used), Duma for Rada, ataman for getman, perhaps even stat’i for artikularii. Biskup instead of episkop is more problematic. Biskup could be an indigenous term for Catholic bishops.33 However, episkop could not have been wrong because in context the non-Orthodoxy of the bishop of Vilna was not emphasized. Such a linguistic aversion suggests that something other than intelligibility was involved in Umnogo-Kolychev’s choice of lexicon. The excerpt from Sugorskii and Artsybashev on the structure of the Holy Roman Empire published, or at least discussed in detail, by Kazakova suggests that magnates lived in the duma, a Russian concept, that each kurfürst (elector) and udel’nyi (appanage) prince had his own state and treasury. Although Kazakova interpreted their mention of Rudolph II’s consulting the electors as an allusion to the Reichstag, that term did not appear. In short, we appear to have yet another mixture of foreign and Russian concepts, which can fruitfully be explored fully only when the complete text becomes available. Pisemskii34 traveled to England with pod’iachei (under-secretary) Neudach Khovralev. His report mentioned: in Kholmogory English gosti (a Muscovite government-ascribed status of elite merchants) led by Ivan Romanov; the English warship convoy protecting them was headed by dvorianin (member of the Tsar’s Court or Dvor, literally: courtier) Christopher Carlyle (p. 100) doktor Ivan Ilf from Holland (Johann Eilof, a Dutch doctor, in Ivan’s service) (p. 102 + n. 6) golova (Muscovite for captain) Christopher Carlyle of an English ship (p. 103) dvorianin korolevin (royal “courtier”) Christopher Carlyle, uriadnik mester (rank-and-file artisan) Pekot (unidentified) and the lutchie 33 For example, in Plemiannikov, PDSDR v. I, 343-356 passim, and elsewhere in the “Lithuanian affairs” (litovskie dela) diplomatic books ( posol’skie knigi). 34 Text in Puteshestviia, 100-155; reprinted in Zapiski russkikh puteshestvennikov, 220-269.

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posadtskie liudi (“best suburban people,” a standard Muscovite group description of the wealthiest and most prominent merchants and artisans living in a city’s outlying districts) of Scarborough, as well as its voevoda (Muscovite term for military and sometimes civil commander) Edward Han (Edvar Gan) (p. 104) namestnik Vakfil’ [Wakefield?], posadtskie liudi, York udel’noi kniaz’ (appanage prince) Essex (p. 105) a royal pristav (bailiff) ( p.106) blizhnyie liudi (“privy people”) (p. 107) English sovetniki (councillors) (p. 108) a sluzhiloi nemchin (“serving German,” a standard Muscovite phrase for European servitors of the Tsar; what is odd is that the individual named was English) Christopher Hoddesdon, an active merchant adventurer and member of trading companies (p. 110 + n. 23) English torgovye liudi (Muscovite term for “trading people,” lower merchants) who trade in Moscow (i.e., members of the Muscovy Company), aldraman (aldermen) Barn, Martyn, Toorsen, Polosen (actually heads of the Muscovy Company George Barne/Barnes, governor Martin, Towerson, Pullison) (p. 110 + n. 25) four royal deti boiarskie (literally “children of boyare,” Muscovite term for gentry (pp. 111, 127) the London posad (suburb) (p. 112) kniaz’ sar (Prince Sir) Henry Neville (p. 113 + n. 28) the royal koniushei (Master of Horse, here as a translation of “constable” = earl of horse) Rofliant (Edward Manners, Graf of Rutland) (p. 114 + n. 29) kniaz’ vikunt (prince viscount) Muntikiu (Anthony Brown, viscount Montague), kniaz’ Noris (Baron Henry Norris of Rycote) (p. 114 + nn. 30, 31) blizhnye liudi (“privy people”), udel’nye kniazi admiral er35 (appanage princes admiral Earl) Eduard Klinton graf Linkonskoi (Edward, Lord Clinton and Sayre, Lord High Admiral), prince erl’ Bedforskii (Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford), prince Genri Khundoch’ (Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon), dumnoi d’iak (Council Secretary, Muscovite rank of highest non-noble bureaucrats, members of the Boyarskaia Duma), Francis Walsingham (p. 114 + n. 32)

35

Er is exactly the way the word appears in the original manuscript.

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among blizhnye sovetniki (privy councillors) kniaz’ lord (Prince Lord) Geord (Charles Howard, Baron of Effingham, Earl of Nottingham) (p. 115 n. 34) kaznachei trezeriu (treasurer of the Treasury) (not named in the text, but obviously William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Lord High Treasurer) (115 n. 35) the royal dvoretskoi sor (Major-Domo Sir) James Kravskoi (?) (p. 118) Lords and Princes, both previously named and new (some unidentified, the “princes” were Earls) (p. 119 n 39) the English oruzheinaia polata (hall of armaments = Armory, the most famous one is still in the Moscow Kremlin) which the Russians enter to present to the envoys a gift of a gun (p. 124) stolovaia polata (Muscovite throne room) (p. 127) boiarinii (wives and daughters of Muscovite boyari) and maids tantsovat’ (dance36) (p. 128 n. 48) voevoda angliiskii (English commander), voevoda and namestnik (commander and governor; these offices could be combined in Muscovy too), Barvyskoi (Charles Howard, Lord Effingham, mentioned previously) (p. 137) doktor (doctor) Roman (p. 142) titlo (titul, title37) of the Queen (p. 147) daughter of an udel’nyi kniaz’ (appanage prince) (Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon) Mary Hastings (p. 149 + n. 66), whose possible offspring with Ivan IV would receive appanages (p. 151) parsona (persona, as an image of a person, portrait38) (pp. 150, 152) a counselor, kanslir kniaz’ (chancellor prince) Tomos Brumlev (Sir Thomas Bromley, Lord-Chancellor), kansilov dvor (the chancellor’s court) (p. 153 + n. 69)39 negotiations took place in the cherdak (no commentary, not even in the Glossary; in seventeenth-century Russian a garret or attic, but used earlier to mean a balcony or upper room, as here, which is closer to its Oriental meaning, from Osmanli čardak40) (p. 153).

36 37 38 39 40

Hüttl Worth, 110. See Puteshestviia, “Slovar’,” s.v. titlo, 448.; Hüttl Worth, 111. See Puteshestviia, “Slovar’,” s.v. parsona, persona, 446; Hüttl Worth, 96. Hüttl Worth, 75-76. Ibid., 118.

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The report from England resembles the Swedish report in that it too projects Muscovite political and social terminology on England, in this case with more evident distortion. Neither “appanage prince” nor “prince” was applied accurately, for example, even Tudor relatives with estates were not “appanage princes” in Muscovite terms. Of course exceptions existed, Admiral (again), Lord, Sir, Earl, Viscount, all titles and ranks, the extraordinary “treasury” (to avoid kaznachei kazny, treasurer of the treasury in Russian? an odd combination of Russian and foreign terminology), the generic Doctor, “persona.” Pisemskii’s was only the third Muscovite delegation to England, following Nepeya in 1557 and Savin in 1569. Muscovy’s relative unfamiliarity with England might explain the detailed tourist information about geography, population, and the economy (pp. 105, 149). Oddly enough, such descriptive information continued to appear in diplomatic reports even after Ivan IV’s death, by which time the English terrain should have been familiar enough not to require repetition. There are two genuine oddities: first, Elizabeth dances with her boyariny, but no English noble is ever called a boyar, and second, the Russians employ an Ottoman term for balcony. Note also the absence of any reference to the English Parliament. Novosil’tsev went to Turkey41 with his son, pod’iachei Posnik Iznoskov, tatarin (Tatar) Deletkozia (probably the interpreter), and a falconer with congratulatory gifts to Selim II upon his accession. His report mentioned: in Azov the ataman zimovishcha (Hetman of winter-quarters), the Cossack ataman Mikhail Cherkeshenin, the dizdar (a word of Iranian origin, meaning fortress commander) Sefer, pristav (bailiff), the aga ianychanskie (the head of the famous Ottoman Janissaries, a term derived from yeni çeri42, “aga” is a common Turkic honorific) (p. 63 + nn. 3, 5) the Turkish Saltan (although the Ottoman Sultan could also be called a tsar’) (p. 64)

41 Text in Puteshestviia, 63-99; reprinted in Zapiski russkikh puteshestennikov, 23-67. 42 The Janissaries, professional gunpowder infantry, were recruited as a tribute of boys, the devshirme, at this period primarily from among subject non-Muslim Balkan populations, and converted to Islam. The Janissaries marched to distinctive music, were celibate, and were forbidden to grow beards, although they were permitted moustaches. They were the military elite of the Ottoman Empire.

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the Azov sanchak (Turkish sançak, znamia [standard], meaning commander or governor, the standard Ottoman provincial administrative title) Aidar-beg, Abdul the big kadi (qadi, religious judge) and a katorga (galley,43 since galleys used convict labor, the word acquired the meaning of penal servitude in modern Russian), in the narrative of the Ottoman/Crimean attack on Astrakhan’ in 1569, the Crimean kalga (son of the khan, second in status to the khan in the Crimean khanate) (p. 65 + nn. 11, 12) kapydonom (kapitan, captain,44 commander of galleys), and Kazymurza (murza or mirza is a common Turkic title, used widely among the Nogai Tatars of the Pontic and Caspian steppe, which could also be part of a name) (p. 66 + n. 13) nakrachee, surnachee and trubniki (trumpet-blowers),45 the Turkish Saltan’s spagi (spahi, the Turkish feudal levy from timars and zeamety [?]) (p. 67 + n. 16) Nogai murzy, the Kafa sanchak Kasim-beg (p. 68) a galley docked at the skel’ia (Turkish iskele, Italian scala = pier) (p. 69 + n. 20) the alafa (Turkish “grant,” in this case obrok [taxes] from Tatar Kafa residents) (pp. 70 + n. 23) Maamet-pasha (the Great Vizier, although the word “vizier” did not appear in the report; pasha is another Turkic title, status, honorific, also employed in proper names), a sarai called Kandil’ (from Turkish saray, court, very familiar to Russians in the name of the Juchid ulus Volga city, sometimes described as the capital of the Juchid ulus, Sarai), and bakchi (lower officials)46 (p. 72 + nn. 26, 27) Maamet chausha (Turkish çavuş, low-ranking diplomat) (p. 73 + n. 28) argamaki (the famous Argamak horses) (p. 73)47 big voevoda (commander) S’iaush-aga (Janissary commander, later twice Vizier) (p. 75 + n. 34) four kopychei (courtiers, formally bodyguards, kapici), prikaznye liudi (a common Muscovite social denomination, usually interpreted

43

See Puteshestviia, “Slovar’,” s.v. katarga, 444. Hüttl Worth, 76. 45 Lur’e did not comment on this phrase, of which the last noun is Russian, but the other two are not identified. 46 This term is of oriental origin, but Lur’e did not annotate it. 47 See Puteshestviia, “Slovar’,” s.v. argamak, 442. 44

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to mean officials who worked in departments [prikazy] but probably just those who took orders [prikazy]) (p. 75 + n. 35) mizgiti (mosques, from Turkish misçit) and kisheni (from Turkish kiş = faith, another name for Muslim houses of worship) on Muscovite soil for the benefit of Muslims serving Ivan (p. 77, p. 78 n. 38) gramota (charter) given by the Sultan to his big d’iak (secretary) (p. 78) Turkish mitropolity (metropolitans, highest Muslim clerical judges, especially military) (p. 78 + n. 40) a golden tiushak (Turkish dősek = mattress) on which the Sultan sat, under which there was a chiuga (Turkish çuha = cloth) (p. 78 + n. 42) the absence of bows, arrows, and saadaki (Turkish saghdak for quiver, a term used extensively in the Muscovite Military Registers [razriadnye knigi]), swords, and budei, budi (knife-bearing guards) around the Sultan, in honor of Ivan (p. 79 + n. 44) iuk (Turkish yük, a large monetary unit, equal to 100,000 aspers) (p. 80, p. 81 n. 48) iurt (yurt, meaning patria, extremely common in East Slavic sources during the Tatar period) (p. 81) frianki (Turkish frek, frengi, the name for West Europeans, but Lur’e did not mention East Slavic friazy in the same meaning; note that here the word is in its Turkish form) (p. 86 + n. 53) the Dervysh (dervish) Aleev syn Magmet-tsarevich (p. 89)48 the big kaznachei (Treasurer) San-Chilibei, pechatnik (keeper-ofthe-seal) Magmet Chilibei, stol’nik (courtier who waits on tables in Muscovy) kapy-aga Sys’iaush-aga (“aga” here is both part of a title and part of the title-holder’s name); defterdary, po-ruski d’iaki (a rare case where a Russian term is used to define an Ottoman one, defterdary [which] in Russian means secretary); in place of the patriarch (the Orthodox Byzantine Patriarch of Constantinople) was a muftikadleshkip (Grand Mufti) with metropolitans and bishops Maalimzada Ikadlishker molla Chilibei (mullah, prayer-leader, the list of secular and religious leaders includes the qadi-asker, the chief military judge, although the term is not listed) (p. 89 + n. 66) 48 Although Puteshestviia treats this as a proper name with an initial capital letter, Hüttl Worth 69, considers it a loan word. Many terms are both, so I have included it here.

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provisions included sharap (Turkish şarap = wine), zatennoe maslo (Turkish zeytuni = olive, ergo olive oil) (p. 99 + n. 76). It is relevant to note here that Mal’tsev used sanchak, pasha, spagi, katarga, alaf, kaptan, and ianychane in his narrative of the OttomanCrimean campaign against Astrakhan’. Mal’tsev took the trouble to gloss spagi as deti boiarskie golova, commanders of gentry cavalry.49 The density of Ottoman Turkish vocabulary in Novosil’tsev is fairly obvious. Some Russian political and social terminology appears, but it is overshadowed by Ottoman lexicon. Obviously Christian Byzantine Constantinople (called Tsar’grad, the city of the Tsar, in East Slavic sources) was familiar to Russians from centuries of pilgrim literature. Evidently Novosil’tsev saw no need to describe the new Muslim Ottoman city of Istanbul. The image of the Ottoman Empire presented in Novosil’tsev’s diplomatic report differed linguistically from the portraits of Sweden and England by Vorontsov and Pisemskii, respectively. We begin our analysis with just the three accounts published in Puteshevestie. Even at first glance, the quantitative disparity in the use of native versus Russian terms is palpable. Over a dozen such terms occur in both Vorontsov and Pisemskii,50 slightly more than a half a dozen in Novosil’tsev, but such numbers do not convey much. All three accounts mentioned pristavy and d’iaki. Vorontsov’s boiare were matched by Pisemskii’s boiariny. Pisemskii’s use of blizhnye need not be the result of sensitivity to the English Privy Council, since Vorontsov also found people “privy” to the monarch. Vorontsov and Pisemskii named namestniki and a dvoretskoi, but Pisemskii’s voevoda and pechatnik were matched in Novosil’tsev, not Vorontsov. Vorontsov and Novosil’tsev referred to stol’niki. Vorontsov listed a dumnyi dvorianin and dvoriane but Pisemskii deti boiarskie, overlapping categories. Both included posadskie liudi, but only Pisemskii alluded to torgovye liudi and gosti, as if no lesser or elite merchants resided in Stockholm. Vorontsov and Pisemskii inaccurately applied Muscovite appanage terminology. Pisemskii and Novosil’tsev mentioned kaznachei, but surely someone in Stockholm managed finances. Only Novosil’tsev referred to prikaznye liudi, although self49

Sadikov, 153-156. Is it significant that Pisemskii had previously been on an embassy to Crimea? (Zapiski russkikh puteshestvennikov, 575 in “Commentary”.) I am assuming that the entire Court elite, regardless of previous diplomatic assignments or travel, shared a common attitude 50

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evidently all three royal courts contained corps of officials. In short, lack of experiences in the three countries, accident and lack of comparability preclude any consistent contrast among the three reports at the lexical level. The quantitative disparity might be more apparent than real, but I doubt it. However, it is the qualitative contrast in Russian vocabulary that stands out. In Vorontsov only the isolated admiral, doctor or Graf appears. Even the aldermen, sirs, lords and earls in Pisemskii cannot modify the impression created by the Russian terminology. In Novosil’tsev the Russian terminology is drowned in a sea of agas, pashas and sanchaks. As a result, the diplomatic reports create the distinct impression that Sweden and England were more like Muscovy than the Ottoman Empire. Lack of allusions to the Swedish Riksdag or the English Parliament, it seems to me, did not reflect any autocratic Muscovite ideological aversion to representative political institutions. Neither the commercial nor the political concerns of the Vorontsov and Pisemskii embassies required consultations with an estates-general. The documents contain weird anomalies, none more bizarre than calling Muslim clergy metropolitans. That the Grand Mufti stood in the place traditionally held by the Patriarch of Constantinople, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. Nevertheless the main point is that since the same political and diplomatic establishment read the reports about Sweden, England and the Ottoman Empire, the Russians who authored and edited the diplomatic reports in such a way as to create the contrast I have identified were saying something. What they were trying to say is not necessarily obvious. The far less frequent appearance of English or Swedish words than of Turkish in the reports should not be construed as a reflection of the extent of knowledge of those languages in Muscovy. True, the East Slavs had ample opportunity to become familiar with Turkic languages going back to the Kipchaks (Polovtsy, Cumans) of the Kievan period, let alone with the Turkic language, called Tatar, that came to dominate the steppe under the Mongols. Yet some Tatar vocabulary, like the Crimean Tatar kalga or Nogai Tatar mirza, did show up in Pisemskii’s report. Muscovite couriers and envoys who dealt with the Tatar khanates and the Nogais spent long periods in a Turkic linguistic milieu. However, Ottoman Turkic was often different from Kipchak or Tatar, and Ottoman vocabulary, such as sancak, distinguishes Novosil’tsev’s report. Moreover, Muscovite merchants, and even offi-

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cials, who dealt extensively with German-speaking merchants in Livonia, Denmark and Sweden also had no less ample occasion to acquire at least conversational German, which would have made comparable Swedish vocabulary very accessible.51 Most of all, knowledge of a language does not always dictate the choice of whether to use it. It is the selection of terms in the reports which is paramount. Even intimate familiarity with foreign words—or social classes, administrative offices or political institutions—does not necessarily entail similarity. A Russian could just as easily have written that the Swedes had boyare, but they are unlike our, i.e. Muscovite, boyare. Again, the motivation for using a Russian term to describe Swedish nobles need not be social identity. Nor does the disproportion of Ottoman as opposed to “European” words in the reports derive from the relative importance or unimportance of those spheres of Muscovite foreign policy. Muscovy was no less committed to keeping out of war with the Ottoman Empire and trying, at times desperately, to use the Ottoman Porte to restrain the Crimea, as it was to securing Baltic Sea ports in Livonia during the Livonian War (1558-1583). Sweden and England were both major players in Northern European politics, and the Muscovites at least hoped to make England a military player as well. European commerce was hardly a minor concern to Ivan. The question therefore arises as to why the Novosil’tsev report should have written about Ottoman spahis without calling them pomeshchiki (holders of conditional land grants, mostly military servitors) or deti boiarskie. There is no reason to infer that he used Ottoman terms to make the report more “exotic,” a standard West European travelogue technique when writing about the “Other,” including the Ottomans. To Muscovy the Ottoman Empire was far too powerful to be treated as “exotic,” a curiosity, and the report was intended to be utilitarian, not entertaining. The foreign policy establishment needed no literary embellishments to inspire interest in the

51 V. A. Varentsov, G. M. Kovalenko, V sostave Moskovskogo gosudarstva. Ocherki istorii Velikogo Novgoroda kontsa XV - nachala XVIII v [Regarding the Composition of the Muscovite State. Studies on the History of the Grand Principality of Novgorod from the end of the 15th –to the early 18th centuries] (St. Petersburg, 1999), 140 observe that in the sixteenth century the “working” [their quotation marks] foreign language in Novgorod was German, yet no one there could translate Swedish.

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Ottoman Empire, as the very dry bureaucratese of the accounts so boringly attests. The Janissaries constitute an entirely different problem. Swedish gunpowder troops were called by the Muscovite term strel’tsy, but no troops in England were so designated, which should have been possible. The strel’tsy lacked the Ottoman devshirme recruiting mechanism, the Janissary training, élan, and political role. The Janissaries were exclusively infantry, whereas a minority of the strel’tsy were mounted infantry. Of course, Novosil’tsev could have used other more generic terms for gunpowder troops such as pishchal’niki or zhol’nery (a word of Polish origin), but he did not. Some modern historians of the reign of Ivan IV, seduced by the positive Ottoman role model espoused in the writings of Ivan Peresvetov,52 have likened the oprichniki, Ivan IV’s personal bodyguard in his separate realm-within-a-realm, the Oprichnina,53 to the Janissaries, despite the same differences in recruitment and training from the strel’tsy. Novosil’tev wrote in 1570, after the Oprichnina had been established in 1565 and before it was abolished, or at least before its name disappears from Russian sources, in 1572. However, it goes without saying that it would have been fatal for Novosil’tsev to compare the Janissaries to the oprichniki, and obviously Novosil’tsev was not suicidal. Nevertheless, Novosil’tsev chose not to describe the Janissaries with Russian vocabulary less dangerous than oprichniki. Usually calculated cynicism is invoked to explain Muscovite invocations of a common Christian identity against the Muslim menace, embodied most of all in the Ottoman Porte. When it suited Ivan’s interests to seek peace in Europe, he issued appeals to PolandLithuania, the Holy Roman Empire, or the Papacy for a common Christian front against Islam.54 Much opportunism was at play in 52

Peresvetov was a soldier-of-fortune who wrote several works addressed to Ivan IV advocating political and military reforms in Muscovy in part by extolling the virtues of the Ottoman Empire in general and of the Ottoman Sultan in particular. Some historians believe “Peresvetov” was a pseudonym; others date Peresvetov’s compositions to the seventeenth century. 53 In 1565 Ivan IV divided the realm, creating his own private appanage, the oprichnina, and a corresponding military corps, the oprichniki, who wore black robes and rode black horses which bore dogs’ heads and brooms on their saddles to signify that the oprichniki were “dogs of the tsar” and would sweep the land clean of treason. The remainder of Muscovy was called the zemshchina (the “land”). 54 For example, to Poland-Lithuania, see G. O. Karpov, ed., SRIO 59 (St. Petersburg, 1887) = PDSDR = PDSMGPL, II (1533-1560), 279 (1549), 557 (1558); G.O. Karpov, ed., SRIO 71 (St. Petersburg, 1892) = PDSDR = PDSMGSPL, III (1560-

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Ivan’s foreign policy pronouncements about religion, since Lutheran iconoclasm figured in his Livonian War propaganda and in negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire against Protestants, but it had no place in Vorontsov or Pisemskii’s diplomatic reports. Yet the Muscovite perception of the Christian / Muslim divide might not have been entirely a facade. Three texts do not rise to the level of a sample, and even within them absolute consistency is lacking, but still the contrast between the lexicon of discussing Sweden and England, on the one hand, and the Ottoman Empire, on the other, stands out in bold relief. I would suggest that culturally, by applying Muscovite terminology much more to Sweden and England than to the Ottoman Empire, the Muscovite diplomatic establishment was expressing the perception, or at least hinting very subtly, that Muscovy was more like Sweden and England than the Ottoman Empire. This diffuse and unarticulated attitude in the diplomatic reports, more than merely a fantasy, would happily resonate with some political propaganda. The linguistic usage of the diplomatic reports might derive from a deep Muscovite cultural perception. The Russians knew that Sweden and England, despite schism and heresy, were Christian like Muscovy, whereas the Ottoman Empire was not. As often as the Muscovites found it convenient to tout their tolera-

1571), 128 (1563), 663 (1570); L. V. Sobolev, compiler, Posol’skaia kniga po sviazam Rossii s Pol’shei (1575-1576 gg.) [The Diplomatic Book on the Relations of Russia with Poland (1575-1576)] (Moscow-Warsaw, 2004) = Pamiatniki istorii Vostochnoi Evropy, Istochniki [Monuments in the History of Eastern Europe, Sources], XVXVII vv., (1575-1576),VII, 45-46, 48-59, 65, 66, 96. The context of Habsburg-Russian negotiations over succession to the Polish-Lithuanian throne was expressed in religious terms: election of Bathory, an Ottoman client, would help Islam, but election of Ivan or his son Fedor, or the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian or his son Ernst, would cement an anti-Ottoman alliance of all parties. See PDSR = Snosheniia s gosudarstvami evropeiskimi [Monuments in the Diplomatic Relations of Ancient Russia with Foreign States. = Relations with European States], 10 vols, izdanie II otdelenie E. I. V. kantseliarii = Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii s Imperieiu rimskoiu. [Published by Section II of His Imperial Majesty’s Chancellery =Monuments on the Diplomatic Relations with the Holy Roman Empire] (St. Petersburg, 1851), I., s 1498 po 1594 god [from 1498 to 1594]), 590. Similarly, the sub-text of Ivan’s appeal to the Pope to mediate the Livonian War, which led to the mission of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, was that in gratitude for papal diplomatic intervention with Poland-Lithuania, Ivan would endorse Church Union, which would, once again, facilitate an anti-Ottoman crusade; see ibid., 768. Of course, Ivan was totally insincere in both cases about going to war with the Ottoman Empire and in the latter about a church union.

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tion of Islam to the Sultan, such political maneuvers did not derive from a sense of Russian “Eurasianism.”55 Unfortunately the cogency of this conclusion would appear to be mitigated by my deliberate omission of Umnogo-Kolychev’s account from my analysis so far. There are some common Russian terms in it and the other three diplomatic reports (pristav, voevoda) and some common omissions (Sejm, like Parliament, Riksdag). But UmnogoKolychev used four times as many foreign as native Russian terms. His silence on so many aspects of Polish-Lithuanian life that were hardly unknown to Russians, such as social structure, may reflect the fact that such matters were too well known to require elucidation. As a Slavic, admittedly West-Slavic, language, Polish might not have been perceived by Russians as quite as “different” from Russian as Swedish, English or Turkish. Such a sense of linguistic affinity would have been reinforced by the beginnings of a significant Polish influence on Russian lexicon in the sixteenth century, which turned from a trickle to a flood in the following century. It would be easy to relegate Russian perceptions of Poland-Lithuania to a separate category, and thus expel Umnogo-Kolychev from our analysis altogether,56 but to do so would be neither very satisfying nor very persuasive. Therefore, however speculatively, I would suggest that the cultural sub-text of the pattern of linguistic usage in Umnogo-Kolychev was intended to discriminate between Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy’s enemy, despite the fact that Poland-Lithuania was a fellow Christian—and implicitly fellow “European”—country. The resistance to using Russian equivalents of Polish/Latin terms might be the cultural result of Muscovy’s hostility to the Polish-Lithuanian state (after 1569, Commonwealth). Such political enmity might have perverted the pattern manifested in the other diplomatic accounts. It remains true that the theme of the Russian perception of her nearest neighbor and biggest enemy would benefit greatly from extended treatment. 55 Eurasianism was a historiographic school created by Russian émigres after the Russian Revolution of 1917 which argued that Russia was not “European” but part of both Europe and Asia. Pilloried by the Soviets, it has aroused much more interest in Russia since 1991. 56 Since Lur’e included Umnogo-Kolychev in his definition of stateinyi spisok, it is even more peculiar that the editors of Puteshestviia did not explain their decision to omit the text from the book. Certainly the history of Russian relations with Poland and Lithuania, the latter part of the Soviet Union at the time, would have been of great interest to the Soviet public.

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Given the no more than suggestive conclusions of this essay, it is ironic that many European contemporaries of Ivan IV and more than a few modern historians of Russia would reverse the polarity of Russia’s cultural identity subsumed in the diplomatic reports’ linguistic usage. Giles Fletcher assured Queen Elizabeth I that Muscovy was totally unlike England; Muscovy was a tyranny.57 The imagery applied to the savage and cruel Ivan IV during the Livonian War derived largely from depictions of the Ottoman Turks, mediated via tales of Vlad Tsepesh, i.e. Dracula, and long-standing medieval Christian propaganda against Islam.58 Entire historiographic schools, such as Oriental Despotism59 or Eurasianism, presented Russia as far more like the Ottoman Empire than civilized Europe. Of course, the possibility that the Russians, as evidenced by their diplomatic reports, deliberately forged a false cultural identity cannot be excluded out of hand. Russia would not be the only country whose self-image failed to match reality. But that self-image, evidenced by the sixteenth-century diplomatic reports composed during the reign of Ivan IV, must also be taken into account in addressing yet again the “accursed question” of Russian national identity. Yet still another irony remains in this discussion. Gurevich, who identified so strongly with the Annales School and did so much to propagate its methods and concepts in Russia, completely overlooked one of its key concepts, mentality, in distinguishing between Russian and European history. If Russian “Westernization” is usually dated to the reign of Peter the Great at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, still Muscovy began borrowing technology from Europe as early as the reign of Ivan IV’s grandfather, Ivan III, who hired Italian architects to rebuild the Kremlin. Ivan IV continued his grandfather’s efforts to hire European artisans to come to work in Muscovy and to train Russians in their skills. True, Muscovy had also borrowed institutions from the Mongols,60 57 Lloyd E. Berry, Robert O. Crummey, eds., Rude & Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyages (Madison, 1968), 109. 58 Marshall T. Poe, A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748 (Ithaca-London, 2000), 227-237. 59 A theory created by Karl Wittfogel that Russia had borrowed its conception of government from its Mongol conquerors, who had previously imbibed it from China. 60 Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (Bloomington, 1985).

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but, as the documents discussed above suggest, by the sixteenth century the Russian mentality might have made distinctions between East and West which Gurevich, notwithstanding his definitional argument that Russia was never “medieval,” did not mention.

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HEALERS AND WITCHES IN EARLY MODERN RUSSIA* EVE LEVIN

Aron Gurevich devoted the last section of his monograph, Srednevekovyi mir: kul’tura bezmolvstvuiushchego bol’shinstva [The Medieval World: The Culture of the Silent Majority], not to the medieval popular culture that constituted his primary research focus over several decades, but rather to an interpretation of witch hunts in early-modern Western Europe.1 In the pursuit of supposed sorcerers, he saw crystallized “the divergence between official and popular cultural traditions” that had “intensified in the late Middle Ages” and that signaled the ultimate destruction of the authentic traditional popular culture at the hands of the absolutist state.2 The practice of magic had long been interwoven with popular culture, Gurevich mused;3 why would the State and Church launch concerted attacks on it, and why would villagers collaborate? In particular, he noted the increasingly intrusive State, the destabilization of the economy, increasing levels of violence and severity of penalties for misconduct, the demands for “civilizing” the “dark masses” found in the burgeoning print culture, the disasters of war, famine, and plague, the growing importance of demonology in elite theology, and the linking of witchcraft and heresy, which redoubled the seriousness of both types of offenses. All of these disturbing developments resulted in a “collective phobia”4—a generalized fear that permeated late-medieval to * An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference “Who Was A Witch? Russian Witchcraft in Comparative Perspective,” University of Michigan, April 1-2, 2005. I am grateful to the conference participants for their stimulating comments. Research for this article was supported by assistance from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the Summer Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois, and the Hilandar Research Library of Ohio State University. The deficiencies of this article are solely my own responsibility. 1 A. Ia. Gurevich, Srednevekovyi mir: kul’tura bezmolvstvuiushchego bol’shinstva [The Medieval World: the culture of the silent majority] (Moscow, 1990), 308-375. 2 Gurevich, Sredneveokovyi mir, 375. 3 See Srednevekovyi mir, 359; see also Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 61-62, 81-103. 4 Gurevich, Srednevekovyi mir, 316.

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early-modern communities. Witches became the “scapegoat, onto which it would be possible to place [peasants’] fears and sins...so that the village collective could recover the feeling of health and internal well-being.”5 Yet village sorcerers had not only elicited fears from their neighbors, but had also been the source of help as defense against the uncontrollable forces in the world, particularly the healing of diseases. Following the work of major scholars of early-modern European witchcraft, Gurevich noted the pattern they discerned: accused witches disproportionately included “marginal” persons and women, and allegations against them arose from webs of social tensions. Yet he remained dissatisfied with this explanation. “Internal conflicts,” he wrote, “took place in the village in the earlier period also, and did not lead to such catastrophic consequences.”6 Although Gurevich did not base his insights into pre-modern popular culture on Russian material, he encouraged other scholars, including myself, to apply them accordingly.7 In this article, I will explore one aspect of the problem of early modern witchcraft as Aron Gurevich framed it: why did Russians of the seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries turn on the “sorcerers” and “witches” who provided them with healing of their illnesses and accuse them of witchcraft? In Russia, as in Western Europe, ordinary people had engaged in the use of herbs, amulets, and incantations to combat disease for generations, and while Church authorities warned against such doings, they regarded them as a pastoral matter, imposing penances rather than subjecting practitioners to torture, trial, and execution.8 What had changed in Russian society and culture to bring about the persecution of folk healers as witches? And why did State authorities choose to act on those charges? These large questions concerning the nature of witchcraft allegations have attracted the attention of a number of scholars who explicitly compared the situation in Russia with that in Western Europe. They note similarities: the pervasive belief in magic, the roots of allegations in local tensions, the state’s role in intensifying charges, and 5

Gurevich, Srednevekovyi mir, 370. Gurevich, Srednevekovyi mir, 373. 7 Aron Iakovlevich presented me with a copy of his book Srednevekovyi mir in September 1990, upon learning of my intention to study medieval Russian popular religion. 8 Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, 78-103; M. G. Korogodina, Ispoved’ v Rossii v XIV-XIX vekakh [Confession in Russia from the 14th to 19th centuries] (St. Petersburg, 2006), 203-232. 6

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the horrendous price accused witches paid for their “crimes.” They also note important differences in early modern Russia: the striking difference in gender, with men as the majority of witches, the lack of Church involvement, the much muted discourse about demons, and the total absence of black Sabbaths, sexual concourse with the Devil, and inverted masses.9 Of the larger cultural stresses Gurevich identified, Russia experienced only some: the destabilization of the economy, higher levels of social upheaval and violence, wars, famines, and plagues, and religious contention marked by bitter rhetoric and brutality.10 But in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, Russia had just begun to partake of the elite intellectual movements that had transformed Western culture and the sharp rupture between elite and peasant culture, so characteristic of late-eighteenth and nineteenth century Russian society, had yet to develop.11 The academic superstructure of learned demonology that dominated the witch trials in the West was almost wholly absent in Russia. Parallel to studies of Russian witchcraft per se, the scholarly literature has produced examinations of folk medicine and its practitioners. Some scholars have seen the individuals accused as “witches” primarily as “healers” and the heirs to generations of empirical 9 W. F. Ryan, “The Witchcraft Hysteria in Early Modern Europe: Was Russia an Exception?” Slavonic and East European Review 76 (1998), 67; Valerie A. Kivelson, “Male Witches and Gendered Categories in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003), 606-631; Kivelson, “Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds. (Berkeley, 1991), 74-94; Kivelson, “Patrolling the Boundaries: Witchcraft Accusations and Household Strife in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 29 (1995), 302-323; Kivelson, “Political Sorcery in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy,” in Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359-1584, A. M. Kleimola and G. D. Lenhoff, eds. (Moscow, 1997), 267-283; W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia (University Park, 1999), 68-93; Russell Zguta, “Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Review 82 (1977), 1187-1207; Zguta, “Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia,” The Russian Review 37 (1978), 438-448; Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2001). 10 Richard Hellie, “The Expanding Role of the State in Russia,” in Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Russia, Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe, eds. (London, 2004), 29-55; Chester Dunning, “Does Jack Goldstone’s Model of Early Modern State Crises Apply to Russia?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39 (1997), 572-592; Georg B. Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1999). 11 See Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1992).

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knowledge about curative methods. In their depiction, these “wise” men and women enjoyed the confidence of their patients and devoted themselves selflessly to them, risking dire punishment by Church and State for their efforts.12 Other scholars took a dim view of folk healers. In their characterization, such “healers” had no knowledge of either the cause of disease or its treatment, and their “cures” were as likely to increase the patient’s suffering as to alleviate it. Preying on patients’ ignorance and superstition, these “sorcerers” used illness as an opportunity to gain power, claiming to cause it or to heal it as suited their purposes. The Church and State rightly tried to free the people from these witches’ clutches.13 To be fair, these scholars were not so stark in their interpretations; they noticed the ambiguities even as they voiced their generalizations. So advocates of the view that “witches” were really “healers” note “magical” or “superstitious” elements. And so advocates of the view that “healers” were really “witches” acknowledge that, in the absence of other reliable medical care, ordinary Russians had no choice but to rely upon self-trained individuals. But their accounts of 12 See, for example, N. Novombergskii, Vrachebnoe stroenie v do-Petrovskoi Rusi [The Medical Structure of pre-Petrine Rus’] (Tomsk, 1907), 3-10; G. I. Popov, Russkaia narodno-bytovaia meditsina: po materialam etnograficheskago biuro kniazia V. N. Tenisheva [Russian folk medicine: according to materials of the ethnographic office of Prince V.N. Tenishev] (St. Petersburg, 1903); A. Vetukhov, Zagovory, zaklinaniia, oberegi i drugie vidy narodnago vrachevaniia osnovannye na vere v silu slova, [Charms, Incantations, Amulets, and Other Methods of Folk Medicine based on Belief in the Strength of the Word] (Warsaw, 1907), 3-6; L. F. Zmeev, Chteniia po vrachebnoi istorii Rossii [Readings on the History of Medicine in Russia] (St. Petersburg, 1896); N. A. Bogoiavlenskii, Meditsina u pervoselov russkogo severa [Medicine in the first settlements of the Russian North] (Leningrad, 1996), 101-121; Bogoiavlenskii, Drevnerusskoe vrachevanie v XI-XVIIvv. [Ancient Russian Healing in the XI-XVII centuries] (Moscow, 1960), 3-17; B. D. Otamanovskii, Bor’ba meditsiny s religiei v drevnei Rusi [The Struggle of Medicine with Religion in Ancient Rus’] (Moscow, 1965), 18, 50-51. For studies of nineteenth century peasant healers, whose image has so colored that of their seventeenth-century counterparts, see Rose L. Glickman, “The Peasant Woman as Healer,” in Russia’s Women, 148-162; and Samuel Ramer, “Traditional Healers and Peasant Culture in Russia, 1861-1917,” in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics in European Russia, 1800-1917, Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds. (Princeton, 1990), 207-232. 13 G. Esipov, “Koldovstvo v XVII i XVIII stoletiiakh”[Sorcery in the 17th and 18th centuries], Drevniaia i novaia Rossiia: istoricheskii illiustritovannyi ezhemesiachnyi sbornik 1878 [Ancient and New Russia: the historical illustrated monthly anthology], vol. 4, 64; F. L. German, Sueverie v meditsine [Superstition in Medicine] (Kharkov, 1895); V. N. Leshkov, Chto i kak delalos’ v drevnei Rossii na pol’zu narodnago zdraviia [What and How Things Were Done in Ancient Russia for the Benefit of Popular Health] (no publisher, no date), 61-62, 69.

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pre-modern Russian healing were often written as political allegory, reflecting the agendas of the scholars’ own times, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this period, many government officials and social reformers advocated the extension of Western medicine to the non-elite. Ideologically, Western medicine marked modernity, and the triumph of science and education over backwardness as embodied in the person of folk healers who, in this period, were primarily women. At the same time, other government officials and social reformers valorized peasant life. For them, folk healers embodied connection with the natural world and the virtue of peasant self-reliance. Folk healers might be unschooled, but they had a wealth of ancient wisdom about remedies that could be scientifically proven to be efficacious. Most folk practitioners of healing did not identify themselves either as “witches” or “healers,” but rather by their social order or primary profession: “posadnyi chelovek” (“urban person”), “pod’iachii” (“subclerk”), or “streletskaia zhena” (“soldier’s wife”). It is only from the description of their offenses that it becomes clear that they stood accused as witches. For example, Pelageia Popova was never labeled a “witch,” but she was reputed to practice “porcha” (“hex”) and “volshebnoe vorovstvo” (“magical criminality”) in connection with the insanity of her neighbor Ul’iana, whom she “hexed” (isportila) and on whom she “practiced witchcraft” (uchinila vedovstvom).14 It was primarily the employees of the government’s Pharmacy Chancellery (Aptekarskii Prikaz)—mostly foreigners—who overtly claimed membership in the healing profession with the titles of “doctor” (dokhtur) or “medic/surgeon” (lekar’)15. Because the sources do not identify either “healers” or “witches” with consistent terminology, for the purpose of this article I will focus on those individuals who meet the following criteria. First, they engaged in the treatment of physical or mental illness, or in the prevention of physical or mental illness. Second, they were sought out for consultation by persons outside of their own families—that is, they appear to have had a reputation for healing abilities, whether or 14 N. Novombergskii, Materialy po istorii meditsiny v Rossii [Materials on the History of Medicine in Russia], 4 vols., ( 1: St. Petersburg, 1905; 2: St. Petersburg, 1906; 3, pt. 2: St. Petersburg, 1906; 4: Tomsk, 1907); the case in question, 4: 173-174. 15 On the Aptekarskii Prikaz, see Mikhail Sokolovskii, Kharakter i znachenie deiatel’nosti Aptekarskago prikaza [The Character and Meaning of the Activities of the Pharmaceutical Chancellery] (St. Petersburg, 1904).

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not it was their primary vocation. Third, they appear to have meant good for their clients, rather than harm to them or to others at their behest. (Granted, some magical workings fall into a gray area, such as coercing love from a reluctant spouse or favor from an antagonistic boss.) Fourth, they fell under suspicion for misuse of healing power. As the historical record reveals, the distinction between a “witch” and a “healer” lay largely in the eyes of the beholder. Most of the ordinary persons who practiced healing also provided their clients with spiritual protection from harmful external forces, supernatural help to achieve their goals, whether good or evil, and prognostication. In his seminal English-language article on folk healing in prePetrine Russia, Russell Zguta observed, “if a healer was successful, he gained faint praise; if not, he was accused of witchcraft, tried, and, on occasion, burned at the stake.”16 As we shall see, the healers’ situation was not even that good; even successful healers could be targeted. Yet, too, unsuccessful ones could escape. A typical Russian healer-cum-witch was Nester Semenov. An ethnic Pole and a herdsman by profession, Nester acted as a healer and a divinationist as well. He treated the sick—especially young people— and cast protective spells over infants, using prayers that invoked the Mother of God and God’s protection of their souls. In addition to healing, he performed magic, offering married persons charms to enhance their mutual affection and helping interested parties to discover the location of buried treasure. He swore that the prayers which accompanied his workings were “given to him from God,” and through them “God was merciful to his patients.” His activities lasted until 1673, when he offered a glass of ensorcelled wine to one Iakov Kosamovskii to help him to locate a buried treasure. When Iakov died the same day, his friends reported Nester for witchcraft. Arrested on a charge of sorcery, Nester insisted that he was innocent. “There is nothing evil, of heresy or witchcraft,” in his activities, he averred.17

16 Zguta, “Witchcraft and Medicine,” 448; see also Zguta, “Witchcraft Trials,” 1202. V. B. Antonovich makes this point, too, on the basis of eighteenth-century Ukrainian materials; cf. Koldovstvo: dokumenty, protsessy, izsledovanie [Sorcery: Documents, Trials, Research] (St. Petersburg, 1877), 20-21. 17 N. Novombergskii, Koldovstvo v Moskovskoi Rusi XVII-go stoletiia [Sorcery in Muscovite Rus’ of the 17th century] (St. Petersburg, 1906), 94-99; quotations on 96, 98.

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Nester fits the norm researchers have deduced from the sources. He was male, like the greater proportion of Russian witches. As a Pole, he was an outsider to the community in which he lived and worked, and his profession, herdsman, involved a measure of itinerancy. He engaged in magic and in healing in equal measure, using a combination of physical and spiritual methods. He did not invoke the devil, but he was accused of casting the hex (porcha). His incantations reveal both Orthodox and pagan elements. When arrested, he claimed that he meant no harm, but was only trying to help people. Was Nester a healer or a witch? In a time and place where the distinctions among science, magic, and religion were uncertain and contested, Nester could be both at once. The documents relating to his arrest labeled him a vedun (“witch”), despite his denial of “witchcraft” (vedunstvo).18 Yet the content of his “sorcerous” incantations did not differ much from officially authorized prayers for healing. Compare, for example, the “verses” (stikhi) that Nester recited (nagovarival) with a prayer from the 1658 service book (trebnik) issued by the Patriarchal Printing Office on the authority of Patriarch Nikon: Nester: Christ have mercy, and the most pure Mother of God, great lady, intercede for us sinners in this world by our fathers’ and mothers’ mercy, and with the baptized word [in which we] transgressed. Righteous sun, intercede for our sinful souls. Have mercy upon your servant Iakov from suffering and disease, and give him good and health forever and ever.19 1658 service book: Physician and helper of those in disease, redeemer and savior of those in illness: You are master and lord of all. Grant healing of your ailing servant N. Be generous, have mercy upon [this] very sinful [person] and forgive [his] transgressions, Christ, so as to glorify your divine power.20

The two prayers clearly do not stem from a single original text, and there is no reason to expect they would. After all, Nester averred that his text was “given to him by God, and simply nobody taught him.”21 But while Nester’s text could not be found in official prayer books, there is nothing in its content that would be out of place there. The elements of Orthodox prayer and symbolism that he used—Christ 18 19 20 21

Novombergskii, Koldovstvo, 95-96. Novombergskii, Koldovstvo, 97. Trebnik [Service Book] (Moscow, 1658), 125. Novombergskii, Koldovstvo, 98.

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as the Righteous Sun, the Intercession of the Mother of God, the admission of sin, the appeal for mercy—all could be found in officially approved texts. Of course, Nester used other of his prayers for goals not in keeping with officially-approved purposes, namely the location of buried treasure and eliciting mutual love between spouses. Still, he did not intend to harm his clients through his incantations, and all of them are overwhelmingly Christian in content. Indeed, the only heterodox element recorded in his several “verses” is his appeal to a sentient River in his incantation to inspire marital affection: “and whenever and wherever you, River, flow, eternal glory to you; and so [may there be] eternal dwelling for this husband and wife N.N.”22 Using any objective standard, one would be hard pressed to distinguish between prayers for healing of unquestionable Orthodoxy as marked by their inclusion in official service books and many of the incantations composed by folk healers—a pattern Gurevich noted also in the medieval West.23 The 1658 service book included not only prayers for healing, but also rituals for a variety of purposes for which peasants often consulted folk practitioners, such as cleansing a house of evil spirits. One prayer in this book for “any illness” implores God, “almighty master and physician of souls and bodies,” to “relieve him [the patient] of any sore, any disease, any wound, any fever, and ague,” using repetitions that are reminiscent of folk incantations.24 The prayers of the official service book included protective as well as curative elements, such as these: [P]rotect him (or her) from every attack and enmity, the oppression and torment of the wicked Devil, and drive away from him (or from her) the eternal satanic dreams and visions and fears, and preserve him (or her) for all of his [the Devil’s] tormenting power.25

While the focus on diabolical threat resembles Western European anxieties that underlay the witch hysteria,26 pre-modern Russians did not necessarily assume that individuals suffered from demonic illness because of the machination of sorcerers. On the contrary, most often individuals suffered from demons through no one’s fault; in a fallen 22 23 24 25 26

Novombergskii, Koldovstvo, 98. See, for example, Gurevich, Srednevekovyi mir, 282, 306. Trebnik (Moscow, 1658), 29-98 and 558-601; quotation on 562. Trebnik (Moscow, 1658), 570. See Gurevich, Srednevekovyi mir, 362.

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world, unclean spirits proliferated and took up residence wherever they could.27 Diseases themselves were often depicted as sentient beings, both in folk charms and in learned herbal manuals. Consequently, “physical” treatments were often suffused with spiritual elements, such as prayers or incantations pronounced over the medicines during their manufacture or during their administration. In this context, it becomes exceedingly difficult to disentangle the “physical” from the “magical” in the treatment of illness, as Gurevich also observed in the context of the medieval West.28 Herbal medical manuals contained instructions on the preparation of medicines that combined physical treatments, Orthodox spirituality, and magic. One guide contained a listing of herbs and its uses, formulae for protecting the site of a new home, a spell for the recovery of a lost horse, and numerous other magical workings, along with an excerpt from the ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen.29 In order to treat ill men and women in childbirth, another guide instructed the practitioner to take the herb “Adam’s head” (adamova glava), “tear that herb with the cross of the Lord, and say, ‘Our Father,’ ‘God have mercy upon me.’ Whoever is illiterate should recite the Jesus prayer 300 times.”30 Another herbal manual recom27 Eve Levin, “Innocent and Demon-Possessed in Early Modern Russia,” Culture and Identity in Eastern Christian History: Papers of the First Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture. Jennifer B. Spock and Russell E. Martin, eds., with the assistance of M. A. Johnson. Vol. 1 Eastern Christian Studies/Vol. 9 Ohio Slavic Papers (Columbus, 2010, forthcoming), 123-161. 28 Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, 61-62; 83; A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii, 1700-1740 [Magic and Religion in Russia, 1700-1740] (Moscow, 2000), 89-92; and E. B. Smilianskaia, Volshebniki, Bogokhul’niki, Eretiki: Narodnaia religioznost’ v “dukhovnye prestupleniia” v Rossii XVIIIv. [Wizards, Blasphemers, Heretics: Popular Religiosity and “spiritual crimes” in 18th century Russia] (Moscow, 2003), 65-118. 29 Russian State Library, Moscow [RGB], F. 310 Sobranie Undol’skogo, No. 696. [Undol’skii Collection]. 30 Cited in V. I. Florinskii, Russkie prostonarodnye travniki i lechebniki i sobranie meditsinskikh rukopisei XVI i XVII stoletiia [Russian popular herbalists and healers and the collection of medical manuscripts of the 16th and 17th centuries] (Kazan, 1879), 4. For other studies of herbal manuals, see L. F. Zmeev, Russkie drevlepisannye vrachebniki [Ancient Russian medical manuscripts] (St. Petersburg, 1895); V. F. Gruzdev, Russkie rukopisnye lechebniki [Russian handwritten medical manuals] (Leningrad, 1946); A. A. Turilov, “Narodnye pover’ia v russkikh lechebnikakh,” [Popular beliefs in Russian medical manuals] in Otrechennoe chtenie v Rossii XVII-XVIII vekov [Prohibited Readings in 17th-18th century Russia], A. L.Toporkov and A. A. Turilov, eds. (Moscow, 2002), 367-375.

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mended keeping plakun (willow herb, St. John’s wort, or loosestrife) in a dwelling in order to keep an “unclean spirit” (dukh nechistoi) from entering. Persons wearing a plakun root with their cross “will not die an evil death.” Further, the anonymous author warned, “without this herb no other herbs will bring any aid.”31 Yet another herbal manual described the herb called “Peter’s cross” (petrov krest) as “very good;” not only did it cure women’s menstrual cramps, but also instructed “whoever goes out into the world, take this root with you, so that God will protect you from heretics and sudden death.”32 Such elements were characteristic not only of healing books in common circulation, but also in the manuals used by the government’s own Pharmacy Chancellery. A healing book (lechebnik) of the early eighteenth century contains rules for the operation of the Pharmacy Chancellery and a calendar of the best times for bloodletting, as well as an Orthodox defense of medical practice attributed to the venerable Church Father Nikon the Great and a list of 70 herbs to cure the hex (porcha) or food poisoning (okorm).33 If books whose content focused on physical medicine often contained Christian and magical elements, Orthodox compendia frequently contained texts concerning physical medicine and magic. A miscellany from the seventeenth century contains a “conversation” between the body and the soul, several accounts of the transfer of saints’ relics, and a circular chart of the four humors, based on Western concepts of medicine. This book belonged to a priest, Nikifor Simeonov.34 In a more practical vein, many monasteries took in and cared for sick patients, and many monastic libraries kept herbal guides. Despite some disdainful rhetoric against “physicians” and their treatments, the Church did not issue a blanket prohibition 31

RGB, F. 310 Sobranie Undol’skogo, No. 1072, ff. 27-27v; 39v. “Travnik” [Herbalist], published in Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi, konets XVI-nachalo XVII vekov [Monuments of ancient Russian literature at the end of the 16th century-beginning of 17th century] (Moscow, 1987), 494. For more information on magical content of travniki, see Lavrov, Koldovstvo, 89-91. 33 Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom), Koll. Velichko, No. 26; ff. 10v-13; 18v-21; 112v-170; 264v-266. 34 State Historical Museum [GIM], Sinodal’noe sobranie [Synodal Collection], No. 758; the chart of the humors is on f. 1. The provenance of the book is derived from an inscription on the inside cover; a notation on the back cover includes the date March 22, 168 (=1660). 168 is the calendar year in Muscovite usage of the 17th century. It is short for 7168, the year according to the Byzantine calendar, which traced to Creation. Muscovites often omitted the “7”, just as we omit the “19” or “20” in our dates. 32

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against the practice of physical medicine. Indeed, the high-ranking cleric Archbishop Afanasii of Kholmogory (d. 1702) compiled his own medical manual.35 Church leaders were considerably less tolerant of the practice of magic, even when its practitioners intended no harm and invoked no devils.36 The distinction between magical healing, which was forbidden, and Orthodox spiritual healing, which was promoted, proved difficult to discern in real life. On the one hand, Muscovite ecclesiastical writers encouraged Orthodox Christians to seek healing through prayer, and multitudes of people responded, reporting miraculous healings at the shrines housing relics and icons of the saints. Most often, patients obtained release from their afflictions directly from the saints through their own prayers, with minimal input from clergy.37 However, the advent of the mid-17th century Old Belief, a radical schismatic movement that challenged the authority of Church and State, made both institutions increasingly wary of popular cults and claims of miracles of the sort they had previously endorsed. To further complicate matters, Russia lacked articulated definitions of forbidden magic as well as cadre of ecclesiastical experts—exorcists and inquisitors—to distinguish the magical from the religious or the heretical from the orthodox. Most allegations of witchcraft, and many of heterodoxy, came before secular officials who had no formal training in either religion or in law. Muscovite officials tended to handle accusations of witchcraft as a criminal matter akin to assault, murder, or treason, which, they believed, could be carried out through magical means. On the other hand, healers could not escape suspicion merely by omitting all words of power and simply dispensing herbal medicines, because the herbs themselves embodied spiritual as well as physical powers. Indeed, Muscovite authorities treated herbal medicines as controlled substances.38 Consequently, the mere possession of herbal recipes and herbs sufficed to justify a charge of witchcraft. For example, when the itinerant 35 T. V. Panich, Literaturnoe tvorchestvo Afanasiia Kholmogorskogo [The Literary creativity of Afanasiia Kholmogorsky] (Novosibirsk, 1996), 121-138. 36 W. F. Ryan, “Witchcraft Hysteria,” 67. 37 Bushkovitch, Religion and Society, 100-127; Eve Levin, “From Corpse to Cult in Early Modern Russia,” in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, eds. (University Park, PA, 2003), 81-103. 38 Eve Levin, “Government Regulation of the Herbal Medicine Trade in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” NCEEER [National Council for Eurasian and East European Research], Working Paper, 2001.

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horse trainer Ivan Kirillov reported to the government reception office upon his arrival in Ostashkov, he was arrested because he was found to have a bag of herbs and bloodletting tools on his person.39 In another case, from 1721, investigators tracking the provenance of an amulet found in possession of a government clerk went to the wrong address, where they found a box of herbs and an illegible notebook in the possession of the doorman, Il’ia Afanas’ev. Il’ia said that the herbs did not even belong to him but were the property of his deceased wife, who had practiced healing. He was arrested anyway and died under interrogation.40 The official in charge of the investigation sent Il’ia’s wife’s box to the Pharmacy Chancellery for analysis, with instructions that the pharmacy staff should describe exactly what materials the box contained and what purpose they had. The foreign doctor Antonius de Theyls, the pharmacist Iohann Schlenik, and the Russian herbalists (travniki) Ivan Grigor’ev and Mikhail Grigor’ev reported back. The box contained a variety of herbs and roots, bits of wood, and stones, some of which had medicinal uses (or they would have, if fresh) and others not. Some of the items the chancellery staff could not identify. Although the pharmacists gave no indication that the items could be used in sorcery, the prosecutor took their report to indicate that Il’ia had no legitimate purpose in keeping the materials.41 When the suspicious herbs were sent to the state Pharmacy for examination in 1721, the practice was already long-established. In 1700, the Pharmacy was called upon to examine a small bag, apparently containing myrrh, which officials of the Kirillov monastery had confiscated from one of their peasants. Chancellery doctors found a beetle (zhuzhelitsa) inside and averred that such beetles had no medicinal use.42 In 1673, Pharmacy Chancellery personnel were called in to identify herbs uncovered in six investigations. In three cases, they confirmed medicinal uses for the herbs, and in one additional case, they stated that the herbs were harmless. In the two remaining cases, they could not identify the substances at all.43 In a 39

Novombergskii, Vrachebnoe stroenie, xxxiii-xxxviii. N. Ia. Novombergskii, Slovo i delo gosudarevo, [Lese-majesty] 2 vols., (1909; repr. Moscow, 2004), 2: 135, 140, 142. 41 Novombergskii, Slovo i delo gosudarevo, 2: 140-142. 42 Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts [RGADA], F. 143, op. 3, no. 485. 43 Mater’ialy dlia istorii meditsiny v Rossii , 4 vols., (St. Petersburg, 1881-1884) 2: 464-495. 40

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similar case in 1657, Pharmacy personnel examined roots that a servant, Andrei Durbenev, kept in a bag. He claimed that he used one type to treat people’s stomach aches, another to treat horses, and a third for teeth; the herbs, he said, grew ubiquitously in fields and yards. The investigator asked Chancellery officials to determine “what is that root and is it not criminal?”. The doctors and pharmacists responded that one root came from the plant bolder’ian (= valerian), and “nothing whatsoever harmful happens from that root,” although they could not say that it would be helpful in curing any condition. The other roots were too dried out to be identifiable, but in that state they could not be dangerous.44 Possession of suspicious herbs did not necessarily lead to conviction on a charge of witchcraft, even in the presence of other suspicious factors, as a case from 1628 indicates. The suspect in this case was Andrei Bisakov syn Loptunov, a carter and serf from Toropets, who was apprehended in Rzhev. Andrei claimed that he suffered from the “black disease,” and that his master had given him permission to go on pilgrimage to seek healing at holy sites. The herb was simply another form of treatment. The master, Mikhailo Polibin, confirmed Andrei’s story, adding that he had given Andrei permission to take vows as a monk if his condition did not improve. However, because Andrei had the herb in his possession and because his itinerancy was in itself suspect, investigators kept probing. Where had Andrei gotten the herb? From another traveler on the road, Andrei responded; he could not recall where. At that point, the investigator sent the herb to Moscow to the Pharmacy Chancellery, apparently with a list of questions. The Dutch doctor Valentin Bills and his colleagues . . . examined the root and said, that this root is “goose flesh” (gusina plot’) and is suitable as medicine, and there is nothing bad in it, even if this root is put in the mouth. And if someone wants to engage in crime (vorovat’), and he puts something harmful (durno) on this good root through criminality (vorovstvo) and incantation (nagovor), that they do not know, if there is an incantation on that root. 44 Mater’ialy dlia istorii meditsiny, 3: 676-677. Valerian has been widely used since ancient times, primarily as a sedative, although it is known to relieve cramps and improve digestion; see Deni Brown, The Herb Society of America New Encyclopedia of Herbs and Their Uses (New York, 2001), 399-400. It is curious that the Pharmacy Chancellery personnel would not be aware of valerian’s medicinal uses, but in 1665, Dr. Samuel Collins presented a lecture on its properties; see Unkovskaya, Brief Lives, 24.

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Satisfied at last, the investigator ordered Andrei released, but had him escorted to the Arkhangelskii monastery in Ustiug, to make sure that he did not slip away.45 Yet the questions Muscovite officials posed to Dr. Bills reveal two unexpected Muscovite conceptions: that a sorcerer could change a harmless herb into a harmful one by reciting an incantation over it, and that the physical examination of an herb might reveal the presence of spiritual contamination. The mere possession of herbs, even seemingly harmless ones, then, could in itself substantiate a charge of witchcraft to Muscovite authorities. Yet, as Andrei Loptunov’s experience demonstrates, arrest did not necessarily lead to conviction. He had a protector in the person of his master, who vouched for him. Similarly the peasant horse-doctor Maksim Ivanov was able to extricate himself from a charge of sorcery, despite much more compelling evidence against him. Maksim was arrested in April 1629 for killing a patient with his potion. Under torture, he admitted to the crime and implicated others, who were also arrested. But among Maksim’s clients was Rafail, the abbot of the Pecherskii monastery in Nizhegorod, who petitioned the tsar for his release. Maksim had incriminated himself only because “he was unable to withstand torture,” the abbot wrote. He and the other healers who had been arrested as a result of his coerced testimony were all innocent, and none of the others had admitted guilt, even under interrogation. It was not Maksim’s remedy that had caused the patient’s death, and even the patient’s husband, who had made the initial accusation, now pointed the finger at someone else. Abbot Rafail asked that Maksim’s case be transferred to Nizhnyi Novgorod, where, evidently, he would have sufficient influence to gain the prisoner’s release. On March 10, 1630, about a year after Maksim was originally arrested, his protector’s petition was granted.46 Another accused witch, the Mordvin Sobaika Beliaev, chose a different strategy—strict denial. Implicated by a woman, Aniutka, who had fed his potion to her husband with tragic results, Sobaika held firm under severe torture and a face-to-face confrontation with his accuser: he did not give Aniutka any root, he did not keep roots or dispense them, and he did not practice witchcraft. In search of evidence against him, Muscovite officials conducted mass interrogations 45 Novombergskii, Koldovstvo, 9-12; quotation on 12. The text mentions only the doctor’s first name, but according to Unkovskaya, Brief Lives, 7-8, Dr. Valentin Bills was the second-ranked court physician from 1615 to 1632. 46 Novombergskii, Koldovstvo, 14-15; quotation on 23.

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of villagers in the region—Russians, Mordvins, and Tatars—but not a single one of the 285 people questioned admitted to knowing about any medical activity on Sobaika’s part. Popular sympathy was clearly on Sobaika’s side; when soldiers came to take Sobaika’s family away, his neighbors besieged his house and released his wife and children. After over three years in prison, Sobaika petitioned for release, arguing that there was no evidence against him. His petition was granted.47 Although many healers who were accused of sorcery came from the lower social orders, itinerants, or non-Russian ethnic groups, ethnic Russians and persons of high rank were not immune to allegations of witchcraft. The priest Andrei from Nikulinskoe village in the Siam district of Vologda province found himself under suspicion in 1702 because of a protective prayer he wrote “with his own hand” for one of his parishioners: . . .there would be no disease in his legs until the end of time; he would be saved from all Satanic imaginings, enemies, and devils, and from serious diseases, from the black illness (chernyi nedug), from the shaking illness (trasovitsa), from the pox (shchery), and from one’s own night illnesses (rodovye nedugi noshchnye), and from every illness and disease. Wherever he goes on the road, may nothing unfortunate meet him; from furious fire, from dreams and enemies; may nothing do anything in eyes or from eyes. And so, if it happens that a person dies, may the Devil not come near to his soul, but may the Angels of the Lord bring him to the archangelic throne of the Archangel Gabriel. And may he not [have] great torment, and be respected by good people.

When the parishioner died, Father Andrei reclaimed the paper and wore it in his hat as a talisman. Unfortunately, the charm did not work. One of Father Andrei’s parishioners, the widowed gentry woman (pomeshchitsa) Maria Bitiagovskaia, filed a complaint with secular authorities, claiming that he caused “great schism and argument” (velikii raskol i ssora) in his church. Father Andrei argued that Maria’s real reason for her accusation was his lease of an abandoned village that she owned. The charges of adherence to Old Belief and dissolute behavior, however, were overshadowed by the charge of witchcraft that stemmed from Father Andrei’s composition of original prayer texts. He was found guilty disseminating “criminal, sor-

47

Novombergskii, Vrachebnoe stroenie, viii-xxvi.

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cerous writings” (vorovskie volshebnye pis’ma) and was sentenced to exile at hard labor.48 The situation in Nikulinskoe illustrates several of the features Gurevich highlighted. Father Andrei’s downfall clearly arose out of local tensions, namely his feud with the gentry woman Bitiagovskaia and his role in the dissension in the village. Maria Bitiagovskaia’s original petition alleged that Father Andrei diverged from proper Orthodoxy, but the charge mutated into one of witchcraft. Yet the evidence used to convict him of sorcery, the prayer he composed, would appear to be innocuous. It was not so different from texts contained in official printed service books; it invoked only Christian figures, and it aimed to protect the recipient rather than to cause him harm. As a priest, Father Andrei would seem to have authorization to adapt Orthodox prayer themes as appropriate; priests traditionally provided their parishioners with the words and rituals that responded to their needs. Father Andrei was the victim not only of village politics, but also of the Petrine state’s increasing hostility toward “superstition.” Another priest, Grisha Eliseev, practiced not only spiritual but also physical healing, and he too encountered accusations of sorcery. Originally a priest in the city of Kostroma, Grisha kept notebooks of protective prayers and a guide to the use of herbal medicines, particularly focused on aiding women’s reproductive health. Apparently, he practiced with women patients. In 1689 he was condemned for witchcraft and for theft of church property, and he was defrocked and sent into exile in Rzhev. But a year later, he had fled from exile, and in 1697, he resurfaced in Moscow. There he became acquainted with maids in service to Ekaterina Alekseevna, Peter the Great’s halfsister, and through them, he gained the tsarevna’s favor. He became a regular in Ekaterina’s household, and he traveled with her to Izmailovo. His duties included prayers for the tsarevna’s well-being— “that evil would not befall her, the tsarevna, and that the tsar would be merciful to her”—as well as writing letters for her. The tsarevna’s lady-in-waiting, Maria Shein, tried to intercede on his behalf with the Patriarch to get his sentence of exile lifted and his priesthood reinstated. But when the whole household came under suspicion of treasonous activity associated with Maria’s husband, Grisha’s past came to light, along with his “sorcery,” which he denied. Ultimately, he was 48

Novombergskii, Slovo i delo gosudarevo, 2: 85-89, quotations on 86.

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condemned to hard labor in Azov, and his “criminal” writings were burned on his back.49 As the cases of Grisha Eliseev and Father Andrei illustrate, often witchcraft constituted only one of numerous charges. In these cases as in many others, it was not dissatisfied clients who denounced the healer-witch, but rather persons who had a grudge against them for other reasons, or against their clients. For example, it was a servant in the household of Ivan Ustinov syn [son] Khrushchev, who reported the healer Ivashko Vasil’ev, whom Khrushchev had brought in to treat his wife’s illness.50 When the runaway house servant Anfinogen Nikonov was apprehended, he accused his master, Dmitrii Shamordin, of sorcery and of treason against the tsar. Anfinogen’s evidence of treason consisted of an herbal manual he had stolen from his master. The manual itself was short—only five folia—listing 19 herbs, how to find them, and their medicinal uses. The recommended uses included both consuming the herbs and wearing them as protection. None of the herbs were intended to cause harm, although some could be used to gain favor from another, unsuspecting, person. The text was suffused with Christian references, such as “God will have mercy” on the patient through the medium of the herbal medicine. Yet the mere possession of the booklet led to Shamordin’s arrest on suspicion of sorcery, allowing his runaway servant to redirect the authorities’ attention away from his own criminal flight and theft. Although the treason charge was dismissed—the matter did not relate to “the Sovereign’s health and dishonor to his person,” the boyar in charge of the case ruled—Shamordin was not released.51 Because allegations of treason were so certain to result in investigation, individuals accused of wrongdoing not infrequently redirected hostile official scrutiny towards their accusers in this manner. Even when the persons accused of treason had no contact with the Imperial family or with known conspirators, their possession of booklets of prayers or herbal recipes, herbs themselves, or amulets could suffice as evidence of intended magical assault on the tsar. Then the search into the origin of the magical formulae or materials would implicate additional individuals, including ordinary healers who had no reason to engage in political sorcery. 49 50 51

Novombergskii, Materialy, 4: 647-683, esp. 651-653, 656-658, 663, and 682. Novombergskii, Materialy, 4: 226-231. Novombergskii, Slovo i delo gosudarevo, 72-80, quotations from 77, 80.

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One such instance involved the members of the household of the noblewoman Avdot’ia Volynskaia. In 1698, Avdot’ia blamed her servant woman (dvorovaia zhena) Dun’ka Iakushina for hexing other women servants, and shipped her off to a country estate. Dun’ka ran off, but Avdot’ia’s husband apprehended her and turned her over to government officials on grounds of sorcery. At that point, Dun’ka alleged treason on the part of her mistress, Avdot’ia Volynskaia, claiming that she conspired with the former regent Sofia to harm Tsar Peter by burying ensorcelled earth in his path. Dun’ka further alleged that Avdot’ia enlisted Fionka Semenova, a peasant woman who was the wife of a boot maker, to formulate the magical potion. Based on Dun’ka’s testimony, both Avdot’ia and Fionka were interrogated. If Avdot’ia fell under suspicion because of her close ties to important persons, including the tsar’s half-sister, Tsarevna Marfa Alekseevna, and his mother, Tsaritsa Natalia, Fionka faced scrutiny because of her practice of healing. Fionka did not deny her involvement with folk healing. On the contrary, she testified that she had benefited from it herself in her youth, when an itinerant healer named Ivashko had cured her of the “screeching disease” (klikotnaia bolezn’) with an herbal drink. Subsequently, Fionka herself practiced healing [. . .] she fed herself going to houses; she healed all ranks of males and females of all diseases, except the screeching disease, buying herbs at the vegetable market, asking the booth attendants which [herb] would be effective for which illness, in her simplicity without incantations. She did not study medicine with anybody. She healed herself with these herbs—skorodubok (= ?rocambole or sand-leek), donnik (= ?alfalfa or meadowsweet), and lenok dikii (= ?statice or toadflax)—with which the traveling man Ivashko healed her, Fionka, from the screeching illness, buying them from the vegetable market. She came to the home of okol’nichii (courtier) Prince Ivan Nikitich Zasekin to his wife, to Princess Avdot’ia, who is now [married] to Petr Volynskii, because her husband used to sew boots and shoes for him, Prince Ivan, and for her, Avdot’ia, and for their servants. And she, Fionka, healed her, Avdot’ia of a high fever (likhoradka), and her brother Vasilii Golovlenkov of swelling in his leg (nogu ot lomoty), and Vasilii’s wife from the “fearing disease” (strakhovatel’naia bolezn’).

Fionka denied concocting any sort of malevolent potion to harm the tsar at Avdot’ia behest. She averred that “she, Fionka, is a good person (chelovek dobryi) and did not engage in petty matters (za khudym delom ne khodila).” Instead, it was Dun’ka who engaged in witchcraft,

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hexing the other serving women in the household. In the face-to-face confrontation that followed, Fionka was judged to be the one telling the truth when Dun’ka admitted that Avdot’ia Volynskaia had sent her away on suspicion of witchcraft. Ultimately, all the testimony vindicated Avdot’ia of political sorcery, and so Fionka escaped as well. Yet the false charge came back to haunt them two years later when a Volynskii servant again accused Avdot’ia of being a “heretic” (eretitsa) and a witch who plotted with a “baba” (midwife)—apparently Fionka—to attack the tsar through magic.52 Another healer, Dorofei Prokof’ev, was similarly implicated in a plot against Peter the Great masterminded by his social superiors in 1689. The suspected traitor in this case was the stolnik (administrator) Andrei Il’ich Bezobrazov. In addition to conspiring with the known traitor Fedor Shaklovityi, Bezobrazov reputedly searched out “sorcerers and witches” (volkhvy i vorozhei) from among his peasant dependents and ordered them to cast spells concerning the health of the tsar and his mother. One of these “sorcerers” was Dorofei, who had treated animals belonging to the Bezobrazov household. But when arrested and interrogated, Dorofei did not identify himself as a “sorcerer,” but rather as a posadskii chelovek (artisan), specifically a horse-trainer (konoval) and a blood-letter (rudomet’). He admitted to practicing bean divination and palm reading53 in addition to treating the illnesses of children and adults with herbs and incantations. His bag contained beans, incense (for protecting brides and grooms from sorcerers, Dorofei said), and a variety of herbs. The herb bogoroditskaia (= royal fern) he gathered himself on St. John’s Day, while reciting the charm “whatever you, herb, are good for, be good for that.” But he denied ever casting a spell to harm the sovereign, and he claimed not to be acquainted with Andrei Bezobrazov—a lie that was quickly uncovered when Dorofei was subjected to torture. At that point Dorofei changed his story: Bezobrazov had asked him to cast a spell on the tsar, but only to make him feel favorably towards Bezobrazov, not to damage the sovereign’s health. Dorofei gave his interrogators examples of the incantations that he used in fortunetelling, all intertwined invocations of Christian figures with sympa52 G. Esipov, “Koldovstvo v XVII i XVIII stoletiiakh,” Drevniaia i novaia Rossiia [Ancient and Modern Russia], 3, (1878) 157-160; quotation from original text on 158; Novombergskii, Slovo i delo gosudarevo, 2: 17-24. 53 On bean divination and palm reading as a fortune-telling techniques, see Ryan, Bathhouse, 113-114, 157-158.

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thetic magic. In short, Dorofei tried to rescue himself by claiming that his healing and fortune-telling activities were all well-intentioned. But the investigators, and Peter himself, were convinced of Bezobrazov’s guilt, which meant Dorofei was guilty as well. Bezobrazov was beheaded, and Dorofei was burned at the stake as a witch.54 Both Fionka and Dorofei tried to extricate themselves from charges of witchcraft by admitting to benign, helpful use of the power to heal. That Fionka succeeded and Dorofei failed had more to do with the disposition of the charges levied against their aristocratic clients than with the character of their medicinal activities. Well-positioned patrons could be either a source of protection or of danger, as another folk healer, Evtiushka Markov, discovered too late. Evtiushka Markov practiced healing in Moscow for many years before he was entrapped in accusations of sorcery. Although he had trained as a boot maker and was employed as a doorman, Evtiushka had also studied healing with Russian employees of the state Pharmacy, as well as with Russian folk healers. His healing involved administering herbs “without incantations,” as he averred. He had even reported another healer-cum-magician, the plumber’s wife Marfushka Dolgaia, for witchcraft in 1682, accusing her of causing Tsar Fedor’s death by sorcery. In the investigation that followed his denunciation, Marfushka died under torture, denying her guilt, and Evtiushka was exonerated. He continued to treat patients of both modest backgrounds and high-rank, the latter including Arina Fedorova, a former lady of the bedchamber to the regent Sofia and her sister, Tsarevna Maria. Evtiushka also had clients at the Novodevich’e convent in Moscow, where Sofia had been imprisoned after her brother, Peter, deposed her, as well as among the musketeers (streltsy), who in 1698 rebelled against Peter in her defense. One musketeer, in an effort to escape the punishment inflicted upon his fellows, denounced Evtiushka for sorcery on behalf of Sofia’s allies. Evtiushka denied culpability, but died under torture.55 Clearly, then, even healers whose patients suffered no ill effects could find themselves accused of witchcraft, often with fatal conse54 Askolon Truvorov, “Volkhvy i vorozhei na Rusi, v kontse XVII veka,” [Sorcerers and Soothsayers in Russia during the 17th century] Istoricheskii vestnik 1889, 701-705; quotation on 704. 55 Esipov, “Koldovstvo v XVII i XVIII stoletiiakh,” Drevniaia i novaia Rossiia, 3 (1878), 66-70.

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quences. Yet in other cases, the patients died and the practitioners, while called to answer, were not charged with sorcery. For example, the monk Makarii, the cell attendant of Archbishop Gelasii of Ustiug and Tot’ma, and Grigorii, a priest at the Church of Simeon the Stylite, were both implicated in the archbishop’s death. Several members of Gelasii’s entourage noted that Grigorii often visited the archbishop in his cell and prepared medicine for him. After Gelasii’s death, Grigorii came and served drinks—vodka—to the clergy who were inventorying the contents of the archbishop’s cell, and several got sick to the point of vomiting. Makarii himself drank some of the medicine Grigorii prepared for the archbishop—one must recall here that medicines were formulated from wine or vodka—and vomited afterwards. Thus, Makarii directed suspicion towards Grigorii. Grigorii refused to give any details about Gelasii’s illness or the medicines, citing an oath of confidentiality he gave to the patient; instead, he referred the investigators to Gelasii’s confessor. The drink he served to the members of the entourage conducting the inventory, he said, consisted of “wine” (vino, perhaps vodka) suffused with pepper, which had belonged to the archbishop. The investigators apparently found Grigorii’s responses satisfactory, but Makarii’s evasive; key points in his testimony were disproved. Ultimately, Makarii was shipped off to another monastery as a prisoner, and no action was taken against Grigorii. Although the documents of the case are incomplete, it does not appear as though either man was accused of witchcraft.56 In a different case in which the patient died, both a folk healer, Fed’ka Belozertsov, and a physician of the Pharmacy Chancellery, Dr. Samuel Collins, were involved. The patient was the eminent Muscovite boyar Boris Morozov, a relative by marriage of Tsar Aleksei. Morozov suffered from a persistent emission of fluid from his ears—what the chancellery document identified as the “wet disease” (mokrotnaia bolezn’)—and in October 1662, he died. He consulted both Belozertsov and Collins just days before he died, and he took medicines prescribed by both. After his death, chancellery officials launched an investigation, calling the folk healer Belozertsov,

56 Akty kholmogorskoi i ustiuzhskoi eparkhii [Acts of the Kholmogorsk and Ustiuzhsk Diocese] = (or, Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka [Russian Historical Library] 14) 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1894) 2: cols. 1141-1152.

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but not the foreign physician Collins, to account. Belozertsov faced questions concerning his treatment of the patient: What root did he, Fed’ka, give to Boyar Boris Ivanovich Morozov, which he took boiled in milk? Where did he get that root? For what reason did he give it to him to take? Why does he know that root, and where did he study medical matters? Did he treat anyone with this root before this, and what were their names? For what illness did he give Boyar Boris Ivanovich Morozov this root?57

The folk healer was forthcoming about his treatment. He prescribed the herb “hare’s paw” (zaich’e kopyto = ?red clover), boiled in milk. He gave a sample of the herb to Morozov’s servants, who gathered it themselves on his estate. Belozertsov testified that he learned the recipe from his mother, who had herself learned it from a priest’s widow. He and his mother had both taken the medicine themselves for years, to no ill effects, and he offered to do so again in the presence of the investigators. He had warned Morozov that the herb could have minor side-effects of melancholy (toska) and hot flashes (zhar), but “that melancholy and heat diminishes by itself as the person gets better.” Morozov decided to try the treatment and “trust in this on God’s will.”58 Chancellery doctors and pharmacists examined the plant Belozertsov had prescribed, and identified it as an herb “called in the Latin language Crasula or Fabaria or Telefium.” They noted that it was used in a “salve for drinking” in the pharmacy, but that it was not listed in herbal manuals as safe.59 Dr. Collins’ prescription, in comparison, is recorded in the register of the pharmacy: October 4, 170 (=1662) according to the prescription of Doctor Samuel Collins a medicine was prepared for Boyar Boris Ivanovich Morozov. This medicine contained 16 zolotniki of syrup from the herb hyssop, 3 drops of anise oil, laudanum opiatum under 4 zeren, and all of that mixed and moistened in licorice root. It should be taken with licorice root as much as necessary. Recorded.60

Most of the contents of Collins’ medicine are as benign as the clover Belozertsov prescribed, although the opium could certainly have had an excessive sedative effect on an already-weakened patient. Collins 57 58 59 60

Novombergskii, Materialy, 1: 12. Novombergskii, Materialy, 1: 12-13. Novombergskii, Materialy, 1: 5. Novombergskii, Materialy, 1: 4.

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did not face any repercussions as a result of his failed treatment; he remained the leading physician on the staff of the Pharmacy Chancellery until 1667.61 What happened to the folk healer Belozertsov is not recorded, but nothing in the tenor of extant materials suggests that he faced charges of sorcery. Russian officials did not rule out the possibility that the medical professionals employed by the Pharmacy Chancellery could engage in witchcraft themselves. The oath required of them specified their role in protecting their patients—the tsar, his family, his court, and his army—from magical as well as physical harm: . . . in all and every food and drink and medicine, not to arrange or corrupt (isportit’) with anything harmful (likha), nor by any means or with any deceit (khitrost’) give harmful herbs or roots, nor to approach the sovereign with any evil intentions or by mean of the hex (porcha), or to mix into your medicines or healing substances any evil herbs or roots at all.... And if I see someone [else] who wants to hurt (portiti) the sovereign himself or intends some sort of harm, or [obtains] from his fellows evil or unclean substances which can destroy their health or defile [him], I will not take evil herbs or roots from that person or listen to that person. But having seized that person, I will take him to the sovereign tsar....or to his, the sovereign’s boyar in whose charge (prikaz) the pharmacy is [entrusted].62

Muscovite government officials might have good reason to be suspicious of Chancellery employees; many were foreigners, adherents of heretical (from the Muscovite perspective) Protestant or Catholic faiths. Yet despite the worry that this oath reflects, the Muscovite government did entrust Chancellery employees with determining the magical qualities of suspicious herbs (as discussed above) and even with diagnosing illnesses resulting from magic. So Dr. Andreas Engelhardt advised Tsar Aleksei to purchase the “unicorn horn” a German merchant offered for sale, arguing that “all philosophers say with one voice” that it could protect against “any poisoning and hex (porcha) and plague winds and pox and scabs and other recent diseases.”63 Dr. Lev Lichifinus diagnosed a hex (ot porchikh) as the cause of the minor serviceman (zhilets) Ivan Chortov’s propensity for masturbation (rukobludie).64 Dr. Lichifinus was already 61 62 63 64

Unkovskaya, Brief Lives, 23-24. Mater’ialy, 1: 48-49; for similar oaths, see 50-51, 53, 55-56. RGADA, F. 143 Aptekarskii prikaz, op. 2, No. 194, f. 3. RGADA, F. 143 Aptekarskii Prikaz, op. 2, No. 344.

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accustomed to treating Russian patients who suspected spiritual origins of their illnesses. Before taking employment at the Pharmacy Chancellery in 1656, he had treated the Muscovite general Boyar Vasilii Vasil’evich Buturlin, who suffered from a hex (porcha), using oil and a stone.65 However, the foreign medical providers invoked magic as an explanation for their patients’ conditions only rarely, preferring to name causes associated with the Western humoral explanatory system, or miasmas and astrology. Unlike their Russian folk healer counterparts, the foreign medical personnel seem to have faced charges of witchcraft rarely, even when their treatments were ineffective. For example, when Dr. Arnoldus van der Gulst’s patient Fedor Neledinskii died in 1682, he faced questions from Chancellery officials: what kind of illness had the patient suffered from, what medicines did he administer, and why had he not consulted with other physicians? Another foreign physician, Dr. Andreas Kellermann, was asked to examine the body and determine whether Dr. van der Gulst was at fault. Kellermann advised them that the patient had died of a fever, not from van der Gulst’s medicine.66 Apparently the chancellery officials were satisfied; they kept Dr. van der Gulst on the staff until his death in 1694.67 The Greek doctor identified in Russian documents as Dmitrei Selunskoi (“Demetrius of Thessaloniki”) similarly escaped allegations of witchcraft, although not of malpractice. One of Dmitrei’s patients, who had also consulted the Western pharmacist Andreas Gessenius, died while under the former’s care. Gessenius, along with the German doctor Hartmann Gramann, brought charges against Dmitrei in the Pharmacy Chancellery, claiming that he did not have the requisite education or credentials and that he was collecting huge fees. Chancellery officials investigated, asking Dmitrei about his training (from doctors in Thessaloniki and Constantinople, he responded), his fees (gifts of food, wine, and clothing only), and his treatment in the case in question (the patient died more than a week after Dmitrei’s last treatment and at a distant location). The officials also quizzed him on the proper treatment of ordinary illnesses—headache and sore feet—and seemed satisfied with his answers, although the ulti-

65 66 67

Mater’ialy, 3: 647-648. Mater’ialy, 4: 1288-1289. On Arnoldus van der Gulst’s later career, see Unkovskaya, Brief Lives, 42-43.

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mate outcome of the case is not recorded.68 In short, instead of treating Dmitrei as a probable witch subject to criminal prosecution, chancellery officials treated the case as a civil matter, defamation, between foreigners in their employ. Nonetheless, foreign medical professionals could be charged with acts of sorcery. In 1674, the cavalryman Silo Semenov syn Potemkin claimed that the doctor Mikulai Grek (“Nicholas the Greek”) had used “hexes (porcha) and cutting,” against his (Silo’s) explicit instructions, in the treatment of his herniated testicle. As a result of Mikulai’s malpractice, Silo said, he was unable to sit a horse without great pain. However, Silo made this complaint about the quality of care only after Mikulai sued him for non-payment for services rendered, suggesting that he (Silo) was not intent upon seeing Mikulai arrested for witchcraft. Once again, Pharmacy Chancellery officials dealt with the case as a civil rather than a criminal matter. They sent three doctors, including Stefan von Gaden, a favorite of the imperial family, to examine Silo. The three reported that he had been cured. Based on this expert testimony, Mikulai won his suit, and the chancellery helped him to collect his money.69 Ironically, Stefan von Gaden was himself the target of allegations of witchcraft from another employee of the Pharmacy Chancellery, the Russian David Berlov. Berlov’s primary complaint was against his son-in-law, to whom he owed money. According to Berlov, his sonin-law had learned magic from Artamon Matveev, a one-time head of the chancellery and an intimate of the Naryshkin family of the widowed Tsaritsa Natalia and her young son Peter. Berlov himself claimed to have witnessed Matveev engaging in magic from books along with Dr. von Gaden, including the harnessing of the Devil into their service. Matveev denied the charge, stating that the books concerned science, not magic. Yet the suspicion of sorcery dogged Matveev; further charges that he dealt in magic books and herbs were made to his successor at the Pharmacy Chancellery.70 During the Streltsy Revolt of 1682, Matveev was murdered, and Dr. Stefan von

68 Mater’ialy, 3: 616-618; see also Unkovskaya, Brief Lives, 14-16 and 45, on the Western medical personnel’s involvement in this case. 69 Mater’ialy, 3: 526-530. 70 Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: the Struggle for Power, 1671-1725 (Cambridge, UK, 2001), 91-95.

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Gaden and Dr. Johann Guttmensch were accused of witchcraft in the death of Tsar Fedor. Both died at the hands of outraged Muscovites.71 The charges of witchcraft leveled at high-profile individuals demonstrate that no social order or group was immune from suspicion. Yet not all persons suspected of malfeasance in the death of a patient were accused of witchcraft, and not all persons who were accused of witchcraft were ultimately condemned. When the Pharmacy Chancellery heard legal suits, it seems not to have entertained charges of sorcery. Other state chancelleries, however, did. Often the charge of witchcraft was but one of many that plaintiffs presented. Thus, for example, when Nazarko Koltovskii of the town of Novyi Efremov denounced his priest Afanasii for sorcery, it was but one of many serious complaints he sent to the secular authorities. Koltovskii alleged that Father Afanasii had committed defamation against Koltovskii himself, a humiliating physical assault on Koltovskii’s wife, serious physical and sexual abuse of Afanasii’s own wife, and dereliction of duty, leaving his parishioners without divine services.72 In such cases, clearly petitioners were looking to find some charge that would spur government authorities to intervene. If the authors of denunciations sought to gain the intervention of State authorities, their petitions did not always yield the desired result. In 1671, the military governor (voevoda) of Iaroslavl’, Grigorii Anichkov, refused to prioritize an investigation of witchcraft accusations against local practitioners of folk healing. Two months after receiving orders from Moscow, Anichkov had his brother write back to the tsar that the governor was too busy tracking down “thieves, brigands, and murderers” as previously instructed; which task did the tsar prefer them to undertake? Even when orders came from Moscow to investigate the witchcraft charges, the governor failed to do so, and eleven months after the initial complaint, he was threatened with official disgrace (opala). More than a year after the initial allegation, one of the accused witches petitioned for an investigation himself, wanting to be cleared of suspicion. It was only in March 1673 that Anichkov finally filed his report.73 The power to heal elicited great anxiety from early modern Russians because the same power could be invoked to cause harm. 71 72 73

Unkovskaya, Brief Lives, 37, 54. Novombergskii, Koldovstvo, 35-36. Novombergskii, Materialy, 4: 241-245; quotation on 243.

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The fact that medical practitioners—whether folk healers, clergy, or foreign doctors—had the knowledge to effect changes in patients’ state of health meant that they were dangerous because they could use their power for good or for ill. While efforts to relieve the suffering of the sick were praiseworthy according to both Christian teaching and Russian folk custom, every method healers could use—herbs, prayers, protective amulets, rituals, bloodletting—could easily be construed as the practice of magic, which was forbidden. The substances of healing themselves could be transmuted, so that harmless herbs and roots became poisonous and holy words became offensive to God. Yet these beliefs were not new in early modern Russia, but rather they were characteristic of the “complex and contradictory interaction of the reservoir of traditional folklore and Christianity” that Aron Gurevich termed “medieval popular culture.”74 Why in this period should those beliefs generate the legal cases against witches in such numbers, when previously they did not? Given the predominantly Christian elements in the culture of healing in Russia, the prosecution of witches cannot be seen as a battle against paganism. And given the trust government leaders expressed in the real power of sorcery to cause harm, the prosecution of witches cannot be seen as a struggle against superstition, although “superstition” and “fakery” became added charges in witchcraft cases in the eighteenth century in the wake of Peter the Great’s Spiritual Regulation of 1721.75 The explanation, I think, must lie not in the introduction of new concepts about the nature of illness and healing, or even in the erosion of traditional village culture and “solidarity,” as Gurevich posits in the western European context.76 Although foreign methods of treatment, such as bloodletting, gradually gained currency even in remote peasant villages, ideas about what caused illness remained true to their centuries-old roots. Furthermore, Russians had a long history of petitioning their authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, to intervene in local disputes. However, until the seventeenth century, the central government hardly had the administrative resources to respond. Ecclesiastical authorities had a greater presence somewhat earlier, and indeed, sorcery, spells, and the dispensing of herbal 74

Gurevich, Medieval popular culture, xv. James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (London, 1971), 292-302; Ryan, Bathhouse, 425-426; Worobec, 31-41. 76 Gurevich, Srednevekovyi mir, 322. 75

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cures fell under canon, rather than secular, law. But the penalties for engaging in magical healing were minor for practitioners and their clients both: no more than a short penance or a small fine. In this context, complaints about healing gone wrong made an ineffective vehicle for eliminating rivals because, regardless of the outcome, accusers and the accused remained neighbors. In the seventeenth century, in contrast, allegations of witchcraft proved to be an effective means of removing enemies from the neighborhood: those convicted suffered exile to distant borderlands or death. And unlike “brigandage”—another favorite allegation from village petitioners—charges of witchcraft could be leveled against unassuming individuals and not only strong men with bands of followers. Charges of witchcraft became a potent weapon in internecine hostilities only because the Muscovite government had become willing and able to intervene. But why should the government act on denunciations from insignificant persons against equally-insignificant “witches”? In the middle- to late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century, the period of the largest number of witchcraft cases, the Muscovite state experienced upheavals that shook both its religious and its political foundations. Old Belief undermined the authority of not only the Church but also the State, characterizing them as manifestations of the Antichrist.77 Ecclesiastical leaders, unable to eliminate the heretics through the spiritual disciplines of penance and reeducation, called in the secular authorities (as they had in the past, with the so-called “Judaisers” of the early sixteenth century). In their pursuit of schismatics, Russian church and state leaders became deeply suspicious of exhibitions of popular piety, such as original prayers and healing cults of saints’ relics and icons, fearing that they could be a cover for dangerous heresy. Political unrest afflicted the Muscovite state even during the central decades of the seventeenth century, when the uncontested reigns of Tsars Mikhail (1613-1645) and Aleksei (1645-1676) provided welcome dynastic stability. Popular uprisings, often fueled by religious dissent, became a recurrent threat, and the contested succession after the death of Tsar Fedor in 1682 put the members of the imperial family at particular risk. But while Muscovite secular and ecclesiastical leaders feared a recurrence of the complete dissolution of state power that characterized the Time of 77

Michael Cherniavsky, “The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist,” Slavic Review 25 (1966), 1-39.

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Troubles three generations earlier, in fact its administrative functioning remained at full strength, and even expanded. This atmosphere of heightened danger and growing governmental power spurred intervention into minor, local complaints, lest they mask more serious threats. As Valerie Kivelson observed, Muscovite thinkers “perceived sorcery as the logical bridge [...] between political and religious transgressions.”78 Allegations of witchcraft could elevate ordinary offenses, including such petty ones as the possession of an herb or a written text, into the major crimes of treason and heresy. The healers in the cases examined in this article, however, were not trying to express either political or religious dissent or to challenge the authority of the State or the Church. They were simply trying to treat patients using time-honored methods, with no more nefarious a motive than earning payment. The shifting political and religious terrain rendered their once-innocuous activities hazardous. For early modern Russian healers and their patients, the “dark forces beyond their control,” to use Aron Gurevich’s phrase,79 proved to be not the supernatural forces of disease and disaster, but rather the intrusive rule of the State.

78 79

Kivelson, “Political Sorcery,” 283. Gurevich, Medieval popular culture, 103.

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individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 135

INDIVIDUALS, FRIENDS AND KINSMEN IN MEDIEVAL ICELAND: THE LEGACY OF ARON GUREVICH EVA ÖSTERBERG

Individual and collective This article will focus on two different types of relations, kinship and friendship, in medieval Icelandic culture. We will try to answer the important question of whether the medieval Scandinavian man was in fact dependent on individual choices of friends, instead of inherited kins, as much as modern man. Inspired by Aron Gurevich’s pioneering research on the medieval North, this study will make a case of the customary pre-modern/modern opposition and will be based on in-depth analysis of medieval Icelandic sagas. Many scholars’ models of social development in Europe contain a contrast between the pre-modern and the modern.1 Sometimes scholars even typologize man himself using the same dichotomy. They characterize pre-modern man as living by collectivism (both of social reality and mentality), having little freedom for individual choice and possessing little individualism in the sense of self-reflection, being backward-looking and bound by traditions, having a religious and magical culture, and relying on personal networks, particularly kinship. Modern man, on the other hand, displays a completely different individual reflexivity, autonomy, and personal profiling. He is said to be forward-looking, rational, and liberated from magic and a profound faith in God. Moreover, he relies less on kin and more on abstract societal systems such as the state. As a good example of this approach, let us examine the ideas in Anthony Giddens’ books on modernity.2 He asserts that no matter 1 See for example Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Berlin, 1922); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989); Johan Asplund, Essä om Gemeinschaft och Gesellschaft [Essay on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft] (Göteborg, 1993); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge, UK, 1991). 2 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, UK, 1990). See also Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 72 ff.

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what the period of history in question, people live at the intersection of an “environment of risk” and an “environment of trust.” Trust creates cohesion and solidarity; it constitutes a general human property.3 At the same time, there are risks in all cultures, but the specific foundation for what constitutes trust and risks has varied. A typical feature of pre-modern culture, according to Giddens, was concrete trust. Medieval people trusted in persons, things, or institutions that were visible and accessible. The environment of trust consisted of four pillars: kin relations as a way to organize social ties in time and place, local community as a place where people could recognize themselves, religious cosmologies and ritual practice which helped people to interpret life and nature, and tradition as a way to link the present and the future by finding old patterns for solving problems in society. The risk environment included dangers emanating from nature, such as disease, crop failure, and other natural disasters. But it also included feuds, wars, and other forms of direct interpersonal violence. Further, people could incur the disfavor of their god or fall victim to black magic. Even modern people live within an environment of trust, which according to Giddens chiefly consists of close relationships based on sexual intimacy (the love of a couple) or voluntarily chosen friendships. However, modern concepts of trust are not linked to local institutions or community, but instead to abstract systems such as the market, the monetary economy, the state, or expertise. Tradition has been cast aside as a map for orientation in life, and the future as the landmark of modernity. Nevertheless, violence remains a component of the environment of risk in modern society. Other threats are generated by the ideal that individuals should be able to fend for themselves while simultaneously enjoying the ability to regard themselves critically. The risk occurs because people think they lose influence and value as a result of age and illness, or they feel meaningless in a non-religious world. Giddens’ argument is of course an abstraction which disregards many complexities. He underestimates the danger nature poses to modern society through damage caused by earthquakes, famines, hurricanes, and tsunamis. From a contemporary global perspective, 3 See Barbara Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies: The Search for the Bases of Social Order (Cambridge, England, 1996); Niklas Luhman, Trust and Power (New York, 1979).

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 137 it is equally clear that he also underestimates the power of religion. In many countries, the major religions are being revitalized. Wars are raging here and there in the name of God, or at least with religion as a cover, just as in the Middle Ages or the early-modern period. Perhaps conversely, in comparison to the Middle Ages, Giddens has overestimated the capacity of individuals today to think critically and insightfully about themselves. For example, Gregory the Great (540–604) asserted that man must be able to see himself from the outside and think about himself, test himself, and get to know himself in order to become a human being.4 The disadvantage of the polarization into pre-modern and modern periods, as Jean-Claude Schmitt, Aron Gurevich, and others have pointed out, is that the history of individualism tends to seem like a linear process.5 One only needs to look for the dividing lines where modern individual consciousness begins and then follow how it steadily increases. Quite often, the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been assigned the role of watershed, as has the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Yet, Augustine’s Confessions, written in the fifth century, provide a splendid example of profound self-reflection. Moreover, some scholars refer to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a kind of renaissance which led to greater individual consciousness. In medieval monasteries and churches, people discovered their human nature (ego, anima, se ipsum) as something shared by all human beings—an imago Dei. All through the Middle Ages a number of thinkers took an interest in the discovery of the self, of the inner human landscape. On the other hand, they did not invent individualism in the sense of autonomy as we see it. They were constantly aware of the requirement to follow the commandments of the group, so as not to lose the respect of others. Aron Gurevich successfully explored this complex blend of individualism and collectivism in his fascinating book, The Origins of European Individualism. In it, he demonstrates that both Icelandic texts and European theological writings from the thirteenth century show a deep understanding of human individuality.6 Viewing the 4 On this and historians’ outlook on humanity, see Eva Österberg, Folk förr: Historiska essäer [People in the Past: Historical Essays] (Stockholm, 1995), 7 ff. 5 Jean-Claude Schmitt, “La découverte de l’individu, une fiction historiographique?” in La fabrique, la figure et la feinte: Fictions et statut des fictions en psychologie, ed. P. Mengal and F. Parots (Paris, 1989), 213–236. 6 Aron Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism (Oxford, 1995), 2 ff.

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emergence of individual consciousness as a series of waves occurring throughout the Middle Ages, he emphasizes that it must be anchored to its social context. As Georg Misch stresses, even before the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Renaissance, there was, in fact, a sequence of special historical periods when self-knowledge and selfobservation developed in Europe and took significant leaps forward.7 In another important book, Medieval Popular Culture, Gurevich argues that ancient and medieval society was characterized by an interesting mixture of static structures and dynamic changes: It seems legitimate to suggest that in the cultures of the ancient and medieval worlds one should differentiate between relatively static, repetitive and seemingly extra-temporal structures and dynamic, individualized and unique phenomena . . . Explaining their specific essences would lead to a better understanding of a culture that was unique and highly original, while also containing constant, ever-reproducing matrices of consciousness and behaviour.8

A distinctive feature of Gurevich as a medieval scholar is his insistence that Northern Europe must also be included in syntheses of medieval mentalities and social processes. It is unreasonable, he declares, to compare only countries like England, France, or Italy if one really wants to detect the value structures and social conditions which governed people’s lives in different strata of the population. In his analyses, he therefore introduces heroic Germanic sagas, Icelandic works of medieval poetry and prose, and Scandinavian laws. In his book about the emergence of individualism, he investigates, among other things, a number of Icelandic family sagas and discusses the advice in the eddic poem written down in the thirteenth century Hávamál, “The Sayings of the High One,” when he highlights the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as an important period in the history of self-reflection. Gurevich’s analysis, as I have already suggested, is subtle and multifaceted, arguing that some form of individuality existed in medieval culture, even outside learned settings. He seeks the explanation in social and institutional structures—in line with the connection between the mental and the social which is his hallmark as a scholar. The church and the Christian confession demanded individual self7

Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie (Frankfurt, 1949–62). Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture. Problems of Belief and Perception (New York, 1988), 224. 8

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 139 examination. In Northern Europe much of the population lived on single farms and had individual responsibility for their household and lands. In Icelandic sagas no centrally organized government exists, individuals get into trouble, fall victim to evil deeds, and must be avenged. The human conflicts, Gurevich asserts, originate in the emotions and interests of individuals, with the feuds actually started by individuals, although they then must seek support of other people letting the conflicts grow into collective enterprises. The authors of the sagas describe the characters in such a way that readers can see them as distinct individuals. Although their language is laconic and describes peoples’ characteristics in just a few curt lines, they still stand out as distinct individuals. Nor do the sagas lack descriptions of people’s feelings, but these are not so much expressed in psychological terms as in changes in the characters’ appearances or actions: they blush, begin to sweat, laugh suddenly, fall silent, or the like.9 Moreover, Gurevich highlights the poets in the sagas like Egil Skallagrimsson. Through his poetry, Egil paints a picture of himself as a contradictory and emotional person.10 This, too, Gurevich interprets as a feature of individualism. At the same time, Gurevich asserts that in the sagas medieval man certainly was group-oriented in the sense that he needed the esteem and practical help of other men to survive with honor in a dangerous society. Gurevich, however, did not deal extensively with whether medieval man was more dependent on kinsmen than friends, nor did he discuss whether the capacity to choose friends might imply a greater degree of individualism than being bound by kinship. Taking into account some relevant arguments on modernity versus pre-modernity, such as Giddens’, there is reason to do so. In my recent book about friendship as idea and practice through history, Aron Gurevich´s nuanced analyses of individualism and collectivism, repetition and static structures, and dynamic individualized phenomena in medieval culture provided a general source of inspiration for one chapter that concentrated precisely on voluntary friendship versus kinship in the Icelandic sagas. According to the prevalent view in the West since ancient times, friendship has not just been associated with reciprocity, trust, loyalty, and equality, but also with voluntarism. People are not born into friendship as they are 9 10

Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, 16 ff., 38 ff., 43 ff. Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, 67 ff.

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into a family and kindred, rather people choose their friends—even though the choice has a different character from the choice of commodities or political parties.11 As we saw above, Giddens envisages voluntary friendships as connected with individualism, making friendship a high-priority relationship in modern society. In contrast, dependence on kin was part of the collectivist way of life that characterized the Middle Ages. It is likely, however, that such a dichotomy is misleading. As Gurevich emphasizes, an individual’s independent actions and deliberations often go hand in hand with his incorporation in collectives. Perhaps individual should not be contrasted against collective, nor self-assertion against group pressure, nor voluntarily chosen friends against a large “inherited” circle of relatives, when one analyzes the sagas. The mixture is surely more complicated than this. Let us look more closely to follow a trail which Gurevich was unable to pursue to its end. What happens in the sagas when medieval Icelanders tried to establish alliances to end a conflict through negotiation, to overcome opponents in bloody battle, or quite simply to survive? To what extent do they expect to fall back on a large kin network? Or, do they instead seek help by forging bonds of friendship with other individuals? How strong are the ties of kinship and friendship when it is a matter of life and death? Did medieval man in fact depend on individual choices of friends, instead of inherited kins, just as much as modern man? Or how were the two different types of relations combined in medieval Icelandic culture? The kin—a gift and a curse Icelandic family sagas were mostly written during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In their austere and pithy language, they present accounts of people, conflicts, and negotiations in medieval Icelandic society, which indirectly reflect the social and cultural patterns that historians have tried to interpret in order to understand how society functioned at the time the sagas were recorded. In Hen-Thorir’s Saga, Blund-Ketil is burned to death in his house by Thorvald and his followers. Blund-Ketil’s son Herstein needs help to pursue the matter whether through battle or court settlement. 11

Eva Österberg, Vänskap—en lång historia [Friendship—a Long History] (Stockholm, 2007).

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 141 Both methods required the power of either tough warriors or individuals well-versed in law. Thorkel, an influential man, accepts the task of furthering Herstein’s interests, doing so skillfully and shrewdly using a strategy of building kinship alliances based on marriage. First, Thorkel turns to the well-respected Gunnar, suggesting that Herstein marry Gunnar’s daughter Thurid. During the marriage negotiations nothing is said about Blund-Ketil having been killed, rather the conversations center on Herstein’s merits as a suitor. Although Gunnar has no objections, he cannot help feeling that the matter is being pursued with almost exaggerated urgency. He therefore at first refuses to promise anything until he has obtained Thurid’s consent and that of her kinsmen, especially the powerful Thord. Because Thorkel continues to pressure him, Gunnar finally gives his pledge. Only then does he learn what really lies behind it. Gunnar is not happy; he says nothing but knows what is expected of him. His instinct of self-preservation now requires Gunnar to think in terms of larger circles, for he is trapped in his newly assumed loyalty to Herstein and his kin. Because attaching a larger network of men to the original actors in the conflict was essential to reduce the risk of defeat, Gunnar rides at once to his kinsman Thord trying to get him involved as much as possible in Thurid’s wedding. He flatters Thord and persuades him to accept the main ceremonial role in Thurid’s betrothal: “And I would like you to betroth my daughter to Herstein,” said Gunnar. “You should betroth your own daughter yourself,” replied Thord. “I think it’s more honourable if you betroth her,” said Gunnar, “because it’s more fitting.”

Thord lets matters stand, and the betrothal took place. It was only afterwards that Thord finds out what Gunnar had likewise learned too late—that Blund-Ketil had been killed and must be avenged; however, the opponents in this case were not easy adversaries. Thord is furious, feeling he has been tricked into getting involved in a very unpleasant conflict, but knowing that honor demands his participation. Both Gunnar and he are caught in a trap: “I wouldn’t have been so quick to give away the bride,” said Thord, “if I had known this. You probably think that you have been more clever than I and outwitted me this time.” […] “We’ll be able to count on you for help,” replied Gunnar, “since you are now duty-bound to support your relative by marriage—just as we

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In this manner, the actors took their places on the stage, each with his part to play. All are bound to one another for better or worse. The parties formed alliances through marriage, which provided them protection in that they acquired a wall of shields—a network of stout fighters or wise negotiators. On the other hand, many of those involved would have been grateful to escape these bonds. They had become mired in grim deadlock, bitter duty, and bloody danger. The examples from Hen-Thorir’s Saga are neither unique nor difficult to find. On the contrary, virtually every family saga relates how alliances are built, broken, and patched again—all to make it possible for men to pursue their cases successfully at the court or to achieve their rights by force of arms. Often, women act as nodes within the networks. They are given away in marriage, although rarely without at least their tacit consent. Through women, kin circles were expanded. The combinations did not always arise in an honest and natural way, but often through cunning and persuasion. The threads in the social networks might be thin, soiled, and dripping blood. Thurid had been ensnared in a web of kinship craftily woven to force as many strong men as possible to carry on a feud. The saga does not reveal very much about how she felt when her father presented Herstein’s offer of marriage, an event which took place quickly in order to achieve a necessary alliance for the next stage in the struggle. The saga only briefly suggests that she did not exactly jump for joy. Had Thurid been left to decide, evidently she would have preferred to remain single a while longer. We may assume similar feelings on the part of Gunnar or Thord, who were unwillingly drawn into fateful conflicts, for they apparently attempted to avoid kinship alliances for as long as possible. A scene from Hrafnkel’s Saga likewise makes it clear that services between kinsmen were not always exchanged with pleasure.13 Hrafnkel killed Thorbjorn’s son Einar for riding Hrafnkel’s horse without permission. Thorbjorn attempted to assemble his kinsmen in 12 Viðar Hreinsson, ed., “Hen-Thorir’s Saga,” in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders 5 vols. (Reykjavík, 1997), 5: 239 ff., chs. 11–12. 13 Viðar Hreinsson, ed., “The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi,” in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (Reykjavík,1997), 5: 261 ff., ch. 6.

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 143 opposition to the powerful and dangerous Hrafnkel by prosecuting the case in court. One of Thorbjorn’s kinsmen, Sam, a good lawyer, was hesitant about taking a case against Hrafnkel, knowing what it could lead to. An irritated Thorbjorn complained about having “such worthless relations” and finally Sam agreed to take on the case, but only reluctantly and mainly for the sake of kinship. Sagas are not history; rather, they are primarily brilliant literature recorded by literate people aware of genres and themes in European classical and medieval literature. The main plot in a saga includes elements of more general literary themes: love, death, betrayal, violence. Nevertheless, few scholars would deny that Icelandic sagas can also be used as evidence for analyzing Scandinavian cultural codes of the period during which they were recorded, albeit with reservations and great sensitivity in interpretation. Culture-specific features reveal themselves through plot, subsidiary plots, and descriptions of people, as well as in other ways. The sagas provide us with hints regarding concepts of social organization within Iceland during the time of their writing. From that perspective, it is not important whether the manner of resolving conflicts and contracting or breaking agreements was an exact reflection of reality at a particular time. It is important that the texts are full of similar scenes, dramas, and relationships which reflect contemporary patterns of social association.14 Men forged bonds and pulled threads of kinship and friendship, making or keeping promises, but not always with any great pleasure or readiness. At times alliances were contracted with someone’s life at stake. The characters often gnash their teeth for having been too quickly enticed into a network of loyalties. Action in the sagas alternates between open conflict, on the one hand, and negotiation and fragile equilibrium on the other. As William Ian Miller argues, the

14 On the sagas as material for historical-anthropological research, see, for example, Österberg, Folk förr [People in the Past], 37 ff.; Jesse Byock, Feud in the Icelandic Saga (Berkeley, 1982); Jesse Byock, Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power (Berkeley, 1988); Carol Clover & John Lindow, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide (Ithaca, 1981); Lars Lönnroth, Skaldemjödet i berget: Essayer om fornisländsk ordkonst och dess återanvändning i nutiden [The Poet’s Drink: Essays on old Icelandic Literature and its Use Today] (Stockholm, 1996); Catharina Raudvere, Kunskap och insikt i norrön tradition: Mytologi, ritualer och trolldomsanklagelser [Knowledge and Insights in Old Icelandic Tradition: Myths, Rituals, and Witchcraft Accusations] (Lund, 2003).

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quest for honor and balance between men provides the key to understanding the mentality of the sagas.15 Marriage could certainly insure alliances, as both the sagas and law codes tell us. Moreover, Auður Magnúsdóttir’s research informs us that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, before the church gradually managed to make polygamous concubinage less accepted, the concubine system was a basis for political alliances and social loyalties. Compared to leagues between equal kindreds, the alliance between a lower-class concubine’s kin and a man’s high-status family could even bring certain advantages to the man. The concubine’s kinsmen were more dependent on the man and thus eager to display their loyalty in the alliance. Consequently, when a high-born man lived with several concubines who all had a loyal family, he would accumulate a large network of allies when needed.16 Regardless of whether contacts were established through ties of blood or marriage, mobilizing the resources needed for conflicts was not always easy. So-called “dormant” networks were numerous and widespread, but it was far from self-evident in the world of the sagas how much of the network could be activated when it was more than just a matter of attending a feast or helping to round up the sheep. Kinship itself was not enough; moreover, it did not always guarantee either support or affection between two people. On the contrary, many conflicts in the sagas arise between relatives. In neither the imaginary nor true-to-life society of the sagas could ties of kinship be invoked automatically when help was needed. Alliances were formed across kin affiliations, and kinship might be a dead web which could only be revived through the injection of new pledges and gifts. Occasionally, these bonds were given new life under external pressure, or even by deceit as in the example from Hen-Thorir’s Saga. It was not with an easy heart that Icelanders acknowledged their loyalty nor were they prepared to act accordingly, for alliances were risky. 15 William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago, 1990). See also Eva Österberg, “Våldets känslorum: Berättelser om makt och moral i det förmoderna samhället” [The Space of Feelings and Violence: Stories about Power and Morality in Premodern Society], in Våldets mening: Makt, minne, myt [The Meaning of Violence: Power, Memory, Myth], Eva Österberg & Marie Lindstedt Cronberg, eds. (Lund, 2004), 19 ff. 16 See Auður Magnúsdóttir, “Kärlekens makt eller maktens kärlek? Om frilloväsende och politik hos Oddaverjarna” [The Power of Love or the Love of the Powerful? The Concubine-system and Politics in the Oddaverjarna People], conference paper, 1999.

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 145 These contradictory pressures raise the question of how to define friendship—close ties not based on kinship. What role did friendship play in the deadly dangerous society of the sagas, where negotiations or alliances were the counter to violence and ruin? Voluntarily chosen friendships ought to be an expression of individual judgments, but did they also lead to further solidarities? Alliances of friendship Njal said, “Here is hay and food which I want to give you. I don’t want you ever to turn to anyone but me when you’re in need.” “Your gifts are good,” said Gunnar, “but of greater worth to me is the friendship with you and your sons.” Njal then went back home. The spring wore on.17

Njal’s Saga stands out as the most remarkable prose work of the medieval North, perhaps even in European literature as a whole.18 Among many other things, it includes a brilliant description of friendship between the two strong men, Njal and Gunnar, a friendship without kinship, but a friendship until death. The basic plot of Njal’s Saga concerns the conflict arising from demands made by friendship between two influential and loyal men and ties of family obligation and love of their wives. Njal’s wife Bergthora and Gunnar’s wife Hallgerd are not on friendly terms, and it is not only Gunnar whom Hallgerd drives to perdition. According to the unknown author of Njal’s Saga, friends help each other with gifts, yet friendship is more important than gifts. Even descriptions of people in the saga include observations about the significance of friendship. For example, at the beginning of the saga one of its brief but precise portraits describes Hrut as “a good-looking man, big and strong, a good fighter, and even-tempered. He was a very wise man, harsh towards his enemies but ready with good advice on important matters.”19 When the author introduces the leading character, Gunnar of Hlidarendi, he describes his many attributes: Gunnar is strong and skilful with arms, he can swing a sword, throw a spear with either hand, jump more than his own height in full 17 Viðar Hreinsson, ed., “Njal’s Saga,” in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (Reykjavík, 1997), 3:1 ff., ch. 47. 18 Peter Hallberg, The Icelandic Saga (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1962). 19 “Njal’s Saga,” ch. 1.

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armor and swim like a seal; moreover, he is handsome, possessing fair skin, blue eyes, a straight nose, ruddy cheeks, and a fine head of hair. Yet even these characteristics are insufficient, for the description ends: “He was very courteous, firm in all ways, generous and eventempered, a true friend but a discriminating friend. He was very well off for property.”20 This splendid man becomes friends with the wise Njal, who gives him good advice in all difficulties. While Gunnar is trustworthy and careful in choosing his friends, his choice of wife is less successful. Njal is unhappy when Gunnar tells him that Hallgerd will be his wife since she has already gained notoriety for her ability to provoke conflicts. Despite Gunnar’s declaration that Hallgerd will never threaten the friendship between Njal and himself, Njal remains doubtful: “All kinds of trouble will arise from her if she comes east,” said Njal. “She shall never spoil our friendship,” said Gunnar. “It will come close to that,” said Njal, “but you will always make amends for her.”21

True, it did not take long until Hallgerd did cause trouble. But the friendship between Gunnar and Njal nevertheless remained stable. In the saga, Gunnar always has Njal´s good advice to fall back on and his friends to assist him.22 The friendship between Njal and Gunnar illustrates that blood ties were no more important in any given situation than ties between unrelated people. Because the friendship between the two leading characters was so strong and even survived conflicts between their kindreds, family solidarity is actually jeopardized. Furthermore, other alliances of friendship also appear in Njal’s Saga. Recent historical and anthropological research tends to reduce the significance of kin in medieval Icelandic society to a sphere of trust and stresses instead the importance of friendship. Gudrun Nordal demonstrates that, according to the Icelandic sagas, alliance was the basic cement underlying a dangerous social system. Alliances could, of course, be based on ties of blood, but loyalty arising through marriage or friendship was of equal importance.23 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson 20

“Njal’s Saga,” ch. 19. “Njal’s Saga,” ch. 33. 22 “Njal’s Saga,” ch. 66. 23 Gudrun Nordal, Ethics and Action in Thirteenth-century Iceland (Odense, 1998), 24 ff. 21

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 147 even believes that friendship was the most important relationship in the Icelandic commonwealth—friendship based on reciprocal loyalty and exchange of gifts. In societies with bilateral kinship systems, friendship was often stronger than kinship, especially when kin was counted on both the father’s and the mother’s side. Bilateral kinship applied in the Nordic countries, then as now. In such systems the numbers of potential kindred could be so large that it was difficult to survey; nor was the extent of actual loyalty to relatives self evident. As Sigurðsson asserts, the term ætt (family, kindred, pedigree) rarely appears in the sagas; rather, the masculine word frændi and feminine words frændkona for relatives and frændsami for kinship are used. In his investigations of which part of the family tree really was reckoned as kindred in a social and emotional sense, Sigurðsson discovered that kin rarely extended laterally any further than to cousins, nieces, and nephews, vertically including at most three generations.24

Uncle Cousin

Social and emotional kin in medieval Iceland. Grandfather Grandmother Father Mother Brother Ego Sister Nephew Son Daughter Niece Grandson Granddaughter

Aunt Cousin

Instead Sigurðsson emphasizes the significance of friendship, citing Njal and Gunnar in Njal’s Saga as an almost ideally strong friendship between two equal men and important farmers.25 The anthropologist Gísli Pálsson argues that, traditionally, when anthropologists explain social mechanisms in primitive societies they give priority to kinship, tending to see kinship systems everywhere, while de-emphasizing informal relationships such as friendship. This predisposition also applies to analyses of Icelandic sagas. Pálsson argues that since many sagas start with genealogical data, the role of the kin has been overemphasized. In an effort to correct this ten24 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, “Forholdet mellom frender, hushold og venner på Island i fristatstiden” [The Relationship between Kin, Household, and Friends in Medieval Iceland], [Norsk] Historisk Tidsskrift 3 (1995) 311 ff. 25 Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, “Friendship in the Icelandic Commonwealth,” in From Sagas to Society: Comparative Approaches to Early Iceland, ed. Gísli Pálsson, (Enfield Lock, UK, 1992), 205–215.

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dency, in a small study conducted together with E. P. Durrenberger, Pálsson focuses on the voluntary relationships forged in saga society. Although family sagas rarely mention friendships between women, Pálsson’s findings reveal references to such friendships. He explains that because the sagas focus on the male world, women’s friendships, although abundant in reality, were concealed behind the literary material’s patriarchal structure. On the other hand, male friendships play an extremely important role, often occurring between leading farmers and less distinguished men, or between older legal experts and young hotheads. Of course, men of equal status were also friends. In fact, Pálsson asserts, in saga society there existed two kinds of social relations crucial for holding society together: patron-client relations and voluntarily constructed alliances between persons of relatively equal status. Both rested on friendship rather than kinship. Iceland was not alone in these social mechanisms. Parallels existed in other cultures in a world lacking a strong state and governed by “big” men. In such cultures, informal friendship ties became an important social and political institution.26 What are the different contexts in which Icelandic family sagas mention friends and friendship? If we look more closely at the narrative and its protagonists, what characterizes a relationship called friendship? Let us consider examples from different sagas. The introduction to the famous Egil´s Saga about the poet and notorious trouble-maker Egil Skallagrimsson presents two men, Ulf and Kari, as brothers in arms; “Kari … and Ulf shared all they owned and were close friends.”27 In the same saga, we are told that both the king and the widow Sigrid’s friends expected her to remarry and believed the best thing she could do was to be betrothed to Thorolf. The saga does not explain who her friends were or what constituted their friendship, but in this example we encounter a woman with friends from whom she obviously sought advice on important matters.28 Gifts between friends are often mentioned. Thorgils, who served on King Harald’s ship in battle, is described in the following manner: “He was a man of great might and courage, and after the battle the 26 E. Paul Durrenberger and Gísli Pálsson, “The Importance of Friendship in the Absence of States, According to the Icelandic Sagas,” in The Anthropology of Friendship, ed. S. Bell and S. Coleman, (Oxford, 1999), 59–77. 27 Viðar Hreinsson, ed., “Egil’s Saga,” in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (Reykjavík, 1997), 1: 33 ff., ch. 1. 28 “Egil’s Saga,”ch. 9.

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 149 king presented him with gifts and promised him his friendship.” In exchange, Thorolf gave the king some beaver skins and other precious items. Further, the saga reveals the existence of inner and outer circles of friends when it refers to Ketil Haeng and his closest friend: “He had been a great friend of Thorolf Kveldulfsson, who was his kinsman.”29 According to the mentality of honor that prevailed in the sagas, friendship had to be nourished, for it could not withstand insults. The texts are full of examples illustrating how friendship could be carelessly jeopardized, perhaps not by the leading characters but by those around them. Then Skallagrim said, very angrily, “Why did you have the audacity to come to me? Didn’t you know how close my friendship with Thorir was?” Bjorn replied, “I knew that you were foster-brothers and dear friends. But the reason I visited you was that my ship was brought ashore here and I knew there was no point in trying to avoid you.”30

It is perfectly clear that Egil Skallagrimssson is not an easy man to handle. Yet, despite his headstrong and unforgiving attitude, as a boy he became friends with Arinbjorn.31 In his analysis of Egil´s complicated personality, Aron Gurevich asserted that Egil represents another example of the individualistic description of characters in the sagas.32 When Egil visits Norway and risks being killed by King Eirik, Arinbjorn gets between them and pleads with the king to spare Egil’s life. Eirik allows himself be persuaded for which “Arinbjorn thanked the king eloquently for the honor and friendship he had shown him.” The saga tells us that Egil and Arinbjorn then exchange gifts and part as the best of friends. Clearly, throughout the sagas gifts both initiate and maintain friendship. In Killer-Glum’s Saga a Norwegian winter guest presents his host Ingjald with a magnificent wall hanging, which excels any gift hitherto brought to Iceland. According to the saga, Ingjald thanks his guest profusely. After that a close friendship prevailed between them. In Gisli Sursson’s Saga we are told that a couple of men were good friends and exchanged gifts with each other. In Grettir’s Saga, 29 30 31 32

“Egil’s Saga,”ch. 23. “Egil’s Saga,”ch. 34. “Egil’s Saga,”ch. 62. Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, 75, ff.

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the young Grettir banters with Asmund, stating on one occasion: “A true friend spares others from evil.”33 If we collect the statements in the sagas about friends and friendship, it becomes clear that friendship requires activity. Friends exchange advice and gifts, help each other, share confidences, arrange court settlements for each other, and refrain from quarreling among themselves. To a certain extent this relationship is due to the demands of the saga genre. Potential enmities among powerful men provide the crux of the narratives. Plots focus on how to avoid open feuds in the process of resolving menacing conflicts. To do so, men created alliances that were essential to them for times when hostilities would break out, but also beforehand, when negotiations and court rulings could parry antagonism. What Jesse Byock calls “advocacy” played a central role in the process of resolving the chain of strife. Mediation of disputes that results in agreements between opposing sides makes up the dramatic structure of the tales; for advocacy means engaging men of influence to act as mediators or negotiators on behalf of good friends.34 From reading a number of Icelandic sagas, it is not difficult to detect what can be called the typology of friendship revealed through the exchange of gifts. Friendship is valued highly and is pledged solemnly following negotiations between the parties. Moreover, it is binding and often a heavy burden to bear. Finally, friendship means standing up the other’s defense, even in the tightest spot. Friendship is also the subject of many of the stanzas in the Eddic poem Hávamál, “The Sayings of the High One,” written down in the thirteenth century.35 A disparate compilation of poems, Hávamál has been the subject of a debate about whether its advice was intended for Viking Age warriors or for ordinary people in an agrarian society. While Aron Gurevich believes that the question can never be answered, he maintains that the ideas expressed in Hávamál may be assumed to have had a widespread circle of recipients. Thus, the stanzas should not be too hastily linked to any one social class, but read as a down-to-earth collection of advice on how an individual should 33 Viðar Hreinsson, ed., “Killer-Glum’s Saga,” in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (Reykjavík, 1997), 2: 267 ff., ch. 1; “Gisli Sursson’s Saga,” in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 2: 1 ff., ch. 8; “The Saga of Grettir the Strong,” in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 2: 49 ff., ch. 14. 34 Byock, Feud in the Icelandic Saga, 24 ff., 57 ff., 205 ff. Also Österberg, Folk förr, 43 ff., and Österberg, “Våldets känslorum,” 26. 35 Carolyne Larrington, trans., The Poetic Edda (Oxford, 1996).

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 151 behave to function in society, namely by “abiding by the rules of the group that are binding for all its members.” In modern society we tend to imagine that people weigh their actions on a scale by which individual conscience relates to general ethical imperatives. In contrast, according to Gurevich’s interpretation, the lone man in Hávamál does not follow this route; rather, he weighs his actions— and he really does so—using the delicate scale that measures his honor and reputation within the group. His scale registers external behaviors normative for the collective. For this reason, many of the pieces of advice in Hávamál concern vigilance and caution when visiting someone or when receiving a guest. It is important not to insult anyone or to take offense oneself, not to be gullible and let oneself be fooled, and not to act in such a manner to lose the respect of others. Hávamál’s society was rough and dangerous, which is why reliable friends were essential to survival. The stanzas describe friendship based on utility and necessity rather than on emotions. The goal was to leave a good reputation behind because what was important was what people thought of an individual during his lifetime and after his death: “Cattle die, kinsmen die, the self must also die; but glory never dies, for the man who is able to achieve it.” Friendship was the instrument that made life possible and insured a good reputation, for it contributed to security and honor in a hazardous society:36 To his friend a man should be a friend and to his friend’s friend too; but a friend no man should be to the friend of his enemy.

Medieval life insurance Alliances were the very breath of life for Icelanders in the sagas, for men and women alike. Further, they were a necessity in a society whose harsh climate and recurrent natural disasters made it difficult to live. Because in Iceland no king and no overall state organization existed, individuals built alliances to create security, to prosecute cases in the courts, or to counteract unnecessary conflicts. However, discovering that the bonds holding existence together and enabling survival did not necessarily have to involve relatives, represents an 36

The analysis is based on Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, 28 ff.; Hávamál, 43 is quoted from The Poetic Edda, translated by Larrington.

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important new research finding. In a kinship system that proceeded from Ego [the self] and counted relatives on both the mother’s and the father’s side, the family tree could become extremely extensive and some parts of it very distant from a social point of view. Thus, it was not possible to mobilize just any kinsmen for assistance in controversial situations. While many relatives quite simply did not live nearby, others were emotionally distant even if physically close. Kinship had to be combined with friendship to function as support. Alternatively, kin networks could be entirely replaced by a network of friendship. The situation actually resembles contemporary life, where certain relatives are simultaneously friends while others disappear into the background and are displaced by pure friends. Several recent scholars claim that friendship played a more important role in saga society than blood ties. I suggest that it is mistaken to juxtapose kinship and friendship as opposites cancelling each other. If we want to understand pre-modern society, it is equally fruitless to set up collectivism and individualism as mutually exclusive opposites. It would be vain to try to decide whether kin or friends were most significant for the Icelanders in the sagas. Ultimately, in both cases it was a matter of the need for personal alliances in a precarious life. Friends could be sufficient, and friendship could sometimes bridge enmity between kin groups. On the other hand, the men in the sagas were at no disadvantage when relying on relatives and friends as a dual foundation for loyalty. In principle, ties of friendship occurred through voluntary choice. Nevertheless, and here we make an important point about the Icelander’s need for collective norms, it was self-evident that friendship also implied solidarity towards the friends and relatives of your friend. It was expected that reciprocal obligations would be met in a world where collective norms meant the loss of honor when an individual’s respect vanished in the eyes of the larger group. According to the sagas, friendship included calls for confirmation, solidarity, and assistance. Moreover, we also encounter clear demands for duty and loyalty—even when life was at stake. If we study how the characters in the sagas build alliances and act on their conflicts, we find precisely the subtle complexity—or ambivalence—that Aron Gurevich described so well. We meet distinctive individuals who choose their personal friends but simultaneously deal with large and important family circles. We find examples of colorful men asserting their individuality and expressing their feelings, who were neverthe-

individuals, friends and kinsmen in medieval iceland 153 less governed by their obligations towards larger collectives and by an extreme sensitivity to insult born out of concern for their position in society. Individualism-and-collectivism and friendship-and-kinship are thus two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, both sides of the coin were more often blood-stained than gleaming gold. The society in which the Icelandic sagas were written was, as Aron Gurevich stressed, much more complex and nuanced than the dichotomy premodern – modern suggests.

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MEDIEVAL IRELAND AND ICELANDWORLDS APART? MICHAEL RICHTER

Medieval Ireland and Iceland both possess a rich early vernacular literature. Possible connections between these two phenomena have been discussed over the past century by the few experts in the languages involved. These discussions remained inconclusive. Since early medieval Irish history begins almost half a millennium before early medieval Icelandic history, a possible connection between the two vernacular literatures would necessarily imply an Irish influence on Icelandic society. It will be argued here that recent research in the field of human genetics has immeasurably strengthened this hypothesis. In addition to that, vernacular literature will be considered here as just one manifestation of a more wide-ranging oral culture. Because oral culture can be investigated most profitably in these two societies, this essay will concentrate on Ireland and Iceland in the hope that ensuing case studies may in turn stimulate research of oral culture in other societies.1 Historical research should not be limited to written culture alone, for during the Middle Ages written culture pertained to only a minority of the population. Although the vast majority of the medieval population remained outside the reach of written culture, its practitioners continued to participate, to various degrees, in their oral environment. Many historians object to investigations of oral tradition, arguing that we have no direct records of medieval oral culture. While this is indeed the case, medievalists continue to research numerous other subjects lacking similar direct records. For example, recently scholars have attempted to study the history of emotions.2 I believe a holistic 1 For most recent surveys see Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ed., “Prehistoric and early Ireland,” in A New History of Ireland, 9 vols. (Oxford, 2005), I; John T. Koch, ed., Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, 5 vols., (Santa Barbara, 2006); Rory McTurk, ed., A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford 2005). Unless otherwise specified these works contain the major historical signposts outlined below. 2 See, for example, Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional communities in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London, 2006).

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approach, treating language in its historical manifestation as a defining element of humanity, is appropriate for the study of any given culture. Oral culture is always all-embracing and holistic because, by its very nature, oral communication has been practiced in daily life by all members of a given society. Aron Gurevich’s inspiring research on the Weltbild (world view) of medieval man provides a particularly apt example of such a holistic approach. We should note that Gurevich maintained that this term, which was used in the German translation of his book, was more adequate than the title “Categories of medieval culture” used in the original Russian edition that has found its way into translated versions.3 Obviously, attempts to ascertain Weltbild are highly complex and entail the imposition of a modern construct on the past. However, such efforts exemplify what history in general is all about. The historian’s craft consists of extrapolating from surviving written records of the past the phenomena he or she seeks to investigate. Such efforts require not only technical skills to evaluate written sources of the past, but the imagination to make a plausible case for a given construct. Needless to say, no historical source ever speaks for itself; rather, the historian makes responsible use of it. Generally, a society’s history supposedly begins when its written sources appear for the first time. Ireland, the island that the Romans knew by the name Scotia, emerged from pre-history in the fifth century. Significantly, the record began with sources linked to Christianity, which affected the westernmost island of Europe from ca. 400 onwards. Ireland’s proximity to the Roman Empire in general, specifically the provinces of Gallia and Britannia, was instrumental in the process of Christianization because the Emperor Theodosius had proclaimed Christianity the official religion of the empire in 391/2. In the West, Latin was the language of the Catholic Church and the lingua franca of the Empire as a whole. This meant that, from the point of view of language, few barriers existed for mass participation in Christianity. Quite appropriately, the Latin Bible, taking shape at that time, was later known as the Vulgate. The Book was articulated in one register of the general language of the vulgus, the common man. 3

Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing medieval history: an interview with Aaron Gurevich,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 25 (2005), 128, 130.

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For the year 431, Prosper of Aquitaine, a Gallic chronicler, reports that Pope Celestine I appointed one Palladius as the first bishop ad Scottos in Christum credentes. It is most likely that Palladius hailed from Gaul and that with him he brought to the Irish the message of the new religion formulated in the Latin language. Moreover, the man who subsequently came to be known as the apostle to the Irish, St. Patrick, personified the link between the Latin language and the Catholic Church when he came to Ireland from his native Britain in the fifth century as well. He left two works concerning his missionary activity among the Irish, written in Latin. Interestingly, he stated (Confessio 9) that for him Latin was an acquired second language.4 Patrick’s native tongue was British, one of the regional varieties of Celtic, which did not then exist in written form. In Ireland Patrick would have encountered another variety of Celtic more archaic than British, two languages which were not mutually comprehensible at that time. In regard to the written record—which is highly fragmentary— both teachers, Palladius as well as Patrick, resorted to Latin for propagating the Christian religion in Ireland. Because it appears in the early written record, we can assume that, in Ireland, Latin continued to be used in the Christian religion. As far as the extant record goes, in Ireland Christianity was tied to a language utterly foreign to the population as a whole. It emerged as lingua sacra, a language specifically linked to the new religion, and whoever wished to adopt the new religion had no choice but to acquire a new language, at least to a certain degree. This linguistic situation contrasted to that in Gaul where Latin was lingua vulgaris, and differed from Britain, where Latin was the official lingua franca of the Empire accessible in various degrees to the general population.5 As a matter of fact, the time of the arrival of Christianity in Ireland ca. 400 coincides with the earliest monuments containing records in the Irish language, the so-called ogam monuments, which provide the oldest specimens of the Old Irish language. These are mostly 4 Confessio 9: “Nam sermo et loquela nostra translata est in linguam alienam, sicut facile potest probari ex saliva scripturae meae.” See Ludwig Bieler, “Libri Epistolarum Sancti Patricii. Introduction, text and commentary,” in Classica et Medievalia 11, (1950), 61. 5 Michael Richter, “Concept and Evolution of the Tres linguae sacrae,” in E. Bremer, J. Jarnut, M. Richter, and D. J. Wasserstein, eds., Language of Religion— Language of the People: Medieval Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Munich 2006), 15-23.

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stones commemorating in chiselled form the names of Irishmen.6 Their record spans approximately three centuries before fizzling out. Most likely, manuscript culture in Latin arrived in Ireland in the fifth century. The oldest surviving monuments date from shortly after 600 and reveal a high grade of professionalism. The oldest specimens of writing the Irish language in manuscripts are glosses found in Latin manuscripts which date to the second half of the seventh century. According to specialists of Old Irish, that language was used extensively by 700, particularly in Irish law texts, although this material survives only as copies from centuries later.7 Irish society existed without a written culture prior to the arrival of Christianity. Because Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire, it did not experience a threat to native institutions by a literate occupying power. For approximately three centuries, Irish society continued to function without a written culture in its native institutions. We are fortunate in having references in legal texts to the main institutions of native learning. The personnel of these institutions were known as fili (pl. filid). Their representatives were responsible for the maintenance and transmission of knowledge in the fields of law, history, and stories.8 They transmitted this information orally. According to this text and other material, the filid had to undergo lengthy training under the supervision of experts in the field and pass systematic examinations until they could join an elite of scholars responsible for the upkeep and the continuation of traditional social values. In this position, they were entitled to adequate remuneration.9 Poets of courtly praise and defamation were just as essential as other specialists and should also be counted among the specialists in oral culture. These scholars also fostered traditional values linking single rulers to the values upheld by their ancestors. Generally speaking, it can be

6 Michael Richter, “Runes and ogam,” forthcoming in the Russian Gurevich memorial volume (Moscow). 7 On Old Irish language, see Koch, Celtic Culture; on Irish law see, Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, Early Irish law series III, (Dublin 1988). 8 Liam Breatnach, ed., Uraicecht na ríar. The Poetic Grades in Early Irish Law, Early Irish law series II, (Dublin 1987); also Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law. 9 Michael Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West. Studies in the Oral Culture of the Barbarians (Dublin, 1994), ch. 9. There is no systematic study of these institutions available from Irish scholars.

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said that scholars of native oral culture were in charge of maintaining traditional values in their society.10 We must return to the point that oral culture can be studied only indirectly through written material. In Ireland, extant material makes it clear that indigenous institutions such as the filid or bards, specialists in genealogy or medicine, survived throughout the Middle Ages,11 as late as the early seventeenth century, when the patrons responsible for their maintenance were expelled from Ireland by the conquering English.12 This picture implies the limited effect of written culture on Irish society. The technology applicable to the native language was available as early as the seventh century, but it did not oust the established native oral culture. At best it worked as a subsidiary feature, making possible the preservation of the products of oral culture in written form. The results are impressive in that Irish literature is the richest vernacular literature of the whole of medieval Europe, but it must be considered as a secondary phenomenon, a product of only the partial transfer of oral culture into written form. Iceland emerged on the historical map of medieval Europe during the age of the Vikings (800-1040). Traditionally, historians date the opening of this important phase of European history to the late eighth century, with the first plundering of Lindisfarne and Iona. Significantly, the Irish annals are of great importance to contemporary documentation of Viking activities in Western Europe because Ireland became an integral part of the Viking world.13 The documents attest that the first Viking settlements in Ireland were established in the middle of the ninth century; nevertheless, in a broader context, the impact of the Vikings on Ireland was not nearly as strong as it was in Britain.14 It is not clear how soon the Scandinavians included 10

The issue of the importance of tradition versus innovation in medieval society has been highlighted by Gurevich in his interview with Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, esp. 139. 11 This is the central theme of my book, Michael Richter, Irland im Mittelalter— Kultur und Geschichte, 3rd ed., (Münster, 2003), English version: Medieval Ireland: The Enduring Tradition (Dublin 1988, 2005), which was not understood by my Irish critics. 12 For the political context, see Brian Ó Cuív, “The Irish language in the early modern period,” in T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, and F. J. Byrne, eds., Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691: A New History of Ireland, 9 vols. (Oxford, 1976), III: 509-45. 13 A. P. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 850-880 (Oxford, 1977). 14 For the impact in the field of language, see Alexander Bugge, “The Norse settlements in the British Isles,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fourth Series

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Iceland in their activities. In any case, the evidence indicates that permanent settlement there began around 870. According to written evidence, settlers hailed from Scandinavia, particularly from Norway. Standard accounts like the ones cited above put forward this view. However, in the past several decades dramatic modifications of this picture have emerged, thanks to research in human genetics. Since the scientists involved in that research were not burdened by conventional historical beliefs, these studies suggest that a high percentage of Gaels (Scotti) lived among the early population of Iceland. Estimates vary quite widely but indicate that no less than 20 % of the overall population were Gaels, with females greatly outnumbering males.15 These new proposals should eventually have a major impact on the evaluation of early Scandinavian history as a whole. Apparently, only the Icelandic medievalist Gisli Sigurdsson, who received part of his postgraduate training in Ireland, has considered these new findings in his work.16 Further down we will outline a few suggestions. Significantly, both an early Irish and an early Icelandic source mention an Irish presence of sorts in Iceland. For example, the account by the Irish author Dicuil, writing in the early ninth century in the Carolingian Empire, discusses an island which he calls Thile ultima, generally assumed to be Iceland: It is now thirty years since clerics, who lived on the island from the first of February to the first of August told me that not only at the summer solstice, but in the days round about it, the sun setting in the evening hides itself as though behind a small hill in such a way that there was no darkness in that very small space of time, and a man could

4, (1921), 173-210. For the Old Norse element in the area of place-names see F. J. Byrne, in Ó Cróinín, “Prehistoric and Early Ireland,” 630 ff. 15 Agnar Helgason, et al., “mtDNA and the Origin of the Icelanders: Deciphering Signals of Recent Population History,” American Journal of Human Genetics 66, (2000), 999-1016; Helgason et al., “Estimating Scandinavian and Gaelic Ancestry in the Male Settlers of Iceland,” American Journal of Human Genetics 67, (2000), 697717. I also found helpful, Jeff T. Williams, “Origin and Population Structure of the Icelanders,” Human Biology 65, (1993), 167-191. 16 Gisli Sigurdsson, Gaelic Influence in Ireland: Historical and Literary Contacts: A Survey of Research (Reykjavík 1988, second edition 2000); Gisli Sigurdsson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method, (Cambridge, MA, 2004) [Icelandic original 2002].

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do whatever he wished as though the sun were there, even remove lice from his shirt.17

This passage contains a reference by a contemporary witness to what was apparently regular seasonal travel from Ireland to Iceland for spring and summer. The dates given by Dicuil, 1 February and 1 August, correspond to the dates of the beginning of spring and autumn, respectively in the traditional Celtic calendar, Imbolc and Lugnasad.18 Considering the fairly undeveloped state of Irish naval technology, certainly in comparison to the Vikings, these ascetic voyages in flimsy vessels to a distant island otherwise uninhabited cannot be called anything but spectacular. There is no way of telling whether these trips continued into the time of the early Viking settlements in Iceland. An early Icelandic source, the first chapter of Íslendigabók, mentions an Irish presence in Iceland, probably similar to that of Dicuil’s account, even though it may have been of an ephemeral nature, i.e. the well-known reference to the Irish hermits known as papar, who “went away because they did not wish to live with heathen men.”19 Although recorded more than three centuries after the event to which it referred, at first glance the memory of these Irish saintly men is remarkable, yet at a second glance it is less so if we take into account the substantial Irish population in the island. We have to assume that during the settlement period at the end of the 9th century the Gaels who came to Iceland were brought there as prisoners and slaves. Apparently, because of their low status they were forced to acquire the language of their masters, and most likely they were given Norse names. Furthermore, as slaves they would not easily find their way into the Icelandic written sources as individuals. Paradoxically, whereas scholars have noticed close parallels between 17 J. J. Tierney, ed. Dicuili Liber de mensura orbis terrarum (Scriptores Latini Hiberniae VI) (Dublin, 1967), 74-75. The original text reads: 18 Trigesimus nunc annus est a quo nuntiaverunt mihi clerici qui a kalendis Febroarii usque kalendas Augusti in illa insula manserunt, quod non solum in aestivo solstitio sed in diebus circa illud in vespertina hora occidens sol abscondit se quasi trans paruulum tumulum, ita ut nihil tenebrarum in minimo spatio ipso fiat, sed quicquid homo operari uoluerit uel peduculos de camisia abstrahere tamquam in presentia solis potest. Koch, ed., 2006, 958 ff, 1201 ff.. 19 Íslendingabók § 1, quoted by Peter Sawyer, “The Vikings and Ireland,” in Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, and David Dumville, eds., Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge, UK, 1981), 350.

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early Icelandic and early Irish literature, substantial differences exist between early Icelandic and early Norse literature.20 Given new insights into the composition of the early population of Iceland discussed above, these features assume an altogether new dimension. So we now turn to the situation of writing in Iceland. As was the case in Ireland, alphabetic writing likely arrived in Iceland together with adoption of Christianity, in 999 or 1000. However, Christianity was adopted only with the proviso that Iceland’s existing religion would not, thereby, be invalidated.21 Vikings were exposed to Christianity from the earliest stages of their raids on Ireland. The Irish slaves whom they captured would have brought their religion with them and maintained it. Prominent missionaries, such as Palladius or Patrick in Ireland, were not attested in Iceland.22 As in the rest of the Western world, Christianity in Iceland required liturgical books and related material, written in Latin; the earliest surviving specimen, a fragment of a computus text, dates from the late twelfth century.23 Writings concerning the Icelandic past can be traced to the first third of the twelfth century. Although surviving in later copies, scholars attribute both Landnámabók and Íslendigabók to ca. 1130 to a known historical individual, Ari Thorgilsson (the Wise). Unfortunately, no Gaelic presence—let alone a major one—in early Iceland can be derived from these works. This fact alone should serve as a warning about the reliability of information obtained from medieval historical sources. Iceland serves as a particularly good area to study the advantages and limitations of written culture, the pre-eminent tool of every medievalist. The advantages are self-evident. Although historians value any piece of writing from the past, they do not always take sufficient account of the potential limitations of their sources. As we noted above, during 20

Sigurdsson, Gaelic Influence in Ireland, xx. In his introduction, Sigurdsson notes that “Icelandic culture, especially literary culture, was radically different from that of the Norwegians.” 21 For a recent summary, see Jenny Jochens, “Late and peaceful: Iceland’s conversion through arbitration in 1000,” Speculum 74 (1999), 621-55. 22 See Jón Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga: A history of the Old Icelandic commonwealth. (Winnipeg, 1974), esp. 125-138. 23 Sverrir Tómasson, “The history of Old Nordic manuscripts I: Old Icelandic,” in Oskar Bandle, et al., eds., The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, 2 vols. (Berlin, New York, 2002), 1:793801.

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the Middle Age, writing and reading skills were limited to a small percentage of the overall population. The medieval custom of reading texts aloud expanded the potential public to some extent. On the other hand, there is no clear evidence in our sources to suggest that literary skills carried substantial social prestige. It is also becoming increasingly clear that writing was not, in the medieval world, considered as a superior medium for storing and transmitting traditional culture. The spread of writing to various fields was a very gradual process.24 Let us return to the critiques of Ari Thorgilsson, whose work has long been considered as a very selective presentation of the Icelandic past. Although he lists up to 6000 individuals by name, all Scandinavian, they are definitely not representative of the society as a whole, but instead emphasize only elites. Because Gaels were captives, therefore booty, they would have been relegated to the lower echelons of society, much like slaves. Consequently, they would not be included in Landnámabók. Furthermore, the Gaels would have arrived as baptized Christians, and females would have been married to Scandinavians who, as Vikings, were only males. Gaels would have brought their native culture with them. Scholars have noted the formal similarities between Icelandic and Irish literature with puzzlement. In important fields, medieval Icelandic literature bears a closer similarity to that of Ireland than that of Norway. Two scholars writing independently of one another at approximately the same time noted the similarity. For example, Russell Poole asserts concerning runhent poetry: “While certain Irish metres also present striking parallels to runhent, a plausible scenario for contact is harder to come up with.”25 Similarly, Francis John Byrne notes: “Old Norse literature, as with the society that produced it, shares many features with that of early Irish. The official praise poetry, with its artificially heightened language, and kennings, is common to skalds and bards, and some metrical devices may show 24 Michael Richter, “Writing the vernacular and the formation of the medieval West,” in Michael Richter, ed., Studies in Medieval Language and Culture (Dublin 1995), 218-227; Michael Richter, “Vom beschränkten Nutzen des Schreibens im Frühmittelalter,” in Walter Pohl and Paul Herold, eds., Vom Nutzen des Schreibens. Soziales Gedächtnis, Herrschaft und Besitz (Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 5) (Vienna 2002), 193-202. 25 Russell Poole, “Meter and Metrics,” in Rory McTurk, ed., A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Malden, MA, 2005), 279.

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Irish influence. In narrative, Irish and Norse are unusual among early literatures in preferring prose to verse.”26 These two authors were unaware of the substantial Gaelic presence in early Iceland. We can now suggest that the parallels in important fields of early Icelandic and Irish literature were due to the concrete influence of one upon the other.27 Sigurdsson has asserted that Gaels living in Iceland would have been permitted to continue their traditional forms of entertainment.28 We should add here that well-educated men, victims of the frequent raids on Irish monasteries, may have been included among the captive Gaels in Iceland. These men would have been familiar with verbal art both in Latin and in the vernacular. According to Peter Sawyer, “Irish symptoms, as we may call them now, appear even in the earliest Icelandic prose works: Landnámabók is…only one indication of the Icelander’s enthusiasm for genealogy, an enthusiasm which, in early medieval Europe, was matched only in Ireland.”29 We conclude this sketch with Sigurdsson’s observation in regard to the Icelandic sagas, written “against a living background of oral tales”; “manuscript research…at present generally ignores the possibility that the oral tradition persisted alongside and influenced the written tradition.”30 It is beginning to become clear that the introduction of written culture in any given society did not oust the previously dominant oral culture,31 although, for the historian, written culture has the advantage of creating permanent records. In 1993, I shared a seminar with Aron Gurevich at Konstanz University titled “The Culture of the Silent Majority in the Middle Ages—Scandinavia and the Celtic Countries.” In this contribution I have continued our dialogue by focusing more sharply on two societies, Ireland and Iceland. In some important respects, these two cul26

F. J. Byrne in Ó Cróinín, “Prehistoric and early Ireland,” 625. Poole, 277. Poole’s statement that “Irish-Scandinavian contacts were to the best of our knowledge too tenuous to have produced a hybrid form,” no longer applies. 28 Sigurdsson, Historical Influences in Ireland, 33. 29 Sawyer, “The Vikings in Ireland,” 359. 30 Sigurdsson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method, 330, 331. 31 Sigurdsson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition: A Discourse on Method, 58, referring to the lawspeakers; Michael Clanchy‚”Literacy is not a civilizing force in itself,” quoted in Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West, 46. 27

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tures share essential features in their early history, in a very concrete manner due to political and cultural contacts. Peter Sawyer has suggested that “these two Atlantic islands (Ireland and Iceland) had more in common than their size. Neither had towns and neither used coins.”32 Furthermore, they shared a location on the western and northern edges of the then known world. Due to their geographical position, Ireland and Iceland suffered less external interference than regions positioned more centrally in Europe and therefore could cultivate traditional forms of culture. Thus Irish and Icelandic verbal culture remained particularly traditional. Gurevich’s remarks pertaining to Scandinavian society are equally appropriate for Ireland and for Iceland: “In Scandinavia, we find many literary documents written in all these ancient languages that allow us to understand the worldview of these people. We don’t have this luxury in Roman Europe, because Latin was the written language of the official culture, while nothing remained of the language spoken by people who did not know Latin.”33 Consequently, we need to rethink our traditional approach to the European panorama in the Middle Ages by including Ireland and Iceland in our considerations.

32 33

Sawyer, “The Vikings in Ireland,” 359. Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History,” 141.

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HEROIC VIOLENCE, INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY, AND COMMUNITY REFLECTION ANDREW COWELL

In one of his longest and most interesting articles, entitled “Heroes, gods and laughter in Germanic poetry,”1 Aron Gurevich addresses the issue of heroic poetry, specifically that of the pre-Christian Scandinavians. In this article, one of his central concerns is the extreme violence which occurs in many of the Old Norse heroic lays, and even more importantly, the fact that this violence seems so often unmotivated and gratuitous. Furthermore, it is often socially-internal violence, directed not against “outsiders,” but against the neighbors, friends, and even family of the heroic characters who pursue it. The article makes several key claims which seek to explain—if not “rationalize”—the violent actions of the heroic figures in the lays. Behind this effort at explanation lies an awareness that the literature in question, and by implication the culture that produced it, have often been seen by literary critics and historians as “barbaric,” “primitive,” “irrational,” and, to put it most bluntly “violent.” The question of apparently gratuitous violence is perhaps the first one which any scholar or teacher who seeks to redeem this type of literature and culture for a modern audience must confront. This redemptive explanation is necessary because, despite the vast violence of Western history during the modern, “Enlightenment” era, modern critics take a persistent ideological position that violence, while common in our society, remains condemnable or at least regrettable and is never valorized for its own sake, except by sociopaths and the like. Thus when a literary tradition such as that of the Old Norse heroic lays—or the larger epic tradition of the Middle Ages—appears to embrace unnecessary, gratuitous violence and cruelty as a central component of the behavior of heroic figures, the modern reaction has almost inevitably been to portray the individuals and culture in question as “primitive.” As a corollary, much effort 1

Aron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, Jana Howlett, ed., (Chicago, 1992), 122-76.

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has gone into showing how such cultures became “civilized” or how they “evolved” over the course of western history, particularly under the influence of the Christian church.2 Part and parcel of the suspicion of primitivism is a view that individuals in such violent cultures lack the self-analytic reflexivity often associated with modern, Western culture—though of course many post-modern theories have called such classical notions of individual consciousness into question more recently. While Gurevich addresses Old Norse heroes most specifically, characters of the Old French chanson de geste have typically been seen in a similar manner: In The Song of Roland, the protagonist has often been understood as a culture hero for bravely following the dictates of his own culture to their ultimate limits, but this admiration has been tempered by the fact that the dictates seem inflexible. Roland seems unable to react creatively to the unfolding situation, so he is trapped in a rigid culturally unreflective framework. Many other readings condemn him as an excessively prideful individual, unable to reflect adequately on his own conduct and its implications, too constrained by notions of honor and vengeance, and ultimately redeemed, ironically enough, only by the proto-crusading hosts of Charlemagne, who turn Roland’s death into a larger victory for the forces of Christianity.3 These very forces of redemption have been associated with notions of penitence, confession, and the supposed origins of individual reflexivity which give birth to the modern “individual.”4 Moreover, these forces were 2 See for example Pieter Spierenburg, The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991). Chapter seven focuses on violence. In it he suggests not only that people were quicker to anger in the past, but that this was due to “suddenly infuriated passion” (195); nevertheless there was a gradual “taming of violence” (197). While later in the chapter Spierenburg goes on to address the issue of honor, and violence as a strategy within honor systems, his overall viewpoint is quite “evolutionist,” though it is more focused on the cultural rather than the religious processes in that evolution. 3 A good survey of past readings of Roland, which was also written roughly at the same time as Gurevich’s article appeared, is Robert Francis Cook, The Sense of the Song of Roland (Ithaca, 1987). The book focuses specifically on the question of individual and cultural consciousness, especially Part 2, Chapter 2, and the Introduction (x-xi) provides extensive references to the past readings. For additional discussion, including of the era since 1987, see Andrew Cowell, The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance and the Sacred (Cambridge, UK, 2007), 80-86. 4 Classic and widely cited studies are Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200 (London, 1972) and Marie-Dominque Chénu, L’Eveil de la conscience dans la civilisation médiévale (Montreal,1969). Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago, 1986) makes broadly similar points. Gurevich stresses his own general

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associated with the Peace of God movement which originated in the late tenth century and gained increasing strength in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the policing elements of religious Chivalry, all part of a more general effort to rein in the violence endemic to Western European Christian society. Thus key elements of modern society and modern individualism have been associated with Church influence. I do not want to debate the importance of those latter influences here. The debate is complex, and Gurevich himself falls partially on both sides. He notes the scholarly tendency to focus on social structures and thereby implicitly to deny reflective capacity and full agency to individuals,5 and moreover, he sometimes points to Latin ecclesiastical culture as part of the reason for this supposed lack of reflection.6 While most theorists of individualism have tended to argue the opposite, recently several others have joined Gurevich in this viewpoint.7 But whether ecclesiastical culture suppressed or enabled individual subjectivity (and one can clearly argue that both tendencies were present, in different contexts), it is clear that it played a strong role in condemning most forms of violence. Partly as a result, modern views of fully-developed subjectivity remain largely incompatible with the embrace of violence either by societies or individuals—for violence is at best a failure, at worst a crime. In this essay, I would like to re-read Gurevich’s 1982 article in this fuller scholarly context—in particular, as that context existed in the 1980s—in order to better understand his contribution to scholarship and his resituating of the question of violence and the individual. In his article, Gurevich engages in a number of moves characteristic of his scholarship in general, and of his advocacy for alternate models of social psychology agreement with this position in a recent interview (Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aron Gurevich,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005), 121-157; 129-30.) 5 Aron Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism (Oxford, 1995), 19 (“tendencies to subordinate the individual to the general”). 6 Gurevich, Origins of European Individualism, 19, 88; but see chapter three on Augustine. Gurevich’s larger argument is that this culture suppressed violent, heroic individualism, but that it eventually provided alternate models for individual reflection—within fairly strict social and religious constraints. 7 See Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford, 2004), especially 9-38, where he argues that the Peace of God movement was largely about suppressing excessive individuality; also Brigitte-Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Dominique Iogna-Prat, L’individu au Moyen Age (Paris, 2005), Introduction.

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and mentalité more specifically. As we shall see, the moves are not without internal tensions and even contradictions, but taken together, they constitute a general response to models of reflection and subject which are based on only a narrowly ecclesiastical view of these concepts. I will argue that Gurevich’s article lays important groundwork for thinking about violence not as contrary to the formation of reflective subjectivity, but as crucial for its formation. Part One: Violence, Heroism, and Medieval Studies Gurevich’s article focuses in particular on the Atlaqkviða (The Lay of Atli), which is part of the larger Old Norse Poetic Edda. The lay recounts events surrounding the destruction of the Burgundian Kingdom and its involvement in battle with Attila the Hun (the Atli of the lay). The historical events date from the fifth century, while the lay itself was composed perhaps in the ninth century. In order to better illustrate my points, I would like to draw on another interesting analysis of this same text by Ursula Dronke, published in 1969.8 Dronke’s text provides a very interesting reading of the lay which in many respects touches on similar issues and ideas as that of Gurevich, but I want to consider how, in comparison to Gurevich’s more multi-layered reading, hers shows a certain “flatness” of historical and anthropological perspective. This difference is attributable to Gurevich’s fuller integration of a truly anthropological perspective made possible in part by work in history and anthropology published since 1969. Furthermore, many of the anthropological perspectives which Gurevich introduced can be deepened and enriched by appeal to even more recent work in areas such as performance studies and concepts of the sacred.9 Thus I want to underline Gurevich’s contributions and innovations, as well as the continuing relevance of his perspectives, which anticipated key trends in anthropology and the

8 Ursula Dronke, ed., The Poetic Edda. Volume I: Heroic Poems (Oxford, 1969); Atlakviða, 3-12, Introduction and Commentary, 13-74. 9 I am thinking of work on performance by scholars such as Richard Bauman and Victor Turner, and studies of the sacred, specifically in relation to performance, by Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley, 1992), J.G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers, Honor and Grace in Anthropology (Cambridge, 1992) and Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift (Chicago, 1999).

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study of culture as they were subsequently applied to medieval history and literature.10 The first question which Dronke and Gurevich must address is the reason for Gunnar’s decision to accept Atli’s invitation to Hungary, given the clear danger that everyone recognized, for a feud existed between the two groups. In stanza eight, Gunnar’s follower Hogni notes that the finger ring wound with wolf’s hair, which their sister Gudrun sent with the invitation, warned of danger. Secondly, they must confront the violence of Gunnar’s death in Hungary and in particular the seemingly gratuitous cruelty of his request for his companion Hogni’s heart before his death. Dronke notes that the invitation constitutes a challenge, which “Gunnar cannot refuse,” causing him to act “sem konungr skyldi” (“as a king should”).11 The logic of honor implicit in this explanation means a king cannot refuse a challenge from a worthy rival without losing face. Moreover, she argues that Gunnar orders Hogni’s heart cut out to insure that he cannot reveal the location of the treasure of the Nibelungs, so that Gunnar, the only other person in possession of the information, can cheat the Huns of their anticipated wealth.12 However, Dronke regards as “folly” Gunnar’s decision to arrive at Atli’s court without sufficient retainers and armor.13 Gurevich seeks to illustrate that the hero’s violence and “irrationality” reveal a deeper motivation, with its own logic. I believe the term “integrity” ideally describes Gunnar’s behavior in this lay, as well as the ideology that lies behind it.14 For the purposes of our discussion, we will define integrity as the state where the hero’s action is entirely motivated by internal drives and a sense of self, where no external cause or motivation can impinge on his will and consciousness. The setting of the lay is a world in which social order is based on relationships of individual reciprocity, often enacted through giftgiving and personal service, and in which an individual’s identity is typically complex and relational, based on the unique forms of reci10 My own recent book (Cowell, Gifts, Violence, Performance and the Sacred) is very much inspired by some of Gurevich’s insights, and could be seen as a further development of them. See that text for greater elaboration of many of the general points discussed here, though without the focus specifically on Gurevich. 11 Dronke, The Poetic Edda, 14. 12 Ibid., 15, 17-19, 25. 13 Ibid., 14. 14 Gurevich , “On Heroes, Gods, and Laughter . .” —or at least his translator— uses this term on 146.

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procity which he enacts with the various individuals around him. In contrast, Gurevich analyzes Gunnar as a king who rises above such reciprocity and solidifies for himself a single, non-relational identity incarnated in the concept of the singular hero.15 As Gurevich argues, he “sets his hopes only on himself and acts only from his own motives”. . . “he acknowledges no higher authority over himself, be it gods or fate.” He “has decisively rejected the only possible pretext” for the insanely dangerous journey which he agrees to undertake to Hungary, where Atli will have him killed.16 Most crucially, Gurevich insists that Gunnar is not acting simply as he must, driven blindly by his own cultural dictates, without the ability to react as an individual, for “Gunnar does not accept an inevitable fate; rather he willfully hurls it a challenge. A rationally unmotivated, impulsive decision that disregards the threat of death, a refusal to display reasonableness and a desire to assert his own will, more precisely, an ecstatic, reckless willfulness, that is what we have here”. In so doing, he “sets himself in opposition to the others.”17 Gurevich goes on to qualify Gunnar’s behavior as “strange and illogical, to say nothing of being inexplicably cruel.”18 Yet he concludes by noting that “only in death...is his formation completed. The more unparalleled his death, the more horrible, unique and abnormal its circumstances, the grander the hero and the more impressive the lay celebrating him,” and finally, “behaviour in the face of death...this is what concerns the Germanic peoples when they think about their heroes.”19 As corollaries to this analysis, we can see that Gunnar’s decision to arrive without sufficient followers or armor is less “folly” than a way of underlining even more powerfully that he acts only based on his own motivations—not in response to threats from others. Gurevich’s reading resolves the problem of why the challenge is accepted, and explains the “folly” of accepting it without armor. He argues that Gunnar seizes an opportunity to stake out a challenge for himself designed to engineer his own spectacular death. By arriving without heavy armor or being accompanied by a large retinue, Gunnar illus15 See Sarah Kay, “Singularity and Spectrality: Desire and Death in Girart de Roussillon,” Olifant 22 (1998-2003), 11-38 for a similar perspective on integrity and “singularity.” 16 Gurevich, “On Heroes,” 129. 17 Ibid., 130. In this regard, note the common occurrence of the descriptor “einn” in relation to Gunnar in the text (7/11, 26/5, 27/4, 32/6). 18 Ibid., 131. 19 Ibid., 135.

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trated his lack of fear of—or even concern with—the Huns. More theoretically, we could say that he rejects reciprocity of thought and regard in relation to them; he does not think about them as a particular group or set of individuals, nor is he concerned with what they may think of him. Similarly, the cutting out of Hogni’s heart permits Hogni a memorable and spectacular death, laughing as his heart is cut out (“hló þá Hogni, er til hiarts skáro,” 24/1-2), while revealing Gunnar’s own lack of concern even for his closest comrades at this moment of integrity. Gunnar is even less concerned with the Huns, or with denying them anything, for he views them only as tools in his own death spectacle. As Gurevich points out, Gunnar had no reason whatsoever to think that Hogni would betray the secret, as Hogni’s own behavior shows.20 Rather than appealing to the “rationale” of honor and vengeance, Gurevich invokes a fuller social psychology of heroism, revealing itself in maximally-realized form in Gunnar’s heroic performance, which occurs in the context of a society based on face-to-face reciprocity and memory. His analysis is not only a brilliant reading of Gunnar’s behavior in the lay, but it also offers an extremely rich potential for analyzing many medieval heroic figures, including those of later Old French and Middle High German as well as earlier Old English texts. The analysis invokes (indirectly) a distinction between the social sign and the unique symbol. Since death is inevitable, it fundamentally means that when an individual dies, he/she ceases to be a part of the reciprocal relations constituting society. This meaning can be taken as semiotic in that it is valid cross-socially, at least within a given society. On the other hand, because the hero dies in a fully individuated and singular fashion, worthy of a heroic lay, death acquires a uniquely symbolic component overwhelming and transcending the socio-semiotic one.21 The logic of such a death can be better understood in the context of Gurevich’s drawing on the anthropology of gift cultures in his discussion of the relationship between the hero and material objects. He follows numerous students of gift-giving in noting that “things are 20

Ibid., 131-32. See Sarah Kay, “The Life of the Dead Body: Death and the Sacred in the Chansons de geste,” Yale French Studies 86 (1994), 94-108 for a reading of Old French heroes, violence and death closely parallel to that of Gurevich in many ways. Cowell, Gifts, Violence, Performance and the Sacred, chapters five and six especially focus on the concept of integrity and non-reciprocity on the part of heroes. 21

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not neutral in eddic poetry; they are closely connected with their owners, and sometimes interact magically with them,” contending that the hero’s “armament and wealth are a direct extension of his self”.22 In other words, in gift-giving cultures, high-value, prestigious objects are removed from the realm of the commodity, where objects circulate interchangeably via barter or sale. The objects are elevated to a sphere of circulation where each one is linked to a specific individual, has its own specific history in relation to its owner’s honorable and glorious accomplishments, and thus represents not so much use-value as symbolic-value. The distinction between the possessions of heroes and the common objects of the culture around them parallels the distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic invoked above. This process of rendering objects heroically symbolic has been termed “singularization” in recent anthropology.23 Gurevich’s analysis, when inflected through anthropological theory, shows that the logic of the hero is one of memory and of death, and more specifically of spectacularly violent and of spectacularly memorable death. More generally, the logic is that of the symbol; the hero seeks to render his gifts, his possessions, himself, and finally his own death fully unique, individual, and symbolic (of him alone) in the face of the crushing, semiotic sameness of most commodities, individuals, and deaths. By asserting that death is necessary for the completion of the hero, and is ultimately his triumph, not tragedy, Gurevich removes the hero from the realm of classic, Aristotelian conceptions of heroism.24 This is in keeping with Gurevich’s consistent efforts to valorize the pagan and the popular in medieval history, as a counterweight to those who focus only on the Classical, Greco-Roman, and learned Christian heritage. It also provides, for the modern scholar and reader, a clear grasp of the motivations of Gunnar’s behavior. Gurevich’s reading is also part of a larger trend in medieval studies towards re-examining the role of violence. Recently, scholars have focused in particular on the memorableness of spectacular violence and its important role in ceremony and performance, as well as on 22

Gurevich, “On Heroes,” 150. See Arjun Appadurai, ed. The Social Life of Things (London, 1986), Introduction, for more on differing spheres of exchange, and Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process” in the same volume, 64-91, for discussion of “singularization.” 24 Gurevich, “On Heroes,” 135. 23

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the more general role of violence as an organizing and ordering feature of medieval culture.25 Most broadly, recent studies of the “poesis” of violence underline that due to its spectacular and therefore highly memorable nature, violence can function symbolically in a manner similar to other kinds of codes that generate symbolic meanings.26 In returning to Dronke’s reading, we notice that she engages on numerous occasions with Gunnar’s emotional state. She repeatedly notes his extreme emotional condition—his “wild speech,” “savage relish,” and “fanatical jealousy,” as well as how he “savagely...prophesies.”27 Such language is of course perfectly consonant with his supposed inability to turn down a challenge, and even more so with his “folly” of departing for Hungary unprepared. In contrast, we noted earlier that Gurevich’s analysis of Gunnar’s actions provides a logic of self-endangerment, violence, and death, which allows us to see him as not simply overwhelmed by emotionalism. Nevertheless, he also describes Gunnar in terms which consistently draw on images of emotion and effusion; he is “greatly excited and seized by the ardour of pride,” “he disregards certain danger in a wildly arrogant state of excitement,” he displays an “ecstatic, reckless willfulness,”28 However, Gurevich’s own, larger claims suggest the need to nuance our reading of such language. Certainly, the task of driving oneself to the point where one is ready to sacrifice one’s life in the most spectacularly violent way would lead to extreme emotional states. Yet Gurevich makes it clear that Gunnar knows exactly 25 Emily Zack Tabuteau, Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law (Chapel Hill, 1988) includes a number of specific examples of violence used to render gift exchanges more memorable, notably on 148-51. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Ithaca, 1999), examines the role of spectacular violence on the popular (and moralizing) stage. Guy Halsall, ed. Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West (Woodbridge, UK, 1998) looks at the role of “socially constitutive” violence in society; 11-21 are especially useful. Donald Kagay and L.J. Andrew Villalon, eds., The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY, 1998) present similar points, as on 73-82. William Miller, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca, 1993) makes the same points about medieval Iceland. The three latter books all point out that there are important distinctions to be made between potentially constructive, controlled and reciprocal violence, as opposed to purely destructive violence. 26 Neil L. Whitehead, ed. Violence, (Oxford, 2005) Introduction 9-10. See also Whitehead’s chapter “On the Poetics of Violence” in the same volume, 55-77. 27 Dronke, 26, 24, 15, 14, respectively. 28 Gurevich, “On Heroes,” 127, 130, 130.

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what he is doing, even if he does it in an emotional state. He does not blindly charge into chaos; he is not in thrall to his emotions. As Gurevich notes, Gunnar himself “cannot help seeing the trap” set for him by his enemies. Moreover, on departing for Hungary, presumably recovered from his ecstasy, Gunnar chooses not to wear his armor and leaves his retainers behind.29 In addition, the famous “grim humor” of the Old Norse materials makes it clear that heroes, at the moment of death, take great pride in mastering themselves and their emotions, while accepting death coolly and calmly, not wildly. Gunnar’s behavior follows a logic which is perfectly clear and understandable—to him, to the Norse audience of the time, and to modern readers. Violence was not only a strategy; it was the product of reflection and conscious decision-making. Thus “emotion,” even extreme and ecstatic emotion, must not be read as unreasonable here, though this is of course exactly the tendency which a great deal of Western epistemological thought encourages, because it portrays emotion as inimical to reason.30 Gurevich’s work, like that of Mikhail Bakhtin, consistently seeks to question such distinctions, just as he questions the distinction of laughter and seriousness in relation to the gods.31 Thus the hero is not “blindly” following cultural dictates and models; he knows exactly what he is doing, and chooses to do so, based purely on an internally-inspired faithfulness to the “dignity” of heroism and kingship.32 Nor is the hero overwhelmed by individual emotion and blinded to the consequences of his actions. He is neither a fool nor a faithful soldier of culture.33 Rather, in his violent death, he attains the maximum degree of subjectivity available to someone in his culture. We could even say that he is the only member of his culture to attain full subjectivity. His death enacts a form of self-awareness with regards to both himself and the deep logic of his culture, with its foundations in face-toface collective memory. Only someone who fully realizes this latter 29

Ibid., 130. For more recent studies which examine violent anger as a positive political strategy, rather than simply a “blind” emotion, see Barbara Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998), especially the chapters by White and Barton. 31 Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, chapters seven and eight. 32 Gurevich, “On heroes,” 130. 33 Gurevich makes very similar points in The Origins of European Individualism, arguing for the need to examine the “self-awareness” of the individual (23) and against the idea of the “mental impotence” of the hero (26-27). 30

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point could willfully seek out for himself such violent and spectacular forms of death. Gurevich then goes on to consider not just the characters in the text, but also the text’s audience and its reception, thus adding an important layer of depth to the interpretation. In so doing, he shows us a second way of considering reflexivity and analytic distance in Old Norse culture, and in epic-type cultures more generally. As we have already noted, he asserts that the hero of these heroic texts was always at a distance from his own society, even alienated from it at times. The characters of historical lays are solitary, do not form groups or associations, and even their affections for others do not completely determine their actions. Heroic poetry did not select the victories and triumphs, but the failures, defeats and deaths of historical figures who appear isolated from their societies.34 Though modern critics have been slow to recognize this process, the distance between a hero and his society—both the society within the text and the listeners who hear the text—is central for the construction of a critical distance between text and audience that heroic lays, as well as epics and chansons de geste, all produce. Virtually all of the great epic heroes of the Middle Ages—Beowulf, Siegfried, Roland, Raoul of Cambrai—end up isolated from their own societies and even from their closest kin and friends. Indeed, the texts which tell of their deeds usually contain an emblematic moment in which the hero breaks off reciprocal relations with those around him (usually by refusing an offer or gift), underlining for the audience that he has become “other” to his own society. Beowulf refuses to allow his closest retainers to help him in his climactic confrontation with the dragon; Siegfried takes very few men to accompany him to Wurms in quest for Kriemhild, and in response to offers of hospitality from Kriemhild’s brothers, announces flatly that he intends to take their lands and their sister by force; Roland rejects Charlemagne’s offer of half his army for the rearguard; Raoul of Cambrai is the most famous of a series of rebellious barons who break ranks with both lords and their own followers (in Raoul’s case, his vassal and companion Bernai). Surely audiences of the time, far more attuned to the subtleties of symbolic reciprocity than we, must have understood that however “true” these texts were, they were fundamentally not about people like them. Gurevich himself follows Bakhtin in insisting on 34

Gurevich, “On heroes,” 126.

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the “absolute, epic” time of the Old Norse heroic lays.35 Similarly, many Old French chansons de geste invoke the ninth century emperor Charlemagne, a figure more legendary than real for audiences of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus the audiences of such texts were no more “in thrall” to the texts than the heroes were “in thrall” to their emotions within the texts. The astute among them, at least, were no more likely to blindly identify with the hero—or race out and try to emulate him—than the astute hero was to hurl challenges at fate without careful consideration of exactly how his own death could be engineered in the most spectacular and worthy fashion. This of course contradicts the typical depiction of medieval audiences for chansons de geste, who are presented as emotional, impulsive, and fully identifying with the texts to which they listen.36 This claim constitutes part of a more general argument about social psychology and reflection, or more specifically, the lack thereof. It is part and parcel of the view of societies and individuals at the time, outside the influence of ecclesiastical theology, as being reflexively emotional and violent, unreflective, and unable to distance themselves from their own cultures in any analytic way. This is not to say that audiences did not admire the heroes in the texts—just that they did not necessarily see such “epic time” heroism as something to pursue in everyday life. It could not have escaped audiences that heroic behavior often produced a social hecatomb for their communities; this is certainly the case for both Germanic and Romance traditions. Roland’s bravery also resulted in the death of 20,000 French knights; Gunnar’s trip to Hungary destroyed the Burgundians (in the Nibelungenlied, at least); Beowulf’s insistence on fighting the dragon alone and dying led to catastrophe for the Geats;

35 Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 141; Origins of European Individualism, 28. Original citation in Bahktin, M.M, The Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist, ed., (Austin, 1981) 13-14. 36 This view of epic audiences is closely related to Walter Ong’s more general claims about the nature of oral literature and its audiences (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), esp. 45-46). Sarah Kay provides an interesting summary and critique of this kind of interpretive tendency among modern readers of the chanson de geste (The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford, 1995), 18-21).

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Raoul of Cambrai’s single-minded rebellion sowed chaos in its wake. The texts themselves are at pains to point this out.37 It seems to me that it is best to treat these texts as specifically ritual performances. Victor Turner’s The Anthropology of Performance argues that ritual can be an enactment which draws full emotional, intellectual belief and commitment from its audience, while also serving as a vehicle to reflect on—or even occasionally reconsider— social issues and organization. Richard Bauman’s work on narrative performance makes the same points, arguing that in some cases ritual can be admonitory even as it is celebratory.38 Recently, a number of anthropologists have studied societies in which quests for honor, heroism, or big-man status cause individuals to pursue quests for power which threaten the overall social order.39 These societies respond by enacting rituals invoking sacred authority in order to blunt such individuals’ efforts. Jacques Godbout discusses this process in traditional societies, arguing that it is by tracking down mercilessly anything in their midst that risks breaking free—such as uncontrollable power or wealth so great that it threatens to accumulate while avoiding the imposition of reversibility—that “they prohibit anyone laying hands on the nomos and making it his own.”40 The nomos in the quotation above refers to the sacred order of societies that allows their reproduction. Godbout contrasts this tendency with that of “reversibility,” but we could argue—with Gurevich—that it is reciprocity in particular that is at stake. Reciprocity is the mechanism of that reversibility, as part of “a system of social communications” through which “the 37 Howell D. Chickering, Jr., ed. and trans., Beowulf: A Dual Language Edition (New York, 1977). Lines 3007 to the end of this text are full of laments and presages of the doom that awaits the Geats once Beowulf is dead. Gerard Brault, ed., The Song of Roland: An Analytical Edition (University Park, PA, 1978). The argument between Roland and Oliver over whether to sound the oliphant in laisses 128-131 is just one example of the text’s underlining of the cost of Roland’s heroism in the poem. 38 Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York, 1987); Richard Bauman, “Verbal Art as Performance,” in Alessandro Duranti, ed., Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader (Oxford, 2001), 165-188. 39 Weiner, Inalienable Possessions, Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, eds., Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia (Cambridge, 1991); Cécile Barraud, Daniel de Coppet, André Iteanu, and Raymond Jamous, Of Relations and the Dead: Four Societies Viewed from the Angle of Their Exchanges, Stephen J. Suffern, trans., (Oxford, 1994); Jacques Godbout, The World of the Gift, Donald Winkler, transl., (Montreal, 1998); Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers, Honor and Grace in Anthropology. 40 Godbout, The World of the Gift, 143

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socio-psychological unity of social groups was established.”41 The reciprocity of give-and-take which forms societies also allows them inevitably, inexorably to reel back individuals seeking to rise above their societies; followers demand more gifts, or the individual is challenged by aggressive counter-gifts. In his examination of honor-based Berber societies, not so different in some ways from medieval European ones, Raymond Jamous notes that holy men constantly restrain the quest for honor by intervening to short circuit such efforts because they threaten to spiral upwards and bring social disaster.42 Similarly, events such as the potlatch or Melanesian give-aways, while representing social triumphs for the sponsor, also impoverish the sponsor so that he is unable to repeat such events for many years to come. Moreover, in the Melanesian cases, the events explicitly feature ritual performances which actually mock the big man’s pretensions to rival gods and ancestors—that is, to lay claim to the nomos.43 Such studies offer a key means of deepening Gurevich’s suggestions about the role of religion and the sacred in connection with heroic violence. Note that Dronke and Gurevich both invoke ideas of ritual and sacrifice in their analyses, though in different ways.44 Dronke focuses on Gunnar’s death or execution as a form of ritual sacrifice carried out by the Huns. While this makes his death meaningful from the perspective of his enemies, it provides little rationale for Gunnar’s own behavior. In contrast, Gurevich turns to notions of pagan religion and ritual sacrifice to explain the deepest logic of Gunnar’s behavior (as well as that of Gunnar’s sister Gudrun, who kills her own children in the second half of the lay, thus providing a scene of spectacular violence parallel to her brother’s). Gunnar’s violence towards Hogni, as well as his own decision to go to his death relatively unprotected, Gurevich argues, must be seen as based on such sacrifices, in which communities are renewed through a process of foundational violence.45 Yet Gurevich acknowledges that, while such logic of religious sacrifice may be the ultimate source of the scenes of heroic violence in the lay, this logic is not overtly present in the text. He refers to “a 41 42 43 44 45

Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 189. Barraud, et al, Of Relations and the Dead, 20-22, 95-96. Ibid., 44-6. Dronke, The Poetic Edda, 23-4. Dronke, 144-147.

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vestige of the ritual sacrifice of captives” asserting that “this type of behavior originated in ritual sacrifices and rites” and then “pass[ed] from ritual into the fabric of the lay.”46 In making these anthropological and historical claims about cultural change, Gurevich again introduces an added layer into the analysis, which is not present in Dronke’s reading. He also provides a richer reading of Gunnar’s own partial awareness of his role in the events. Nevertheless Gurevich’s historico-anthropological approach leaves an awkward gap in his analysis; on the one hand, Gunnar’s behavior is a product of a heroic quest for integrity largely independent of the community, though it certainly exemplifies the cultural logic of that community, and on the other, it is an echo of a ritual sacrifice which would have renewed community, and to which he seemingly acquiesces. The two viewpoints seem incompatible, though Gurevich attempts to resolve the issue in an appeal to diachronics, by suggesting that the first type of ethos is immanent in the text, while the second is vestigial. Yet the larger concept of ritual, and particularly of admonitory ritual, allows us to bridge the gap in the analysis. We must see the heroic lay itself, and in particular the performance of that lay, as a specifically ritual re-enactment of an actual, foundational sacrifice. This ritual acknowledges the legitimacy of the heroic violence of the sacrifice as a foundational model of social psychology and social motivation, which renders all heroic action understandable. It simultaneously also acts to underline the distance between the typical listener and the hero, and thus limits the listener’s ability ever to fully recapitulate the hero’s gesture, even if the gesture remains both admired and conceptually operative for the listener as a means of understanding, measuring and judging his own conduct, and his own, more carefully-restricted violence. I would not go so far as to claim that no listener would ever try to emulate Gunnar—perhaps some might. However, Gunnar was a king after all, and it was over much time and through strenuous effort that he acquired a reputation as a great warrior. Only those in similar circumstances and with similar abilities would be in a position to fully emulate Gunnar’s spectacular violence. Part of the reason that Gunnar’s death is so memorable lies in the fact that he, a great warrior fully capable of great deeds, dies in the way he does. One must first live spectacularly to have the right and ability to die spectacularly. Yet, the elevation of 46

Gurevich, “On Heroes,” 145, italics my own.

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violence to foundational sacrifice serves to clarify the logic of everyday violence even as it points out its dangers and limits. A number of anthropologists—most notably Annette Weiner and Maurice Godelier—have emphasized that social performances of giving and taking, as well as quests for honor and status enacted through violent taking and remunerative giving, must be understood in light of what Weiner calls the “governor” of the sacred.47 Weiner discusses the case of fine mats in Samoa, and shows that in that society, the nearly ceaseless giving and taking can be best understood as an attempt to avoid having to give away what are essentially sacred fine mats in the possession of key families. These items were to be kept, not given as gifts, and anchored the family’s status. Giving and taking of lesser items is a strategy to protect and keep these mats, and the greatest social disaster that can befall a family is to be forced into a situation where the only reciprocation they can offer for a gift they have received is one of the fine mats they possess. Similar analyses can be applied to sacred relics of medieval Europe or the Sacred Pipes held by certain Plains Indian tribes of North America. Godelier and Weiner argue that protecting the sacred—or gaining access to the sacred—is what ultimately motivates individual social behaviors. However, from a community perspective, that access had to be carefully mediated by society, restrained by strong networks of reciprocity, and limited to a few privileged individuals, lest social chaos result. Gurevich’s invocation of ritual sacrifice, in conjunction with the idea of epic distance, provides an early example of this same basic realization, which the above analysis has sought to realize more fully in the context of more recent anthropological studies of ritual, performance, sacrifice and the sacred. Part Two: Anthropology, Violence, and the Middle Ages In recent years, numerous critics have underlined the conjunctions between modernist anthropology and colonialism. Structuralism, in particular, as exemplified in the work of figures such as Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, has often been read as virtually the official academic component of colonialism, though Functionalism has also

47

Weiner, Inalienable Possessions, 6. See also Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift (Chicago, 1999), 8-9.

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received its share of attention in this regard.48 Specifically, numerous critics have pointed out that Structuralism and Functionalism both tended to look much more closely at socio-cultural norms than individual variation. As part of this tendency, individual agency and reflexivity in relation to these social norms were often not only ignored but implicitly denied. Gurevich raises the same methodological issues when he asserts that “the merging of history with sociology and political economy has led to its dehumanization,”49 and he explicitly invokes the negative influence of structuralism.50 Neither anthropologists nor medievalists have failed to recognize that such perspectives directed at contemporary “others” are also directed at the past as well, as scholars of the Middle Ages and other periods attempt to use contemporary anthropology to aid their studies.51 This perspective on the individual in non-western (and past) cultures cannot be separated from perspectives on violence in such cultures; to put it bluntly, violence and primitivism have repeatedly been read in tandem. A recent scholar of Scandinavia, William Miller, claims that modern western culture operates on a “nature versus culture” paradigm, wherein violence is seen as an element of nature and opposed to culture.52 As Miller’s remark suggests, such a perspective can be considered a pervasive ideological concept transcending academia and anthropology. Yet, while academic anthropology has certainly shared in this perspective of violence on many occasions, some of its practitioners took a different approach, arguing that violence can indeed be a rational strategy, used by thoughtful agents.53 This latter perspective arises as part of the general trend in post-modern 48 See for example William Adens, The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology (Stanford, 1998); Bernard McGraw, Beyond Anthroplogy: Society and the Other (New York, 1989); and Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society (London, 1988). Good starting points for further reading on both Structuralism and Functionalism within the broader context of Anthropology can be found in Adens, The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology; Stanley R. Barrett, Anthropology: A Student’s Guide to Theory and Method (Toronto, 1996); and Robin Fox, The Challenge of Anthropology: Old Encounters and New Excursions (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994). 49 Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 11; see also 12, 15. 50 Ibid., 46. 51 See McGraw, Beyond Anthropology, 68-71, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York, 2000). 52 Miller, Humiliation, 78-9. 53 Bettina E. Schimdt and Ingo W. Schröder, eds., Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, (London, 2001), Introduction. David Riches, Anthropology of Violence (Oxford, 1986), Introduction.

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anthropology towards highlighting individual difference, agency and reflection in relation to socio-cultural systems. In this sense, it would appear that anthropologists are laying the theoretical groundwork for a better understanding of medieval heroic violence as well. However, this is not necessarily the case. The problem, within recent studies of violence, remains that while some scholars view violence as a product of rational strategists, most regard it as a last resort, a failure, and—most simply—bad.54 Thus, in studies of violence, statements such as “at some point, conflicts can no longer be avoided or renegotiated, but escalate to war...” (italics my own)55 or discussions of the necessity of using “tactical pre-emption” to “defend” the use of violence abound.56 As scholars of violence themselves readily admit, it is extremely hard to get past what David Riches (too narrowly) describes as the typical Anglo-Saxon mindset, wherein the very word “violence” denotes something “illegitimate or unacceptable” and even connotes “irrationality and bestiality,” with a fundamental opposition between “social order” and violence, wherein the word “violence” is used ideologically to express “moral impropriety.”57 Thus while anthropologists accept that violence can be quite powerful and effective in achieving social action, both as a direct instrument and as a powerful symbol,58 their views typically do not escape what we might call the western, folk viewpoint of violence as fundamentally contestable at a minimum,59 and “bestial” at worst. According to one set of views, outlaws or a-social or anti-social individuals commit violence; another interpretation suggests that structures of power within a society may produce violence on individuals within that society, but those structures of power at least should be regretted and, at most, condemned and resisted. Finally, members of certain powerful, violent groups may inflict violence on other societies. As a result of these three viewpoints, many post-modern anthro54

See Fox, The Challenge of Anthropology. Part Two of the book focuses on violence and aggression, and chapter seven in particular examines ideologies of violence among anthropologists themselves. 55 Schmidt and Schröder, Violence and Conflict, 4. 56 Riches, Anthropology of Violence, 5. 57 Ibid., 1, 2, 3, 4 respectively for the citations. David Perkin further notes the connection between “physical destruction” and “metaphysical desecration.” (Perkin, “Violence and Will,” 205, in Riches, ed., Anthropology of Violence, 204-223). 58 Riches, Anthropology of Violence, Introduction, 12, 25; Schmidt and Schröder, Violence and Conflict, Introduction, 6-8. 59 Ibid., Introduction, 10 discusses contestability.

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pological studies have avoided examining violence in non-western societies, specifically out of a fear that doing so will stereotype these societies negatively.60 Can we then imagine individual violence which is gratuitous, cruel, potentially committed against peers (as was often the case with medieval nobles and heroes), yet nevertheless admirable? This is all the more difficult since readers of this book are clearly part of a tradition wherein willful and spectacular violence are incompatible with models of full and socially productive subjectivity. This latter tradition itself has a long history. In his Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt discusses Christopher Marlowe’s Renaissance drama Tamerlane, noting that the title character is emblematic of Renaissance individuals who engaged in “casual, unexplained violence” in the process of self-fashioning.61 The author goes on to argue that such violent self-fashioning failed for both Tamerlane and Renaissance individuals more generally because, at the time, “violence ha[d] no discourse” and thus could not really productively constitute an individual (as opposed to group) identity.62 As Gurevich insists, however, such a discourse of violent self-fashioning did exist during the Middle Ages, at least within the pagan Scandinavian realm, and, as I argue, within the realm of western European, Christian, epic society as well. Gurevich’s use of the term “willful” and his concentration on the element of the will in relation to violence and the concept of integrity can be usefully compared to recent anthropological scholarship on violence and identity to further illustrate exactly why positive valence existed in the texts and culture he studied. Anthropologist Glenn Bowman asserts that the word “violence,” though normally considered to be a “transitive” phenomenon in our culture (i.e. having a 60 See Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, eds., Violence in War and Peace (Oxford, 2004), 5-9 and chapters 1-6 for commentaries both on the entanglement of anthropology with colonialism and colonial violence, and also the more recent, reactive counter-trend, which takes the form of resistance to seeing violence (with positive or negative valence) in non-western cultures for fear of depicting them as “primitive.” 61 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), 193-4, 217. 62 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning, 198. The ability of violence to establish and maintain group identities has been amply illustrated, however. An especially good discussion is Glenn Bowman, “The Violence in Identity” in Schimdt and Schröder, eds. Violence and Conflict, 25-46.

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perpetrator and a victim), actually derives from Latin forms such as “violentus” meaning “full of force” or “violentia” meaning “vehemence.” Thus the focus in Latin was actually on an “intransitive” quality of will and power.63 Bowman goes on to discuss group identity, but he uses words quite similar to those used above in describing the hero; violence creates “integrities and identities” or “integral identities,” and he likewise poses the question of when the intransitive meaning gave way to a more transitive one in the use of the word.64 In response to that question, we can say that the shift certainly occurred subsequent to the era of Scandinavian heroic lays and medieval chansons de geste. More importantly, we can recognize in the etymology itself the reason why the use of violence would be so appealing to an ambitious warrior aristocrat: it allows the projection of an image of forcefulness and inner-directedness—which, conveniently, is also highly memorable. In this glorification of intransitive will, the object or person on which that will is exercised can become virtually incidental.65 If we move once again from the individual to the ritual and sacrificial, we can appreciate even more fully the dilemma posed for us by Scandinavian society, and the value of Gurevich’s turn to the notion of ritual sacrifice for underlining this dilemma. Bettina Schmidt and Ingo Schröder, in their introduction to Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, note that while modern anthropologists are moving closer and closer to a rationalized understanding of violence, [o]n the other hand, particularly the close relationship between religion and violence, from female circumcision to human sacrifice, has always challenged our relativistic tolerance and our modern understanding of violence as meaningful social action.66

It seems to me that religion and sacrifice pose this great dilemma— and bring out most strongly the limits of our ability to rationalize violence from a modern, western perspective—because the religious 63

Bowman, “The Violence in Identity,” 25-26. Ibid.,” 27-28. 65 In a very interesting article on the Spanish bullfight as a forum for the expression of masculine honor and integrity, Garry Marvin makes a very similar point about the Spanish view of the bull in relation to the bullfighter (“Honor, Integrity and the Problem of Violence in the Spanish Bullfight,” in Riches, ed., Anthropology of Violence, 118-135.) 66 Schmidt and Schröder, Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, 8. 64

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and ritual practices in question make violence not a last resort, but rather the best and even the only means of accomplishing the society’s goals. However, we must remember that Gurevich is at pains to stress that he is talking about heroic lays, not ritual sacrifices. Or as I have stressed, the ritual performance of such texts is secondary, bearing only an indirect and reflective relationship to the primary ritual of sacrifice. In recognizing the “epic time” and thus receptive and aesthetic distance at play in such performances, we can recognize not only their ritual nature, but also the fact that they provide a halfway ground for us to better consider the problematic violence involved. Clearly, the texts constitute positive celebrations of spectacular violence and cruelty. Furthermore, we cannot use the idea of “epic time” to argue that the texts are just “texts” about violence in some other time and place; they clearly engage with the question of actual violent identity formation in their own cultural context and the positive valence of violence in that culture, not just in some “epic” time. Yet they also constitute reflections on the exact role and status of violence and cruelty in their society and—as I have already argued—provide admonitions on the nature and limits of such behavior in relation to the average member of the audience of the time. Thus in this context, the specifically secondary ritual nature of the texts mediates—for us moderns as well as for the audience— between two poles: the problematic otherness of primary ritual sacrifice, and the social and individual reflection, which we—as post-moderns—seek to find in and share with the other. We can now see that the genius of Gurevich’s article lies in its ability to escape the potential determinisms of anthropology while still bringing a highly anthropologically-informed perspective to his work as historian and reader of literature and culture.67 The article is one of the strongest analyses arguing that “literary” heroic individuals— in a certain kind of society—do in fact engage in gratuitous and willfully spectacular violence, and that they are admired (though also feared) because of it. Moreover, their behavior offers to those societies a model of full subjectivity, of full individuality—a way of thinking about and conceiving the individual qua individual. At the same time, the analysis strongly suggests that these individuals were not 67 In part, Gurevich himself suggests, this was because historical anthropology was especially driven by French perspectives, and the Old Norse realm was largely neglected by this work. (Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History,” p. 141).

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taken literally by the social audience; they can be thought of as test cases of the individual, against the background of which more prosaic individual identities can be established and measured. The gratuitous nature of the violence committed by the hero symbolically constitutes full individuality itself—for the character, within the heroic lay or chanson de geste—and also simultaneously opens a reflexive distance for the audience of the lay or chanson de geste. This distance allows them to think about individuality and its limits, as well as about the constitutive nature of violence itself, both for heroic subjectivity and, indirectly, for the interpretive communities focused on heroic lays and chansons de geste. In another context, Gurevich notes that “the study of death seems to be connected with the study of awareness of individuality.”68 Although Gurevich was discussing Christian death, if we insert “[violent] death [of the hero]” then we come quite close to the argument that I am making here. In conclusion, the question of violence is one test case for the degree to which modern anthropology can truly confront alterity, by which I mean true cultural difference, accepted as such without condemnation or judgments of superiority and inferiority, either in the present or the past. The constitutive role of violence in such textual and social communities—and more importantly, the clear awareness of this constitutive role on the part of the communities, expressed in their fascination with and admiration for the heroes who embody this violence—marks a boundary with our own society. This is not to say that we are not a violent society, or that we are not aware of this violence. The point is rather that the rhetoric of violence in our society leaves little space for appreciating heroic violence. Gurevich’s effort to confront and accept the true valence of “cruel,” “unnecessary,” “gratuitous” violence in the heroic lay is an exemplary case of the kind of anthropology I am supporting here. Yet Gurevich goes beyond simply accepting the violence as different—he also provides a way for medievalists to better conceptualize this violence as central to a kind of reflection on the individual and the social order, of a very profound sort. Gurevich notes that “the historian must...always be guided by an understanding of the “otherness” of what is being studied,”69 without, he would implicitly add, exoticizing and demean68 69

Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, pp. 65-68. Ibid., 7; see also 29.

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ing that otherness. Ironically, it is only by understanding the radical differences between medieval Scandinavian—and epic—society and our own in terms of the uses and meanings of violence that we can begin to see deeper commonalities in terms of individual and social reflexivity.

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L’ÉMERGENCE DE LA COMPASSION DANS LE REGARD SUR LA PASSION AU MOYEN ÂGE FRANCISCANISME ET MENTALITÉ POPULAIRE JEANPIERRE DELVILLE

Quel est le vécu religieux de l’homme médiéval ? Comment le deviner, le décrypter ? En posant ces questions, nous entrons de plain-pied dans la pensée d’Aron Gurevich et dans sa perspective d’une anthropologie historique.1 L’histoire du christianisme ne peut en effet se contenter d’étudier les institutions, les doctrines, les sociétés, les individus; elle doit aussi comprendre ceux-ci “within the wider context of medieval man’s general notions about the world and himself.”2 Si l’on veut rechercher la spiritualité de l’homme médiéval au-delà des clichés, Gurevich rappelle que, pour montrer la culture de cette époque, il faut une étude systématique des sources.3 Nous avons dès lors entrepris une plongée dans les sources en cherchant à jeter un pont entre deux pôles: les écrits spirituels ou théologiques et la religion populaire.4 Nous avons été frappé par le développement d’une image littéraire, conjointement au développement d’une image picturale: la représentation de la Passion du Christ, tant dans la littérature que dans la peinture ou la sculpture. Cette représentation apparaît de plus en plus dramatique au cours du moyen âge, spécialement du 13e au 15e siècle. Il semble que la représentation plus humaine de Jésus et de sa Passion provoqua graduellement une réponse plus émotionelle de la part des spectateurs croyants, ce qui mena, à travers plusieurs étapes, au développement du sentiment de la compassion. En d’autres mots, le remplacement du Christ par le Jésus-homme dans les écrits spirituels mais surtout dans la piété populaire est la base d’une foi faite de compassion. 1 Aron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, (Cambridge, 1992), 10-11. 2 A. Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, Problems of Belief and Perception, (Paris, 1990), 152, 222. 3 Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, 220. 4 Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, 222-223.

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Mon hypothèse est que la Passion du Christ implique le spectateur dans l’événement qu’elle figure, elle le rend sensible à la souffrance de Jésus, elle entraîne chez lui une réponse: la compassion ; elle provoque sa piété et sa consolation. On entre ainsi dans la psychologie du fidèle: il s’agit de cette psychologie socio-historique dont parle Gurevich, qui la considère comme un aspect indispensable de la recherche.5 Nous avons ainsi eu l’idée de repérer des textes qui font appel à deux points de vue: les données sur la Passion du Christ et le regard que le lecteur lui applique. Ainsi, nous disposons à la fois du point de vue de l’auteur d’un texte (les éléments de la Passion qu’il veut souligner) et du point de vue du lecteur (le regard qu’il est invité à porter sur la Passion et le sentiment de compassion à développer). On peut ainsi sortir du point de vue spécifique de l’auteur pour entrer dans la réaction, au moins potentielle, du destinataire. On sort du point de vue individuel pour entrer dans un point de vue collectif. Pour cela nous avons sélectionné des textes où nous voyons apparaître, 1. le point de vue de l’auteur sur la Passion, par la description de celle-ci, et 2. le point de vue du destinataire, par le mot compassion et par les termes qui manifestent le regard du lecteur ou du spectateur. Le choix de ces œuvres s’est fait à partir d’un constat de base: dans deux œuvres très répandues, les Meditationes Vitae Christi, attribuées à saint Bonaventure (mais qui sont en fait de Johannes de Caulibus, de vers 1350)6 et la Vita Christi de Ludolphe le Chartreux7 (de vers 1370), qui s’en inspire, la Passion du Christ est décrite avec de nombreux détails, qui font appel au regard mental du lecteur et, explicitement, à sa compassion. Dès lors, nous avons voulu explorer ce qui est à la source de ce courant (la spiritualité bernardine, franciscaine et féminine du 13e s.) et ce qui en découle (écrits de la Devotio moderna, prédications); pour ce deuxième versant, nous ne nous sommes pas limités aux noms connus (Jean Rusbroeck, Thomas à Kempis…), mais nous avons abordé des sources inédites, qui étaient à notre disposition. Nous avons ainsi repéré 21 œuvres différentes, du 13e au 15e

5

Gurevich, Historical anthropology, 13. Iohannes de Caulibus, Meditaciones vite Christi olim S. Bonaventuro attributae, M. Stallings-Taney, ed. (Turnhout, 1997). 7 Ludolphe de Saxe, dominicain puis chartreux, 1300?-1378, Vita Jesu Christi e quatuor evangeliis et scriptoribus orthodoxis concinnata per Ludolphum de Saxonia (…), A.-C. Bolard, ed, (Paris-Rome, 1865). 6

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siècle. Nous sélectionnons donc les passages qui allient Passion et compassion au regard.8 En fait, il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur l’importance croissante de la Passion. Ce thème est toujours rare en orthodoxie; en Occident, il est tardif, il n’est donc pas représentatif de tout le moyen âge. En fait, l’accent mis sur la Passion marque un changement fondamental des sensibilités, à partir du 13e siècle. L’intérêt de ce thème, outre le fait qu’il permet de rejoindre le vécu du chrétien de base, est qu’il touche au cœur de la nature humaine: face à la souffrance et à la mort du Christ, l’homme est confronté à son propre destin, à son salut, au sens de sa vie et de sa mort. La personne humaine atteint son climax face à la réalité de la mort.9 Face à la mort, elle est invitée à confronter deux plans: sa vie personnelle et les événements importants pour le futur du monde, comme la crucifixion de Jésus.10 Elle va donc forger sa propre mentalité et celle-ci va évoluer au fil des siècles. Nous voudrions donc essayer de décrire l’univers mental de ce regard, centré sur la Passion et la mort du Christ, et le développement du sentiment de compassion. Car, comme l’écrit Gurevich, “le sens des enseignements chrétiens change constamment et imperceptiblement.”11

8 Sur ce sujet, voir C. Harbison, “Visions and Meditations in Early Flemish Painting,” Simiolus, 15 (1985), 97-118, et Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie des christlichen Kunst, 2 vols. (Guetersloh, 1968), 2: 164-165. Cf. aussi Brigitte D’HainautZveny, ed., Miroirs du sacré. Les retables sculptés à Bruxelles, xve-xvie siècles, (Bruxelles, 2005). J’y ai publié une première approche du sujet de cet article sous le titre “Images de la passion et regard de compassion,” 95-109. Pour une approche globale, voir Piero Coda et Mariano Crociata, eds., Il crocefisso e le religioni. Compassione di Dio e sofferenza dell’uomo nelle religioni monoteiste, (Rome, 2002): il s’agit cependant ici avant tout de la compassion de Dieu pour l’homme et non l’inverse. Je ne me centrerai pas sur les représentations théâtrales de la Passion car, si elles doivent induire la compassio, elles n’utilisent pas ce mot, puisqu’elles ne décrivent pas explicitement le sentiment du spectateur; à ce sujet, cf. U. Schulze, Schmerz und Heiligkeit: zur Performanz von Passio und Compassio in ausgewählten Passion-Spieltexten (Mittelrheinischer, Frankfurter, Donauerschinger Spiel), dans Horst Brunner ed., Forschungen zur deutschen Literatur des Spätmittelamters. Festschrift für Johannes Janota, (Tübingen, 2003), 316 9 Gurevich, Historical anthropology, 88. 10 Gurevich, Historical anthropology, 88. 11 Gurevich, Historical anthropology, 19.

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1. ‘Compassion’: mot absent de la Bible et rarissime chez les Pères de l’Église Curieusement, le substantif compassio n’est pas présent dans la Bible latine. Le verbe compati est utilisé 6 fois,12 dont une seule fois pour marquer la compassion avec le Christ, lorsque Paul s’adresse aux Chrétiens de Rome par ces termes: “Nous sommes (…) cohéritiers du Christ, puisque nous souffrons avec lui pour être aussi glorifiés avec lui” (Rm 8,17). Le verbe latin compatimur traduit le grec sunpaschomen. Si le mot est rare, l’attitude est cependant bien présente.13 C’est pour inciter les lecteurs à une compassion avec le Christ que les quatre évangélistes ont fait le récit de sa Passion. Il est reconnu que ce récit est le noyau le plus ancien de la tradition orale qui a précédé la mise par écrit des Évangiles. Ensuite, chaque évangéliste a raconté l’événement avec son interprétation propre. Matthieu (16,24), Marc (8,34) et Luc (9,23) réfèrent aussi à la parole de Jésus: “Si quelqu’un veut venir à ma suite, (…) qu’il se charge de sa croix et qu’il me suive.” Le disciple est donc invité à s’associer à la Passion du Christ. Dans cette ligne, la figure de Simon de Cyrène, qui aida effectivement Jésus à porter sa croix (cf. Mc 15,21), deviendra l’emblème du disciple et sera souvent représentée dans les retables, comme porte d’entrée du spectateur dans la scène de la Passion. L’apôtre Paul développera cette association en soulignant combien la croix du Christ signifie le point culminant de l’abaissement de Dieu, le comble de son amour pour l’être humain et donc la source de tout salut.14 Il ajoute, d’une manière plus personnelle: “Je suis crucifié avec le Christ et, si je vis, ce n’est plus moi, c’est le Christ qui vit en moi.”15 On le voit, la communion aux souffrances du Christ est toujours liée à une communion à sa force de vie et de salut. Elle complète même la

12 Concordantiarum universae scripturae sacrae thesaurus, (Paris, 1939), 245: Job 30,25; Romains 8,17; 1 Corinthiens 12,26; Hébreux 4,15; 10,34 ; 1 Pierre 3,8. Les mots correspondants en grec sont les verbes sunpaschein et sunpathein, ainsi que l’adjectif sumpathès. W.F. Moulton, A Concordance to the Greek Testament, (Edinburgh, 1980), 916, 924. 13 Cf. Flavio Di Bernardo, “Passion (Mystique de la),” Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, 15 vols. (Paris, 1983), 12: 312-338. On ne trouve pas d’article concernant la compassion. 14 Cf. la première lettre aux Corinthiens, 1, 18-25. 15 Cf. lettre aux Galates, 2, 19-20.

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Passion du Christ: “Je complète en ma chair ce qui manque aux épreuves du Christ pour son corps, qui est l’Église.”16 Les Pères de l’Église développent la perspective des écrits du Nouveau Testament. Méliton de Sardes (†190 env.) est le premier à utiliser en grec le mot sumpathein (compatir) en lien avec paschôn (souffrant), mais il s’agit du Christ qui compatit à la souffrance humaine.17 Pour voir apparaître le mot compassio dans la langue latine, il semble qu’il faille attendre Tertullien (†245).18 On le retrouve aussi chez Augustin (Confessions, 3,2), qui distingue la compassion pour des amants malheureux, dans laquelle se complaît le spectateur de théâtre, et “la compassion infiniment plus pure” que Dieu éprouve pour l’être humain. Le mot apparaît rarement et n’est pas centré sur la réponse du croyant à la Passion du Christ. On retrouve le verbe chez Ambroise (†397): “Celui qui compatit, qu’il ne compatisse pas à la légère, mais pour accomplir en son corps les tribulations du Christ, comme faisait Paul. ”19 On peut cependant dire que les pères de l’Église sont plus centrés sur la résurrection du Christ que sur sa Passion. Celle-ci est vue à la lumière de la divinité du Christ, moins en fonction de son humanité; le thème de la compassion aux souffrances du Christ y est très peu présent. 2. La compassion dans le regard sur la Passion: François d’Assise (1191-1226) C’est le christianisme catholique du moyen âge qui va mettre en valeur les souffrances du Christ dans la réalité de son humanité. Ce sentiment se développera progressivement; ainsi, dans son Elucidatorium, rédigé vers 1140, Honorius d’Autun réprouve son interlocuteur, qui serait prêt à avoir de la compassion pour les souffrances des défunts damnés.20 Saint Bernard (†1153) ouvre la porte à la compassion en approfondissant la dimension psychologique de l’être humain, y compris celle de Jésus. Contre l’intellectualisation 16

Cf. lettre aux Colossiens 1, 24. Cf. Di Bernardo, Passion…, c. 321. Cf. Meliton, Œuvres (Sources chrétiennes, 123), (Paris, 1966), 84, 159. 18 De resurrectione carnis, 40, selon Félix Gaffiot, Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, (Paris, 1934), 359. 19 Cité par Ludolphe le Chartreux (†1378), Vita Christi, II, ch. LVIII, (ParisRome, 1865), 600. 20 Cf. Gurevich, Medieval popular culture…, 162. 17

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de la théologie, Bernard accentue la dimension affective de l’expérience religieuse et ouvre la voie au sentiment de compassion. On trouve que chez lui la notion de compassion du chrétien, qui entraîne son salut,21 est liée à la compassion de Marie au pied de la croix: Oui, Mère bénie (…), ton âme, c’est la force de la douleur qui l’a transpercée, aussi pouvons-nous très certainement te proclamer plus que martyre, puisque ta souffrance de compassion aura certainement dépassé la souffrance qu’on peut ressentir physiquement (…). Qui es-tu donc, frère, (…) pour que tu puisses regarder davantage la compassion de Marie que la Passion du fils de Marie ?22

François d’Assise (1191-1226) accentue cette redécouverte de l’humanité du Christ. Dans ses écrits et ses discours, il se réfère constamment à la vie de Jésus, qu’il veut imiter au maximum, en particulier dans sa Passion. Chez ses biographes, on trouve le mot compassion en lien avec la Passion du Christ à des moments clés de sa vie, et chaque fois en lien avec les yeux: la vision du crucifix de Saint-Damien, au début de son ministère; la vision du séraphin et sa stigmatisation, à la fin de sa vie; sa maladie des yeux peu avant sa mort. Le premier épisode est raconté dans la Vita seconda de Thomas de Celano, composée vers 1248, sur base de témoins directs. Le passage revêt un intérêt particulier pour notre propos puisqu’il montre la relation entre le fidèle et l’œuvre représentant le Christ: Il lui arriva de se promener un jour du côté de l’église Saint-Damien, une église presque en ruines et abandonnée de tous; poussé par l’Esprit, il entra pour prier. Prosterné, suppliant devant le crucifix, il fut touché et visité de grâces extraordinaires; il se sentit devenir tout autre qu’il n’était en entrant. Or à sa stupéfaction, voilà soudain qu’il entend—chose inouïe depuis des siècles—l’image du Christ crucifié qui parle en empruntant les lèvres de la peinture. Elle l’appelle par son nom: “François, lui disaitelle, va et répare ma maison qui, tu le vois, tombe en ruines!” Tremblant, stupéfait, François était comme égaré, incapable de répondre. Il 21

Cf. Schiller, Ikonographie…, 204. Saint Bernard, Homélie pour le dimanche après l’Assomption, 14-15, dans Œuvres completes de St. Bernard, ed., cistercienne, 8 vols. (Paris, 1866-1868), 5: 273274: “O beata mater (…), tuam ergo pertransivit animam vis doloris, ut plus quam martyrem non immerito dicemus, in qua nimirum corporeae sensum corporis excesserit compassionis affectus (…). Quisnam tu, frater (…) ut mireris plus Mariam conpatientem quam Mariae filium patientem?” Dans cette citation, comme dans les suivantes, je mets en italiques les mots passion, compassion, larmes et les termes signifiant le regard ou l’image contemplée. J’utilise les traductions existantes, mais je les corrige quand elles s’écartent trop du texte en langue originale. 22

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se mit en devoir d’obéir et concentra toutes ses forces pour s’exécuter (…). C’est dès lors que fut ancrée dans son âme la compassion pour le Crucifié, et il est permis de supposer que, dès lors aussi, furent imprimés très profondément dans son cœur les stigmates de la Passion avant de l’être dans sa chair (…). C’est pourquoi à partir de ce moment, il lui fut impossible de retenir ses larmes, et il pleurait à haute voix sur la Passion du Christ, comme si elle était toujours placée sous ses yeux.23

On voit donc réunies dans ce passage l’image, la compassion et la Passion. L’attitude première de François est la prière; mais celle-ci est comme renforcée par la présence de l’image du Christ en croix. Sa contemplation induit un dialogue, qui amène François à une conversion intérieure plus profonde et à une relation plus intime avec son Seigneur souffrant, dont “l’image lui parle en empruntant les lèvres de la peinture.” Le regard est exprimé par les mots: imago, picturae, cernis, oculis. La compassion entre dans le cœur de François; elle retentit même par les plaintes de sa bouche et les larmes de ses yeux;24 elle s’étendra du Christ à toute son Église et toute l’humanité. L’image qui en fut la source sera d’ailleurs conservée précieusement et peut être admirée aujourd’hui encore dans l’église Sainte-Claire d’Assise. C’est l’exemple-type de l’image qui parle et qui fait passer de la Passion regardée à la compassion vécue. On retrouve la même idée un peu plus loin dans le texte: “Fréquemment, cette joie finissait en larmes et en compassion pour la Passion du Christ.”25 Entre 1260 23

Thomas de Celano, Vita secunda, 1e partie, § 10-11, dans Saint François d’Assise. Documents. Écrits et premières biographies, Théophile Desbonnets et Damien Vorreux, eds., (Paris, 1968), 329-330. Texte latin dans Analecta franciscana, X, Quaracchi, 1941, 136-137: “Ambulabat die quadam iuxta ecclesiam Sancti Damiani, quae fere diruta erat et ab omnibus derelicta. Qua cum, spiritu ducente, causa orationis intraret, ante crucifixum supplex et devotus prosternitur, et visitationibus pulsatus insolitis, alterum quam ingressus fuerat se invenit. Cui protinus sic affecto, quod est a saeculis inauditum, imago Christi crucifixi, labiis picturae deductis, colloquitur. Vocans enim ipsum ex nomine: “Francisce, inquit, vade, repara domum meam, quae, ut cernis, tota destruitur.” Tremefactus Franciscus stupet non modicum, et quasi alienus a sensu efficitur in sermone. Ad obediendum se parat, totum se recolligit ad mandatum (…). Infigitur ex tunc sanctae animae Crucifixi compassio, et ut pie putari potest, cordi eius, licet nondum carni, venerandae stigmata passionis altius imprimuntur (…). Nequit ex tunc propterea continere a fletu, etiam alta voce Christi passionem quasi semper coram oculis positam plangit.” 24 A ce sujet, cf. Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge. Un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution (ve-xiiie siècle). Préface d’Alain Boureau, (Paris, 2000). 25 de Celano, Vita secunda, [cf. n.23], § 127: “Frequenter in lacrimas et in passionis Christi compassionem hic iubilus solvebatur.” Repris dans le Miroir de la per-

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et 1263, Bonaventure, ministre général des franciscains, compose une nouvelle vie de François, la Legenda maior. Au chapitre sur la stigmatisation de François (datée du 14 septembre 1224), on trouve les mots suivants: Ainsi transporté en Dieu par son désir d’une fougue toute séraphique et transformé, par une douce compassion, en Celui qui, dans un excès d’amour voulut être crucifié, il priait un matin, vers la fête de l’Exaltation de la Croix, sur le versant de la montagne; et voici qu’il vit descendre du haut du ciel un séraphin aux six ailes resplendissantes comme le feu (…). L’effigie d’un homme crucifié apparut alors entre les ailes: c’était un homme crucifié, les mains et les pieds étendus et attachés à une croix (…). Cette apparition plongea François dans un profond étonnement (…). Il se réjouissait au spectacle agréable par laquelle il voyait que le Christ le regardait sous l’aspect d’un séraphin, mais ce crucifiement transperçait son âme de douleur et de compassion comme d’un glaive. Il s’étonnait d’autant à ce spectacle d’une vision insondable, car il savait que les souffrances de la Passion ne peuvent atteindre un séraphin (…). Il comprit enfin, grâce aux lumières du ciel, pourquoi la Divine Providence avait envoyé cette vision à sa vue: c’était pour que l’ami du Christ sache que ce ne serait pas le martyre de son corps, mais l’amour incendiant son âme qui devrait le transformer à la ressemblance du Christ crucifié. Puis la vision disparut, lui laissant au cœur une ardeur merveilleuse, mais non sans lui avoir imprimé en pleine chair l’effigie tout aussi merveilleuse de certains signes: c’est à ce moment qu’apparurent dans ses mains et ses pieds les signes des clous tels qu’il venait de les regarder dans l’effigie de cet homme crucifié.26 fection, § 93,1 et 5, publié dans Saint François d’Assise. Documents. Écrits et premières biographies, 1028, et dans Sabatier, Le Speculum perfectionis ou mémoire de frère Léon, (Manchester, 1928-1931). 26 Bonaventure, Legenda maior, ch. 13, 3, dans Saint François d’Assise. Documents. Écrits et premières biographies, 681 (cf. aussi: ch. 8,1, ibid., 632). Texte latin dans Analecta franciscana, X, (Quaracchi, 1941), 616-617: “Cum igitur seraphicis ardoribus sursum ageretur in Deum et compassiva dulcedine in eum transformaretur, qui ex caritate nimia voluit crucifigi: quodam mane circa festum Exaltationis sanctae Crucis, dum oraret in latere montis, vidit seraph unum sex alas habentem, tam ignitas quam splendidas, de caelorum sublimitate descendere (…). Apparuit inter alas effigies hominis crucifixi, in modum crucis manus et pedes extensos habentis et cruci affixos (…). Hoc videns, vehementer obstupuit (…). Laetabatur quidem in gratioso aspectu, quo a Christo sub specie Seraph cernebat se conspici, sed crucis affixio compassivi doloris gladio ipsius animam pertransibat. Admirabatur quam plurimum in tam inscrutabilis visionis aspectu, sciens, quod passionis infirmitas cum immortalitate spiritus seraphici nullatenus conveniret. Intellexit tandem ex hoc, Domino revelante, quod ideo huiusmodi visio sic divina providentia suis fuerat praesentata conspectibus, ut amicus Christi praenosset, se non per martyrium carnis, sed

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Dans cet extraordinaire récit, nous découvrons de nouveau les trois éléments: la vision (videre, cernere, conspicere, conspectus) d’une effigie (aspectus, effigies), la compassion de l’homme, la Passion du Christ. Ainsi une double singularité se fait jour. D’abord, l’image ici n’est pas matérielle, mais mentale; il s’agit d’une vision du Christ crucifié apparaissant sous les traits d’un séraphin. Mais surtout il se produit une inversion des rôles: ce n’est plus le spectateur seul qui regarde: il est aussi regardé par l’image ! La compassion qu’il éprouve pour le Christ rencontre la compassion du Christ pour lui, au point que l’image du Christ ne reste plus extérieure, mais s’imprime en lui et marque son corps. On est au sommet de la communion que l’image peut susciter avec son spectateur: celui-ci même devient image! Peu après septembre 1224, François rentre à Assise, épuisé, en particulier à cause des souffrances que ses yeux lui faisaient endurer. La Légende de Pérouse, qui regroupe les témoignages du frère Léon et d’autres compagnons de François et peut être datée de 1246, en parle en ces termes: Le bienheureux François avait contracté une très grave maladie d’yeux (…), mais (…) il ne se mettait pas en peine de soigner ces maux. À cause de la grande douceur et de la compassion qu’il tirait de l’humilité et des traces du Fils de Dieu, ce qui était amer pour son corps, il le prenait et le considérait comme doux. Bien plus, les souffrances et les amertumes endurées pour nous par le Christ, il en souffrait tellement chaque jour et, pour elles il s’affligeait tant, intérieurement comme extérieurement, qu’il ne se souciait pas des siennes propres.27 per incendium mentis totum in Christi crucifixi similitudinem transformandum. Disparens igitur visio mirabilem in corde ipsius reliquit ardorem, sed et in carne non minus mirabilem signorum impressit effigiem. Statim namque in manibus eius et pedibus apparere coeperunt signa clavorum quemadmodum paulo ante in effigie illa viri crucifixi conspexerat.” Bonaventure ajoute ici au récit de Thomas de Celano (Vita prima, 94) de nombreux éléments, en particulier les mots compassivus et effigies. 27 Légende de Pérouse, ch. 37, publiée dans Saint François d’Assise. Documents. Écrits et premières biographies, 920. Texte latin publié par Ferdinand et M. Delorme, La “Legenda antiqua S. Francisci”, (Paris, 1926) ; et R. Brooke, Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli, sociorum sancti Francisci, (Oxford, 1970), 154: “Cum beatus Franciscus (…) habuisset infirmitatem maximam oculorum (…), noluit tamen inde habere solicitudinem ut faceret se curari (…): quia propter magnam dulcedinem et compassionem quam cotidie attraebat de humilitate et vestigiis Filii Dei, quod erat amarum carni pro dulci sumebat et habebat. Ymo de doloribus et amaritudinibus Christi, quas pro nobis toleravit, in tantum cotidie dolebat et pro ipsis interius et exterius se affligebat, quod de suis propriis non curabat.” Repris dans le Miroir de la perfection, Sixième partie, ch. 91, dans Saint François d’Assise. Documents. Écrits et premières

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On relèvera dans ce passage l’effet salutaire de la contemplation de la Passion du Christ: la douleur se change en douceur, et cela au moment même où François souffre des yeux. C’est d’ailleurs dans ce contexte de maladie des yeux qu’il composera vers 1224 le Cantique des créatures, commençant par une contemplation du soleil et de la lune. Il disait à ce sujet : “Nous sommes tous comme des aveugles, et c’est par ces deux créatures que Dieu nous donne la lumière.”28 Il est étonnant de voir que ce chant de pure contemplation est prononcé par un François en proie à la souffrance et à la cécité. Ainsi donc, à la fin de sa vie, la compassion de François naît encore de ses yeux, non plus de leur regard, mais de leur cécité. Étrange renversement: tout est dans le regard intérieur. Trois mentions du mot compassion dans les sources franciscaines ont permis de baliser la vie de François d’Assise au fil de trois images: celle du crucifix de Saint-Damien, celle du séraphin en croix du mont Alverne et celle de la maladie des yeux. La stigmatisation de François (la première dans l’histoire du christianisme) manifeste l’incarnation d’une image de la Passion dans la personne animée de compassion. Elle ouvre la voie à une littérature plus prolixe en matière de compassion.29 3. La diffusion du thème de la compassion: saint Bonaventure (1221-1274) Bonaventure est à la base du développement du thème de la compassio. Il en donne d’ailleurs une définition: L’homme qui connaît ses défauts éprouve une douleur de componction pour lui-même, une douleur de compassion pour les prochains, et une douleur d’émulation pour l’honneur de Dieu.30 La compassion est donc liée de près biographies, 1028: “De sa ferveur constante et de sa compassion pour la passion du Christ. Qu’il ne se souciait pas de ses propres maladies par amour pour la passion du Christ.” Publié par Sabatier, Le Speculum perfectionis ou Mémoires de frère Léon 2 vols. (Manchester, 1928-1931). Je cite d’après le manuscrit 6F12 de la Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Liège (f° 41): “De continuo fervore amoris et compassionis ad passionem Christi et primo quod non curabat de suis infirmitatibus propter amorem passionis Christi.” 28 Légende de Pérouse, ch. 43, 925. 29 Voir aussi Julia Johanna Seipel, Ordensrepräsentation und Compassio: Form, Funktion und Wirkungsabsicht der Vitentafeln des heiligen Franciscus und der Croci dipinte, (Frankfurt-am-Main, 2000). 30 Bonaventure, Collationes de septem donis spiritus sancti, dans Doctoris Seraphici Sancti Bonaventurae (…) opera omnia, t. 5, Quaracchi, 1898, 457-503: “Sciens

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à l’amour du prochain. On a vu plus haut (n. 26) comment Bonaventure introduisait ce thème en retravaillant un récit plus ancien. Il est en outre le rédacteur de deux offices liturgiques liés à notre sujet: l’office de la Passion du Seigneur et l’office de la Compassion de la bienheureuse Vierge Marie. Le mot compassion se trouve employé à l’oraison de la prière de Complies: “Seigneur Jésus-Christ, toi dont la sueur, à l’heure des Complies, est devenue du sang à cause de la tristesse de ton âme (…), tire de nos yeux des larmes de pieuse compassion, de sorte qu’en pleurant avec toi, nous méritions d’être consolés par toi.” 31 On remarquera comment l’œil qui contemple le Christ souffrant devient l’œil qui verse des larmes de compassion (comme chez saint François) et mérite de vivre la consolation. Dans l’Office de la Compassion de Marie, le terme apparaît dans le titre même de l’office. Celui-ci donna progressivement naissance à une fête liturgique, instituée à Cologne en 1423.32 On y trouve l’oraison suivante: Vierge très douce, à cause du glaive de la douleur qui a transpercé ton âme, lorsque tu regardais ton fils, élevé nu sur la croix, perforé de clous, lacéré partout de plaies, de coups et de blessures, aide-nous en sorte qu’un glaive de compassion et de componction transperce notre cœur et qu’une lance d’amour divin le blesse.33

homo defectus suos, habet dolorem compunctionis pro se ipso, dolorem compassionis pro proximis, et dolorem aemulationis pro honore Dei” (Collatio 4, 22). Comparer à la définition donnée par Ruysbroeck, cf. n. 66. 31 Bonaventure, Officium de Passione Domini, dans Doctoris Seraphici Sancti Bonaventurae (…) opera omnia, t. 8, Quaracchi, 1898, 158: “Domine Iesu Christe, cuius sudor hora Completorij prae tristitia animae factus est sanguineus (…), educ de oculis nostris lacrymas piae compassionis, ut dum deflemus tua, à te consolari mereamur.” 32 Cf. M. Noirot, Compassion de Marie, dans Catholicisme aujourd’hui, hier, demain, t. II, (Paris, 1949), col. 1418. La fête était fixée au vendredi suivant le 3e dimanche après Pâques. Elle prendra le nom de Transfixion de Marie en 1727 et sera fixée au vendredi précédant le vendredi saint. Elle s’appellera ensuite fête de Notre Dame des Sept Douleurs et est fixée au 15 septembre (1908). Cf. aussi A. Luis, Evolutio historica doctrinae de Compassione B. Mariae Virginis, 1943; et Giovanni Farris, La « compassio virginis » nel sec. XV. Giovanni d’Aquila: Compassio virginis (Quaderni di civiltà letteraria, 21), (Savona, 1981). 33 Bonaventure, De Compassione B. Mariae Virginis officium, dans Sancti Bonaventurae (…) operum tomus sextus, (Lyon, 1668), 464: “Propter doloris gladium, qui pertransivit animam tuam, Virgo dulcissima, quando filium tuum cernebas, nudum in cruce levatum, clavis perforatum, ac per omnia laceratum plagis ac verberibus, necnon et vulneribus, adiuva nos, ut cor nostrum nunc compassionis et compunctionis gladius perfodiat, divinique amoris lancea vulneret (…).”

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La Vierge Marie est ici celle qui contemple l’image de son fils crucifié. Elle est la première spectatrice et la première à entrer en compassion. Elle est donc le modèle de tout chrétien face à la croix du Christ.34 Ce n’est pas pour rien que l’art de la fin du moyen âge l’a souvent figurée au pied de la croix ou l’a représentée en pietà avec le corps de son fils mort sur les genoux. C’est aussi pour cet office que Jacopone da Todi a composé la séquence Stabat Mater.35 C’est dans la même ligne que Bonaventure écrit dans le Lignum vitae, une prière qui fait de Marie et de Marie-Madeleine celles qui introduisent le chrétien à la compassion: Mon Dieu, mon bon Jésus, accorde-moi, qui suis de toute façon sans mérite et indigne et qui n’ai pas mérité d’assister à ceci en mon corps, mais qui, par la foi, les traite en mon esprit, d’expérimenter cette attitude de compassion envers toi, mon Dieu, qui as été crucifié et es mort pour moi, compassion que sentirent ta mère innocente et Marie Madeleine, la pénitente, durant la Passion même.36

Marie-Madeleine exprime sa compassion par le parfum dont elle oint le corps du Christ: Marie prit une livre de parfum (…). Cela signifie le parfum de la compassion: en effet l’âme est pincée de douleur à la considération de l’affliction de l’humanité, qui est signifiée par les pieds, et par la considération de la dignité divine, qui est signifiée par la tête.37

Le fidèle quant à lui exprime sa compassion par sa communion au calice: “Le calice du Christ (…): il faut communier à ce calice triplement: par la compassion spirituelle (…), par la réception sacramentelle (…); par l’imitation actuelle (…).”38 34

Bonaventure, Collationes de septem donis [cf. n. 30], Collatio 6, 18. G. Mathon, Stabat Mater, dans Catholicisme aujourd’hui, hier, demain, t. XIV, c. 420-421, (Paris, 1996). 36 Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, dans Doctoris Seraphici [cf. n. 30], t. 8, Quaracchi, 1898, 80: “Deus meus bone Iesu, concede mihi quamquam per omnem modum immerito et indigno, ut qui corpore his interesse non merui, fide tamen haec eadem mente pertractans, illum ad te Deum meum pro me crucifixum, et mortuum, compassionis affectum experiar, quem innocens mater tua et poenitens Magdalena in ipsa passionis tuae hora senserunt.” 37 Bonaventure, Collationes in Evangelium s. Ioannis, dans Doctoris Seraphici [cf. n. 30], t. 9, 593: “Ioannes 12,2: Maria accepit libram unguenti (…). Significat unguentum compassionis ; compungitur enim anima ex consideratione afflictionis humanitatis, quae significatur per pedes ; et ex consideratione dignationis Divinitatis, quae significatur per caput.” 38 Bonaventure, Collationes in Evangelium s. Ioannis, [cf. n. 30], 613: “Ioannes 18,11: Calix Christi (…). Et huic calici communicandum est tripliciter: per spiritua35

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La compassion est donc signifiée ici de manière visuelle par le calice auquel on boit spirituellement, puis sacramentellement et enfin dans la vie active. 4. Compassion et monde féminin: la vita de Julienne de Cornillon (1263) Il semble que le mot compassion employé en lien à la Passion du Christ apparaisse surtout dans la seconde moitié du 13e siècle. La mystique féminine n’y est pas étrangère.39 On pourrait relever à cet égard sa présence dans la Vita de Julienne de Cornillon (1191-1258). Ce texte, écrit entre 1260 et 1263, présente la vie d’une mystique liégeoise, directrice de l’hospice de Cornillon, marquée par le désir d’union au Christ et promotrice de la fête du Corps et du Sang du Christ, appelée plus tard Fête-Dieu.40 Le mot compassio y est employé six fois, trois en lien avec la Passion du Christ et trois en lien avec les personnes souffrantes. La compassion de Julienne se manifeste par priorité au temps liturgique de la Passion. Comme saint François, elle pleure et crie, au souvenir de ce moment douloureux: Ainsi au temps où l’Église chante la Passion du Christ, elle était émue d’une telle compassion qu’elle pouvait à peine se contenir de douleur. Quand elle était à l’office divin, elle était toute en larmes: ainsi s’écoulait de ses propres yeux une pluie de larmes provenant du pressoir de la croix et mouillant abondamment le lieu de l’église où elle était... Et quand elle entendait qu’on entamait l’hymne Vexilla regis prodeunt,41alors se renouvelait en elle subitement la Passion du Christ. Parfois elle émettait de grands cris et on devait très rapidement la porter hors de l’église. Elle fondait ensuite au souvenir de la Passion, elle lem compassionem (…). Per sacramentalem susceptionem (…). Per actualem imitationem.” 39 Pour un point de vue global, cf. Otto Langer, Leibhafte Erfahrung Gottes. Zu compassio und geistlicher Sinnlichkeit in der Frauenmystik des Mittelalters, dans K. Schreiner, ed., Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter, (München, 2002), 439-461, qui s’intéresse en particulier à la Vie de sainte Marie d’Oignies par Jacques de Vitry, mais ne relève pas de passage avec le mot compassio. 40 Publié dans les Acta sanctorum, Aprilis, (Anvers, 1675), 1, 437-477, et dans Fête-Dieu (1246-1996), 2 vols., Vie de sainte Julienne de Cornillon, Jean-Pierre Delville, ed. (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1999). 41 L’étendard du roi s’avance: hymne de procession composée par Vénance Fortunat (530- 607 env.), utilisée comme hymne pour les vêpres pendant le temps de la Passion.

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jean-pierre delville ne pouvait se retenir d’exhaler, au moins un peu, des cris semblables.42

A l’instar de saint François, elle s’assimile au corps du Christ souffrant: On dit même qu’elle a souhaité de nombreuses fois endurer la mort de la croix à la place du Christ en vue de tous les vivants afin de pouvoir ainsi au moins contrebalancer à son tour un tant soit peu l’amitié que le Christ a montrée en mourant sur la croix. Mais comme elle ne pouvait atteindre physiquement cette mort de la croix qu’elle désirait, souvent elle s’étendait en esprit avec une ferveur d’affection incroyable sur la même croix que celle sur laquelle le Christ avait souffert.43

On trouve ici une attitude commune à de nombreuses femmes mystiques du 12e et du 13e siècle:44 Élisabeth de Schönau (†1164), Hildegarde de Bingen (†1179), Mechtilde de Hackeborn (†1298), Gertrude de Helfta (†1301).45 Cependant, chez Julienne, cette compassion ne se limite pas à la Semaine sainte. Elle est le résultat de méditations fréquentes, qui suivent mentalement les scènes et les images de la Passion du Christ: Depuis sa jeunesse dans ses saintes et fréquentes méditations, elle contemplait de l’oeil de sa pensée le roi Salomon avec le diadème dont sa mère l’a couronné. Elle l’apercevait lié, flagellé, plein de crachats, harcelé d’opprobres et fixé par des clous. Elle apercevait ce serpent de 42 Vie …[cf. n. 40], I, 18, 57: “Unde eo tempore quo in ecclesia canitur de christi passione; tanta afficiebatur compassione; ut vix sese caperet pre dolore. Que cum divinis intererat· in lacrymis tota erat, ita ut ab eius oculis profluentibus lacrymarum ymbribus· de torculari crucis expressis· locum templi in quo sedebat· habundantius humectaret. Et cum audiebat incipi hymnum vexilla regis prodeunt; passione christi sibi subito renovata· magnos interdum clamores emittebat, ipsamque deduci extra ecclesiam velocissime oportebat. Liquescebat siquidem ad huius memoriam passionis nec se poterat continere· quin vel ad modicum per clamores huiusmodi respirare.” 43 Vie …[cf. n. 40], I, 18, 57: “Multotiens etiam optasse dicitur· in conspectu omnium viventium pro christo perpeti mortem crucis; ut sic saltem aliquantulam rependere vicem posset illius quam christus in cruce moriens exhibuerat caritatis. Sed quoniam mortem crucis assequi non poterat corpore ut optabat, sepius in spiritu in eamdem in qua christus passus est crucem· sese incredibili fervore dilectionis extendebat.” 44 Cf. Di Bernardo, Passion…, c. 327. 45 Par contre, on ne trouve pas d’allusion à la passion dans la Vie de sainte Lutgarde de Tongres (1182-1246). Mais on en retiendra sa vision célèbre (Vita, I, 13), par laquelle elle vit le Christ en croix détacher un de ses bras et l’inviter à embrasser la plaie de son côté. Il s’agit plus d’une compassion du Christ pour Lutgarde que l’inverse. Cf. Thomas de Cantimpré, Vita Lutgardis, Guido Hendrix, ed. (Ontmoetingen met Lutgart van Tongeren, Deel III), (Louvain, 1997), 10.

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bronze, élevé sur le tronc de la croix au désert de cet exil, abreuvé de myrrhe et le côté transpercé par une lance. Ces signes de la Passion et de la mort du Christ furent toujours présents au cœur de Julienne (…). Leur mémoire avait transformé son cœur en un cœur de chair si tendre que pendant longtemps elle ne pouvait entendre personne parler de la Passion du Christ ou en parler elle-même sans être aussitôt remuée par une incroyable douleur du cœur, à cause de sa compassion prodigieuse.46

Cette mémoire des événements de la Passion transforme le cœur de Julienne dans le sens d’une sensibilité plus grande aux souffrances d’autrui. Cette sensibilité peut être ravivée par une image de la Passion. On trouve ainsi un épisode étonnant dans sa Vie. Lors d’une visite qu’elle rend à son amie Ève, recluse à Saint-Martin, celle-ci ouvre sa véronique, c’est-à-dire un petit retable domestique où est peinte la face du Christ, telle qu’elle se serait imprimée à la Passion sur le voile de Véronique essuyant le visage de Jésus: Mais lorsque la recluse eut ouvert sa véronique, la vierge du Christ [Julienne] fixa les yeux sur l’image du Sauveur et, saisie aussitôt d’une douleur aiguë, à la mémoire de la Passion du Christ, elle s’écroula à terre et défaillit. La recluse la prit dans ses bras et la coucha sur son lit. Voulant apaiser sa douleur ou la calmer, elle lui dit: Reposez-vous, Madame, car la douleur de la Passion du Christ est passée et déjà loin. Mais elle lui répondit: C’est vrai qu’elle est passée, mais il dut quand même endurer cette Passion.47

Les yeux de Julienne sont fixés sur le retable; elle est alors saisie d’une douleur forte (nimio correpta dolore, expression superlative de la compassion), à la mémoire de la Passion. Tout son corps tombe 46 Vie… [cf. n. 40], I, 18, 55: “A iuventute etenim sua in suis sanctis et creberrimis meditationibus· pro mentis oculo aspiciebat regem salomonem· in dyademate quo coronavit eum mater sua; aspiciebat ligatum; flagellatum; consputum; oprobriis lacessitum, clavis confixum. Aspiciebat illum serpentem eneum in huius exilii deserto super crucis stipitem exaltatum; myrra potatum, latus lancea perforatum. Hec patientis et morientis christi insignia, cordi iuliane semper fuere presentia (…). Quorum memoria tam carneum ac tenerum cor sibimet confecerat ut multo tempore nec aliquam personam audire loquentem· nec ipsa loqui de christi poterat passione· quin ipsa subito pre nimia compassione ad dolorem cordis incredibilem ipsa moveretur.” 47 Vie…, I, 28, 81: “Cum autem aperuisset reclusa veronicam suam, christi virgo fixit oculos ad ymaginem salvatoris. Que statim nimio correpta dolore ex memoria passionis christi ad terram corruit et defecit. Reclusa vero accepit eam in ulnas suas, et ipsam in lectulo reclinavit. Cupiensque ipsius dolorem vel pellere vel lenire, dixit ei· Quiescite domina mea, quoniam dolor passionis christi iam abiit et recessit. At illa· Verum est inquit quod recessit, sed tamen ipsam passionem sustinuit.”

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comme mort. Ici encore, Julienne est assimilée au corps du Christ, mais suite à la vue de l’image du retable, qui rappelle que la Passion n’est pas le fruit de l’imagination, mais a bel et bien eu lieu.48 La vision de la sainte manifeste ici toute son importance.49 5. Compassion systématisée: les Meditationes Vitae Christi (1350 env.) C’est au 14e siècle que le lien entre Passion et compassion se développe dans la littérature spirituelle. L’exemple le plus frappant et peutêtre le plus répandu est celui des Meditationes vitae Christi, attribuées longtemps à saint Bonaventure, mais dont l’auteur semble bien être le franciscain Johannes de Caulibus, qui les a composées entre 1346 et 1364.50 Le texte a eu une grande diffusion en Europe occidentale (211 manuscrits recensés). Je repère 13 fois le mot compassio, 12 fois le verbe compati, 10 fois le mot passio dans le contexte immédiat, et 30 fois un mot indiquant le regard (cerne, vide, considera, intuere, attende, conspice, contemplare, oculi). Le but de l’auteur est de parcourir toute la Passion, comme si on y assistait scène par scène: “Méditation de la Passion du Christ le matin. Reprends donc ces méditations à partir du début de la Passion (…). Fais attention à chaque chose, comme si tu étais présent, et regarde-le attentivement.”51 Pour chaque épisode, l’auteur procède à une description des faits de la Passion, invite le lecteur à contempler la scène et à compatir au Christ. Cette démarche peut être observée pour la prière de Jésus à Gethsémani, la rencontre avec les saintes femmes, la flagellation, le dénuement, le portement de la croix, le secours de Simon de Cyrène, l’élévation de la croix, le crucifiement, la présence de Marie et de Jean, la mise au tombeau, le témoignage de Marie, le tout suivi d’une conclusion extraite des œuvres de saint Anselme. Par 48

Malgré le titre de l’ouvrage suivant, je ne trouve pas le mot compassion en lien avec la Passion chez Mechtilde de Magdeburg: Elisabeth Schwarz-Mehrens, Zum Funktionieren und zur Funktion der Compassio im « Fliessenden Licht der Gottheit » Mechtilds von Magdeburg, (Göppingen, 1985). 49 Cf. Gurevich, Medieval Popular culture…, 147. 50 de Caulibus, Meditaciones vite Christi olim S. Bonaventuro attributae, M. Stallings-Taney ed., (Turnhout, 1997) xi ; Cf. C. Schmitt, Jean des Choux, dans Catholicisme aujourd’hui, hier, demain, 15 vols. (Paris, 1967), 6: 596. 51 Meditaciones, ch. lxxv, 255: “Meditatio passionis Christi ante matutinum. Reassume ergo meditationes istas a principio passionis (…). Attende ergo ad singula, ac si praesens esses, et cerne eum attente.”

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exemple, pour la prière de Jésus à Gethsémani, l’auteur écrit: “Maintenant le Seigneur Jésus prie (…). Compatis avec lui et admire sa profonde humilité (…). Compatis intimement avec lui autant que tu peux et considère, et vois avec diligence tous les actes et les afflictions de ton Seigneur.”52 Pour l’épisode de la flagellation, les trois éléments sont soulignés: le regard, la compassion, les souffrances de la Passion: Fais bien attention ici et considère son attitude dans tous ses actes. Et pour que tu compatisses intimement, et qu’en même temps tu sois édifié, détourne quelque peu les yeux de la divinité, et considère-le comme un pur être humain ; et tu verras ce jeune homme élégant, si noble, innocent et aimant, entièrement flagellé, couvert de sang et de meurtrissures (…) comme s’il était abandonné de Dieu et privé de tout secours.53

La consigne adressée au regard est claire: il doit se diriger vers l’humanité du Christ et non sa divinité, le voir comme s’il était abandonné de Dieu. Ensuite, à propos de Simon de Cyrène et de la montée au Calvaire, l’auteur utilise le jeu de mots entre Passion et compassion et ajoute son propre témoignage: Tout cela ne t’apparaît-il pas témoigner d’une douleur violente et amère, d’une horreur stupéfiante, indépendamment de toute crucifixion ? Oui, je le pense. Et ces choses poussent à la compassion, sans compter qu’elles produisent la Passion.54

Avec la crucifixion, l’auteur invite le lecteur à regarder avec les yeux de l’esprit, “Vois donc avec les yeux de l’esprit: les uns fichent la croix en terre, d’autres préparent les clous et les marteaux.”55 À ce stade, la présence de Marie accentue la valeur de la scène et met en valeur 52 Meditaciones, ch. lxxv, 256 et 260-261: “Orat nunc Dominus Iesus (…). Compatere sibi et admirare profundissimam suam humilitatem (…). Intime quantum potes compatere ei, considera, et vide diligenter omnes actus et singulas afflictiones Domini tui (…).” 53 Meditaciones, ch. lxxvii, 267-268: “Attende hic diligenter, et considera staturam eius in singulis actibus. Et ut intime compatiaris, et simul pascaris, averte parumper oculos à divinitate, et eum purum hominem considera, et videbis iuvenem elegantem nobilissimum, et innocentissimum, et amantissimum, totum autem flagellatum, et sanguine livoribusque respersum (…) acsi foret derelictus à Deo, et omni auxilio destitutus.” 54 Meditaciones, ch. lxxvii, 269-270: “Nonne igitur haec (…) videntur tibi sine ista crucifixione vehementissimi dolores esse, et amarissimi, et horrores valde stupendi ? Certe sic puto, et ad compassionem facientia motiva, quinimmo valde inferentia passionem. ” 55 Meditaciones, ch. lxxviii, 270: “Videas ergo oculis mentis alios crucem in terram, alios parare clavos et martellos (…).”

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le rôle exemplatif de la mère du Christ: Tout cela est dit et se déroule en présence de sa malheureuse mère. Sa compassion à elle augmente beaucoup la Passion du Fils, et réciproquement.”56 Pour finir, une reprise d’une méditation de saint Anselme couronne le tout: Contemple, mon âme, cette homme inoubliable, que tu vois comme présent dans le miroir du texte évangélique (…). Regarde-le plus attentivement. Comme il apparaît digne de grande admiration et de tendre compassion. Vois-le nu, lacéré de coups (…). Pleurez, mes yeux, et liquéfie-toi, mon âme, au feu de la compassion.57

Le regard passe ici par le texte évangélique, perçu comme un miroir qui rend présente la réalité suggérée. On peut transposer sans doute ceci aux retables: comme l’évangile, ils sont un miroir des réalités divines. 6. La compassion diffusée: la Vita Christi de Ludolphe le Chartreux (1370 env.) Les Meditaciones vite Christi seront utilisées comme matériau par Ludolphe le Chartreux,58 dans sa célèbre Vita Jesu Christi, ouvrage qui présente tous les éléments de la vie du Christ d’une manière 56 Meditaciones, ch. lxxviii, 272: “Et hec omnia dicuntur, et fiunt praesente matre sua moestissima: cuius compassio multum augmentat filio passionem, et e contrario.” 57 Meditaciones, ch. lxxxvi, 297-298:”Anima mea, (…) contemplare virum hunc memorabilem, quem in speculo Evangelici sermonis quasi praesentem intuearis (…). Adhuc autem attentius illum intuere quam grandi admiratione et tenerrima compassione dignus appareat. Vide nudum, et verberibus laceratum (…). Fletum deducite oculi mei, et liquesce anima mea igne compassionis.” 58 Ludolphe de Saxe, dominicain puis chartreux, 1300?-1378, Vita Jesu Christi e quatuor evangeliis et scriptoribus orthodoxis concinnata per Ludolphum de Saxonia (…)A.-C. Bolard, ed., (Paris-Rome, 1865). Première édition imprimée: Strasbourg, 1474-88; 60 éditions environ jusque 1880. Traduction française par Guillaume Le Menand, Lyon, 1487, etc.; traduction catalane par Roiz de Lorella, Valence, 14951496; traduction castillane par Ambrosio de Montesino, Alcala, 1502-1503; traduction portugaise par Bernard d’Alcobaça, Lisbonne, 1495; traduction néerlandaise, 1503; traduction italienne par Fr. Sansovino, Venise, 1570; traduction abrégée en allemand et en anglais. Voir à ce sujet: W. Baier, “Ludolphe de Saxe,” dans Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, IX, c. 1130-1138. Cf. aussi C. Conway, The Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxonia and the Late Medieval Devotion Centered on the Incarnation, (Salzbourg, 1976). Pour les passages qui nous intéressent, Ludolphe reprend les Meditationes, ch. lxxvi, 265, l. 46-48, au ch. lxii de la Vita Christi, 638 ; ainsi que le ch. lxxvii, 267, l. 11 à 268, l. 22, à son ch. lxii, § Flagellatio Domini, 639 (cité supra, n. 30).

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systématique, avec un commentaire tour à tour littéral et spirituel. Cet ouvrage sera traduit en de nombreuses langues européennes et jouira d’une très large diffusion. La Passion occupe les chapitres 58 à 68 de la seconde partie, soit 95 pages in folio. J’y repère 10 fois le mot compassio et 27 fois le verbe compati; dans le contexte immédiat des passages repérés, 14 fois le mot passio et 22 fois un mot indiquant le regard (aspicere, attendere, considerare, conspicere, figurari, imaginari, imago, intueri, oculi, repraesentare, respicere, videre). Les proportions sont assez semblables à celles des Meditaciones. Dans un premier chapitre, il propose une méditation globale de la Passion. Il lance rapidement son idée de base: “Compatis donc avec notre Sauveur Jésus, en gardant en ton cœur la mémoire de sa Passion et de ses blessures, parfaitement conscient que tu participeras à sa consolation dans le futur, si tu participes à sa tribulation dans le présent.”59 L’auteur introduit alors un rapport à l’objet visuel: la croix pendue au plafond d’une église: Cela est bien figuré par le fait qu’une croix est disposée entre le chœur et la porte d’une église, pour que ceux qui veulent entrer dans le chœur, passent sous la croix, car personne ne peut passer de l’Église militante à l’Église triomphante, si ce n’est par la croix. Il plaît donc beaucoup à Dieu que l’être humain porte dans son cœur la mémoire de sa Passion et de ses blessures.60

Le crucifix incite donc à la compassion: il manifeste la nécesité de passer par la croix pour être sauvé. La compassion est comprise ici comme la mémoire du cœur qui se rappelle la Passion. Cela débouche sur une attitude corporelle expressive: porter la croix du Christ avec lui: “Nous devons porter la croix du Christ et l’aider à la porter; et cela, dans notre cœur par le souvenir et la compassion; dans la bouche, par une action de grâces fréquente et fervente; dans le corps, par la flagellation et les châtiments.”61 Cette attitude corporelle est 59

Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 58, 599: “Compatiaris igitur Salvatori nostro Jesu, memoriam passionis et vulnerum in corde tuo habendo, certissime confidens quod eius consolationis socius in futuro efficieris, si eius tribulationis in praesenti socius invenieris.” 60 Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 58, 600: “quod bene figuratur per hoc quod crux ponitur inter chorum et cancellos ecclesiae, ut qui chorum intrare voluerint, vadant sub cruce, quia ab ecclesia militante ad triumphantem, nemo nisi per crucem potest intrare. Multum quippe placet Deo quod homo memoriam passionis et vulnerum eius portet in corde suo.” 61 Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 58, 600: “Crucem Domini debemus bajulare, et juvare eum portare, et hoc: in corde per recordationem et compassionem ; in ore,

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stimulée par la contemplation de la croix: “Exerce-toi à la piété par l’extension des mains et l’élévation des yeux vers le crucifié, par la percussion de la poitrine et les génuflexions ferventes, par les disciplines et les flagellations (…) jusqu’à ce que sortent les grandes eaux des larmes.”62 Le but de cette compassion est de conduire le fidèle à la joie du vrai amour: “Ainsi, concernant la Passion du Seigneur, l’imitation conduit à la purification et à la direction ; la compassion, à l’union et à l’amour; l’admiration, à l’élévation de l’âme ; la joie et l’exultation, à la dilatation du cœur.”63 Dans une prière qui conclut ce chapitre introductif sur la Passion, Ludolphe suggère que, par la mémoire de la Passion, un jeu de représentation passe de la réalité au tableau inscrit dans le cœur, pour rejaillir comme vision perpétuelle sous les yeux du croyant: “Très doux Seigneur Jésus, (…) écris avec ton doigt sur les tablettes de mon cœur la mémoire de ce que tu as souffert pour moi: afin que je les aie toujours sous les yeux et que le fait d’y penser m’adoucisse.”64

Ludolphe passe ensuite en revue chaque scène de la Passion, en suivant une méthodologie rigoureuse: description historique de l’événement, invitation à la contemplation, conséquences morales, “acte de conformité”, et enfin prière. L’acte de conformité concernant le baiser de Judas fait intervenir la notion d’image, non en vue de la contemplation mais de l’acte de dévotion: “En méditant cet article du faux baiser de Judas, l’être humain pourra, au contraire, baiser les pieds du crucifié avec une foi et une dévotion sincères (…). S’il n’a pas d’image du crucifié devant lui, qu’il baise la terre, en se

per crebram et devotam gratiarum actionem ; in corpore per flagellationem et castigationem.” 62 Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 58, 601: “Percute bis silicem, videlicet: interiori recordatione, et corporali nihilominus labore, te exercens ad pietatem, per extensionem manuum, seu oculorum ad crucifixum sublevationem, vel pectoris tunsionem aut genuflexiones devotas, seu disciplinas et flagellationes (…) donec egrediantur aquae lacrimarum largissimae.” 63 Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 58, 604-605: “Sic circa passionem Domini debet esse imitatio ad purgationem, et directionem, compassio ad unionem et amorem, admiratio ad mentis elevationem, gaudium et exultatio ad cordis dilationem, resolutio ad perfectam conformationem, quies et pausatio ad devotionis consummationem.” 64 Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 58, 605: “Dulcissime Domine Jesu (…), scribe digito tuo in tabulis cordis mei eorum quae pro me pertulisti memoriam: ut ea semper prae oculis habeam, et dulcescat mihi non solum illa cogitare (…).”

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représentant la même chose.”65 La contemplation de l’amoindrissement du Christ sur la croix montre bien le passage du regard à la Passion, pour susciter la compassion: Les yeux fixés sur ses blessures, contemple avec une piété toute intérieure ce corps tendre, ce corps innocent, ce corps immaculé, lourdement lacéré par son extension sur la croix (…). Et quoique tu n’ignores pas le bien que cette Passion confère au monde, s’il est en toi des viscères de charité et de compassion, compatis par un mouvement de piété, et émets des larmes en criant.66

Le sommet de la compassion est atteint par Marie. Sa compassion fait écho à celle du Christ pour l’humanité et suscite la nôtre: Le Fils compatissait avec sa mère, qui compatissait avec lui (…). Pensons même à ce que fut la douleur compatissante du Fils pour sa mère, qui compatissait avec lui (…). Qui ne compatirait avec une mère d’une telle piété ? (…) Compatissons avec sa mère souffrante, parce qu’il a été lui-même compatissant pour elle.67

Ainsi ce passage chez Ludolphe nous fait découvrir l’importance du thème de la compassion en lien avec le regard. 7. Mystiques et compassion: Ruysbroeck (1293-1381) et Suso (1295-1366) C’est un tout autre point de vue que l’on découvre dans l’œuvre de Jean Ruysbroeck (1293-1381). Celui-ci en effet est beaucoup plus centré sur le thème de la résurrection et de la participation de l’homme à la divinité de Dieu que sur celui des souffrances du Christ. La compassion à celles-ci n’est qu’une étape sur le chemin de la contemplation. Dans L’Ornement des Noces spirituelles, le traité de spir65

Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 5, 613: “In recolendo hunc articulum de falso osculo Judae, poterit homo per contrarium cum sincera fide et devotione osculari pedes Crucifixi (…). Quod si imaginem crucifixi ante se non habeat, osculetur terram, repraesentando hoc idem.” 66 Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 63, 653: “Fixis in illa vulnera oculis, interna pietate considera illud corpus tenerum, corpus illud innocens, corpus immaculatum, gravi crucis extensione graviter laceratum (…). Et licet non ignores quid boni illa passio conferat mundo, si qua caritatis, si qua compassionis viscera, pietatis affectu compatere et emitte lacrymas, clama.” 67 Ludolphe de Saxe, Vita…, II, ch. 63, 664: “Compatiebatur itaque Filius matri compatienti sibi (…). Pensemus etiam quantus fuerit dolor compassivus Filii ad matrem, sibi compatientem. (…) Quis non compatitur matri totius pietatis ? (…) Compatiamur dolenti matri suae, quia compassus est ei, et ipse.”

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itualité de Ruysbroeck, lui est consacré un court chapitre, le 18e sur les 26 que compte le premier Livre (La vie active) et l’on ne retrouve rien dans le second Livre (La vie intérieure) ni dans le troisième (La vie contemplative). Elle est définie ainsi: La compassion est un mouvement intérieur du cœur, ému de pitié à l’égard des besoins de quiconque (…). La compassion fait que l’on souffre avec le Christ en sa Passion, lorsque l’on considère le pourquoi de ses souffrances, la manière dont il les a portées et la patience dont il a fait preuve (…). Ces peines inouïes et multiples du Christ, notre Sauveur et notre Époux, elles suscitent la compassion et la pitié chez l’homme bon à l’égard du Christ. La compassion fait en sorte que l’homme se voie et se considère lui-même (…). La compassion est une blessure du cœur qui fait aimer également tous les hommes.68

L’image de la Passion est spiritualisée chez Ruysbroeck, elle se détache de la représentation réaliste, elle devient une considération, qui suscite la compassion et qui—renversement significatif—éveille un regard de l’homme sur soi-même. On voit le côté formateur de la compassion quand on lit la méditation destinée à des religieuses, intitulée De trois petits livres à lire le soir. Le second de ces livres imaginaires est celui de la vie de Jésus-Christ: Les cinq grandes plaies forment les lettres capitales qui sont au commencement des chapitres de ce livre. Vous lirez avec grande compassion les lettres ainsi écrites sur son corps vénérable; mais c’est avec une dévotion intime qu’il vous faut faire mémoire de l’amour qui est dans son âme.69

68 Jan van Ruysbroeck, L’ornement des noces spirituelles, dans Œuvres de Ruysbroeck l’admirable, (Bruxelles, 1928), t. III, 62-64.—Die geestelijke Brulocht, J. Alaerts, ed. (Corpus christianorum. Continuatio medievalis, CIII), (Turnhout, 1988), 229 et 233: “Dese compassie, dat es een inwindich beweghen des herten met ontfermicheiden tot alre menschen noot (…). Compassie doet den mensche lijden ende doghen met Christum in sinen doghene, alse die mensche merket: die waromme sijnder pinen, die wise, ende sine ghelatenheit (…). Dese onghehoerde menichfoudighe pine Christi ons erlossers ende ons brudegoms, die beweeghet den goedertieren mensce in compassien ende in ontfermicheiden met Christo. Compassie doet den mensche hem selven ane sien, ende merken (…) Compassie es een quetsure der herten die minne maect ghemeyne tot allen menschen.” 69 Ruysbroeck, Le livre des sept clôtures, ch. xxi, ibid., t. I, 199.—Van den Seven Sloten, G. de Baere, ed. (CCCM, CII), (Turnhout, 1989), 209: “Maer die vive groete wonden dat sijn hoet letteren daer die capitele in dit boec beginnen. Die letteren die inden werden lichame gescreven sijn, die suldi met groter compassie lesen. Maer die minne die in sine sielen leeft, dire suldi met inneger devotien gedincken.”

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La compassion est donc suscitée par les cinq plaies du corps du Christ, présentées comme les cinq lettres initiales d’un livre qui est son corps. Mais cela doit entraîner l’amour. Dans le même ouvrage, Ruysbroeck expose la nécessité de dépasser toute image matérielle pour arriver à percevoir la lumière éternelle: Si vous voulez pratiquer et réaliser au plus haut degré l’amour et la sainteté, vous devez dépouiller votre puissance intellectuelle de toute image et, par la foi, l’élever au-dessus de la raison. C’est là que brille le rayon du soleil éternel, qui vous éclairera et vous enseignera toute vérité. Puis la vérité vous affranchira et établira votre regard purifié au-dessus de toute image. Heureux les yeux qui voient cela; car cette vue entraîne toujours après elle la puissance aimante avec un amour dépouillé.70

Au septième et suprême degré de l’amour, il n’y a plus d’image. Tout est pris dans l’union à Dieu, chez qui l’on trouve en même temps action et repos, aimer et jouir: L’amour veut toujours agir, car il est une éternelle opération avec Dieu. Mais la jouissance réclame le repos, car c’est, au-dessus de tout vouloir et de tout désir, l’embrassement du bien-aimé par le bien-aimé, dans un amour pur et sans images; là où le Père conjointement avec le Fils s’empare de ceux qu’il aime dans l’unité de jouissance de son Esprit.71

La contemplation, chez Ruysbroeck, débouche donc sur une absence d’image, mais une totalité de vécu. Pourquoi alors ses contemporains vont-ils néanmoins élaborer de plus en plus d’images et de retables? On pourrait émettre l’hypothèse que la spiritualité de Ruysbroeck est trop élitiste pour le commun des fidèles, elle est d’ailleurs adressée plutôt à des religieux. Le mystique de Bruxelles sera certes suivi par des cercles de fidèles, mais peut-être pas par la masse des gens.

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Ruysbroeck, Le livre des sept clôtures, ch. iii, ibid., t. I, 160.—Van den Seven Sloten…, 117: “Maer wildi minne ende heilecheit oefenen ende besitten inden hoechsten grade, soe moet di uwe verstendege cracht ontbloeten van allen beelden ende overmids gheloven verheffen boven redene. Aldar scijnt die raye der eweger sonnen. Ende die sal u verclaren ende leren alle waerheit. Ende die waerheit sal u vrien ende u bloete gesichte stadeghen in ongebeelheid. Salech sijn die ogen die dit sien, want desen siene volcht altoes die minnende cracht met bloeter minnen.” 71 Ruysbroeck, Les sept degrés d’amour spirituel, ch. xiv, Du septième degré d’amour, ibid., t. I, 261.—Van seven Trappen…, 211: “Minne wilt altoes werken, want si es een eewegh werc met gode. Ghebruken moet altoes ledegh sijn, want het es boven willen ende begheren, lief in lief behelst in onghebeelder bloeter minnen, daer de vader met den sone sine ghemeinde begrepen heeft in de ghebrukeleke eenegheit sijns gheests.”

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Ceux-ci sont plus sensibles à la piété visuelle de Ludolphe et des Meditationes vitae Christi. Cependant chez son contemporain Henri Suso (1295 env.-1366), le thème de la compassion lié au regard sur la Passion apparaît clairement. Ainsi dans les Cent méditations sur la Passion du Christ, on le trouve une fois explicitement; il montre la compassion comme un sentiment qui s’impose même aux cœurs les plus durs face à la Passion: “XXV. Tu es pendu si misérablement et si péniblement, Jésus très pieux, que rien qu’à te voir, des cœurs d’acier auraient pu se ramollir par compassion pour toi.”72 Cette évidence de la compassion doit cependant être suscitée par l’exercice spirituel des 100 méditations, comme le montre l’expérience de l’auteur, décrite par l’épilogue de la traduction néerlandaise: “Ces méditations proviennent d’un prêtre dévot, de l’ordre des prêcheurs, du pays de Suède; comme il se trouvait une nuit, après matines, devant un crucifix, il se plaignait piteusement qu’il n’éprouvait aucune compassion ou pitié face à l’amère souffrance de notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ alors qu’il la désirait.”73 Cette histoire sert évidemment à contrecarrer l’indifférence et à inviter le croyant à s’adonner davantage à la contemplation de la Passion par des exercices spirituels. 8. Compassion discrète au temps de la Devotio moderna Suite à Ruysbroeck se développe le mouvement de la Devotio moderna, centré sur la dévotion personnelle. Un des auteurs caractéristiques de ce mouvement, après Gérard Groote (1340-1384), dont la publication ne fait que commencer,74 est Gérard Zerbolt de Zutphen 72 Henri Suso, Centum meditationes de passione dominica, trad. latine publiée par José van Aelst, Passie voor het lijden. De Hundert Betrachtungen und Begehrungen van Henricus Suso en de oudste drie bewerkingen uit de Nederlanden, (Leuven, 2005), 304: “Tam miserabiliter tamque penaliter, Ihesu piissime, pependisti, ut solo aspectu adamantina pectora in tui compassionem mollescere potuissent” 73 Suso, Centum meditationes de passione dominica, trad. néerlandaise publiée par José van Aelst, Passie voor het lijden, 294: “Want also quam dese bedinghe tot enen gheesteliken man, eenen devoten priester vander prediker oerden inden lande van zweden, daer hi op eenre nacht na metten stont voer een crucifixe ende jammerlic beclaechde, dat hi gheen compassie of medeliden en hadde totten bitteren liden ons heren Jhesu cristi als hi begheerde.” Dans cette ligne, J. van Aelst consacre un paragraphe de son étude sur les Cent méditations au thème Compassie leren ( 61-62). 74 Gérard Groote, Gerardi Magni Opera omnia. Prolegomena, Th. M. van Dijck, ed., (Corpus christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis, 192), (Turnhout, 2003). Le thème de la compassion n’apparaît pas dans le traité de Florent Radewijns (1350

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(1367-1398). Dans son traité La montée du cœur (De spiritualibus ascensionibus), les ch. 32 à 38 traitent de la Passion du Christ. Il souligne que la lecture de la Passion selon le sens littéral doit engendrer la compassion. On remarquera qu’il s’agit donc moins ici de voir la Passion, que d’en lire le texte: Pour être capable de lire avec dévotion la Passion du Christ en son sens littéral, et la disposer avec circonspection, tu dois savoir qu’une telle méditation de la Passion du Seigneur faite simplement selon le sens littéral—c’est-à-dire considérer simplement les faits, les gestes, les souffrances du Christ pendant sa Passion—incite au plus haut point à la compassion et, par cette compassion, à la dévotion au Christ. Pour retirer de cette méditation davantage de compassion et de dévotion, tu dois surtout (…) concevoir le plus clairement que tu pourras concevoir le Christ comme une seule personne (…) Dieu et homme.75

La compassion est donc d’autant plus grande que le fidèle considérera la divinité du Christ qui subit les outrages de la Passion. Gérard Zerbolt introduit donc une dimension théologique contraire à celle des Meditationes vitae Christi; celles-ci en effet demandaient de ne considérer que l’humanité du Christ. Dans la suite de son texte, consacré aux différents épisodes de la Passion, il n’introduit plus le mot compassion. On ressent donc une certaine discrétion par rapport à son emploi. Elle est une attitude générale qui résulte de la lecture de la Passion, mais elle n’est pas un sentiment qu’on réactive constamment; elle doit plutôt conduire à la dévotion intérieure. L’ouvrage le plus marquant de la devotio moderna est l’Imitation de Jésus-Christ (1441), de Thomas à Kempis (1379-1471). Celui-ci prône une piété intérieure et personnelle, assez indépendante des institutions et des manifestations publiques de la foi. Il invite à trouver l’humilité du cœur, par l’imitation du Christ, et spécialement de ses souffrances. Cependant, curieusement, on ne trouve pas le mot compassion dans env.-1400), Petit manuel pour le dévot moderne. Tractatulus devotus, sr Francis Joseph LeGrand, ed., (Sous la Règle de saint Augustin, 6), (Turnhout, 1999), malgré les pages consacrées à la Passion ( 159-169). 75 Gérard Zerbolt de Zutphen, La montée du cœur. De spiritualibus ascensionibus, N. Staubach et sir Francis Joseph Legrand, eds. (Sous la Règle de saint Augustin, 11), (Turnhout, 2006), 234-235: “Ut autem Christi passionem ad litteram devote relegere valeas et circumspecte dirigere, scire debes quod talis meditacio passionis dominice simpliciter ad litteram—id est simpliciter facta et gesta et penalitates Christi in passione considerate—maxime inducit compassionem et devocionem ad Christum ex compassione. Ut autem melius compassionem et devocionem ex huiusmodi meditacione elicias, debes summopere (…) attendere, ut semper Christum quo lucidius unam personam concipies (…) Deum et hominem.”

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l’Imitation. Le passage le plus proche de ce thème se trouve dans le livre ii, chap. xii, La voie royale de la sainte croix, où l’auteur écrit: “Personne ne prend aussi à cœur la Passion du Christ que celui à qui il est arrivé de souffrir semblablement.”76 L’accent est mis sur l’expérience personnelle de la souffrance, sur la disposition psychologique du chrétien, qui lui permet de prendre à cœur la Passion du Christ, et non sur la réalité des souffrances du Christ et leur description. De nouveau, cette sensibilité nous écarte de l’aspect visuel, pour nous centrer sur la démarche privée du croyant. 9. La compassion chez des prédicateurs du 15e siècle: Soreth et Maillard Relevons un prédicateur de renom, Jean Soreth (1394-1471), maître général des carmes, qui prononça les sermons de Carême à Liège en 1451. On trouve dans ce recueil le mot compassion, mais rarement, et jamais directement en lien avec la Passion. Il est utilisé pour définir l’attitude Marie-Madeleine, qui oint les pieds de Jésus avant sa Passion: “Ayant piété et compassion de nostre seigneur, vint en la maison symon où elle oït dire que il estoit, entra ens, non honteuse de nuluy, ala par derier et soy bouta desoubs le table, et le boiste d’onguement elle getta sur ses pies pour a dieu satisfaire des sept péchiés mortels dont elle estoit remplie. ”77 On trouve aussi le mot pour signifier la compassion du Christ pour l’être humain: “Ainsy fait dieu nostre benoit redempteur; lui aiant piété et compassion de nous, il vuelt saintefier, benire et dédire nostre lieu et temple où le dyable a esté par péchié.”78 On le trouve aussi employé en lien avec l’amour du prochain et le salut des âmes: Le premier point donc est compassion. C’est que on doit par carité avoir piété espirituelement premier des âmes de nous-meismes et de celles de nos proismes; en tele manière en devons avoir piété que quant ils pèchent que nous devons réputer le péchié sur nous; mais au jourd’huj,

76 Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, Liber ii, ca xii, v. 19, Rome, 1925, 143. Cf. aussi De imitatione Christi, Tiburzio Lupo, ed., (Vatican City, 1982): “Nemo ita cordialiter sentit passionem Christi: sicut is cui contigerit similia pati.” 77 Jean Soreth, Sermons de Carême, Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Liège, Manuscrit 6 G 2, f. 130 v° (la ponctuation et l’accentuation sont ajoutées au texte original). 78 Soreth, f. 171.

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on ne treuve point che; dieu est mis avec les bestes crueuses car nul n’a de son proisme piété!79

Aux sermons du jeudi et du vendredi saint, on trouve le thème de la participation du chrétien aux souffrances du Christ, mais le mot compassion n’apparaît pas: On doit venir méditer à sa benoite Passion et puis après, plourer chacun pour sa male vie et péchiés, par quoy on fache de sa vie une chante, pleure en riant des choses devant dites et en plourant pour la mort et Passion de nostre Seigneur, et por sa male vie; et ainsy on chante préméditacion du cuer et bouche, et pleure-on du cuer et de l’oel. Au jour de sa Passion, il fist unc souflet pour es cuers de ses amis souffler et espreindre le feu de Carité; un soufflet est fait de cuire qui est clavé sur bois; regarde se dieu nostre benoit redempteur n’eut sa piaul perchié et clawé et atachié sur la bois de la croix, par la grant amour et carité qu’il avoit à nous, en nous démonstrant que par amour et carité poons après luj aller.80

On observe donc, comme dans l’Imitation, une absence du mot compassion en rapport avec la Passion du Christ, même si le thème fondamental de la pitié par rapport aux souffrances du Christ est présent. On peut aussi se référer aux sermons sur la messe, lue à la lumière de la Passion, du franciscain Maillard (†1502).81 Ces sermons ont connu six éditions anciennes. On y relève l’expression “pitié et compassion” à propos de la vierge Marie,82 à propos des amis de Jésus,83 à propos de saint François84 et par rapport à la Passion;85 à propos des êtres humains, on trouve: “sans compassion,”86 “à propos des fidèles face au centurion,87 l’invitation à être “en grande compassion.” Deux passages lient la compassion au regard. Le premier situe le chrétien au pied de la croix: Lors ne pourras demourer là longuement sans plorer par pitié et compassion quant tu verras les larmes de la mere de misericorde, de laquelle

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Soreth, f. 161 v°. Soreth, f. 157 et 157 v°. 81 Jean Maillard, Istoire de la Passion douloureuse, (Berne, 2001), 253. 82 Maillard, § 19 (l. 613), 120. 83 Maillard, § 25 (l. 721), 126. 84 Maillard, § 51 (l. 1632), 173 85 Maillard, § 47 (l. 1554), 164 86 Maillard, § 44 (l. 1297), 156. 87 Maillard, § 45 (l. 1315), 157, à propos du Per omnia saecula saeculorum qui précède le Pater. 80

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On remarque le lien entre le chrétien et la compassion de Marie, ainsi que le débouché sur les larmes. L’autre passage est développé en lien avec la communion de la messe, qui est identifiée au moment où Marie au calvaire embrasse le sang coulant des pieds de Jésus mort sur la croix. L’auteur invite alors les fidèles à contempler cette scène en communicant: Ce debvons contempler devotement en communiant et recevant le saint sacrement et, en le voyant, communier, transformer en nous toutes ses playes ainsi que se les avions et les imprimer en noz cœurs par compassion (…). Quant tu viens au saint calice, viens ainsi ferventement ou comme si tu venais boire à icelluy costé ouvert de Jesucrist (…). Ayes donques d’icelle Passion pitié par amour et compassion en toy se croistra.89.

On retrouve dans ces remarquables passages la totalité des éléments liés entre eux depuis François d’Assise: la vision, la Passion et la compassion. En outre ils sont reliés au moment de la communion, qui comprend aussi la communion au calice (encore d’usage à l’époque, jusqu’au Concile de Trente). Et, comme pour la stigmatisation de François, cette démarche du fidèle fait de lui-même une image du Christ, dans la mesure où les plaies du Christ doivent être “imprimées” dans son cœur. On retrouve donc les caractéristiques découvertes à propos de François d’Assise. 10. La compassion dans la vision du saint sang de Bois-Seigneur-Isaac Un document particulièrement intéressant pour la question de la compassion vécue dans le milieu populaire est l’Originale du monastère de Bois-Seigneur-Isaac (Belgique, province du Brabant wallon);90 on trouve dans ce registre une chronique qui retrace en latin l’origine

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Maillard, § 41 (l. 1006-1009), 142. Maillard, § 47 (l. 1374-1377 et 1396-1399), 160-161. 90 Delville, Le “Sang de miracle”, à la lumière de l’Originale de Bois-SeigneurIsaac: faits et interprétations, dans Jean-Marie Cauchie, ed., Le miracle du Saint-Sang: Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. 1405-2005 (Vita regularis, 41), (Münster, 2009), p. 43-118. 89

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du monastère,91 fondé suite à un miracle du saint sang survenu en 1405 (une hostie d’où aurait coulé du sang durant la messe). La chronique a été rédigée vers 1450 par un religieux augustin de ce monastère et ne comporte pas le mot compassion lié à la passion. Cependant sa traduction néerlandaise, datée de 1468,92 traduite elle-même en français en 1560 par le prieur Jean Lescot,93 comprend une introduction qui n’est pas dans le texte latin et qui rapporte trois apparitions qu’eut Jean Le Familleur, seigneur de Bois-Seigneur-Isaac, les trois nuits qui ont précédé le miracle du saint sang. Cette introduction de type légendaire provient donc d’une plume plus populaire que le texte de la chronique. Elle raconte que Jésus apparut à Jean Le Familleur sous la forme d’un jeune homme souffrant, blessé, qui lui demandait de le faire soigner par un médecin et d’avoir pitié de lui. Voici comment elle décrit la réaction de Jean: Et le regardant il luy dict. J’ay certes Sire grande compassion de vous, comme raison le veult. Car qui est homme tant dur et inhumain qui ne seroit esmeu de pitie? (…) Puis il luy monstra la tres grande plaie qui estoit en son costé, semblable a celle qu’on painct au coste dextre de nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ.94

Le compassion apparaît ici suite au regard de Jean et entraîne sa pitié. De plus lorsque le blessé insiste en montrant sa plaie, l’auteur du texte a le soin de dire que cette plaie ressemble à celle qu’on peint sur le côté droit du Christ en croix. L’allusion à l’image est donc explicite: la vision mentale dépend d’une vision matérielle. Mais Jean ne se décide pas à aller trouver un médecin. À la seconde vision, il est question trois fois de compassion; à la troisième vision, deux fois. Puis, Jean Le Familleur se voit poussé par l’homme blessé à se rendre à la chapelle voisine, afin d’être enfin con91 Ici commence le prologue…, ms. conservé au prieuré de Bois-Seigneur-Isaac, publié par Jean-Pierre Delville, L’Originale de Bois-Seigneur-Isaac: introduction, publication et traduction, dans Jean-Marie Cauchie, ed., Le miracle du Saint-Sang: Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. 1405-2005 (Vita regularis, 41), (Münster, 2009), p. 351-496. 92 Dit is tbeghinsel…, ms. conservé à la Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Ms 13 254. 93 Histoire originelle du sainct sang de miracle, Ms conservé aux Archives de l’État à Louvain-la-Neuve. 94 Histoire originelle du sainct sang de miracle, 2, publ. dans L’Originale de BoisSeigneur-Isaac… Version flamande Dit is tbeghinsel…, f. 4 v°-5: “Ende die dit ansach antwerde Heere ic hebbe groete compassie ende melijden op u want daer steet compassie groetelijc op te nemene (…). Ende daer na soe thoende hy hem eene groete wonde vele meerdere dan mense maect ofte beworpt inde zijde van den figuren ons liefs heeren.”

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vaincu de faire quelque chose pour lui. Le narrateur décrit ainsi l’épisode: Il luy sembla qu’il print la clef de la grande porte de la chapelle laquelle ouverte il s’approcha de l’autel, la il trouva le seigneur Jesus Christ pendant en croix ensanglanté par tout le corps, et plein de plaies, telles qu’il avoit veu les trois nuicts precedentes. Alors par compassion se prosternant, il se jecta par terre. Et le sang du costé coulloit en telle abondance sur luy, qu’il luy sembloit qu’il fust tout couvert de sang.95

Jean reconnaît donc que l’image de sa vision correspond à l’image du Christ en croix dans la chapelle. Devant le crucifix il est de nouveau pris de compassion. Survient alors un épisode extraordinaire: il se sent aspergé de sang du Christ. Comme saint François lors de sa stigmatisation, le voyant est touché corporellement par celui qu’il voit. Se réveillant alors de sa vision, il témoigne à son frère, qui dormait avec lui, de ce qu’il a vu: Je cognoy que c’est nostre seigneur Jesus Christ en la semblance de la chair. Il m’a semblé que je l’ay veu sur l’autel de la chapelle, attaché a la croix, grevement navré, et coullant de sang souffrir une mort tres amere. Veritablement je l’ay veu mourir, et tellement estre tourmenté de douleur de la plaie de son costé que de lá est sortie comme une fontaine de sang tellement que j’en ay esté tout arrousé, estant avec componction, et compassion gisant devant luy soubs la croix.96

Le témoignage de Jean montre que sa foi provient de sa vision du Christ souffrant et mourant, qu’il se voit arrosé par le sang coulant 95 Histoire originelle du sainct sang de miracle, 12-13, publ. dans L’Originale de Bois-Seigneur-Isaac… Version flamande Dit is tbeghinsel…, f. 7 v°: “Doe nam hy die slotels als hem dochte van der cleynder dueren ende deedse op ende ghinc sien op den outaer Ende daer vand hij onsen heer ghecruust ligghende op den outaer al sijn lijf bebloet ende ghewont met onvertelliken wonden al versch ghedaen ende met alselken wonden als hy hem op de drye nachte voerleden verthoent hadde tallen stonden de wonden al versch bleodende. Ende hy cnielde em neder met grooter ontfermenessen. Ende dat bloet van der groeter wonden inde zijde storte soe seere op hem als dat hem dochte dat hij al bedect was met bloede.” 96 Histoire originelle du sainct sang de miracle, 15, publ. dans L’Originale de BoisSeigneur-Isaac… Version flamande Dit is tbeghinsel…, f. 8 v°: “Het es wer waer onse lieve heer na mijn wesen so dunct my dat ic hem in de capelle hebbe gheweest visenteren op den outaer daer hij aen den cruce al versch bloedende met bitterheiden ende zwaerliken ghewont ghestorven es. Ic hebbene voerwaer sien sterven seere verscricken de vander groter pinen ende anxsteliker smerten der ontsacheliker groter wonden zijnre sijden die es op ghebroken seere ontfermelike bloedende dat soe vele bloets op my ghestort ende ghespronghen es dat ic ben al bedect met bloede daer ic op mijn cnien lach in groter compassien ende medelijden zijnre bitterheit daer hy die doot leet aen den cruce.”

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de la croix et que cela a suscité en lui la compassion. On arrive ainsi au total de 8 mentions du mot compassion dans 16 pages de texte. On remarquera que le mot est traduit littéralement en flamand par compassie, et une fois est explicité par medelijden. Il apparaît clairement dans ce texte que la vision de la Passion (Passie) provoque la compassion (compassie). Cette expérience d’un simple laïc reflète le sentiment de l’homme médiéval qui vit une expérience personnelle de solidarité avec le Christ à travers la contemplation de ses souffrances. La rédaction très répétitive du texte flamand, avec ses mots crus évités en français (comme versch bloedende: “saignant fraîchement”), montre que l’on a affaire à un écrivain populaire qui reflète les sentiments du peuple de la base. C’est une foi qui passe par les sens, par le vécu quotidien et par le sentiment. 11. Les connotations de la compassion En guise de synthèse, précisons notre thème par les connotations qui l’entourent (regard, objet du regard, Passion, compassion) et les effets produits (soit imagés, soit conceptualisés). Sur un total de 61 paragraphes regroupant ces thèmes et provenant de 21 oeuvres différentes, 48 (78,6%) mentionnent le regard (ou l’audition); 40 (65,5 %), un objet du regard qui médiatise la Passion; 54 (88,5 %) évoquent directement la Passion; 47 (77 %) comportent le mot compassion ou compatir; enfin 29 (47,5 %) évoquent un effet imagé de cette expérience et 34 (55,7 %) un effet conceptualisé. Le regard est évoqué par 65 mots au total (29 mots différents): videre (ou voir, ou sien, ou visenteren) (12 fois), oculi (ou yeux) (7), considerare (ou consideratio, ou considérer) (6), aspicere (ou aspectus) (5), regarder (ou ansien, ou regard) (5), cernere (4), conspicere (ou conspectus) (3), admirari et mirari (3), intueri (2), contemplari (ou contempler) (2), apparere et disparere (2), attendere (2), relegere (ou lesen) (2), figurari (1), circonspecte (1), repraesentari (1), audire (1), sentire (1), dirigere (1), monstrer (1), découvrir (1), divers (prosternitur, mente pertractans, communicare, divinis interesse, memoria, merken, staen voer, trouver) (8): ils forment un ensemble homogène, avec des sens convergents.97

97

Sur l’importance du regard dans le christianisme médiéval, cf. Delville, “Les pèlerinages dans la Bible et l’histoire de l’Église: chemins de vision et de guérison,”

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Par contre, les objets du regard sont divers et évoqués par 67 mots (25 différents); par ordre de fréquence, on trouve: le crucifix et la croix (21 fois), la Passion en général (5), les blessures ou les plaies (6), la plaie du côté droit (3), un autre aspect de la Passion [roi Salomon, lié, serpent d’airain, peau percée, le corps du Christ] (5), Marie (4), imago (3), visio (3), effigies (2), aspectus (2), le chant liturgique de la Passion (2), le parfum sur les pieds et la tête (2), les lèvres de la peinture, le séraphin-crucifié, les traces, le voile de Véronique, le calice, Marie-Madeleine, le texte évangélique, la lettre de l’Ecriture, les lettres initiales (1 fois chacun). Seules ces 4 dernières, ainsi que l’image du parfum, celle des lèvres de la peinture et celle des traces ont des connotations de consolation, soit 7 sur 67; les autres évoquent la souffrance, soit 60 sur 67 (89,5 %). La Passion du Christ est évoquée explicitement par 95 mots (33 mots différents): la Passion (ou passio, ou passie) (32), le crucifix et la croix (21); par l’évocation de ses souffrances (dolores, patiens, afflictio, compassio filii Dei, pinen, tam miserabiliter tam penaliter pependisti, bitteren liden) (15), de sa mort (3), de son humanité pure (2), de sa déréliction (ou ghelatenheit) (2); et une fois par les mots: stigmates, humilité, amertumes, sueur de sang, tristesse, nu, calice, pressoir, gibet, prière du Christ, flagellation, sang, horreurs amères, clous, marteaux, baiser de Judas, corps tendre, lacéré, cinq blessures, plaies. La compassion est évoquée par 67 mots (13 différents): compassio (ou compassion, ou compassie) (41), compati (8), compassivus (2), medeliden (2), ontfermen (1), componction (1) ou d’autres mots qui associent le fidèle à la Passion: crucifixi similitudinem, similia pati, passione renovata, pro ipsis se affligebat, praesentia (2), correpta dolore ex memoria passionis, tribulationis socius, in corde suo (2), du cuer, lijden met. La compassion manifeste le fait qu’on lit la représentation de la Passion d’une manière synchronique, c’est-à-dire actualisée,—comme Gurevich l’a bien remarqué pour les représentations des scènes du jugement dernier.98 Que provoquent ce regard de la Passion et cette expérience de la compassion? Distinguons trois types d’effet: l’effet imagé intérieur (ou spirituel), l’effet imagé extérieur (ou matériel), qui transforme le spectateur en spectacle, et l’effet conceptualisé, qui le pousse à dans Delville, ed., Pèlerinages et espaces religieux, (Bruxelles, 2007), 75-138, spécialement 83-85. 98 Gurevich, Medieval popular culture…, 145.

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l’action. Pour ce qui est de l’effet imagé intérieur, les mots qui l’expriment sont au nombre de 19 (14 différents): les stigmates de la Passion inscrits dans le cœur, un glaive qui transperce l’âme (2 fois), une lance qui perfore le cœur, la componction de l’âme, la liquéfaction de l’âme (2), s’étendre en esprit sur la croix, la tendresse du cœur, porter la croix du Christ dans son cœur, Dieu qui écrit sur les tablettes du cœur, se prendre en considération soi-même, faire de sa vie un chant, avoir le cœur imprimé, adoucir les douleurs, n’avoir pas le pouvoir. On le voit, ces mots font souvent intervenir le cœur et évoquent davantage une attitude de souffrance partagée (13) (68 %), qu’une attitude de joie (6). Les effets imagés extérieurs sont exprimés par 35 mots (22 différents): les pleurs (6), la plainte à voix haute, les cris (3), les larmes (5), les stigmates de la Passion (2), la communion au saint sacrement (2), une douleur au cœur, défaillir, tomber à terre, rendre grâces, étendre les mains, se frapper la poitrine, faire des génuflexions, s’imposer des disciplines, des flagellations, baiser les pieds du crucifix, baiser la terre, chanter, émettre des soupirs, communier au calice, trouver un médecin pour le Christ, être couvert de son sang (2). Ici encore, il y a davantage d’attitudes de souffrance (28) (80 %) que de consolation (7). Enfin, pour les effets conceptualisés, on distingue 40 mots (30 différents) qui l’expriment; par ordre chronologique: l’interrogation sur soi-même, la conversion ou transformation intérieure (3 fois), l’étonnement (4), la disposition à l’obéissance, la douceur (3), la joie, l’ardeur, l’amour (3), la consolation, l’aide, l’affection, l’imitation, le souci pastoral, la consolation, l’accession à l’Église triomphante (la vie éternelle), le repos, l’accomplissement de la dévotion, la foi sincère, la piété, la compassion à Marie (2), la connaissance de soimême, l’adoucissement du cœur, la dévotion, la réparation des péchés, suivre le Christ, la pitié par amour, l’émotion de pitié, trop peu de diligence, la perplexité, l’affliction. On le constate: la grosse majorité de ces attitudes reflète un effet positif, un dynamisme intérieur renouvelé: 33 sur 40 (82,5 %). Curieusement, cependant, jamais la compassion pour le Christ n’est censée engendrer la compassion pour le prochain; celle-ci n’est évoquée que trois fois dans notre corpus, à propos des définitions de la compassion, faites par Bonaventure, Ruybroeck et par Jean Soreth, mais jamais dans le cadre de la compassion pour le Christ souffrant.

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Il est frappant de voir que les effets imagés (intérieurs et surtout extérieurs) reproduisent de façon symbolique les attitudes de la Passion du Christ et expriment donc littéralement la compassion (41 sur 54, soit 76 %). Leur proportion se rapproche de celle des objets du regard (89,5 % d’images de souffrances). Parmi eux émergent les pleurs, les cris et les larmes, qui forment à eux seuls 40 % des effets imagés extérieurs. Par les pleurs, les cris et les larmes, l’œil passe du regard de la Passion à la compassion vécue physiquement. Cette mutation du rôle de l’œil (de la vision aux larmes) débouche sur les effets intérieurs ou conceptuels de la compassion. Ceux-ci sont surtout de consolation et de joie (82,5 %). Il se passe donc une transformation qui fait en sorte que le spectateur, devenu image vivante de la Passion par ses larmes, vit une métamorphose intérieure qui le fait passer de la souffrance à la joie intérieure. Certaines attitudes extérieures expriment déjà cela: ce sont celles de la communion et de la prière. Elles produisent une association au Christ, non plus dans ses souffrances, mais dans sa résurrection, dans sa vie actuelle. Ainsi peut-on dire que la contemplation de l’image du Christ souffrant produit une communion matérielle aux souffrances du Christ, spécialement par les larmes, qui débouche sur une communion spirituelle à sa résurrection, vécue en particulier dans la communion sacramentelle, comme le suggère Maillard.99 Peut-on percevoir une évolution dans ces concepts? Ce qui apparaît avant tout, c’est que la plupart d’entre eux sont déjà présents au 13e siècle. Ainsi sur 61 passages cités, 24 sont du 13e s., 22 du 14e s., 15 du 15e s. Sur les 25 mots différents présentant un objet de regard, 18 sont du 13e s., 5 sont ajoutés au 14e s. (miroir du texte évangélique, croix pendue au-dessus du chœur, blessures du Christ, lettres capitales) et 2 au 15e s. (peau percée et côté ouvert). Chez Ludolphe, les verbes de regard diminuent (5 sur 9 citations). L’aspect visuel est donc moins prégnant. Au 15e siècle, on l’a vu, le thème même de la compassion liée à la Passion se raréfie, sauf dans le courant franciscain ou populaire.

99 Je rejoins ici l’idée de C.M.A. Caspers, Het laatmiddeleeuwse Passiebeeld. Een interpretatie vanuit de theologie- en vroomheidsgeschiedenis, dans Nederlands kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 45 (1994), 161-174.

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Conclusion Le fait le plus frappant que nous ayons pu observer est que le thème de la compassion, provenant du regard sur les souffrances du Christ, se développe du 13e au 15e siècle. Il s’agit d’un sujet très novateur, dans la mesure où il ne vise pas la compassion de Dieu pour l’homme mais la compassion de l’homme pour Dieu fait homme. Certes, le thème de la compassion de Dieu pour l’homme existe aussi, ainsi que celui de l’être humain pour son semblable, mais ils sont moins présents. L’originalité de cette compassion est aussi qu’elle est un sentiment et non un concept; elle débouche d’ailleurs sur des effets matériels analogues (comme les pleurs), avant de produire des effets positifs de consolation. Il s’agit d’un sentiment provenant du regard sur la Passion du Christ, au point que, même dans les traductions en langue flamande, on utilise le mot compassie, basé sur Passie, plutôt que medelijden, basé sur une racine linguistique germanique. Le succès de la compassion provient donc de la contemplation de la Passion. On pourrait même évoquer son aspect “démocratique,” dans la mesure où la compassion met le croyant sur le même pied que son Dieu. Cet aspect correspond également aux tendances du milieu franciscain et féminin où il a emergé100 aussi bien qu’à la ‘démocratisation’ de la vie spirituelle mise en place par la devotio moderna et par Jean Gerson.101 On est ici au cœur d’une dévotion populaire de couleur franciscaine. En effet le point de départ est le regard, physique ou mental, et non la foi intellectuelle. On observe que, lorsque les mystiques du 14e siècle et les auteurs de la Devotio moderna reprennent le thème, ils limitent la notion de regard: ils préfèrent partir de la lecture de l’Écriture ou de la théorie de la compassion, que de son développement à partir du regard concret. La diffusion des images de la Passion au 15e siècle pourrait donc être liée à la diffusion de textes fondateurs proches du franciscanisme; peut-être qu’ils sortent alors des maisons religieuses et atteignent le monde des laïcs. En tous cas, on connaît la diffusion importante au 15e siècle des manuscrits puis des imprimés de la Vita Christi de Ludolphe, des Meditationes vitae Christi et de la vie de saint François. 100

Sur cette dimension démocratique, cf. Gurevich, Medieval popular Culture…,

147. 101

Cf. Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, L’âge d’or de la mystique française: de Jean Gerson (1363-1429) à Lefèvre d’Étaples (1450?-1536), (Paris-Milan, 2004).

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Ce corpus marque sans doute toujours plus les milieux bourgeois et en particulier les artistes. Cela signifierait qu’il ne faut pas négliger l’influence de ce courant spirituel à côté de celui de la Devotio moderna, avec lequel il ne coïncide pas exactement. Dès lors l’expérience fondatrice de François d’Assise serait déterminante. De même que “l’image du Christ lui a parlé par les lèvres de la peinture,”102 ainsi lui-même devient-il image vivante de la Passion du Christ par ses stigmates et image de la résurrection par son regard intérieur de joie profonde. “Ce qui était amer, il le considérait comme doux,”103 dit de St. François l’auteur de la Légende de Pérouse. Ainsi en va-t-il aussi pour tout spectateur de la Passion dont le regard se transforme en larmes, la compassion en communion, et l’amertume en douceur. Grâce à la compassion issue du regard sur la Passion, nous avons pu toucher une caractéristique de la religiosité populaire; nous avons assisté à son émergence et décrit son développement au moyen âge, preuve, comme le disait Gurevich,104 que “les enseignements chrétiens changent constamment et imperceptiblement.” L’originalité ici consiste dans le fait que c’est le regard qui produit un changement de paradigme spirituel et qui fait passer l’enseignement théologique dans le vécu quotidien du croyant. Le passage par l’image, mentale ou physique, est producteur d’une accélération de l’histoire et d’une intensité spirituelle nouvelle.

102 103 104

de Celano, Vita secunda [cf. n. 21], 1e partie, § 10-11, cf. n. 12. Légende de Pérouse [cf. n. 25], ch. 37, cf. n. 16. Gurevich, Historical anthropology…, 19.

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THE BLEEDING HOST OF DIJON: ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF EUCHARISTIC DEVOTION THOMAS IZBICKI

A Jew has mutilated the Host of the holy sacrament By striking ten blows and more, And making it bleed abundantly. Eugene, treasure of the church, Took it as his witness And had it transmitted To Philip Duke of Burgundy. Having arrived in Lille On business the Duke Received it devoutly In the year 1430. But in order to keep the Holy relic sacredly He had it decently placed In the chapel in Dijon.

Miri Rubin’s translation of a French text, charitably described by scholars as “quatrains,” found in some French books of hours1 describes a bleeding host miracle, one of many attributed in the later Middle Ages to hosts attacked by Jews or otherwise mistreated, and the gift of the relic to the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, by Pope Eugenius IV. At that time (1433), the pope was beholden to the duke for support against the Council of Basel’s efforts to impose reforms on the Roman Curia.2 The relic, drawn from the pope’s own store of precious objects, was received solemnly at a chapter general of the Order of the Golden Fleece on the feast of St. Andrew (Novem1 Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, 1999), 162-169 at 163-164. Transcribed in Franz Unterkircher and Antoine De Schreyver, eds., Gebetbuch Karls des Kühnen vel potius Stundenbuch der Maria von Burgund: Codex Vindobonensis 1857 der Österreichischen National Bibliothek, 2 vols. (Graz, 1969), 1: 12. 2 Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good, new ed., (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2002), 206214.

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ber 30) of that year.3 The story, later repeated in verse by Hughelin de Bregilles,4 differs from the other Gentile Tales, which Rubin and other scholars relate.5 The papal letter contains no reference to a Jew attacking the host. Instead it simply describes the host as having been wounded by someone with a sword and having bled from the places where it was struck.6 The author of the quatrains inserted the relic into an anti-Jewish context without any reference to the time or place of the supposed attack. Nor do the quatrains mention the retribution usually visited upon the offender in such “gentile tales.” Instead the quatrains focus on the gift of the relic to the duke and its housing in Dijon. Consequently, the Dijon host presents a somewhat unusual version of a motif common to the Middle Ages, the unholy violence of enemies, usually Jews or witches, provoking a manifestation of holiness from the Eucharist bread.7 In more general terms, the host could be the locus of magical practice, hatred, violence and sinful acts, rather than piety, at a time when belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was at its height. These seeming contradictions were accepted as facts in the later Middle Ages.8 The relic’s permanent home eventually was at the Charterhouse of Champmol, the funerary church of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy.9 3

Gebetbuch Karls des Kühnen, 1: 12-13. Rubin, Gentile Tales, 165. Many of the issues mentioned below are discussed in greater detail by Rubin in Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, UK, 1991). 5 See, for example, Mitchell B. Merback, “Fount of Mercy, City of Blood: Cultic Anti-Judaism and the Pulkau Passion Altarpiece,” The Art Bulletin 87 (2005), 589642. For a text recounting the miracle, see Jacob Rader Marcus and Marc Saperstein, eds., The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook, 315-1791, rev. ed., (Cincinnati, 1999), 174-177. 6 Gallia Christiana, 12 vols. (Paris, 1876), 4: col. 855, “A...tibi hostiam quandam sub imagine Salvatoris in throno sedentis, mirabile sacramentum Dominici corporis multis in locis a vaesana cuiusdam feritate gladii ictibus perforatam, et ex eo sanguine respersam in locis praefatis, quae in sacrario nostro est recondita, tuae piae devotioni concedamus et donamus....” 7 Aron Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, G. L. Campbell, trans., (London, 1985), 178-179 notes that medieval people believed in wonders but not everyone reported to them. For witches as abusers of hosts, see Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex and the Crisis of Belief, (Chicago, 2002), 207-240. 8 Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, János M. Bak and Paula A. Hollingsworth, trans., (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 195-196. 9 Otto Cartellieri, The Court of Burgundy (London, 1929; reprint New York, 1972), 24-35; Laura D. Gelfand, “Y me tarde: The Valois, Pilgrimage, and the Chartreuse de Champmol,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, eds., 2 vols. (Leiden, 2005), 1: 567-586. 4

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It remained in Champmol until the French Revolution when it was destroyed and the monstrance that held it melted down.10 Consequently, we can only study the monstrance and its precious contents through images. In one image, from a manuscript now in Brussels, Philip and his duchess can be seen kneeling in prayer with the monstrance in the background.11 This is the earliest image of the monstrance, which was created as a commission from the duchess, Isabella of Portugal in 1454. Her benefaction is directly related to the duchess’ dedication of her infant-son Charles to the Blessed Sacrament, a dedication she hoped would spare the child heir to the duchy the early deaths of his older siblings.12 This image closely resembles one found later in the pictures of the monstrance with the host relic, accompanied by the French quatrains and the Latin texts, which we will examine below. Four manuscripts examined by the author contain inserts with this material. The most famous of these is the so-called Hours of Mary of Burgundy.13 Another is British Library Manuscript 31240, with the insert at folio 21.14 A third copy of the insert is found in a book of hours once owned by Ogier Benigne, now at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore [plate 1].15 Least known of these is the copy at the John 10 The last procession with the host was held in 1792, and the monstrance was sent away to be melted down later in the next year. The relic was destroyed in the church of Saint Michael in early 1794; see Etienne Metman, L’Eglise Saint-Michel de Dijon (privately printed, 1914). [http://perso.orange.fr/nadine-emmanuel.clause/ famille/emetman/sommaire.html] [accessed September 12, 2006]. 11 Thomas Kren, ed., Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, and the Visions of Tondal: Papers Delivered at a Symposium Organized by the Department of Manuscripts of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Collaboration with the Huntington Library and Art Collections, June 21-24, 1990 (Malibu, Calif., 1992), 49, figure 12: Brussels Bibl. Royale MS 9026, fol. 258r. The possibility that Van Eyck painted the doors of a wooden tabernacle Duke Philip commissioned to house the host is discussed in Lotte Brand Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, 1971), 149-150. 12 Gebetbuch Karls des Kühnen vel potius Stundenbuch der Maria von Burgund, 1: 12-13; Aline S. Taylor, Isabel of Burgundy: The Duchess Who Played Politics in the Age of Joan of Arc, 1397-1471 (Lanham, Md., 2001), 68-69. 13 Eric Inglis, ed., The Hours of Mary of Burgundy: Codex Vindobonensis 1857, Vienna, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek (London, 1995), 58-59, 68-69: 16. The Bleeding Host. 14 Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece, plate 143. A fuller description of the manuscript can be found on the British Library’s website [accessed May 8, 2007]. The decoration of the texts includes a picture of the bloodied head of Christ in the O of O salutaris hostia. 15 W.291, described by Lillian M. C. Randall, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1992), 2: pt. 2, 394.

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Work Garrett Library of the Johns Hopkins University [plate 2], also in Baltimore.16 All these inserts show the monstrance topped with a crown donated in 1505 by Louis XII of France as a thanksgiving following his recovery from an illness. The shape of the monstrance itself (rounded and shorn of some of its ornament) in the Garrett copy differs from the others. Ogier’s copy includes French royal emblems, the fleur-de-lys, and something that might be the sun peeking through clouds in the background. In all the manuscript copies examined, plus one in a printed book of hours [plate 3],17 the image is accompanied not just by the quatrains but by Latin texts, the hymn O salutaris hostia and the prayer Deus qui nobis sub sacramento. The printed hours include a rudimentary illustration of the host itself, but minus the monstrance. The image in another Parisian printing of a book of hours depicts the host with a prayer in French instead of the quatrains. It includes O salutaris but substitutes the text O sacrum convivium for the prayer.18 These materials, especially the Latin texts, are frequently ignored by scholars, but they provide some context for our understanding of the manuscript inserts as devotional aids. Before looking closely at these texts, we should provide a wider context, noting other depictions of the Dijon host itself. All copies of sufficient size depict Christ seated, displaying His wounds, with the instruments of the Passion arrayed on either side of Him. Christ displays evidence of the ultimate evil he endured, death on the Cross, to reassure believers that the gates of heaven had been opened to them. The host relic also appears, without its monstrance, in other books of hours, manuscript and printed. The earliest known image of the host appears, supported by two angels, in the Hours of René of Anjou. This manuscript was copied for a prince who had developed a reverence for the relic while a captive of Duke Philip. There, more clearly than in other manuscript illuminations of the relic, we can see an image of the consecrated bread, imprinted with the figure of Jesus seated on a rainbow, displaying his wounds and flanked by the instruments of the Passion.19 In one manuscript now at the Pierpont Morgan Library, 16 For this manuscript see, Digital Scriptorium database: http://www.scriptorium. columbia.edu/ [accessed August 24, 2006]. 17 Hore beate marie virginis secundum usum Romanum... (Paris, 1543). 18 Hore beate marie virginis secundum usum Romanum... (Paris, 1526). 19 British Library, Egerton MS 1070, fol. 110v; see Le Roi René et son Temps 13821481 (Paris, 1981), 40: A49 [image on 41]. “Vaisseau d’or où est exposé la Sainte Hostie” is listed as A50. Another image of angels supporting the Host, from Paris BN lat. 1156, fol. 22r, is listed as A51. See also Rosy Schilling, “The Master of Egerton

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an image of the host has been inserted into a blank space, unaccompanied by any decoration or texts.20 A painting in a printed book of hours at the Morgan Library illustrates a couple, the patrons who commissioned the decoration of the volume, kneeling in prayer before the Dijon host.21 Thus the relic was well known from the time of the papal gift, and its image was diffused not just in our manuscript inserts but by other means as well. Bleeding hosts were first mentioned in the late 13th century. Although not the earliest blood relics, they were the most typical of their time. Earlier blood relics were supposed to contain the blood shed by Christ in his lifetime, at the Circumcision or on the Cross. Closer in nature to the late-medieval host cult is the belief that an image of Jesus might bleed, if struck by an enemy—usually a Jew. The story of the Beirut icon, which bled when assaulted by a Jew, is typical of these miracle tales.22 Only in the 13th century was the offended image, which displayed its power, displaced in popular devotion by the offended host. In either case, the unholy attack revealed the holy presence in the image, whether the painted image of Christ or his living “image” in the consecrated bread.23 Aron Gurevich argues that hosts were not just signifiers of the holy, but of medieval symbolism in general.24 They were believed to be united to the holy in an effective manner, producing real effects. By the end of the 13th century, transubstantiation was already a widely accepted theological explanation of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ without their visible “accidents” or appearances changing. This doc1070 (Hours of René d’Anjou,” Scriptorium 8 (1954), 272-282 n. (1). The details of the Dijon host are clear in James Clifton, “A Fountain Filled with Blood: Representations of Christ’s Blood from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century,” in James M. Bradburne, ed., Blood: Art, Politics and Pathology (Munich, 2001), 65-86 in the plate at 88. 20 The image from Pierpont Morgan Library M. 1001, fol. 17v, is found on Corsair, the Morgan’s online catalog [accessed March 4, 2005]. 21 Heures a l’usage de Rome (Paris, 1501), fol. 84r, Pierpont Morgan Library [PML 129355]. 22 Both of these blood motifs are discussed in Nicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge, UK, 2001). 23 Ordinarily, the image of a host shows a figure imprinted on the bread. A different approach is that in Lewis MS E 196, fol. 26 verso, of the Free Library of Philadelphia, which shows the Crucifixion faintly, as “through a glass darkly”(1 Corinthians 13); see: http://libwww.library.phila.gov/medievalman/detail.cfm?imagetoZoom= mca1760260 [accessed October 26, 2007]. 24 Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 77-78.

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trinal development took several centuries, but it resulted in conceptual separation of the corpus verum in the Eucharist from the corpus mysticum, the church as the body of Christ.25 At least some of these miracle stories ratified the Real Presence by having a host manifest Christ’s blood or the appearance of a child, the Christ child, when it suffered abuse.26 This affirmation of Christ’s Real Presence was linked, in turn, to the Passion-centered piety of the time and to the development of art motifs representing the physical reality of the Crucifixion.27 The earliest recorded miracle tale involving a bleeding host originated in Paris in 1290.28 Most of these stories of bleeding hosts, but not all of them, circulated in Germany, where they often were associated with attacks on Jewish communities or public executions of Jews.29 Accounts of host miracles, however, were not entirely localized. Some such tales, most tied to accusations against Jews, arose in places as far apart as Catalonia, Crete and Breslau in Silesia. The dates of the stories run from 1290 to the 1470s. In each instance, along with a reaffirmation of the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated host, local tensions contributed to anti-Jewish actions. Some of these bleeding host relics received the favor of the popes. One such pope was Eugenius IV, who granted 100 days of indulgence to visitors to the wonder host at Saint Gudele in Brussels.30 Despite the favor Eugenius showed bleeding hosts, he was among those who thought a newly-consecrated host should be displayed alongside the 25 Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum: l’eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen âge, Étude historique, 2nd ed., (Paris, 1949); Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament according to the Theologians, c. 1080-c. 1220 (Oxford, 1984). 26 Kristen Van Ausdall, “Doubt and Authority in the Host-Miracle Shrines of Orvieto and Wilsnack,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, 1, 513-538 at 517-520. Host desecration became equated with the horror of infanticide, according to Jody Enders, “A Theatre Makes History: Ritual Murder by Proxy in the Mistere de la Sainte Hostie,” Speculum 79 (2004), 991-1016. 27 Ann W. Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2006), 52-53. 28 For an attempt to diagnose the doubts that such a miracle might allay, see Gavin Langmuir, “The Tortures of the Body of Christ,” in Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000-1500, Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl, eds., (Cambridge, UK, 1996), 287-309. 29 Major exceptions are noted in Carolyn W. Bynum, “Bleeding Hosts and their Contact Relics in Late Medieval Northern Germany,” Medieval History Journal 7 (2004), 227-241. 30 Shlomo Simonshon, ed., The Apostolic See and the Jews, 3 vols., (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1989) 2: 828-830, no. 708.

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relic hosts at Wilsnack to reaffirm the liturgical context of the Eucharist, hedging against the possibility that the hosts were not miraculous or had not been consecrated when assaulted.31 It also is worth noting that some tales about Jews desecrating hosts were not believed by the local authorities, both clerical and lay.32 This opens the question whether the clergy were, as Aron Gurevich argued, influenced from below—the lower culture influenced by the higher one—when they became the judges of cases involving host desecration and other supposed malleficia.33 It might be argued, instead, that the very real pressure from below noted by Gurevich dovetailed with the theological agendas of certain learned men, a phenomenon described by Walter Stephens in his book Demon Lovers.34 Moreover, not all bleeding host stories were tied to Jews—or to witches. The earliest stories were intended to demonstrate the reverence due the Eucharist, not the Real Presence or transubstantiation per se.35 Moreover, the violence inflicted on the host might, on rare occasions, be attributed to a Christian. Most famously, the bleeding hosts of Wilsnack survived the burning of a church by a local nobleman. These hosts, with their red spots, became the focus of a popular pilgrimage as Wilsnack became one of the most popular shrines in Western Europe. Many theologians, including Jan Hus and Heinrich Tocke, opposed such devotion as fraudulent, but others defended it. The legislation of Nicholas of Cusa, when he was papal legate to the lands of the Holy Roman Empire (1438-1448), failed to discourage pilgrimage to the shrine at Wilsnack. Cusanus wanted to redirect piety away from the bleeding hosts and like “wonders” to true faith and more “acceptable” devotions. As has been noted, however, the Wilsnack pilgrimage had been favored by Pope Eugenius IV; moreover, Pope Nicholas V, instead of supporting his own legate, Cusanus, overturned his legatine decrees against venerating these “relics.”36 31

G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (Leiden, 1995), 318. 32 Rubin, Gentile Tales, 105. 33 Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aron Gurevich,” The Medieval History Journal 7 (2004), 169-197 at 191. 34 A popular fear of evil doing (malleficia) thus was transformed by learned men into an inquiry into relations between witches and demons; see Demon Lovers, 14-18, 299. 35 Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist, 315. 36 Donald Sullivan, “Nicholas of Cusa as Reformer: The Papal Legation to the Germanies, 1451-1452,” Medieval Studies 36 (1974), 382-428; Morimichi Watanabe, “The German Church Shortly Before the Reformation: Nicolaus Cusanus and the

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The Wilsnack hosts were advertised, even in print, well into the sixteenth century.37 But in no case, not even in these printed advertisements, was the Wilsnack “miracle” tied into the anti-Jewish context of so many other stories. The liturgical corporal supposedly stained with Christ’s blood still preserved in Orvieto had another origin entirely; one which portrays the “unholy” challenge it overcame as doubt rather than as rank violence by unbelievers. This corporal is a relic of the Miracle at Bolsena. The faithful were told that God made a host bleed onto the corporal when a German priest celebrating mass in the town doubted whether the bread and wine he had consecrated really became the body and blood of Christ.38 Likewise, the Andechs host was supposed to have bled to show the truth of the Real Presence to an entire crowd, not just to one doubting priest.39 In both of these cases, the host was supposed to have vindicated not just itself but the Real Presence by overcoming the doubts of Christians.40 Similarly, another instance of the power of the Eucharist to convert doubters can be found in a book prepared for an English noblewoman, Joan Tateshal, which was illustrated with a picture of an unbelieving old man given communion by receiving the flesh of the Christ Child himself.41 Veneration of the Bleeding Hosts at Wilsnack,” in Reform and Renewal in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Louis Pascoe, SJ, Thomas M. Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto, eds., (Leiden, 2000), 210-223. Cusanus did not oppose all devotion to bleeding hosts. He made recommendations for the custody and proper display of the relic at Andechs; see Edmond Vansteenberghe, Autour de la Docte Ignorance (Münster, 1915), 150: Letter 26. 37 See Hartmut Kühne, “Wallfahrt?: Deutung der Heiligengraber Wallfahrtsüberlieferung im historischen Umfeld,” in Friederike Rupprecht, ed., Von bludenden Hostien, frommen Pilgern und widerspenstigen Nonnen: Heiligengrabe zwischen Spätmittelalter und Reformation (Berlin, 2005), 33-60 at 42-43. 38 Lucio Ricetti, “I notai e il miracolo da Bolsena,” in Notai, miracoli e culto dei sainti: pubblicità et autenticazione del sacro tra XII e XV secolo, Atti del Seminario internazionale, Roma, 5-7 dicembre 2002, Raimondo Michetti, ed., (Milan, 2004), 519-559; Andrea Lazzarini, Il miracolo di Bolsena: testimonianze e documenti dei secoli XIII e XIV. (Rome, 1952). 39 Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist, 315. 40 Kathleen Biddick, “Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible,” in Studying Medieval Women, Nancy F. Partner, ed., (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 87-116 at 108, “The Eucharist, at the border of the human and the divine, offended but triumphant, like Jesus Himself....” 41 See figure 12 in Adelaide Bennett, “A Book Designed for a Noblewoman: An Illustrated Manuel des Péchés of the 13th Century,” in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1988, Linda L. Brownrigg, ed., (Los Altos Hills, CA, 1990), 163-181 at 171-172. The story is derived from the Vitae patrum.

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Along with the cult of bleeding hosts, there was a common devotion to the Blood of Christ, with its own shrines. Some of these blood relics, like that in Mantua, had long histories and had provided portions of “blood” to other churches for them to display as relics.42 Moreover, we must be careful not to equate all blood relics with the Eucharist, for some blood relics were supposed to represent the blood shed by Jesus either at the Circumcision or during the Agony in the Garden, not on the Cross. By the fifteenth century, the status of any blood which Christ shed, whether taken to heaven with him or left on earth, was a topic of lively debate throughout Europe, including at the court of Pope Pius II (1458-1464).43 Further, blood themes passed into art without always being tied to a relic. Thus the Man of Sorrows often was depicted emerging from a chalice or bleeding into one.44 Likewise, the crucified Christ or the Lamb of God could be depicted bleeding into one or more chalices.45 What was the devotional function of the manuscript inserts with images of the Dijon host and their print equivalents? Here we must return to the Latin texts. How did they originate, and how were they used? All are connected to the celebration of the Real Presence in the late medieval liturgy. In the 13th century, Juliana of Mount Cornillon advocated for the establishment of the feast of Corpus Christi.46 The feast was first authorized by Pope Urban III in 1264. However, the feast languished for many years thereafter, but it attained prominence in the fourteenth century as one of the major festivals of the church.47 The Latin texts noted above, O salutaris, the prayer Deus qui and O sacrum convivium, derive from the office Thomas Aquinas 42

On Holy Blood churches, see Mitchell B. Merback, “Channels of Grace: Pilgrimage, Architecture, Eucharistic Imagery, and Visions of Purgatory at the HostMiracle Churches of Late-Medieval Germany,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, 1, 586-646 at 617-633. 43 This theme is explored in Caroline W. Bynum, “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Church History 71 (2002): 685-714; Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007). 44 Clifton, “A Fountain Filled with Blood: Representations of Christ’s Blood from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century,” 73, figure 13. 45 Multiple examples can be found in the Index of Christian Art [accessed October 26, 2007]. 46 Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, Myra Heerspink Scholz, trans., (Philadelphia, 2005), 78-117. See also the account of the hermit Eve of St. Martin at ibid., 118-147. 47 Charles Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany,” Past and Present 118 (Feb. 1988), 25-64 at 37-38.

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is believed to have composed for the feast, an office known as Sacerdos in aeternum. The hymn O salutaris hostia is excerpted from the last two stanzas of the hymn Verbum supernum prodiens, composed by Thomas for the liturgical hour of Lauds.48 The prayer Deus qui nobis sub sacramento originated as the prayer used at Vespers in the same office and as the Collect of the mass for the feast. It also had a long individual life in books of hours, including in one now in the Royal Library of Copenhagen,49 in which the prayer accompanies an image of two angels kneeling beside a monstrance.50 O sacrum convivium is also an antiphon composed by Thomas Aquinas for the Corpus Christi office. Here we find ourselves deep in the liturgical piety of the later Middle Ages, during which the Eucharist was central but communion was received so rarely that the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) mandated confession and communion during Eastertide. This “Easter duty” remained for centuries an integral part of the spiritual lives of Roman Catholics.51 Because the host was handled only by the clergy, and placed in the mouth of the communicant, liturgical life for the laity was more visual than tactile, whether members of the laity desired this to be so or not. The chalice was withheld from the laity, even—or especially— after the Hussites demanded that communion be given to all the faithful under both species. Their denial of concomitance, the presumed sufficiency of one species to serve in place of both because of the presence of the whole Christ, made even the more moderate Utraquist faction, who wanted both bread and wine [utra] at com48 The accepted Eucharistic hymns by Thomas Aquinas are: Lauda Sion, Pange lingua, Sacris solemniis and Verbum supernum; see Astell, Eating Beauty, 55 n. 135. Aquinas may have composed an earlier version, known as Sapientia aedificavit, for the celebration of the feast by the papal court in Orvieto in 1264; see Barbara R. Walters, Vincent Corrigan and Peter T. Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi (University Park, PA, 2006), 33-36. 49 Royal Library Copenhagen Manuscript GkS 1612 4°, fol. 4v. 50 [O] Angelorum escam itruisti populum tuum domine et panem de celo prestitisti eis. Alleluya. Alleluya. O sacrum convivium in quo [Christ]us sumitur recolitur memoria passionis eius, mens impletur gratia et future glorie nobis pigrius datur alleuya. V. Panem de celo prestitisti eis alleuya. R. Omne delectamentum in se habentem alleuya. Oraison. Deus qui nobis sub sacramento mirabili passionis tue memoriam reliquisti: tribue quesumus: ita nos corporis et sanguinis tui sacra misteria venerari. Ut redemptionis tue fructum in nobis iugiter sentiamus. Qui vivis et regnas deus. Per omnia secula seculorum. Amen.http://www.chd.dk/gui/gks1612_ guil.html [accessed August 23, 2006]. 51 See the decree Omnes utriusque sexus in Giuseppe Alberigo, ed., Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, 3rd ed. (Bologna, 1973), 245: c. 21.

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munion, a threat to accepted Eucharistic practices.52 The demand that the communicant be in a state of grace following confession, accompanied by true contrition and absolution, almost certainly discouraged the laity from receiving communion with any frequency, even under the species of bread alone.53 Cautionary tales of those who suffered for communicating when their souls were inadequately prepared might also have warned the faithful away from frequent communion.54 Women who longed for the Eucharist, whose piety has been documented by Caroline W. Bynum,55 probably hungered even more because of these obstacles to reception. Moreover, a portion of the populace was not satisfied with sight alone. Some, and not just uneducated lay folk, sought to touch relics or to obtain liquids (water, oil or wine) that had been poured over these remains. They desired a more tactile and reassuring contact with the divine.56 Sight was also privileged in some secular schemes of decoration. Touch and Taste, in fact, were regarded as the least dignified of the senses, even outside the most learned circles. The Lady with the Unicorn Tapestries, as arranged in the Cluny Museum, Paris, make this clear by positioning the images of the senses with Sight in the center, flanked by Hearing and Smell. Taste and Touch only appear outside of this arrangement.57 We should note, however, that each positive association about a bodily sense has its converse. The worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride, was identified with sight; especially

52 Caroline W. Bynum, “A Matter of Matter: Two Cases of Blood Cult in the North Germany in the Later Middle Ages,” in Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy du Quesnay Adams, Stephanie A. Hayes-Healy, ed., 2 vols. (New York, 2005), 2: 181-210 at 192. For Eucharistic art with anti-Hussite themes from southern Germany, Austria and Bohemia, see Dóra Sallay, “The Eucharistic Man of Sorrows in Late Medieval Art,” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 6 (2000), 45-80 at 64-66. 53 On the pastoral challenges presented by the demand for true contrition, see D. Catherine Brown, Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson (Cambridge, UK, 1987). 54 Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (London, 2002), 140-141. 55 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987). 56 Bynum, “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” 714. 57 The mirror held by the Lady in this tapestry has been compared to a monstrance; see Gottfried Büttner, The Lady and the Unicorn: The Development of the Human Soul as Pictured in the Cluny Tapestries (New York, 1995), 33-35, where the positive and negative aspects of mirror symbolism are discussed. For a detail of the mirror, see plate 11.

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with the mirror a vain woman uses examine her beauty.58 Moreover, visions claimed by the faithful were subject to verification by ecclesiastical authorities. Claims to direct visual contact with the divine were particularly suspect. Faith, not sight—let alone touch—was crucial to such clerical thinkers.59 It was in this context, in which communion was rare, that ideas of spiritual communion by sight took root. The Elevation of the Host after its consecration, instituted in the period when the idea of transubstantiation was taking root and when the chalice was being withheld from the laity, became the one moment in which the laity, long excluded from close access to the altar, could participate fully in the Eucharist with “mental” sight.60 The fact that the priest, by that time, was facing away from the congregation made this moment more special. Likewise the ringing of bells and the lighting of candles made the elevation dramatic for lay people who were down on their knees in adoration of God.61 Consequently, we should not underrate the psychological impact of this glimpse of godhead on the faithful; although clerical authorities frowned upon the prolonged elevation of the host, it was held up for the faithful to contemplate for a sustained period.62 The Corpus Christi procession, using texts from the office of the feast, created the opportunity to see the host in the streets. From the 14th century onwards, the procession became an occasion for sacred dramas enacted in the streets and for tableaux vivants and other displays bordering on the ostentatious, including in their employment 58 Morton Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (Lansing, MI, 1952), 422 n. 281. The same figure could represent luxuria (lasciviousness); see Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art from Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1964), 76. 59 Jeffrey Hamburger, “Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art,” in Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bilder in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Alessando Nova and Klaus Krüger (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2000), pp. 47-70. 60 Dallas G. Denery II, “From Sacred Mystery to Divine Deception: Robert Holkot, John Wyclif and the Transformation of Fourteenth-Century Eucharistic Discourse,” Journal of Religious History 29 (2005): 129-144 at 136, discussing the training of Franciscan novices. 61 Moshe Barasch, “Elevatio: The Depiction of a Ritual Gesture,” Artibus et historiae 48 (2003): 43-56. In England, depictions of the elevation were more common than images of the faithful receiving communion or even than the adoration of the host; see Ann Eljenholm Nichols, Seeable Signs: The Iconography of the Seven Sacraments 1350-1544 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1994), 241-259. 62 Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages,” 32.

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mechanical devices.63 Processions taking communion to the sick or dying, the Viaticum, may have set the pattern for the Corpus Christi procession. The host, carried in a pyx of gold or ivory, was accompanied by lights. It might also cause a crowd to follow along, attracted by the sacred presence and, in some cases, the possibility of earning indulgences.64 Moreover, sight was not merely an abstraction. Vision was understood, at least by some learned persons, as involving a “visual ray” sent from the eye to the object and back. Thus the believer could “touch” the host, and Christ, through sight.65 Complaints also survive about lay people running to church at the sound of bells to catch sight of the elevated host or lay people leaving the church after its elevation, as though the mass had ended.66 Holding the host up before a dying person, instead of administering the Viaticum, was accepted eventually, often grudgingly.67 The idea of sacred sight applied even to images of saints. The faithful, we are told, opened the doors of English churches to catch sight of an image of Saint Christopher, hoping that seeing it would protect them from bodily harm that day.68 Sight could also be dangerous, even threatening sacrilege. Consequently, Jews were supposed to get off the streets while the host was being carried in procession. The nominal reason was fear that Jews would deride the Eucharist.69 Perhaps a Jew’s glance was presumed to threaten the host through the “visual ray” from his or her eyes as it was carried in a monstrance [ostensory], visible 63 The Croxton Play of the Sacrament is the only surviving English Corpus Christi play that employs a host miracle. It may have been a piece of anti-Lollard polemic; see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, 1966), 48. For occasional excesses in Corpus Christi dramatizations, see Susan Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain (Princeton, 1998), 83-87. 64 On the importance of these processions, see Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages,” 38-45. 65 Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston, 1985), 96-97. Repetition of the Canon of the mass in a whisper removed any auditory element; see ibid., 97-98. 66 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 143. 67 This practice may have originated as a means of consoling dying persons unable to receive the Viaticum, as in the case of Alice Gysbye recorded in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400 - c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992), 322. On occasional prohibitions of this practice, see Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages,” 33. 68 Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350-1500 (New York, 2002), 76. 69 See, for example, a decree of Sixtus IV, dated January 14, 1479, in The Apostolic See and the Jews, Shlomo Simonshon, ed., 4 vols. (Toronto, 1990), 3: 1250-1254, no. 1002.

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behind crystal or glass. Moreover, such a belief would fit with the idea that Jews possessed an “evil eye.”70 Another innovation based on the desire to see the host involved a change in the reservation of the sacrament. Early on, reservation was intended to keep consecrated elements available for the communion of the sick. Later arrangements, including the hanging pyx suspended over the altar, were designed as a focus of veneration of the consecrated elements by the faithful. Reservation was also accompanied by burning perpetual lights to underline the presence of God. These reserved elements became, after a fashion, the most powerful relic, offering the faithful access to the divine.71 Theologians knew that there were legitimate differences between the Eucharistic “body” and the remains of saints. The Lord Himself was believed to be present in the host, although under the appearance of bread, while the saint’s relics were only the remains of the truly devout. Other believers, even simple priests, might not draw such lines adequately. They expected the host to have greater efficacy in meeting their spiritual and material needs.72 The consecrated host might even be displayed during mass or the celebration of the liturgical hours, although some authorities frowned upon doing so. They thought such a display during the mass distracted from the mystery enacted at the altar, which brought about the transubstantiation of bread and wine.73 In all cases, the veneration of the host cannot be separated from the Passion piety of the later Middle Ages, with its focus on the redemptive suffering of Jesus and the power of His blood.74 The images of the Dijon host fit into the context of this form of piety. For example, the 1543 Paris book of hours includes the rubric, In eleuatione sacre hostie, “At the elevation of the sacred host,” plac70 Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven, 1944), 70-71. 71 See the parallels drawn in Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist, passim. The host, especially during the feast of Corpus Christi and its octave, was displacing the relics of saints in the devotions of the faithful; see Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages,” 47. 72 Archdale A. King, Eucharistic Reservation in the Western Church (New York, 1964), 63-64, 75-110, 129-131. Artificial light sometimes was used to create dramatic affects, moving the faithful to devotion; see Paul Davies, “The Lighting of Pilgrimage Shrines in Renaissance Italy,” in The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle ages, Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf, eds., (Rome, 2004), 57-80. 73 Nathan Mitchell, Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass (New York, 1982), 184. 74 Miri Rubin, “Blood: Sacrifice and Redemption in Christian Iconography,” in Blood: Art, Politics and Pathology, 89-101.

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ing the Latin texts among prayers said at the elevation while bells rang and lights were kindled. O salutaris and the prayer, with its versicle and response, could be recited quickly if the host remained visible for approximately a minute; the same applies to O sacrum convivium, for neither is a long text. Either could be said while the host was in plain sight.75 Another possibility also exists, that images of the Dijon host might have substituted for seeing the consecrated bread itself at mass or at a host shrine.76 It is possible, therefore, that inserts in the manuscripts showing the monstrance or the paintings of the host in manuscripts and editions substituted for viewing the host. Devout persons might recite fixed prayers or meditate while contemplating a painting of the relic.77 The free-standing image in the Pierpont Morgan manuscript particularly invites contemplation without dictating the recitation of prayers. It provides no instructions or texts to recite; however, a pious reaction might be inspired by gazing at an image of Christ similar to the one that could be seen by visitors to Dijon.78 The Latin texts also invite another line of inquiry. Not only do they point back to the office for Corpus Christi but forward to the postReformation era. The Reformers rejected transubstantiation, although Martin Luther argued for the Real Presence, as opposed to Ulrich Zwingli’s more spiritual idea of the Lord’s Supper. In either case, Roman Catholics continued to reaffirm received Eucharistic teachings in opposition to Protestants.79 According to the principle lex orandi lex credendi, the belief that worship expresses belief, this reaffirmation was made not just through pronouncements and polemics but also through ritual. For example, the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament 75 P. Browe, “Die Entstehung der Sakramentsandachten,” Jahrbuch für Liturgiewissenschaft (1927), 83-103 at 91. O salutaris, as well as Tantum ergo, the last two stanzas of the Angelic Doctor’s Eucharistic sequence Pange lingua, might be sung during votive masses of Corpus Christi. 76 Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240-1570 (New Haven, 2006), 41-42. 77 The erosion of boundaries between the visual and the spiritual, once emphasized in the monastic tradition, is emphasized in Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions,” Viator 20 (1989), 161-182. 78 Indulgences gained by looking at holy images are discussed by Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages, 169-180. 79 For a brief summary, see Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Oxford, 2005), 303-304. For Catholic efforts to purify the mass after the outbreak of the Reformation, see Lee Palmer Wendell, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge, UK, 2006), 208-255.

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grew out of the giving of blessings with the host, contained in a pyx or a monstrance. Such blessings might be bestowed with the host from stations erected along the route of a Corpus Christi procession.80 The conclusion of the procession may also have featured a blessing with the host.81 As Benediction developed further, the texts and gestures employed became standardized. The consecrated host was displayed on the high altar of a church in a golden monstrance, even during mass.82 Medieval monstrances could take one of two shapes, flat or cylindrical. During the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the monstrance took on a standardized form, a golden sunburst. A vessel with this design displayed the host to the faithful in an eye-catching manner.83 The lights, music, bells and incense used to honor the host all combined in a “multimedia experience.”84 All the texts used in the rite of Benediction were drawn from the mass and office of Corpus Christi. These are the hymns O salutaris (added late) and Tantum ergo85 and the prayer Deus qui nobis sub sacramento. After the prayer was said, the priest took up the monstrance using the “humeral veil,” a rectangular piece of silk placed over his shoulders, to glove his hands when he touched the monstrance, blessing the congregation with the vessel containing the host.86 The manuscripts under examination contain two of these texts. 80 Benediction might be the climax of a period of public exposition of the sacrament, known as Forty Hours Devotion; see John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford, 1991), 163-164; James L. Connolly, “Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament: Its History and Present State,” The Ecclesiastical Review 85 (1931): 449-463. 81 Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 183. 82 A flat monstrance with a circular frame is shown on the altar during mass in an illustration in a fifteenth-century book of hours; see John Plummer, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves: Introduction and Commentaries (New York, 2002), plate 78. 83 The “tower monstrance,” with its cylinder of crystal or glass, was common in the Middle Ages. It is closely akin to reliquaries designed to permit the precious object to be viewed by the faithful; see Nancy Netzer and Virginia Reinburg, eds., Fragmented Devotion: Medieval Objects from the Schnütgen Museum Cologne (Chestnut Hill, MA, 2000), 120-121, figure 9, 122-123, figure 11. The sunburst monstrance originated in the sixteenth century according to Sacred Art from the Old and New Worlds: An Exhibit at the Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, June 2 to September 15, 2002 (Lubbock, TX, 2002), 42-43. 84 This was an “integrated” baroque spectacle, much like opera; see Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque, 1610-1660 (New York, 1962), 83-87. Incensing the altar during the consecration was an innovation of the 13th century; see Archdale A. King, Liturgy of the Western Church (Milwaukee, 1957), 168. 85 Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 204, 324-331. 86 At first the blessing was delivered during the singing of Tantum ergo, but it was moved to the conclusion of the service by a decision of the Congregation of Rites in

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Their presence permits us to raise the question whether the devotional practices represented in the manuscript inserts under discussion have a place (however indirect) in the evolution of Benediction as a rite distinct from the Corpus Christi procession. Bleeding host relics, housed in monstrances or depicted in books of hours, offered the faithful opportunities to venerate Christ under the appearance of bread, accompanied by “evidence” of his blood. When the priest elevated the host, the owners of the manuscript inserts discussed here may have said the hymn (O salutaris), an antiphon (O sacrum convivium), or a prayer (Deus qui nobis sub sacramento), all derived from the office of Corpus Christi. The addition to such devotions of lights, music, incense and the blessing, the rite of Benediction, created a new Eucharistic devotion. It offered Roman Catholics of the post-Reformation era a chance to benefit spiritually, if more passively than they did in a Corpus Christi procession, from the real Presence of Christ.87 Simultaneously, the clergy enacted in this rite a reaffirmation of transubstantiation in a way that supposedly left no room for doubt or contention.88 The offending Jew who attacked the host, the foe overcome by the Sacrament, vanished quickly from this picture.89 The host was supposed to vanquish new foes, whose unholy violence was that of doctrinal deviance, iconoclasm and the rejection of the liturgical rites of the medieval church. Although anti-Semitic thought remained embedded in certain aspects of Catholic popular piety, as in the Oberammergau Passion play, Eucharistic piety separated from that context.90 Transubstantiation could be affirmed without such anti-Jewish miracle tales.

1639; see Connolly, “Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament,” 459-460; Browe, “Die entehung des Sakramentsandachten,” 92. 87 Corpus Christi processions and other older paraliturgical rites did not cease with the Counter-Reformation. The Eucharist, whether in the mass or these devotions, formed a central focus of German Catholic identity at the parish level; see Marc Forster, The Counter Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560-1720 (Ithaca, 1992), 222, 238-230; Forster, Catholic revival in the Age of the Baroque (Cambridge, UK, 2002), 118-119, 124, 143, 160-161, 201. 88 However, the Jansenists decried the sensory satisfaction given by Benediction; see Connolly, “Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament,” 459. 89 See, for example, Margaret M. McGuinness, “Let Us Go to the Altar: American Catholics and the Eucharist, 1926-1976,” in James M. O’Toole, ed., Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, 2004), 187235 at 201-203. 90 James S. Shapiro, Oberammergau: the Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York, 2001).

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Plate 1: The Dijon Host in its Monstrance, Walters Art Museum MS W.291, fol. 17v.

the bleeding host of dijon

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Plate 2: The Dijon Bleeding Host in its Monstrance, John Work Garrett Library, Johns Hopkins University, Garrett MS 14, fol. Iv.

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Plate 3: The Dijon host in /Hore beate marie virginis secundum usum Romanum.../ (Paris: Hardouyn?, 1543), fol. A1v, John Work Garrett Library, Johns Hopkins University.

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 247

SOME ASPECTS OF ARON GUREVICH’S DIALOGUE WITH MIKHAIL BAKHTIN ON MEDIEVAL POPULAR CULTURE YELENA MAZOURMATUSEVICH

I am interested in man, religious man, and his attitude towards God, the world, and his fellow men; his attitude is not only emotional, but also rational and volitional, the attitude of the whole man. (G.P. Fedotov)1

Introduction: Bakhtin’s worship versus Bakhtin’s industry An analysis of Aron Gurevich’s position toward Bakhtin presents several difficulties. One difficulty lies in Gurevich’s own uneasiness about the very idea of “the juxtaposition of the names Bakhtin and Gurevich…”2 This discomfort is partly rooted in the Bakhtin’s cult or rather in two competing and parallel cults that developed in Russia and in the West. As Vadim Linezkii put it in his Anti-Bakhtin, “Bakhtinian studies are swiftly turning into hagiography.”3 The adulation surrounding Bakhtin’s name in his homeland is traditional and represents nothing new to anyone familiar with Russian history and mentality. His tragic human and scholarly destiny inspires special respect because “his lived experience has become for many Russians a prototype of…spiritual purity.”4 According to the Russian researcher, A.T. Ivanov, this identification of Bakhtin’s ideas with his life leads to a “canonization” of the Russian thinker in the charac1 G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1966), cited by John Meyendorff in Foreword, 2: vi. 2 Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aaron Gurevich,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005), [hereafter: the interview] 138: “Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the names Bakhtin and Gurevich makes me feel uncomfortable.” This is also the reason why, upon his request, I changed the original title of this paper from “Gurevich versus Bakhtin” to the present title. 3 Vadim Linetskii, Anti-Bakhtin: luchshaia kniga o Vladimere Nabokove [AntiBakhtin—the Best Book about Vladimir Nabokov] (St. Petersburg, 1994), 59. 4 Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton, 1997), 22.

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teristically Russian way.5 In their redeeming zeal, Russian researchers apply to Bakhtin methods of negative theology by defining what he was not. Vitaly Makhlin goes so far as to say that Bakhtin was… “Non-collectivist, non utopian, non theologian…” while Georgii Gachev enumerates, among the traits Bakhtin did not have, a “feeling for the natural world, children, dogs, daylight and sexual life.”6 Even the most renowned scholars like Dmitrii Likhachev7 and Sergei Averintsev, both victims of Stalinist repression, shared the same attitude to a certain degree. Thus, even though Averintsev fundamentally disagreed with Bakhtin’s model of laughing culture,8 his review of Rabelais and His World, bearing the explicit title “Personality and Talent of a Scholar,” turns out to be “part eulogy, part apologia, part exhortation,”9 for he too “is distracted from a critique of the ideas by the image and appeal of Bakhtin’s life.”10 I do not mean to say that the Russian reception of Bakhtin is doomed to misunderstanding.11 His evaluation in the West is plagued with “traditions” of its own. In the West, Bakhtin’s cult has been in effervescence longer and created a vibrant Bakhtin industry. The fact that Bakhtin became known in the West in the 1960s is highly relevant to his success. His formulation of the “material bodily principle,

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A.T. Ivanov, “Bakhtin, Bakhtinistika, Bakhtinologia,” Novoye Literaturnoye Obozrenie 16 (1995), 333-37, 334-35. 6 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 4-5. 7 See D. Likhachev, “Drevnerusskii Smekh” [Ancient Russian Laughter], in M.M. Bakhtin, Pro et Contra: Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo M.M. Bakhtina v otsenke russkoi i mirovoi gumanitarnoi mysli: antalogiia [M. M. Bakhtin, Pro et Contra: Evaluations of the Personality and Creative Power of M.M. Bakhtin in Russian and World Humanist Thought: An Anthology] 2 vols., (St. Petersburg, 2001), 1, 448-467. 8 Sergei Averintsev, “Bakhtin, Laughter and Christian Culture,” in Bakhtin and Religion, Susan Felch and Paul J. Contino, eds., (De Kalb, IL, 2001), 97-120, 79-96. 9 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 113. See Sergei Averintsev, “Personality and Talent of a Scholar,” Literaturnoe Obozrenie 10 (1976), 58-61. Georgii Fridlender objects: “Does not Averintsev, in his review, speak more about Bakhtin himself than about the content of the book?” See, Fridlander, “Realnoe soderzhanie poiska” [The Actual Content of the Search], Literaturnoe Obozrenie 10 (1976), 61-64. 10 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 180. 11 See Emerson’s book for Bakhtin’s reception in Russia. Several Russian scholars, like Konstantin G. Isupov, “Mikhail Bakhtin and Alexander Meier,” in Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin: Filosofiia Kul’tury 2 (1991), 60-121, and Mikhail Ryklin, “Bodies of Terror: Thesis Toward a Logic of Violence,” Molly and Donald Wesling, trans., New Literary History 24 (1993), 51-74, are highly critical of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival culture.

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 249 triumphant and festive”12 was enthusiastically welcomed by an academic community already quite preoccupied with body, freedom and sex for some time. As N.K. Bonetskaia puts it, “a Western [intellectual] is attracted to Bakhtin by the ‘spiritual thirst,’ by the desire to find some existential foundations.”13 This existential foundation was thought to be found in carnivalesque laughter precisely because of the “ironic reality that amid the ubiquity of images of play and laughter, both in academia and popular culture …genuine laughter [is] increasingly difficult to access.”14 As Western intellectuals put it themselves, “the bourgeoisie…is perpetually rediscovering the carnivalesque as a radical source of transcendence.”15 In this connection, Averintsev astutely observed, “Laughter is something elemental” and the craving “to surrender oneself to something elemental […] is a well-attested dream of civilized humanity.”16 Western spiritual sterility found in Bakhtin another prophet of “the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.”17 The idea of the independent existence of medieval popular culture “outside the Church and religiosity” as “a second world and a second life outside officialdom”18 also has a tremendous charm for all progressive minds. Thus, thanks to “the charisma of Bakhtin’s thought,”19 grotesque realism became one of the most influential “medievalisms” of the 20th century and is partly responsible for increased interest in the medieval period in general.20 Moreover, his theory was proclaimed revolutionary and, as such, appropriated by Marxist critics.21 This situation of two rival “cults” is responsible of what David Shepherd characterized as the “confronta12 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, Helene Iswolsky, trans., (Bloomington, IN, 1984), [hereafter: Bakhtin] 19: “The material bodily principle is a triumphant, festive principle, it is a banquet for all the world.” 13 N.K. Bonetskaia, “M.M. Bakhtin and 1920’s,” in M.M. Bakhtin: Pro and Contra, 2, 132-201, 151. 14 Mark Weeks, “Beyond a Joke: Nietzsche and the Birth of ‘Super-Laughter’,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27 (2004), 1-17, 2. 15 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, 1986), 201. 16 Averintsev, “Bakhtin, Laughter and Christian Culture,” 84. 17 Bakhtin, 9. 18 Ibid., 5-6. 19 The interview, 135. 20 Chris Humphrey, “Bakhtin and the Study of Popular Culture: Rethinking Carnival,” in Materializing Bakhtin: Bakhtin’s Circle and Social Theory, Craig Brandist and Galin Tihonov, eds., (New York, 2000), 164-172, 164. 21 Charles Lock, “Bakhtin and the Tropes of Orthodoxy,” in Bakhtin and Religion, 99: “It was the Rabelais’ book and the theme of carnival that had been

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tion and dialogue of the deaf between the West and Russia… symptomatic of the situation of complete disagreement concerning many questions of Bakhtin’s studies.”22 Gurevich’s Position toward Bakhtin in Existing Scholarship Criticizing Bakhtin in Russia remains a risky business. (A. Ia. Gurevich)23

Gurevich’s position toward Bakhtin must be situated somewhere between the two extremes described above. Neither Marxist nor Christian, his reverence toward Bakhtin is far from “a virtually hagiographic discourse [that] has enshrined the memory of a man [Bakhtin]” in Russia.24 Still, Gurevich’s position has to be determined in spite of his own declarations and a self-imposed censorship (especially perceptible in his interview, for example), and this is another difficulty. Moreover, Gurevich modestly considered himself as only a disciple of Le Goff, Duby and other Annales scholars; as merely a “branch” of the French school of historical anthropology in Moscow, thereby diminishing the originality of his own work. As I discovered during our interview, it is tempting to accept Gurevich’s self-effacing posture at face value (his favorite form of self-address being “your humble servant”). Yet, such modesty must be taken “cum grano salis,” for some of his objections to and treatments of Bakhtin’s ideas tend to be far more significant and fundamental than he was ready to admit. Furthermore, Gurevich’s style is highly relevant to the evaluation of his work. Nancy Mason Bradbury remarks that “the intellectual styles of these two Russians could hardly be more different—Gurevich is spare, concise and cautious where Bakhtin is exuberant, discursive, and speculative.”25 Truly, nothing could be further removed from Gurevich’s personal and professional attitude, which, seized on by Marxist critics as a radical assertion not only of materiality as such…but of revolutionary materialism…” 22 David Shepherd, “Opposite Views on the Carnival,” in M.M. Bakhtin: Pro and Contra, 2, 451-452. 23 The interview, 138. 24 Charles Lock, “Bakhtin and the Tropes of Orthodoxy,” in Bakhtin and Religion, 97. 25 Nancy Mason Bradbury, “Popular Festive Forms and Beliefs in Mannyng’s Handlying Synne,” in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, Thomas J. Farrel, ed., (Gainesville, FL, 1995), 158-179, 161.

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 251 it seems to me, can be the best characterized as méfiance, rather than pure speculation. As the above citation clearly demonstrates, the names of the two Russian scholars have already been placed side by side. In her article, Bradbury examines Gurevich’s work as “an important corrective to certain methodological problems in Rabelais and his World” and pinpoints the author’s originality on his insistence of “the appropriation of popular-festive discourse into clerical texts” as well as in the application of Bakhtin’s own key notion of dialogue to the relation between higher and lower strata of medieval culture.26 Martha Bayless also believes that Gurevich “has challenged Bakhtin’s view of humor (manifested in carnival) as the defining characteristic of medieval folk culture, stating that the grotesque is a more accurate description of medieval attitudes.”27 Michael George states that Gurevich defies “Bakhtin’s idea that humor forms a necessarily subversive element in culture.”28 However, these scholars merely mention Gurevich’s contribution in passing; concentrating on what Bayless calls Gurevich’s “historical scrutiny,” that is his professional expertise, which “Bakhtin’s position cannot withstand.”29 The German scholar Dietz-Rüdiger Moser has already applied historical scrutiny to Bakhtin in two passionate articles directed against Bakhtin’s theory, which, according to the author, must be rejected (abschwören) and denounced (verzichten) as false and dangerous for historical science. To confront what is, in Moser’s opinion, the emerging myth of carnivalesque popular culture, the German researcher refers to Gurevich’s authority as “not only an expert on

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Bradbury, “Popular Festive Forms,” 161. Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), 195. See Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture. Problems of Belief and Perception, Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth, trans., (Cambridge, UK, 1988, reprint 1993), [hereafter: MPC], 181: “Thus, we are not looking at marginal or strange rarities, but at a fundamental feature of medieval art and integral part of medieval man’s perception of reality. The principle of laughter must be seen within the general concept of the grotesque polarity.” 28 Michael George, “An Austere Age without Laughter,” in Misconception about the Middle Ages, Stephen J. Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby, eds., http://www.the-orb. net/non_spec/missteps/miscon.html. 29 Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages, 180. This is a traditional reproach to Bakhtin’s theory. In his book Zametki i Nabliudenia [Notes and Observations] (Leningrad, 1989), 163-164, D. Likhachev remarks that Bakhtin’s concept suffers [from]…a certain degree of non-historicity.” 27

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the Middle Ages but also on Bakhtin’s Oeuvres.”30 The article is relevant here because it exposes Gurevich’s contradictory attitude toward Bakhtin’s views. Although the Russian historian clearly states that historical evidence contradicts Bakhtin’s theory, which Gurevich labels “das Konstrukt Bakhtins”—“Bakhtin’s Fabrication”—or even more explicitly, “eine Mythologie des Karnavals,” he approves of Bakhtin’s theory in all essential points [wesentlichen Punkten] all the same. This paradox puzzled Moser as far back as 1984: […] what would be still left of Bakhtin’s position, as far as it concerns the prematurely fashioned theory of some carnavalesque Popular Culture of Laughter, if not, as he [Gurevich] (certainly rightly) put it, just a stimulus for research?31

Gurevich’s view of Bakhtin’s carnival seems to coincide with the Averintsev’s opinion for whom “it [Bakhtin’s theory] is not an answer for all time…but as a stimulus it is unparalleled.”32 Is Gurevich’s position vis-à-vis Bakhtin just a gracious tribute to the revered national hero (as, I believe, Averintsev’s statement to be) or are there some other elements of Bakhtin’s thought, aside from its historical inaccuracy, that Gurevich took seriously and applied in his work? The present study, based on Gurevich’s books Categories of Medieval Culture, Medieval Popular Culture and Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, as well as on the opinions expressed in his articles and my interview with him in January 2003, will attempt to answer this question. *** Gurevich’s critique of the historical inaccuracy of Bakhtin’s ideas only amplified since the time of Moser’s anti-Bakhtinian polemic in the 1980s.33 However, I believe that his position toward what both he and Moser call the carnivalesque myth differs from that of the German scholar. Where the latter sees a danger for historical science, the Moscow historian perceives important intuitive discoveries. The difference in perception derives from Gurevich’s adherence to the school 30 Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, “Auf dem Weg zu neuen Mythen oder von der Schwierigkeit, falschen Theorien abzuschwören,” Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, 85 (1991), 430-437, 430. 31 Ibid. 32 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 113. 33 The interview, 135: “Bakhtin did not know the Middle Ages at all, while he fully shared the anti-medieval prejudice of his time…”

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 253 of historical anthropology. While Moser finds Bakhtin’s use of anthropological, psychological and even physiological phenomena—such as fear and laughter—a methodological error,34 historical anthropology, as its name implies, welcomes such approaches. One has only to recall Jacques Le Goff’s book La peur en Occident35 to grasp the genre of study of which Moser disapproves. In contrast, as a professed historical anthropologist, Gurevich was able to appreciate Bakhtin’s genius in discovering, completely independently and without any knowledge of not only historical anthropology but also anthropology in general, the anthropological reality commonly referred to as mythological consciousness. It is this reality that Le Goff called “archaic (agricultural) mentality,” Gurevich “collective consciousness,”36 and Mircea Eliade the “sacred mode of being.”37 Critics Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have already noted “the convergence of Bakhtin’s thinking and that of current symbolic anthropology.” They called attention to the fact that Bakhtin and Lévi-Strauss “have much in common in their treatment of…the ritual or the carnival, which can be traced back historically to ritual performance.”38 Indeed, even an amateurish reading of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane39 proves that several of Bakhtin’s characteristics of popular festive culture, although described in his own ingenious terms, correspond to the ethnographic and anthropological data. Among these amazing intuitive discoveries are the return to “terra mater,” “social confusion and sexual license during certain New Year ceremonies,” “the idea of the renewal of time and the regeneration of the world,” “openness to the world,” “a symbolism of death and a new birth,” and the idea that “death is not final, that it is always followed by new birth.”40 Bakhtin’s description of people’s lives where “the cosmic, social, and bodily elements are given as an indivisible whole”41 certainly coincides with Eliade’s depiction of the mythical “paradigmatic” or total consciousness 34

Moser, “Auf dem Weg zu neuen Mythen,” 433-434. Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre moyen âge (Paris, 1977), 10. 36 Aron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, Jana Howlett, trans. & ed., (Chicago, 1992), [hereafter: HA], 99. 37 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, Willard R. Trask, trans., (NewYork, 1959), 15. 38 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 17. 39 Eliade, 147. 40 Ibid., 141, 147, 167, 192, 157. 41 Bakhtin, 19. 35

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through which man “succeeds in living the universal.”42 Similarly, the art historian Geoffrey Harpham also understood that “Bakhtin’s true subject is mythological consciousness for […] perpetual metamorphosis is the central premise of mythic thought, which operates on the principle of the cosmic continuum.”43 Harpham’s realization comes from his analysis of grotesque realism, which “belongs to the borderline between art and life,”44 falling into the category of ritual. As a follower of the Annales school and also familiar with Eliade’s writings, Gurevich could not fail to understand grotesque realism in the same way. He was fully aware that the culture common to all people in a pre-civilizational, archaic society becomes the culture of the common people in a civilized, class society.45 According to Gurevich, mythical archaic consciousness thrives on “that layer of consciousness in which its elements originated and were defined, namely the more amorphous, unstructured sphere of images…hovering in social consciousness.”46 As the Russian philosopher and Gurevich’s close friend Vladimir Bibler notes in his analysis of Medieval Popular Culture, Gurevich’s description of popular culture can be identified as “mytho-poetic, with the accent on mythical.”47 One of Gurevich’s most important accomplishments was his unequivocal recognition—or rather, reestablishment—of Christianity and more precisely, medieval Catholicism, as the major interlocutor in the dialogue with popular culture or mythological consciousness.48 In doing so he followed in the steps of his compatriot George Fedotov (1886-1951), who first attempted, in his studies of Russian history, to “describe the subjective side of religion as opposed to its objective side” and to examine the “wholeness of religious personality […] out of which the main phenomena not only of religious but of cultural 42

Eliade, 212. Geoffrey Harpham, On the Grotesque (Princeton, 1982), 51. 44 Bakhtin, 7. 45 Gurevich, Foreword for MPC, xviii. 46 Gurevich, MPC, xix. 47 Svetlana Neretina and Alexander Ogurtzov, Vremia Kultury [The Time of Culture] (St. Petersburg, 2000), 155. See Vladimir Bibler, Chelovek i Kultura [Man and Culture], (Moscow, 1990). In his Forward to Medieval Popular Culture, Gurevich himself insists that “[W]e cannot understand the spiritual life of medieval society adequately without the mythopoetic and folkloric tradition…” (xviii) 48 Gurevich, HA, 19: “[…] the authentic history of medieval Christianity—the contribution of the affective and intellectual life of broad strata of European populations and its role as powerful factor in social behavior—should be one of the tasks of future historians.” 43

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 255 life in general have their origin and receive their meaning.”49 Consequently, in this article it is not our task to analyze Gurevich’s assessment of the historical accuracy of Bakhtin’s ideas for the Middle Ages (this has already been done by Bradbury, Moser and Gurevich himself), but rather to identify Gurevich’s adjustments of Bakhtin’s model of popular culture (collective consciousness) in its relation to medieval Christianity. On time Isn’t Gothic architecture the apogee of dynamism? (Osip Mandelstam)50

Although Gurevich hardly ever mentioned it, his development of Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope or chronotopos was clearly influenced by anthropological scholarship, particularly by Eliade’s original ideas on sacred and profane time.51 As Gurevich points out, Bakhtin “did not develop this concept in his books, and his examples did not convince me.”52 Bakhtin emphasizes the continuity of popular culture (mythological consciousness) “throughout all the stages of antiquity, […] the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.”53 His conclusion roughly corresponds to the conclusions of historical anthropology, which dates the closing stages of archaic mentality between the 16th and 18th centuries for different parts of Europe. Accordingly, if the collective consciousness persisted practically unchanged from the archaic past, its temporal dimension should have also remained the same or very similar, that is, cyclical. Indeed, Bakhtin’s “time of the people” has many characteristics of what Eliade refers to as “sacred time.” Gurevich fully endorsed the cyclic and cosmic elements of medieval collective consciousness, which Bakhtin rightly emphasized and which anthropological research supported, for the cyclic worldview could not disappear from the medieval mentality due to man’s continuing close dependence on nature. Nonetheless Bakhtin’s time of the people, although cyclical, is somehow oriented 49 G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, II, cited by J. Meyendorff in Foreword, vi. 50 Osip Mandelstam, Prose (Ann Arbor, MI, 1983), 8. 51 Eliade, 212. 52 The interview, 129. 53 Bakhtin, 32. See n. 8.

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toward the future since the accent of popular feast was “placed on the future; utopian traits are always present in the rituals and images of the people’s festive gaiety.”54 On the contrary, official religious ceremony (Christmas, Easter) looked back to the past to use it to consecrate the present.55 Thus, according to Bakhtin, official and popular cultures had opposite vectors: the past-oriented, immovable time of the Church56 and the cosmic, future-oriented time of the people. Gurevich radically challenged this idea of the medieval chronotope by rejecting the concept of a static Church culture and a future-oriented, utopian component of popular culture. In contrast to Bakhtin, Gurevich affirms that “high culture is dynamic while low culture is static,” insisting on the “stickiness” and “viscosity of popular mentality.”57 This “lack of flexibility and resistance to change”58 expresses itself in “inattention to time, bordering on its negation”59 or “a refusal of history,” as Eliade put it.60 According to Gurevich, Bakhtin’s analysis led to this conclusion: “If popular culture existed, according to him [Bakhtin], since almost pre-historical times…it means that for two thousand preceding years it remained static!”61 Besides, it is precisely the collective/popular consciousness that is forever turned toward the past, fixed on the “eternal return” to the times of the beginnings. As Eliade argues, it can be characterized as “utopian” only in the sense of the “nostalgia for the perfection of beginnings.”62 The icon of what was commonly and collectively perceived as a Golden Age changed under the influence of Christianity, but, as the famous French medievalist Gilbert Ouy pointed out, the idea of the return remained unaltered, because it was a “return to some golden 54 Ibid., 82. I will purposely avoid the historically charged term “carnival” in this study for “carnival is exclusively a phenomenon of Christian Europe.” (the interview, 136). Since my argument is based on the assumption that Bakhtin’s description of carnival corresponds rather to the anthropological description of archaic consciousness than to the reality of European carnival, the use of the latter concept would be misleading. 55 Ibid., 9: “The link with time became formal; changes and moments of crisis were relegated to the past.” 56 Ibid., 81: “Its official, ecclesiastical face was turned to the past…” 57 The interview, 138-139. 58 Ibid., 138. 59 Gurevich, HA, 98. 60 Eliade, 90. 61 The interview, 140. 62 Eliade, 92.

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 257 age like the reign of Saint Louis, Charlemagne’s Empire or times of the Primitive Church.”63. Here it is very important to note that, while emphasizing the pagan roots of popular culture, Bakhtin never mentioned (although, as many researchers believe, it might be implicit in his work) the sacred character of “folk’s” worldview and perception of time. In general, Bakhtin speaks of culture “as comprising three domains: science, art and life, without mentioning religion at all.”64 Gurevich accords the religious factor central importance.65 Concerning the question of time, Gurevich insists on the highly dynamic character of clerical Catholic culture: “Of course, medieval Christianity was neither immobile nor sterile; on the contrary, what immense creative strength it possessed!”66 He argues that this dynamism originated in the radical, extraordinary change in the perception of time produced by JudeoChristianity. The Old Testament’s “experience of time as an eschatological process,”67 as well as Saint Augustine’s rejection of the cyclical idea of time,68 made time linear and transformed it from the natural and cosmic into the interior state of a human soul.69 Although Christianity changed the very essence of sacred time because “God…took on a historically conditioned human existence, and history acquires the possibility of being sanctified,”70 Christian time retained its sacred character, as religious men (homo religiosus), continued living in a sacred universe, experiencing two kinds of time, sacred and profane. Far from being formal, Christian religious cele63 Gilbert Ouy, “L’Humanisme du jeune Gerson,” Genèse et débuts du grand schisme d’Occident 286 (1979), 256-268, 264. 64 Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukacs, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (Oxford, 2000), 33. 65 Gurevich, HA, 101: “we are dealing with a religious conception of reality…one sacred world-view.” 66 A. Gurevich, “Popular and Scholarly Medieval Cultural Traditions: Notes in the margin of Jacques Le Goff’s book,” Journal of Medieval History 9 (1983), 71-90, 75. 67 Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, G.L. Campbell, trans., (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley, 1972) [hereafter: CMC], 110. 68 Gurevich, CMC, 113. 69 Interestingly enough, Albert Camus held the same view on the Christian conception of time: “The Christians were the first to consider human life and the course of events as a history that is unfolding from a fixed beginning toward a definite end, in the course of which man achieves his salvation or earns his punishment. The philosophy of history springs from a Christian representation, which is surprising to a Greek mind.” [A. Camus, The Rebel (New York, 1991), 189.] 70 Eliade, 111.

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brations remained rituals, re-actualizations rather than commemorations of the sacred past, which Eliade characterized as occurrences “when the mythical event became present again.”71 Catholic theologian Caspar Schatzgeyer (d. 1527) formulates this essence of Christian ritual: The answer to this is that the sacrifice made now is not an image of the past sacrifice but past things renewed before the Father, as though they were taking place right now on the cross.72

While Gurevich emphasizes this fundamental distinction in Categories of Medieval Culture and in Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, he also develops the idea that Christianity brings, because of its linear character, differentiations within sacred time, on tempus (or biblical time) and eternity. Tempus confers to the Christian chronotope an unprecedented dramatic character because of its fatal irreversibility. It is precisely to tempus that Bakhtin seems to have an unequivocal aversion, associating it with the “eternal,” “immovable,” “absolute,” “unchangeable”73 time of the Church. Gurevich challenges this perception by arguing that Christian time is characterized not only by the immobility of spirit and pessimism, stressed by Bakhtin, but also by historical optimism and faith in spiritual advancement:74 “The Christian philosophy of history endorsed a belief in progress, in contradiction to the radical pessimism with which antiquity had viewed history.”75 Nevertheless, changes in the perception of time did not affect all Christians evenly. Aside from the high clerical elite, distinctions among eternity, tempus and secular (profane) time, so important for the Christian worldview, were not as clear to the majority of the Christian population: At the very time when the Western philosophers were attempting to ‘straighten out time’ into an irreversible sequence, the collective consciousness compressed the present, past and future into a certain timeless state and was not inclined to distinguish between time and eternity.76 71

Ibid., 77 Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts (London and NewYork, 1993), 177. 73 Bakhtin, 91. 74 Gurevich, CMC, 125: “This conception of the apotheosis of history in God could not but act as a counter-balance to historical pessimism.” 75 Gurevich, CMC, 126. 76 Gurevich, HA, 99. 72

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 259 Bakhtin’s description of popular festal time expresses precisely this timeless, ahistorical dimension of collective mythological consciousness and corresponds to what Eliade identifies as the sacred time of festivals, “a primordial time made present, reversible by its very nature.”77 Eliade’s concept bears a striking resemblance to Bakhtin’s description of carnival: The meaning of this periodical retrogression of the world into a chaotic modality was this: […] everything that time had soiled and worn was annihilated in the physical sense of the word. By symbolically participating in the annihilation and re-creation of the world, man too was created anew; he was reborn, for he began a new life.78

The only critical element distinguishing Bakhtin’s depiction of times of festivals from the actual anthropological reality Eliade describes is, again, Bakhtin’s insistence on the popular feast’s orientation toward the future or its “utopian element.” Here lies a real paradox in Bakhtin’s model, for it is the specifically Christian time, endorsed by the elite, and not the circular collective time, that is future-oriented. Bakhtin based his idea of the “utopian element” on studies of Rabelais and not of medieval collective culture for, as Gurevich reminds us, “Rabelais was not medieval.”79 Cyclic yet future-oriented concepts of time likely originated from notions developed by highly educated Renaissance minds, like that of Rabelais (1494-1553) or his older contemporary Thomas More (1578-1535), in whose universe the Christian future-oriented idea of time (the last Judgment) mingled with the newly rediscovered cyclic worldview of classical antiquity. Bakhtin seems to recognize this fact himself: “This entire image of the triumph of mankind is built along the horizontal line of time and space, typical of the Renaissance.”80 The attribution of the futureoriented dimension to collective consciousness might also be better understood when placed in the context of the Russian intellectual utopian tradition, which associated hopes for a better future with the collective spirit of simple folk. This is the point where Bakhtin’s amazingly accurate vision of archaic collective consciousness borders the 20th century’s most popular myth, and where Gurevich rejects it as such. 77 78 79 80

Eliade, 68. Ibid., 79. The interview, 135. Bakhtin, 367.

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yelena mazour-matusevich On collective power Faces in a crowd are irrelevant. (O. Mandelshtam)81

The key to understanding Gurevich’s position lies in the scholar’s attitude toward the collective. In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin’s stance vis-à-vis the collective is unambiguously positive. He ties freedom to the collective popular festival where “life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.”82 It is safe to suppose that under “the laws of life” Bakhtin means the pre-civilization (archaic) or anti-civilization layer of collective life. His festive folk are “drunken philosophers,” oblivious of themselves and relieved of themselves during the festival’s “joyous recreation.”83 They merge into “the collective ancestral body of all the people.”84 As Stallybrass and White explain, “it is ecstatic collectivity, the superseding of the individuating principle in what Nietzsche called ‘the glowing life of Dionysian revelers.’”85 In contrast, Gurevich deeply distrusts this kind of freedom, as well as the benefits of collective consciousness in general.86 He insists on “the severe lack of freedom” proper to mythological consciousness.87 Also, while for Bakhtin “collective existence never lost its ethical bearings,”88 Gurevich takes a position far from such a “nostalgic and over-optimistic view of carnival.”89 Completely foreign to Bakhtinian “cosmic populism,”90 Gurevich’s views are rather similar to the position of Arnold Toynbee for whom “our worship of ourselves in the plural in the shape of collective human power is…the resurgence of 81

Osip Mandelstam, The Egyptian Mark (Moscow, 1991), 33. Bakhtin, 7. Walter Kaufmann, trans. and ed., The Portable Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part, “On the Thousand and One Goals,” (Toronto, 1968), 173. 83 Bakhtin, 91. 84 Ibid., 19. 85 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 19. 86 In their attitude to collective mentality, Bakhtin and Gurevich are children of their respective epochs. While “worshipping simple people, the folk, was proper to the Russian intelligentsia well before Bakhtin,” Russia’s 20th century history largely discredited “this folk-loving tradition.” (The interview, 136) 87 Gurevich, HA, 147. 88 Ken Hirschkop, M. Bakhtin, an Aesthetic for Democracy (Princeton, 1999), 165-66. 89 Stallybross and White, The Politics of Transgression, 18. 90 Ibid., 10. 82

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 261 another religion or even ideology.”91 To Gurevich, just as to Bakhtin’s Western critics, uncritical evaluation of collective celebrations overlooks their violent tendencies and abuses of “weaker, not stronger social groups.”92 Although Gurevich calls the Bakhtinian conception of popular culture a “charming myth of the laughing majority,”93 the very word “majority” could never have a positive connotation for him. The idealization of any type of discharge of individuality in a crowd is not, or at least should no longer be, possible for modern Russian intellectuals. Gurevich associates the collective mentality with the “depths of human consciousness” and “irrationality” that lead, if liberated, to cataclysmic results.94 Moreover, collective popular culture exhibits “a deeper level of social psychology where spontaneous and unconscious mental structures dominate…in their primeval indivisibility” and “clear vectoral concepts of time as well as logic…have no power.”95 In this case the following conclusion imposes itself: “But the very same specific features are…the main indicators of the unconscious.”96 Therefore, although cautiously (“The psychologist would say that here we enter the sphere of the unconscious…”),97 Gurevich acknowledges the supposition ventured by Western theorists like Stallybrass and White that mythological consciousness corresponds to the psychology of the unconscious.98 Historical anthropology has to deal with the unresolved paradox of “the dialogue between the unique (and therefore conscious) and 91

A. Toynbee, Christianity among Religions of the World (New York, 1957), VII. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 19. 93 The interview, 136. 94 Ibid., 130. Gurevich relates the witch-hunt precisely to the pressure of the masses. Interview, 147: “I believe that, in the case of witchcraft, the Catholic Church actually gave in to the pressure of the populace and not vice versa.” 95 Gurevich, HA, 98-99 96 Ibid., 99 97 Ibid. 98 Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 182: “The commonness of the carnivalesque material in hysterical discourse witnesses a cultural and an historical phenomenon. It is striking how the thematics of carnival […] find their neurasthenic, unstable and mimicked counterparts in the discourse of hysteria.” The same connection is also suggested by Moser, 432: “However, this correlation between Bakhtin’s description of popular carnival and Freud’s discoveries is itself paradoxically unconscious: “Since for Bakhtin carnival is the model of an alternative culture, it remains unclear why he did not recognize in [….] Freud the elements, which could have become foundations of such a model […]?” (Linetskii, 61). 92

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traditional, customary (and therefore unconscious) elements of culture.”99 Moreover, once the “mental image of the world”100 finds its expression in an individual work, this work becomes the object of culture, anonymous or not, “Who created monuments, manuscripts and music? Individual geniuses. Of course, there is a censorship of the collectivity, but in the beginning is always an individual talent.”101 Here we deal with Gurevich’s own paradox. In spite of his concentration on the studies of “the silent majority,” the accent in his work persistently falls on the problem of the individual. This emphasis leads, once again, to the reexamination of the role of Christianity.102 According to Gurevich, […] the idea of personality or individuality, the way we understand it now, is a product of Christianity [… which] encourages a deeply personal approach to life because Christians are called to be in a personal, private relationship with God.103

The individualization of consciousness and interiorization of Christian principles went hand in hand. Individual spirit seemed to make sporadic and uneven progress throughout the Christian age. It had to find its full expression in a few exceptional men before it could spread to a larger number of people even among the educated Christian elite. “The consciousness of one’s uniqueness” existed mainly among the educated elite, among the most brilliant representatives of clerical culture.104 Viewed from this perspective, Bakhtin’s fundamental tension between the collective body of the people and the clerical elite appears as the masses’ resistance to the specifically Christian individualization of consciousness. Furthermore, in Bakhtin, the emphasis on the collective finds its expression in the notion of the “people’s earthly immortality,”105 which is opposed to the Christian model of personal judgment and 99

Neretina and Ogurtzov, Vremia Kultury, 153. Gurevich, CMC, 13. 101 The interview, 131. 102 Toynbee, 53: “Worshipping of the collective human power … is certainly not derived from Christianity.” 103 The interview, 131. On this issue Gurevich agrees with Le Goff, who admits that it was the “IV Council of the Latron, in 1215, that opened a pioneering front in every Christian—examination of conscience.” (Le Goff, Pour un autre moyen âge, 12). 104 The interview, 131: “St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and many others reflected on themselves, on the goal of their existence, sense of life, and so forth…” 105 Bakhtin, 95. 100

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 263 salvation in every aspect. Under this bodily collective immortality, Bakhtin understands the “unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming.”106 Here again Bakhtin’s picture of archaic mentality is remarkably accurate as Eliade remarks, “[…] for all archaic societies, access to spirituality finds expression in a symbolism of death and new birth.”107 As nature renews itself, so do people. People’s immortality is non-individualized, cosmic, generic and the eternal circulation of matter.108 It is natural, physical, and material—“the link in the chain of genetic development.”109 Besides, the cosmic eternity is not reserved to humans only; plants and animals participate in it as well.110 Popular festival essentially leans toward an orgy with its celebration of destructive and life-germinating chaos.111 In this ritual, personal salvation is replaced by the collective oblivion of a sacred orgy. Still, Bakhtin paradoxically insists that people’s immortality is not just “the biological body, which merely repeats itself in the new generations, but precisely the historic, progressing body of mankind.”112 The word “progressing” is highly significant here for it brings up, once again, the idea of popular culture’s inexplicable orientation toward the future. This future-oriented element, distinguishing man’s immortality from the natural and involuntary “biocosmic circle of cyclic changes”113 must have been inherited from the JudeoChristian tradition precisely because organic metamorphic immortality alone is insufferable for modern European minds formed, as they were, by this very tradition. Even the most courageous of European thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, in spite of the eternal return, had to come up with his Übermensch as the final triumphant goal of humanity. Besides, as Gurevich points out, Bakhtin could not distance himself from “the European assumption, not always appropri-

106

Ibid., 24. Eliade, 192 108 In describing the culture of grotesque realism, Gurevich echoes Bakhtin (CMC, 53-54): “The grotesque body was represented as non-individualized, incomplete and constantly intertwined with the earth which gives it birth and swallows it up again. The eternally renewed generic body was cosmic, universal and immortal…” 109 Bakhtin, 26. However, Bakhtin happens to contradict himself later (367). 110 Ibid., 223: “Animal and human organs are interwoven into one indissoluble grotesque whole.” 111 Petr Sapronov, Culturology (Moscow, 2003), 318. 112 Bakhtin, 367. 113 Ibid., 24-25. 107

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ate, but taken as a given, that the foundation of the historical process is evolution and progress, the evolutionism I mentioned earlier.”114 On laughter and fear “It is always harder to make a wise man laugh than a simpleton.” (Sergei Averintsev)115

According to Bakhtin, another crucial, specifically-human attribute is intimately tied to the idea of popular culture’s progressive nature: universal laughter.116 Festive laughter allows the “second life of people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.”117 Moreover, carnival laughter revealed “the material bodily principle in its true meaning,” “opened men’s eyes on that which is new, on the future,” and “permitted the expression of…popular truth.”118 Collective laughter performs three functions: relief from fear (the bodily principle), uncovering the future (a utopian element) and expressing the truth about the world (a form of gnosis). Laughter’s “future-oriented” character is connected to the similar vector of popular culture, discussed earlier; furthermore, it is highly paradoxical, considering the mythological consciousness’ circular character and its fixation on the past. Here we will focus on popular laughter’s fear-liberating function. The concept itself, although widely accepted, is debatable. As a psychological and even physiological phenomenon, laughter constitutes a basic human experience. The very idea of distinguishing among medieval, popular, modern or pre-modern types of laughter may induce skepticism or even seem erroneous to professional historians.119 Also, aside from historical arguments, “…liberation coincides not with 114

The interview, 140. Averintsev, “Bakhtin, Laughter and Christian Culture,” 81. 116 Bakhtin, 11-12. 117 Ibid., 9. 118 Ibid., 94. 119 Moser, “Auf dem Weg zu neuen Mythen,” 433: “Es scheint, dass Bakhtin [...] dem Irrtum erlegen sei, den seine Apologetin ungeprüft und als lautere Wahrheit weiterträgt, dass das Lachen keine anthropologische, sondern eine historische Kategorie darstellte; nur so kann er ja von einem „antiken Lachen,“ einem „mittelalterlichen lachen“ oder einem Renaissance Lachen sprechen, als ob dies völlig verschiedenen Dinge wären.“ “It seems that Bakhtin […] made a mistake which his followers did not verify and carried on as a pure truth, that the laughter represented not an anthropological but a historical category; only this way he can speak about an 115

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 265 laughter but with the regaining or recovery of sobriety following laughter.”120 In any case, in the context of Bakhtin’s work, laughter should be understood neither as on historical phenomenon nor as a physiological reaction but as an existential category. As such, carnival laughter liberates the individual from what Bakhtin identified as a “fear of the sacred.”121 Although he never acknowledged this sacred fear as specifically Christian, in Rabelais and his World Bakhtin refers to it as “the oppression of the absolute,” “chains of devout seriousness” or “the fear of God.”122 Yet, let us recall that the Christian fear of God is the price for the freedom of will, as well as a powerful means for shaping individual consciousness. According to Fedotov, the fear of God supposedly makes Christians fearless before world powers, of which the power of the collective is one of the greatest: Do not fear, nor hesitate, nor be ashamed before the face of man […] thou are the slave of God and the servant of Christ, and thou shall work with daring the commandment of God.123

Since laughter “is rather far from the triumph of the personal principle [and…] temporarily suspends the action of our personal will,”124 one of its main functions consists precisely in releasing the festive masses from the burden of Christian individualized consciousness. However, according to Gurevich, mythological consciousness is hostile to the development of personality and dwells on “we-being.” It is true, though, that the development of the Christian personality comes at a high cost. The moral struggle, central to the universal drama of salvation, is personal, for it takes place in every soul. As a result, personal responsibility and “man’s free will and goodwill are necessary.”125 Individual responsibility is a heavy burden accompanied by acute feelings of guilt and agonizing fears of the last judgment. Bakhtin vigorously stresses this religious fear. However, such ‘ancient laughter,’ a ‘medieval laughter,’ or about a ‘Renaissance laughter,’ as if those were completely different things.” (My translation.) 120 Averintsev, “Bakhtin, Laughter and Christian Culture,” 90. 121 Bakhtin, 94: “[laughter] liberates from the fear of the sacred…” 122 Ibid., 91. 123 G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, Preface to the Penitence, published by A.S. Pavlov in Russkaia Istoricheskaia Biblioteka, second edition, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1908), 1: 241. 124 Averintsev, “Bakhtin, Laughter and Christian Culture,” 80. 125 Gurevich, CMC, 112.

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terror is only one side of the Christian dialectic of fear and hope; as Gurevich asserts, “Fear of the Last Judgment mingled and blended with hopes of salvation and attaining the kingdom of heaven.”126 The triumphal anticipation of divine bliss fills the pages of medieval clerics like Jean Gerson (1363-1429), who declared, “Your grace lifts up those who lie on the earth in the dust…and allows them to sit above with princes, meaning with the angels and the saints, and to dwell in heaven.”127 Trepidation represents only one aspect of the complex Christian “despair-hope-love cycle.”128 More significantly, the fears of medieval people were not limited to those of Christian origin. Gurevich argues that […] if we take the problem of popular culture in a wider context, it is easy to establish that popular culture was not at all solely one of laughter and joy…During the entire middle ages human conscience was relentlessly tormented by fears.129

Although festive celebration may have inspired a particular type of intoxicating temporary fearlessness, collective consciousness is also susceptible to panic, destructive, bestial, and sometimes suicidal behavior. Instinctive, animal anxiety about physical annihilation or injury is as organic and present in human beings as the passion for life and constant renewal. Both emotions are basic survival instincts and collective bodily immortality is insufficient to subdue the fear of physical death: One scholar notes that in Bakhtin, Apart from official seriousness…there is also an unofficial seriousness… an extreme form of the protest of individuality…against change and absolute renewal, the protest of the part against dissolution into the whole.130

126

Ibid., 125. Brian P. McGuire, trans. and ed., Jean Gerson, Early Works (New York, 1998), [hereafter Gerson, EW], 104. 128 Gerson, EW, 122-123: “And here the devout person in firm faith concentrates on everything that can create in herself a holy fear and terror of the secret judgments of God […], the uncertainty of the hour of death, the horror of damnation […] At the second stage … we find hope, which gives confidence to the devout person, so that she not despair and be lost through too great fear. […] There the devout soul will recover some courage. […] At the third stage, where charity dwells, the devout soul will consider the greatness of its Lord, and how he makes us love […]” 129 A. Gurevich, “Smekh v narodnoi culture Srednevekoviia”[“Laughter in medieval popular culture”], Voprosy Literatury [Questions of Literature] 6 (1966), 207-213, 209. 130 Ruth Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin (Cambridge, UK 1998), 139. 127

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 267 Finally, the very idea of individual salvation emerged precisely from the horror of personal annihilation! However, here we encounter an interesting paradox; while Christian mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux believed that it was mortal flesh that communicated the terror of death to the eternal soul,131 Bakhtin suggested that it was exactly the opposite. According to him, the mystically oppressed soul communicated sacred fear to the joyfully immortal body. Upon closer examination though, this seeming paradox might uncover the reality of pre-modern Christian society. Quite probably, theologians, these “professionals of the sacred,” placed more hope in “beautiful acts of contemplation”132 while simple folk, knowing less of mystical delights, were more inclined to forget themselves in collective bodily laughter. On the other hand, according to Peter Burke, upper-class participation in popular festivities was “an important fact of European life” prior to the early modern period.133 According to Gurevich, all European people, including those living in the most remote corners, were “indeed Christians” and not “just pagans out of whom the Church was trying to make Christians.”134 Thus, all people experienced both bodily and spiritual fears and were familiar with both types of psychological cures available to them—the mystical experience of prayer and the healing effect of comic relief. Still, while faith provided a life-long source of consolation, bodily laughter provided what Bakhtin called a short-lived, “ephemeral” relief from mystical anxieties. As Gurevich notes, laughter or carnival celebration hardly abolished the horror of eternal perdition, “the intensity of which is difficult for us even to imagine,”135 but “it did make it bearable.”136

131 St. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, IV, (Kalamazoo, MI, 1980), sermon 82, p. 173: “Its [the soul’s] immortality continues also, but…with the dark clouds of physical death of the body overshadowing it.” 132 Gerson, EW, 124. 133 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London-New York, 1978), 24-25. 134 The interview, 145. 135 Gurevich, MPC, 193. 136 Gurevich, HA, 121.

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yelena mazour-matusevich On chaos One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. (Nietzsche)137

The third, truth-revealing function of collective laughter is intimately connected with the nature of mythological consciousness, which, according to Bakhtin, is characterized by a droll attitude toward life. For Bakhtin this “truth [of laughter] was an object of unconditional philosophical belief.”138 According to him, laughter gave people a glimpse into the true nature of the universe: relative, unstable, mutable and ever-becoming, “with its unfinished and open character.”139 Because it uncovers “the relative nature of all that exists,”140 laughter exposes man to the very origin of the world—the original chaos. The idea of chaos, likely of Nietzschean origin, seems to me the key to understanding Bakhtin’s view of popular celebrations.141 Bakhtinian carnival, like an orgiastic ritual, is, according to Eliade, “the periodical retrogression of the world into a chaotic modality,”142 returning people to or, more appropriately, into the collective and the unconscious: The idea of renewal…of time and the regeneration of the world, recurs in orgiastic agricultural scenarios…; the orgy is a return to the cosmic night, the preformal, in order to ensure complete regeneration of life and hence the fertility of the earth.143

To be sure, what is plunging into the collective organic life if not a return to primitive consciousness and, even deeper, into the lifegerminating and future-bearing chaos? The fundamental feature of collective ritual is to liberate the creative energy of chaos—collective, material and organic—from the oppression of the individual, spiritual and moral.

137 Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 129. 138 Averintsev, “Bakhtin, Laughter and Christian Culture,” 84. 139 Bakhtin, 83. 140 Ibid., 48. 141 I developed this idea in my article “Nietzsche’s Influence on Bakhtin’s Aesthetics of Grotesque Realism,” Comparative Literature and Culture, 11.2 (2009): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol11/iss2/7. 142 Eliade, 79. 143 Ibid., 147.

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 269 Many Western intellectuals have greeted Bakhtin’s celebration of carnival chaotic freedom and “gay relativity of the world”144 with enthusiasm: Such meaninglessness may be a blessed moment of release, a temporary respite from the world’s tyrannical, compulsive legibility […], from the terrorism of excessive significance.145

In the disillusioned post-Soviet bloc, such nostalgia for chaos can encounter nothing but skepticism. As Gurevich’s older contemporary Averintsev put it, “what we find at the very origin of any sort of ‘carnivalization’ is blood.”146 Milan Kundera characterized the obsession with carnival freedom as nothing but “a tempting lure for the opponents of authoritarian order, who will be led by it to their doom.”147 Besides, even in archaic societies the relativity of existence is not always perceived “in its droll aspect.”148 For the mythical mentality “an abolition of an order, a cosmos, an organic structure, and reimmersion in the state of fluidity, of formlessness—in short, of chaos— denotes catastrophe.149 Experiencing the relativity of the equilibrium between cosmos and chaos could be just as terrifying as it can be liberating; “It is hard to know how much necessary non-meaning, how much free-wheeling contingency, can be embraced by any system of meaning without it collapsing into the demonic.”150 In fact, the blessed moment of plummeting into “chaotic modality” is liberating only under the condition that the “return” of the celebrating community back to the cosmic life is more or less guaranteed, as it is in the case of orgiastic cyclical rituals. Moreover, extreme situations of disease, pain, moral distress or mortal danger also reveal the relativity of the world, and, in all probability, in a sharper fashion than during the “time of laughter.” However, in these situations, precisely because they do not guarantee “the return,” people need a different kind of relief. For that reason the “Christian myth,” in addition to oppressing and terrorizing, also offers spiritual consolation. One of the main functions of medieval theology was that it was supposed to provide “its [the soul’s] harbor and its safe haven against all the mishaps of 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Bakhtin, 11: “the entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity.” Hirschkop and Shepherd, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, 185. Averintsev, “Bakhtin, Laughter and Christian Culture,” 86. Hirschkop and Shepherd, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, 185. Bakhtin, 11. Eliade, 49-50. Hirschkop and Shepherd, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, 186-187.

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the great sea of the present world.”151 French historian Jean Delumeau recognized and explored this fundamental function of the Christian Church, which corresponds to people’s profound need to be “protected and reassured” by God.152 This means that not only bodily laughter temporarily freed men from religious fears, but that religious beliefs freed men from bodily fears. The role of Christianity Now it is pertinent to raise the problem of Bakhtin’s anti-religious polemics in Rabelais and His World, which probably provoked more disagreement than any other. Bakhtin described “medieval ideology” as “intolerant, one-sided, the icy petrified seriousness of asceticism, somber providentialism, sin, atonement and suffering,”153 exposing his most virulent but rather traditional anti-clericalism. While his view was welcomed by the majority of Western intellectuals, it has been embarrassing for many Russian and some non-Russian critics. Obviously, Christianity can neither be reduced to “the narrowminded seriousness of spiritual pretense”154 of the religious establishment nor entirely belong to the oppressive official sphere of “non-people.” Further, the seriousness of the Church was not just the sign of its oppressive power; it was closely related to the moral seriousness of the Gospel itself. Some researchers believe that Bakhtin directed his anti-religious energy exclusively against the Catholic Church because “what Bakhtin says about its hierarchical authoritarianism is not applicable to the decentralized conciliar organization of the Orthodox Church.”155 This point of view suits both Bakhtin’s Western and Russian admirers, though for different reasons. According to literary scholar Caryl Emerson, Bakhtin’s criticism of the Catholic Church as “infused with elements of fear, weakness, humility, submission, falsehood, hypocrisy…violence, intimidation, threats, [and] prohibitions”156 was naturally met with a pleasant sense of immediate recognition by 151

Gerson, EW, 124. Jean Delumeau, Rassurer et protéger: Le sentiment de sécurité dans l’Occident d’autrefois (Paris, 1989). 153 Bakhtin, 73. 154 Ibid., 22. 155 Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin, 73. 156 Bakhtin, 94. 152

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 271 Western intellectuals, who were, by definition, almost exclusively left-wing and very often of Protestant background. Moreover, Russian anti-Catholic feelings have long been part of an established tradition. “In assimilating Bakhtin, Russian theology proved itself marvelously elastic. Carnival emerges as…an Orthodox site for metamorphosis and miracle in opposition to the Latin corrupt officialdom.”157 Bakhtin’s hero, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, excelled in anti-Catholic polemics and was, as Hirschkopf argues, “like Bakhtin himself, askew to the bourgeois political project, merely by virtue of being Russian.”158 Preferring “utopian, invented sociality rather than a historical one,”159 this tradition despises what Averintsev calls “the moderate civilizing norms of the Western Church.”160 Indeed, Bakhtin did not sympathize with the Western Church’s civilizing efforts, for “he would have responded that the world is simply not set as a battle ground between system and chaos,”161 and this would have been a perfectly Russian answer. In this context, Gurevich judges the medieval Catholic Church in a more a balanced and rather positive manner: This clerical elite of the Catholic Church […] because of celibacy, … did not reproduce itself, but absorbed the best, the most talented representatives of all social classes, including the lowest.162

Gurevich’s reassessment of the role of Christianity and the Catholic Church is original. In the context of Bakhtin’s pro and contra polemics, Gurevich’s position displays the privilege of independence that Michelet once claimed for himself, “to approach Christianity with neither prejudice nor religious formation that would have made him either admire it excessively or reject it by reaction, without analysis.”163 Gurevich identified the medieval Catholic worldview as “integrated” or “holistic,” where “the palpable and physically visible world is contiguous with the supra-sensual world.”164 Its “integrated nature” could be sustained precisely because of Catholic medieval religiosity. 157

Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 175. Hirschkop, Aesthetic for Democracy, 250. 159 Ibid., 250. 160 Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 184. 161 Ibid., 71. 162 The interview, 137. Leonid Batkin, “Panurge’s Laughter and the Philosophy of Culture,” in M.M. Bakhtin, Pro et Contra, 1, 398-412, 402: “Catholic culture…accumulated intellectual potential of the society.” 163 Le Goff, Pour un autre moyen âge, 33. 164 Gurevich, CMC, 87. 158

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The coexistence and constant mixing of the “lower” bodily with “higher” celestial forms is no coincidence but a natural consequence of deeply rooted theological views: “The synthesis of extreme seriousness and tragedy, on the one hand, and of the tendency to maximum lowering, on the other, was in essence part of Christian dogma.”165 The concept of life as all-embracing is that of the Roman Catholic Church.166 Trying to cope with popular mythological consciousness, the medieval Catholic Church incorporated chaos into its monumental order in the same way as the gargoyles constitute part of the sacred space. Gurevich emphasizes that the holistic sacred worldview persisted from archaic times until the Reformation: “the relation of ‘lofty’ and ‘low,’ of the serious and the comic, the sacred and the profane, in eddic poetry and in the medieval religious novella is somewhat similar”167 (my italics). Although Gurevich does not directly point to this correlation, grotesque images from the Elder Edda, described in his Historical Anthropology—mile deep kettles, a giant grandmother with nine hundred heads, bulls used as bait for fishing, etc.—irresistibly bring to mind Rabelais’ hyperboles.168 It seems to me that Gurevich’s very sensitivity to this exaggerated “burlesque” imagery is inspired by Bakhtin’s influence. According to Gurevich, the opposition of the comic and the serious was not an original feature of medieval culture or the Catholic religion, but the product of later, post-modern development.169 The “inclusive” or “unexclusive”170 character of medieval Christianity contradicts Bakhtin’s vision of the medieval Church as excluding and closed. Medieval people lived in both spiritual and bodily dimensions. Yet, and this is crucial, both these dimensions belonged to the sphere of the sacred.171 The survival of the collective feast directly depended on the general sacred character of a given worldview. In a still sacred pre-modern universe, “which regarded the order of earthly things as the outcome of a divine plan,”172 popular feast, as Bakhtin understood 165

Gurevich, MPC, 181. Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts, 2. 167 Gurevich, HA, 175. 168 Ibid., 160. 169 Ibid., 164. 170 Gurevich, MPC, 177. 171 Gurevich, HA, 164, “The comic and the tragic, the low and the lofty, are but two poles of a holistic world-view.” 172 André Malraux, The Metamorphosis of the Gods, Stuart Gilbert, trans., (New York, 1960), 251. 166

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 273 it, could remain an organic part of life. As Eliade notes, the opposition between archaic and Christian psychologies did not become complete until the Reformation; “Christianity…has long since lost the cosmic values that it possessed in the Middle Ages…[when] it lived as a cosmic liturgy…among rural populations.”173 The very emergence of carnival in the 15th century is connected with the development of western European cities.174 Because of the intense life and density of the towns, carnival festivities became popular diversions from the ever-increasing pressure of organized Christianity. It was Christianity’s final victory, which Gurevich unambiguously identifies with the Reformation, which denied the collective mythical consciousness its last public expression—carnival. It was the Reformation that was determined to eradicate the remnants of mythical consciousness—the essence of Bakhtin’s carnival culture—from the Christian worldview. Indeed, Moser and others have proved that while carnival and other forms of collective, ritual-like festivities continued to enjoy the support of papal authority, Protestants relentlessly persecuted them.175 Therefore, as a historian, Gurevich rightly criticized Bakhtin for artificially isolating carnival and taking it out of the larger context of medieval culture.176 In this sense, Bakhtin’s intuition connecting carnival to saturnalia is not entirely inaccurate, since, as Eliade informs us, “saturnalia symbolize regression to the amorphous con-

173

Eliade, 178. The interview, 135: “It [carnival] is an entirely urban phenomenon.” 175 Moser, “Lachkultur des Mittelalters?,” 99: “Während das Fest [Carnival] auf katholischer Seite mit Eifer gepflegt wird, schlägt ihm evangelischer Seite deutliche Ablehnung entgegen. [...] ein Bonner Pfarrer formulierte: „Unser herr ist night Prinz Karneval, sondern Jesus Christus. [...] Die evangelischen Kirchenordungen des 16. Jahrhunderts schaffen die als “päpstisch” bewertete Fastnacht ab, während man sie auf katholischer Seite verteidigte und in den rekatholisierten Gebieten neu installierte. Tatsächlich hat sie in den Zentren der katholischen Welt stets eine grosse Rolle gespielt, in Rom wie in Venedig, in Mainz wie in Köln, in München wie in Rio de Janeiro [...] “While the feast was assiduously maintained on the Catholic side, an evident rejection opposed it on the evangelical side. […] One good Bonn pastor put into words: “Our Lord is not prince carnival, but Jesus Christ.” The 16th century evangelical Church orders abolished popular feast regarded as “popish,” while it persisted on the Catholic side and was reinstalled in the territories regained by Catholics. Indeed, it continually played a focal role in the Catholic world centers, in Rome as in Venice, in Mainz as in Cologne, in Munich as in Rio de Janeiro [...] (My translation.) 176 A. Gurevich, “Annales in Moscow” in The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, Miri Rubin, ed., (New York, 1997), 247. 174

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dition that preceded the Creation of the World,”177 in other words, to the universal equalizer—primordial chaos. Conclusion This study has attempted to elucidate some of the essential tendencies in Gurevich’s treatment of Bakhtin’s theory, which the historian characterized as a “charming myth.”178 Nonetheless, this myth succeeded in depicting the collective consciousness, mythical in essence and always (not only in the Middle Ages) inclined to irrationality and the descent into primordial chaos. This fact induced some researchers to insist on Bakhtin’s pre-Christian sensibilities,179 for “only the religious vision of life makes it possible to decipher in the rhythm of vegetation first of all the ideas of regeneration, of eternal youth, of health, of immortality.”180 Bakhtin definitely possessed this vision. His view of collective mythological consciousness is undeniably nostalgic for the unified, primordial, pre-modern world. It seems to me that it is precisely what Eliade calls the “non-cosmic,”181 unnatural, non-organic character of the Christianity with its “transcendence, abolition of cosmos, absolute freedom”182 that Bakhtin repudiates in his book. Bakhtin resented as oppressive and “intolerant, a one-sided tone of seriousness,”183 that which Gurevich identifies as the Christian “spiritual appropriation of reality,” knowing “no ethically neutral forces or elements while each event is seen as unique and irreversible.”184 From this perspective, “the carnivalesque becomes a resource of actions…to degrade all that is spiritual and abstract”185 because, for Bakhtin, all abstract, ideal, metaphysical categories (soul, spirituality, faith, virtue, spirit, God) are sterile. He replaced “sterile eternity by pregnant and birth-giving death,” preferring “earth and its lower stratum as a fertile womb, where death meets birth and a new life

177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185

Eliade, 147. Interview, 135. Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 184. Eliade, 149. Ibid., 177. Ibid. Bakhtin, 73. Gurevich, CMC, 394. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 18.

gurevich and bakhtin on medieval popular culture 275 springs forth”186 to any form of perfect yet unearthly, abstract reality whatever it might be.187 Bakhtin did not base his conclusions on the study of historical documents; his idea of Catholic medieval religiosity rather reflects a common anti-clerical and anti-medieval prejudice of his time as well as that of post-Reformation, modern Christian practice. This modern Christian religious experience, unlike the medieval Catholic one, “is no longer open to the cosmos. It is strictly private. […] even for a genuine Christian the world is no longer felt as the work of God.”188 One of Gurevich’s major legacies consists precisely in a reexamination of “the problem of real content of Christianity in medieval Europe,”189 a reformulation of its historical role and its revalorization as an essential cultural paradigm. Thus, while the Bakhtinian opposition between clerical and popular cultures does not correspond to the historical reality of the holistic medieval Catholic world-view, it points toward a real conflict—the one between collective popular consciousness and Christian doctrine. This is, in reality, the real issue underlying Bakhtin’s binary view of medieval culture: people/elite, mind/body, laughter/ seriousness, future/past, open/closed, freedom/oppression, etc. Gurevich clearly understood this, for he recognized in medieval Catholicism the very bond that kept European society together in spite of the inherent tension between collective, ritualistic and agrarian consciousness and Christianity. In mythological consciousness, characterized by the inherent propensity toward the sacred and the dualistic worldview in which earthly and divine worlds not only face each other but organically and intimately intermingle, Bakhtin heavily emphasized the earthly component, while Gurevich redressed the equilibrium by calling attention to and reconsidering the divine. In Rabelais the mythical consciousness of popular culture might have found its powerful literary voice, but this voice is individual, belonging to the highest and most refined scholarly elite. The very awareness of unconscious, mythological reality led to, or rather points toward, its impending disintegration. Rabelais’s books might be the very last swan-song of the Catholic pre-modern experience bearing the 186

Bakhtin, 395. Here Bakhtin’s celebration of the mother earth echoes the typically Russian religious sensitivity to the cult of the Mother Earth, which survived, according to Fedotov, up to recent times (The Russian Religious Mind, 1, 36). 188 Eliade, 179. 189 Gurevich, HA, 18. 187

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traces of a holistic, sacred worldview. From this point on, the Christian sacred would be in contact not with another popular and collective, yet still sacred reality, but with a gradually more and more profane popular culture.

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CHESS AS A METAPHOR FOR MEDIEVAL SOCIETY1 S. I. LUCHITSKAYA

One of the most important contributions of A. Ia. Gurevich’s creative legacy is his work on the subjective aspects of medieval social culture. In the early 1960s, while studying the social structure of the early Germans, Gurevich examined how social ties were reflected in barbarian consciousness as he explored the system of representation by which members of society recognized themselves.2 Henceforth, Gurevich was deeply interested in such themes as the symbolic representation of medieval social structure, idealized views of medieval people on modes of social stratification, and medieval models of social structure. Much of Gurevich’s research concentrated on aspects of medieval self-consciousness and popular culture;3 it also included essays on the German preacher Berthold of Regensburg,4 as well as original research on the “tri-partite model of feudalism.”5 In the present article, dedicated to the memory of this great medievalist, we will 1 The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Westphalian Wilhelm’s University of Münster (Sonderforschungsbereich 496) without which this article would not have been possible. 2 See A. Ia. Gurevich, Problemy genizisa feodalizma v zapadnoi Evrope [Problems of the Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe] (Moscow, 1970); A.Ia. Gurevich, “Nekotorye nereshennye problemy sotzialnoi struktury dofeodal’nogo obshchestva: individ i obshchestvo (tezisy doklada)” [“Several Undecided Problems regarding the Social Structure of pre-Feudal Society: the individual and society (major theses of the address)”], Srednye Veka [Medieval Centuries] 31 (Moscow, 1968), 64-66. 3 A.I. Gurevich, Srednevokovy mir: Kultura bezmolvstvuiushchego bol’shinstva [The Medieval World: The Culture of the Silent Majority] (Moscow, 1990); Kul’tura i obshchestvo srednevokovoi Evropy glazami sovremennikov: Exempla XIII veka [Culture and Society of medieval Europe in the eyes of its contemporaries: Exempla of the 13th century] (Moscow, 1989). See also Norvezhskoe obshchestvo v rannee srednevokov’e: Problemy sotsial’nogo stroia i kul’tury [Norwegian Society in the early medieval period: problems of the social structure and culture] (Moscow, 1977), 274. 4 “‘Sotsiologiia’ i ‘antropologiia’ v propovedi Bertol’da Regenburgskogo” in Literatura i iskusstvo v sisteme kul’tury [“Sociology and Anthropology in the Sermons of Berthold of Regensburg,” in Literature and Art in Systems of Culture], (Moscow, 1988) 88-97. 5 See, for example, A. Ia. Gurevich, “Tripartitio Christiana—tripartitio Scandinavica” in Kwartalnik historyczny [Historical Quarterly] 3 (Warsaw, 1973), 547-567. Norvezhskoe obshchestvo v rannee srednevokov’e: Problemy sotsial’nogo stroia i

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attempt to examine the interaction between imagination and social reality as well as to explain changes in medieval popular conceptions regarding social structure occurring during the difficult period of “interregnum” in 13th century Germany. ***** A miniature in a 13th century treatise found in the collections of the British Museum depicts Death playing chess with a human being.6 Chess became one of the most beloved allegories of the Middle Ages, which imagined the whole world as a chess board on which an allpowerful God moves the kings and pawns, enabling them to win or lose. Chess representations became quite common beginning in the mid-13th century when, in images of chess-playing, we see a kind of condensed universal formula for life. An essay ascribed to Pope Innocent III asserts, “The world is like a chess board, one square in white, and the other black. Just as life and death, fortune and misfortune replace one another.”7 In this treatise, the author attempts to connect the chess pieces to specific social groups, designating the pieces as familia, which, at least during the period of the game, were removed from of the sacculo materno (literally, the mother’s purse) in order to capture a particular place. When the game of life ends, Death arrives, piles up all the pieces, flings them into an ossuary, or the sacculus maternus, as in our treatise, and once again all the pieces find themselves in the same position, equal before death. It was no accident that medieval preachers used chess representation in their sermons. Chess, as a game, possesses a wealth of semiotic meanings. A player sitting before a chess board moves his men in certain ways similar to battle; the chess match mimics the game of life, the player achieves victory and suffers defeat, concludes alliances and enters into conflicts, and then departs forever. M. M. Bakhtin kul’tury [Norwegian Society in the early medieval period: problems of the social structure and culture] (Moscow, 1977), 274. 6 See on these representations, Ch. K. Wilkinson, “A Thirteen-Century Morality,” in Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 2 (1943), 47-55. 7 “Mundus iste totus quoddam scaccarium est, cuius unus punctus albus est, alius vero niger, propter duplicem statum vite et mortis, gratie et culpe.” In some manuscripts this passage is attributed to Innocent III’s treatise, “Quaedam moralitas de scaccario.” However, other opinions attribute the authorship of these lines to the Franciscan monk John of Wales in his treatise “Cummuniloquium.” The full text of the passage and the corresponding debates on its provenance can be found in the following: H.J.R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford, 1913), 530-534, 559-561; L. Thorndyke, “All the World’s a Chess-Board,” Speculum 6 (1931), 219-224.

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correctly asserts that when we engage in such games, it is as if we are playing out life in miniature (translated into the language of conventional symbols).8 He claims that the “games of Gargantua” transmitted these ideas and indeed, in such games we find something like a concentrated and universalized formula for life and the historical process. By mid-century, games vividly realized the conceptions of their time, while also predicting the future (dice and cards—the tools of fortune-telling), as well as explaining fate and illuminating the character of their world-view.9 Just as chess pieces were understood in this manner, so were the figures and masters on cards; even dice were accepted in this way. Play had not yet become simply a social activity; at the time it retained its philosophical meaning. To a great degree, these observations relate to chess above all. However, we will interest ourselves only in one of the aspects of this immense topic— chess as a metaphor for society, as well as one of the general metaphors by which medieval people gave meaning to social relationships. Metaphors of Medieval Society During the Middle Ages, social and governmental relationships were represented in diverse and colorful ways, ranging from the image of the body to buildings, trees, and even wheels.10 For example, buildings, most often churches, were among the most popular metaphoric symbols during the High Middle Ages. Consequently Honorii Augustodunensis11 compared society to a church whose components represented the various parts of society. For example, the floor represented the peasantry.12 Even though people trampled all over the 8 See, for example, M.M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kultura srednevekovia i Renessansa (Moscow, 1965) or in English, Rabelais and his World, Helene Iswolsky, trans., (Cambridge, MA, 1968). 9 See H. Petschar, Kulturgeschichte als Schachspiel. Vom Verhältnis der Historie mit den humanwissenschaftlichen Variationen zu einer histroischen Semiologie, (Aachener Stuiden zur Semiotik und Kommunikationsforschung), 11 (Aachen, 1986). 10 See H. Bierschwale and O. Plessow, “Schachbreet, Körper, Räderwerke, Verräumlichte Gesellschaftsmetaphorik im Spättmittelalter,” in Raum und Konflikt. Zur symbolischen Konstituierung gesellschaflicher Ordnung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Münster, 2004), 59-81. 11 12th century German scholar. See Eva Matthews Sanford, “Honorius, Presbyter and Scholasticus,” in Speculum 23 (1948), 397-425. 12 Honorii Augustodunensis, “Speculum ecclesiae. Sermo generalis,” in Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina. 172 (Paris, 1854), Col. 866.

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floor as befitting its lowly status, it nevertheless provided the foundation for the whole building. From the 12th century on, comparing society to the human body was the most widely disseminated metaphor of the late medieval period. Better than anything else, the image of the body communicated the idea of the cooperation of its separate parts for the benefit of society as a whole, depicting the idea of medieval social harmony. Apparently, the metaphor was partly borrowed from antiquity. Let us recall, for example, Menenio Agrippa’s fable about the rebellion of the parts of the body against the belly.13 However, Christian religious writings enhanced this metaphor with a new concept. St. Paul, in First Letter to the Corinthians, represented the Church as the body of Christ, Corpus Christi.14 Medieval thinkers frequently utilized this transformed metaphor. Thus, John of Salisbury’s15 Policraticus, which the author of the chess treatise often cites, specifically uses the body metaphor. In this treatise, society (the state) is represented as the body, in which the ruler is the head, the senate is the heart, and judges and governors are the eyes and ears.16 The unarmed hand symbolized executive power, whereas the armed hand represented the military, the stomach—finances, and legs—peasants and artisans.17 The body was related to the soul just as the state was related to the Church.18 In this manner, John of Salisbury’s model of society reflects 13

The original fable goes back to Aesop when the parts of the body rebelled against the belly, “going on strike,” they discovered that they could no longer function. The moral: “As in the body, so in the state; each member in his proper sphere must work for the common good.” (Translator’s note.) This metaphor is used in the Plutarch’s biography of Coriolanus as well as in the drama of Shakespeare. 14 Corinthians 1, 12, v. 12 and 27: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” The New Revised Standard Version (Anglicized Edition), copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. (Translator’s note.) 15 John of Salisbury, ca. 1115-1176. (Translator’s note). 16 Policraticus, “Princeps vero capitis in re publica optinet locum…Cordis locum senatus optinet…Oculorum aurium et linguae official sibi vendicant iudices et praesidiis provinciarum ...” in C.J. Webb, ed., Policraticus sive de nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum, 6 vols. (London, 1909), 2: 283, 1-15. 17 Policraticus: “Manus rei publicae aut armata est aut inermis. Armata quidem est quae castrensem et cruentam exercet militiam; inermis quae iustitiam expedit et ab armis feriando iuris militiae servit...” 6 : 1, 2, 15-18, 25-26. 18 Policraticus: “Ea vero quae cultum religionis in nobis instituunt et informant... uicem animae in corpore rei publicae obtinent. Illos vero, qui religionis cultui praesunt, quasi animam corporis suscipere et venerari oportet.” 5 : 2, 282, 14-22.

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Paul’s metaphor, differing only in the concept of Ecclesia as Corpus Christi, which supplanted the Christianized representation of Res publica, the body of state, all of whose members together served God.19 In one way or another, all medieval models of society were, in essence, interpreted holistically as a reflection of God’s order. This representation was especially close to the corporeal tripartite model, various modifications of which were described in the works of medieval clerics. In the Latin tradition, one of the first to reproduce this model was the 7th century scholar Isidor of Seville, who asserted that even in the time of Romulus all the Roman tribes were divided into three parts—senators, warriors, and plebs. In the ninth century, Eamon of Auxerre substituted three ordines—clerics, warriors, and common people—for the three Roman tribes; similarly, senators were turned into oratores, and the Roman plebs into laboratores.20 Bishop Adalberon of Laon (11th century) and his followers further developed these concepts of society in their works.21 The bishop’s outline of society, consisting of oratores, bellatores, and laboratores represents only a partial instance of the tripartite model. In its entirety, this model was conducive to strengthening central power by masking the differences between clerics and laymen, on the one hand, and warriors and peasants on the other. It was interpreted as a reflection of the heavenly Trinity and the hierarchy of angels. Like God, society was simultaneously unitary and triune. Like the members of the Holy Trinity, the three orders were intimately tied to and dependent on one another.22 We must keep in mind that self-understood social categories existed as some kind of abstract unity since division of society into countervailing strata did not exist during the Middle Ages. The bases of stratification lay along various criteria—far different from today. Society could be divided into those who were sick and those who 19

See, regarding John of Salisbury’s social metaphors, Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffasssung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1978), 123-148. Other studies on this theme include H. Liebschütz , Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writing of John of Salisbury, Studies of the Warburg Institute 17 (London, 1950). 20 D. Iognat-Prat, “Le ‘baptême’ du schéma des trois ordres fonctionnels: l’apport de l’école d’Auxerre dans la seconde moitié du IX s,” in Annales. E.S.C. 41 (1986), 102-126. 21 See Georges Duby, Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris, 1978). 22 See C. Carozzi, “Les fondements de la tripartition sociale chez Adalberon de Laon,” in Annales: E.S.C. 33 (1978), 683-702; Iognat-Prat, “Le ‘baptême,’ 102-126.

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were not; peasants and non-peasants, adults and children, etc.23 Criteria of stratification were entirely undifferentiated and always morally slanted. In their attempts to construct a social hierarchy, clergy resorted to the taxonomy of sin and virtue; for example, in Etienne Fuger’s Book of Custom, every social category corresponds to either a sin or to a virtue.24 Hugo of Saint Victor took a similar approach in his model of society, in which every stratum corresponds to a virtue or (more often) a sin: knights represented violence (violentia), merchants—cheating (fallacia), artisans—fraud (fraus), etc.25 Although expressed differently, all these forms of social hierarchy fulfilled the function of stabilizing and ordering the world; each individual had a specific place in this social pyramid within a system of rights and obligations. Nevertheless, these models were conducive to the idea of volens nolens: the individual had to recognize conditions of existence dictated from above. Scholars specializing in medieval social structure tend to believe that although society could be presented in a variety of ways, in almost every case the creation of a new metaphor likely mediated and reflected changing views of society.26 From the mid-13th century onwards, intellectuals attempted to imagine social relationships in an innovative manner, representing society in the form of a chessboard and social strata through chess pieces. What were the assumptions leading to the social metaphor of the chess board and what new principles of social stratification did it presume?

23 O. G. Oexle, “Die funktionale Dreiteilung als Deutungsschema der sozialen Wirklichkeit in der ständischen Gesellschaft des Mittelalters,” in Winifred Schulze, ed., Ständische Gesellschaft und Soziale Mobilität, (Munich, 1988), 19-51. 24 H. Martin, Mentalités médiévales, Représentations collectives du XI au XV s., 2 vols., (Paris, 2001), 2: 129. 25 V. Serverat, Le pourpre et la glebe: Rhétorique des états de la société dans l’Espagne médiévale, (Grenoble, 1997), 31. Hugo of Saint Victor was a famous medieval philosopher, theologian, and mystic of the 12th c. who created the school of SaintVictor, Paris. V. Serverat considers his view of the medieval society to be rather typical of this epoch. 26 See, for example, Duby, Les trois ordres, 199-200.

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Book on the Customs and Obligations of the Nobility, or Regarding the Chess Game Jacopo di Cessolis’ Book on the Customs and Obligations of the Nobility, or Regarding the Game of Chess (Liber de moribus et officium nobelium, sive de ludo schaccario) was one of the first to depict medieval society through chess pieces.27 The author was a Dominican monk at the monastery of Genoa. We can only approximate the date of the book’s publication. In it, the author refers to the construction by Frederick II of the Capuan gates; thus the year of Frederick’s death, 1250, serves us as the earliest date it could have been written. However, the exempla found in the treatise indicate that the author consulted the Speculum Historiale by Vincent of Beauvais, completed in 1259. Thus it is possible to date its composition to the second half of the 13th century. In the opinion of a number of scholars, the Dominican’s multiple allusions make it possible to attribute his treatise to the period of interregnum (1254-1273).28 Jacopo di Cessolis divides his treatise into three parts. The first consists of a detailed account of how the game of chess was devised. The second recounts the forms of the eight noble chess figures—the king, queen, bishops, rooks, and so forth—each of which personified a specific social stratum. The third relates the story of the pawns, the 27

See the following: Köpke, ed., Liber de moribus hominum ac officiis nobilium super ludo scaccorum (Brandenburg, 1879) [from here onwards: Liber de Moribus]; Das Schachzabelbuch Kunrats von Ammenhausen nebst den Schachbüchern des Jakob von Cessole und des Jakob Mennel (Appendix to Vol. 7) Bibliothek älterer Schriftwerke der deutschen Schweiz (Frauenfeld, 1892); A.M. Burt, “Jacobus de Cessolis: Libellus de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo scacchorum,” (Texas, 1957). This particular article utilizes the 1879 version of the text. At the end of the 19th century, several scholarly editions of Jacopo di Cessolis were published. The recent publication in Upsala of the essay collection, Chess and Allegory in the Middle Ages edited by O. Ferm and V. Honemann (Stockholm, 2005), testifies to the new spurt of interest in the treatise. With the exception of Honemann’s general essay, the articles in the volume focus on the symbolism of the chess pieces, as well as those found in the chess treatises in the examples. The authors pay less attention to the principles of social construction contained in di Cessolis’ treatise. See also: O. Plessow (unter Mitwirkung von V. Honemann und M. Temmen), Mittelalterliche Schazabelbücher zwischen Spielsymbolik und Wertvermittlung (Der Scahtraktat des Jacobus de Cesollis im Kontakt siner spätmittelalterlichen Rezeption), (Köln, 2007). 28 See Th. Kappelli, “Pour la biographie de Jacques de Cessolis,” in Archivium Fratrum Praedicatorum 30 (1960), 149-162. See also J.M. Mehl, “Jeu d’échecs et éducation au XIII siècle. Recherches sur le «Liber de moribus» de Jacques de Cessoles,” Perspectives médiévales 10 (1984), 81-83.

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simple chess pieces. In this section, the subject concerns the eight pawns as personifying the various occupations of the common people. At first, Jacopo expounds on the reasons for devising the game of chess. According to the author, the game is a wholesome way to spend spare time and a distraction from sorrow. However, the following incident, which directly led to the invention of chess, was tied to Regis correctio.29 Once upon a time, the author recounts, there lived in Babylon the strong emperor, Evil’merodag [possibly Amelmarduk—(trans.)], the son of Nebuchadnezzar. He was a person of corrupt and evil ways who more than anything else hated his critics and mentors, whom he killed if they tried to contradict him.30 The people suffering under the cruel ruler turned to a wise man, Filometer, asking him to force the tyrant onto the path to truth. The wise man faced a complex problem—how to direct the depraved ruler towards a correct way of living without losing his own life in the process. For this reason, he devised chess—he made the quasi-human pieces out of gold and silver, spreading them over 64 squares. The game gained enormous popularity, members of the court began to play, and Evil’merodag became interested in it as well, asking the wise man to acquaint him with the rules of the game. Filometer explained the rules of the game while simultaneously teaching him how the king, nobility, and common people were supposed to conduct themselves in society; in essence, he delivered a sermon regarding manners and obligations.31 Based on this account, di Cessolis concludes that chess is a game appropriate for education in saving souls. In the treatise, the author regularly compares chess to society, asserting that according to the prophet Jeremiah, the plan of Babylon, where the game was invented, resembled a large square, in which each side comprised 16 Roman miles, 16 x 4 = 64. To represent the dimensions of the city, the inventor of the game created a board with 29 In the preface, Jacopo de Cessolis explains three reasons for writing his work; the first one is to correct the morals of the ruler. See Liber de moribus: “causa autem inventionis huius solatii fuit triples. Prima fuit regis correctio,” 2. 30 Liber de moribus, “Hic enim rex inter omnia alia mala unum habebat pessimam, quod correctores suos occidebat et increpatores oderat, quod stultissimum est,” 1. 31 Liber de moribus, “Tunc philosophus formam tabularii ac scachorum, ac mores Regis nobelium et popularium et officium eorum describens, ut in sequentibus capitulis declarabimus, eum ad correctionem et morum ac virtutum informationem attraxit,” 2.

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64 squares. The corners of the board are high because they represent the walls of the city of Babylon.32 Chess therefore represents the idealized city of Babylon and, at the same time, an ideal society in which concordia and harmony reign.33 At the outset of his treatise, Jacopo di Cessolis explains that he deferred to the suggestions of his Dominican brothers to write down a sermon which he had been known to preach on a regularly.34 Thus, in so far as the Dominican was willing to experiment from the pulpit, his treatise consists of practical morality. Preachers of the period sought various methods to interact with the public with the goal of gaining its attention. For example, it was well known that while he was preaching Bernard of Siena aimed a mirror at his congregation so that its dispersing rays kept his parishioners alert.35 Similarly, in his presentation, our author also used such tested methods to maximize the effect on his parishioners’ imagination while instilling in them principles of proper social interaction. In the second part of the treatise, Jacopo recounts the story of the noble chess pieces, explaining that chess suggests the social allegory: the king and queen represent the monarchy, the rooks (rochus)— agents of royal power (vicarii Regis), the horses—knights (milites), and the bishops (alphili)—judges (judices).36 The description of each figure follows the same formula. He first discusses its form and external appearance, revealing its distinctive symbolic attributes. Accordingly, he describes the king as sitting on a throne, holding a scepter in his right hand and an orb in his left.37 The judge (aphilus) 32 Liber de moribus, “…secundum dictum beati Ieremiae civitas Babylonia fuit amplissima et quadrata; quodlibet autem quadrum ipsius habuit XVI milia passuum in numero et mensura, quae sedecim milia in quatuor ducta crescent in LXIIII quadrata puncta…labia tabularii nurun dictae civitatis significant, et quia fuit altissimus, ideo et labium in altum statuitur,” 30. 33 In regard to the concepts of the ideal society of the time, see C. Frugoni, Una lontana città, idee e sentimenti nel Medioevo (Turin, 1983). 34 Jacobus de Cessolis was a Dominican friar, and he was persuaded by the brethren of his order and by many of his secular friends to transcribe the sermon he had composed based on chess. 35 C. Frugoni, “Das Schachspiel in der Welt des Jacobus de Cessolis,“ in Das Schachbuch des Jacobus de Cessolis. Kommentarband zur Faksimileausgabe des Cod. Palatinus Latinus 961, (Zürich, 1988), 41. 36 J.M. Mehl, “La noblesse d’après Jacques de Cessoles,” in Mélanges réunis en l’honneur de M. Freddy Thiriet, (Amsterdam, 1987), 523-535. In his article the author attempts to characterize the symbolic role of the noble chess pieces. 37 Liber de moribus, “Nam in solio positus…in manu dextera habens sceptrum, in sinistra habens pilam rotondam,” 3.

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sits on a chair (cathedra magistralis), holding an open book in his hands.38 The royal agent or deputy (rochus) holds a scepter in his right hand as a symbol of royal power.39 Describing the chess pieces colorfully and in great detail, di Cessolis proceeds from the figurative images.40 He also discusses how each piece’s location was closely associated with each figure just as each social estate was strongly related to a specific place in the social hierarchy. The queen, attired in rich clothing, is seated on a throne to the left of the king, who imparts to her his power and mercy.41 Alphili, representing justice, were distributed on the black squares (to the right of the king) and the white squares (to the left of the king), corresponding to one judge responsible for criminal matters in the kingdom (causae criminales) and the other for civil questions (res temporales).42 In exactly the same manner, the rooks (rochus) were located at the right and left of the two ends of the chessboard, indicating that the king, who personally could not be present in every part of his kingdom, delegated part of his power to each of his deputies. All the noble figures were interconnected in that they implemented the king’s commands. The third section is dedicated to a description of the non-noble pieces, i.e., “the common people” (populares), who represented various occupations—peasants, blacksmiths, weavers and spinners, merchants, physicians, inn-keepers, city-guards, and couriers. In the treatise, the appearance of the pawn figures includes representations of various professions and trades new to the 13th century. We must note that Hugo of Saint-Victor’s treatise, Didascalicon, contains the basic classification of trades of the period. In it he brought together 38 Liber de moribus, “Sciendum est, alphiles fuisse formatos ad modum iudicum assessorum in cathedra cum libri aperto ante oculos,” 7. 39 Liber de moribus, “Vicarii esu legati Regis rochi sunt, quorm forma sic inscribitur: Nam miles super equum cum chlamyde, pelle de vario et circa capucim habens, in manu baculum positum est…Quia enim rex personaliter in regno suo ubique praesens esse non potest, ideo necesse fuit in auctoriats, quae est in rege sicut in fonte, derivetur ad rochos,” 12. 40 A detailed and colorful description of the forms of the pieces in Cessolis’ text can be understood as a commentary on the representations. It is not surprising that the treatise gave birth to a rich iconographic tradition. An illuminated manuscript of the treatise of Konrad von Ammenhausen, a translator of Cessolis, is preserved in the National Library in Russia. See Ms. Deutsch. F. v. XIV, 1. 41 Liber de moribus, “…Est autem a sinistris Regis collocate per gratiam, quod regi donatum est per naturam,” 5. 42 Liber de moribus, “Et quia quaedam sunt causae criminals, quaedam vero circa possessions et res temporales litigatoriae, ideo duos iudices necesse fuit in regno esse, unum alphilem in nigro, quo ad primas, alterum in albo, quo ad secundas,” 7.

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all the previous representations of artes mechanicae. The medieval author assigned lanificium (the working of wool and cloth), armature (armoring, as well as construction and graphic arts), and navigatio (shipping and commerce in its broadest sense) to the mechanical trivium, and agricultura, venatio (agriculture, hunting—i.e., all connected to sustenance), medicina (the art of healing), as well as theatrica, which was understood to include knightly pageantry, to the mechanical quadrivium.43 Several scholars suggest that in his description of the non-noble pieces Jacopo di Cessolis relied, to a certain degree, on the above classification, in itself a rather conventional and inadequate reflection of reality.44 In conventional terms, the first commoner, the peasant (agricola), was tied to venatio, for under this term Hugo of Saint Victor understands all activities as related to providing sustenance. The second commoner, the blacksmith (faber), was probably associated with manufacture of armor (armatura). A definite tie existed between the weaver and the spinner (the third commoner) through lanificium. The profession of the fourth commoner, the merchant (mercator), corresponds to the mechanical trivium’s navigation, the fifth—physician (medicus) to medicina, and the sixth—inn-keeper (taberinarius) to venatio. It is problematic, however, to connect the seventh as well as the eighth (city guard and courier, respectively) with any particular “artes mechanicae.”45 43 See, Hugonis de S. Victore. Eruditionis didascalicon libri septem. Patrologiae cursus completes. Series Latina, (Paris, 1854), 176: Lib. II, Ca XXI, Col. 767: “mechanicae septem scientias continent: lanificium, armaturam, agriculturam, venationem, medicinam, theatricam.” In regard to the concept “artes mechanicae” of that period, see Sternagel, Die artes mechanicae im Mittelalter. Begriffs- und Bedeutungsgeschichte bis zum Ende des 13. Jh. Kallmünz, 1966). 44 The tie between trades and profession with real daily life was more distinctly reviewed in the German version of the treatise by Konrad von Ammenhausen. His enumeration of various trades is also easier to tie to the mechanical trivium and quadrivium. In this regard, see K. Lerchner, “Wissensystem und Gesellschaftstechnik im Schachzabelbuch Konrads von Ammenhausen. Zum Verständnis der artes mechanicae,” in Text und Bild: Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 11, (Marbach, 1999), 333-345. Frugoni, Das Schachspiel in der Welt des Jacobus de Cessolis, 35-79. 45 Moreover, Jacopo di Cessolis relates the profession of physician to the liberal arts (artes liberals); in his opinion, the doctor needs to possess knowledge in the areas of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy, etc. (Hugonis de Victoire, Eruditionis didascalicon, 24). Regarding the figure of the doctor in the treatise, see R.A. Miller, Der Arzt im Schachspiel bei Jakob von Cessolis (Munich, 1981). In general, it seems that the parallels between di Cessolis’ treatise and Hugo of Saint Victor’s essay are rather strained.

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Because the world of occupations was extremely diverse, Jacopo tried to categorize a variety of trades under one heading. Thus the figure of the blacksmith (faber) exceeds the traditional meaning of the word by including the master goldsmith, engraver of coins, shipwright, woodcutter, mason, as well as builder. What did they have in common? They all worked with metal, whether creating something from it, or using it in their work. The figure of the weaver and spinner (lanificus) represents all the professions connected with working cloth, wool, or leather, among them the tailor and the barber, and even—paradoxically—the notary, in so far as he writes on parchment. The figure of the merchant (mercator) includes traders and money changers; the figure of the physician also involves pharmacists, doctors, and surgeons, etc. The eighth commoner, the figure of the courier (ribaldus, lusor), quite artificially unites both wastrels and gamblers—here we have in mind not so much occupation, as moral qualities. However, this should not surprise us if we remember that Jacopo di Cessolis made it his task to describe social morals in his treatise on chess. Commoners were depicted with appropriate attributes—the peasant with hoe in hand, the blacksmith with hammer and ax, the notary with scissors and knife. The disposition of the pieces on the chessboard is often instructive as well. Thus, the merchant stands in front of the king, just as he secures the treasury, the blacksmith—in front of the knight for whom he prepares spurs and bridles.46 In this manner the non-noble pieces were systematically connected to the noble ones. Further, Jacopo enumerates the virtues demanded of each order, corresponding to the obligations of each to society. Thus, the knight, as the representative of the warring class, must possess loyalty (fidelitas) and generosity (liberalitas); the rook (Rochus) in his role as royal representative must possess fairness (justicia), piety (pietas), as well as voluntary poverty and magnanimity (vountaria paupertas et liberalitas); the al’phili (bishops) had to display justitia.47 In every case, the story of some virtue necessary for the representative of a social order is accompanied by a brief tale—exemplum—which serves as a reminder, turning the text also into a distinctive mnemonic 46 Liber de moribus, “Fabrum …quem ante militem in dextra Regis parte situatum dicimus. Et merito, quia miles indigent freno calcaribusque...,” 18. “In isto repraesentantur mercatores…Ante regem congrue situantur, quia thesauris Regis debent praeesse et pro res militibus in stipendiis respondere…,” 21. 47 Liber de moribus, 8, 11-13, 16.

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devise, imago virtutis. This is, without doubt, the preacher’s method— the goal of which is to clarify for the congregation the precise division of the orders, to show that each social stratum is charged with specific tasks and obligations. These are the broad strokes through which Jacopo di Cessolis represents the medieval social structure in the forms of medieval chess pieces. As we can see, this model left no room for the medieval clergy.48 Scholars interpret this specific part of the treatise in various ways. Thus, in the view of the German historian Volker Honemann, this moral instructional treatise was dedicated above all to the genteel orders, precisely because they, and not the prelates, possessed the moral superiority necessary for the “improvement of manners”; furthermore, in general, Jacopo di Cessolis was disinclined to view the clergy as a “status.”49 It is noteworthy that the chess model reflected the effort of medieval intellectuals to make sense of social stratification in a new, critical situation just as the stable three-functional model of social order allotted the pre-eminent place to the clergy. Similarly, this treatise concentrates its attention on the productive orders of society—peasants, artisans, etc.—generally devoting greater attention to vita activa while paying less attention to the spiritual orders. Chess as a Spatial Metaphor Chess represented above all a spatial metaphor for society (just as it is also a physical metaphor), and spatial symbolism played an important role in the distribution of the pieces on the chess board coinciding with their social symbolism. According to the ideas of the treatise’s author, just as in chess everything is based on defending the king, so too in society all social groups must support royal power. In the game, the goal of defending the king united all the pieces with 48 In earlier treatises, for example in the works of the Franciscan monk John of Wales, “A Short Discussion of Virtues of Ancient Rulers and Philosophers or regarding four major virtues,” (“Breviloquium de virtutibus antiquorum principum et philosophorum sive de quattuor virtutibus cardinalibus”), the clergy is present since the piece, “the bishop” represents the archbishop. 49 Volker Honemann, “Der Beitrag der mittelalterlichen Schachtraktate zur Beschreibung und Deutung der menschlichen Gesellschaft,” in O. Ferm and V. Honemann, eds,. Chess and Allegory in the Middle Ages: A Collection of Essays (Stockholm, 2005), 51.

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the monarch, thus creating harmony and order. Accordingly, the distribution of the pieces on the chess board expressed the interdependent relationships characteristic of all social life. First of all, vertical ties between pawns and noble pieces were just as necessary to the noble pieces as they were for the pawns which needed defenders. These bonds could be horizontal as well, for the king could do nothing without his nobles. In this manner, the principles of hierarchy, like the principles of interdependent ties in medieval society, were beautifully conveyed. The preacher explains in detail why the common people stand in front of the nobles. The people are the completion of the nobility, for without them the aristocracy’s existence was unthinkable. What would the rochus on the right, as the king’s deputy, be able to accomplish if the peasant, whose obligation is to guarantee sustenance, were not placed in front of him?50 What would the knight do if the artisan who made his spurs and bridles were not standing before him? What would the king and queen and all the others do without the help of physicians?51 Further, it is not accidental that the fourth commoner, mercator (the merchant and money changer), stands in front of the king and like him holds a central position on the chess board, for he must provide for the royal treasury and secure the military.52 Even the most disdained piece, representing the spendthrift and the courier, ribaldus, stands before rochus—the deputy to the left of the king. Why? The king’s deputy, the rochus, is required to retain people capable of supervising various far-off places, and the couriers, indeed, were the ones able to deliver letters quickly and fulfill the king’s instructions.53 Following this logic, di Cessolis explains that the sixth pawn was placed in front of the alphilus and to the left of the king. This position indicates persons of the despised professions—the inn and tavern-keepers (tabernarius)—were controlled by the alphilus, for fights and quarrels often

50 Liber de moribus, “Nam dexter rochus, qui est Regis vicarious, quid posset facere, nisi situates esset ante ipsum agricola, cui cura esr temporalia ad victum ministrare?” 30. 51 Liber de moribus, “Quid enim miles faceret, nisi ante se fabrum haberet, qui frena et calcaria pararet?...Quid reges aut reginae aut ceteri facerent sine medicis?” 30. 52 Liber de moribus, 21. 53 Liber de moribus, “Ad vicarium enim Regis, qui est rochus, pertinet habere hominess aptos ad civitates et loca Regis contraria exploranda, et cursors, qui cito portent literas et Regis mandata,” 28.

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occurred in these places, and the judge had to settle the scandals.54 The seventh commoner, the position of the city guard (custos civitatis) at the left of the king and at the front of the knight, was also not accidental, for it was connected to his obligation to fulfill the knight’s orders.55 Jacopo claims that the knights and nobles would not disdain the common people as soon as they learned why pawns were placed in front of the noble figures56 Further, di Cessolis then explains why the pawns were placed in front of empty squares, asserting that the common people must learn how to fulfill their obligations by standing at the forefront in case of war. Their activities were directed by the nobility, with the advice of the learned. This was natural, for how would a commoner be able to reason and make a decision without consultation (consilia)?57 Thus, Jacopo concludes, he who “wishes to be greater than himself, becomes less than himself,”58 i.e., every person must correspond to his status. The preacher also explains why the chessboard consists of as many occupied as unoccupied squares, claiming that the space was necessary to enable the king and other noble pieces, supported by the populares, to engage in their social activity—their “field of action.” According to the treatise, the ruler must make an effort to expand his domains to guarantee the welfare of the realm, thus the chess city represents the whole kingdom and its own particular world.59 In addition to social categories, spatial categories—horizontal-vertical, internal-external, front-back, “left-right,” “center-periphery”— applied. Consequently, the pawns closer to the edges of the chessboard stood further down the ranks in relation to the figure of the 54 Liber de moribus, “Hi ante alphilem tanquam ante iudicem sunt positi, quia saepe inter eos rizae et turbationes orate per alphilem, Regis iudicem solent trctari et libra iustitiae quietari,” 26. 55 Liber de moribus, “Recte enim ante militem collocantur; per milites, civitatis custodies, habent require et videri, etiam per eos habet ipsa civitas custodiri,” 27. 56 Liber de moribus, “Nunc ergo tu, miles aut nobilis, populares non despicias, cum eos ante nobiles in hoc ludo situatos noveris,” 30. 57 Liber de moribus, “…populares, antequam incipient bellare, ante vacua quadra situantur, ut ex hoc discant suis officiis et artibus interesse atque intendere. Consilia vero et civitatis regimen ac bellorum ordinem nobilibus permittant tractare. Qualiter sciat consulere popularis, qui nunquam studuit circa consilia?” 30. 58 Liber de moribus, “Saepe enim fit, ut qui plus quaerit esse quam sit, minus fiat quam est...,” 30. 59 Liber de moribus, “Et licet schacharium civitatem, quam praediximus, praefiguret, totum tamen regimen et ipsum utique mundum significant.” 31.

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leader. Located in the central position on the chessboard, the fourth and fifth pawns represented the merchant and the doctor, who were the most admired among the common people. At the right, in the front, stood the peasant, whose labor was valued positively.60 The eighth pawn, representing the spendthrift (ribaldus), clearly a negative personage, stood on the left precisely for that reason.61 In general, the pieces on the left of the board were associated with negative connotations, representing despised occupations—the inn-keeper, wastrel, etc. Further, the spatial symbolism expressed itself in the precise descriptions of the principles by which the pieces are distributed on the chess board.62 According to Jacopo, just as in chess, where the sense of the game consists in guaranteeing the king’s defense, everything in society must be subordinated to the interests of royal power. The final section of the treatise attributes a dynamic character to all the pieces, for it tells of their movements on the chess board. If prior to the appearance of his treatise chess pieces were viewed in a static manner in their initial positions, now Jacopo di Cessolis presents human society “in motion.” In general, each piece’s movement indicates the motion necessary for its functioning in society so as to achieve harmony and concord, concordia. Let us review in sequence the rules of the movements of the king, queen, and the other noble pieces in relation to one another. According to Jacopo di Cessolis, in chess, the king moved along a straight line, moving two or three squares on the first move.63 When he reaches the center (perhaps as early as on the first move), he is limited in his moves to one square.64 On both ends of the board, the knights, bishops (alphili), and rooks (rochi) bracket the king,

60

Liber de moribus, “incipiemus a primo populari in acie posito dextra regis, quem ante rochum dextrum ponimus, quia ad Regis vicarium,” 16. 61 Liber de moribus, “Ribaldos et lusores ante sinistrum rochum dicimus situatos,” 28. 62 In this regard, see E. Strouhal, ed., Vom Wesir zur Dame. Kulturelle Regeln, ihr Zwang und ihre Brüchigkeit. Über kulturelle Transformationen am Beispiel des Schachspiels (Vienna, 1995); H. Hollander, “Bretter, die Welt bedeuten,” in C. Zangs and H. Hollander, eds., Mit Glück und Verstand (Aachen, 1994), 21-31. 63 During the Middle Ages, rules of for the movement of chess pieces changed greatly. See on this subject E. Strouhal, ed., Vom Wesir zur Dam…, 39-43. 64 Liber de moribus, “Quia vero quatuor prmae lineae sunt intra regni spatium, ad tres primas rex in suo loco proprio situatus potest accedere. Cum vero illam tertiam progredi coeperit, non nisi in uno quadro puncto potest progredi,” 32.

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strengthening royal power.65 Thanks to a vigorous monarchy, the kingdom prospers. However, distracting the nobility from its primary function—security and defense of the monarchy—produces discord, and the monarchy loses its good name and royal dignity.66 The queen moved only along the diagonals.67 In several treatises, for example in Communiloquium and Breviloquium by John of Wales,68 diagonal moves were regarded negatively and interpreted as a symbol of greed and dishonesty, characteristics which the misogynistic medieval world frequently attributed to women; whereas in that period, a move along a straight line was regarded as a symbol of honesty.69 Yet bishops (judges—alphili) also moved along diagonals and could skip across three squares.70 How do we interpret the logic behind these movements? According to di Cessolis, the king should not attempt difficult or doubtful matters without first receiving advice from his judges, who must be knowledgeable and honest.71 This perfection of knowledge and manners also symbolizes the moves from three squares to three squares, for the number 6 (3+3) is perfect; thus, thanks to this number, the pieces (alphili) complete a circular movement, a perfected movement, to the point where they return to their original positions.72 On the right side of the board, the judge 65 Liber de moribus, “Sinister vero rochus et alphilis regem in simili sede sociant ut hinc inde sibi opposites regnum, quod in rege et regina emicat, ipsis in locis ac sedibus similibus ad modum coronae succinctis securius obfirment,” 31. 66 Liber de moribus, “Si autem unusquisque propria attenderet, non quae regno vel regi debentur defenderet vel curaret, cito fieret regni division et per consequens regnum perderet nomen regni et regiae dignitatis?” 31. 67 Liber de moribus, “Postquam autem mota fuit de proprio quadro nigro, ubi primo fuit locata, non potest procedure nisi de quadro in quadrum unum et hoc angulariter sive procedat, sive retrocedat,” 32. 68 13th century Franciscan monk. For more information, see Jenny Swanson, John of Wales: A Study of the Works and Ideas of a Thirteenth-Century Friar, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series (Cambridge, UK and New York, 1989). 69 See A. Vidmanová, “Die mittelalterliche Gesellschaft im Lichte des Schachspieles” in A. Zimmermann, ed., Miscellanea Mediaevalia. Veröffentlichungen des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln, Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstverständnis des Mittelalters, 12/1 (Berlin and NewYork, 1979), 323-335. 70 Liber de moribus, “Est autem sciendum quod alphili simper procedunt de tertio quadro in tertium, servando proprium situm in forma...,” 33. 71 Liber de moribus, “Nulla enim ardua et dubia debet rex attentare, nisi primo iudicum consilium interveniat, et ideo perfectos necesse est esse tam scientia quam moribus...,” 33. 72 Liber de moribus, “…in VI stationibus et processibus totum tabularium circualariter peragit, qui tunc in loco, in quo primo situatus fuit,” 33.

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(alphil), who stands on the black square, moves to the right on the empty black square and situates himself in front of the peasant because the judge must protect the latter’s property.73 In moving to the left, he finds himself in front of the doctor. Just as the physician must occupy himself with the condition of the body, so the judge must be occupied with spiritual health—with justice and fairness.74 On the left side of the board, the alphil stands on the white square. When he moves three squares to the right, he finds himself in front of the merchant, for merchants frequently engage in quarrels and need the services of a judge.75 If he moves to the left, he lands in front of the gamblers and wastrels who constantly squabble and create scandals which judges must always settle.76 Thus the movements of the pieces create harmony in society and bring it stability. The movements of the knights on the chess field can also be interpreted as actions directed at the achievement of concordia in society. di Cessolis pays particular attention to the king’s “vicars” (rooks, rochi). They find themselves on the same line as the king; to his right, one of the vicars is situated on the white square, and to the left, the other, on the black square. The key principle behind the way they move was not to distance themselves from the king. Yet, from the moment they enter into battle, they can use the power delegated to them by the king to roam around the whole board.77 Similarly, the distribution principles for non-noble pieces fulfill a deep symbolism. They all have one, identical move. They can jump a piece and thus immediately move to the third square, but afterwards their freedom of action is limited, and they can move only one square

73 Liber de moribus, “Dexter enim, qui niger est, ad dextram pergens se in spatio vacuo et nigro ante agricolam locat, quod et congruum fuit, ut iudex possessions et laboreria secundum iura sibi credita defenderet,” 33. 74 Liber de moribus, “…Sicut enim medicus habet curare corpora et ad sanitatem reducere, sic et iudices habent animosas contentions sanare et reducere ad concordiae veritatem,” 33. 75 Liber de moribus, “…quia mercatores saepe indigent consiliis et lites eorum indigent per iudices terminari,” 33. 76 Liber de moribus, “…alium progressum habet versus sinistram ad spatium album et vacuum ante ribaldos et lusores, et quia tales saepe rixas et quandoque furta committunt, per iudices habent puniri,” 33. 77 Liber de moribus, “Tertium processum habet versus sinistram in loco, ubi mercator situatur ante regem, qui locus niger est, et congrue, quia miles personam Regis tanquam propriam habet defendere et tueri,” 34.

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at a time.78 Moving forward along a straight line, by dint of their courage they acquire what nobility possesses by virtue of status. Thus the black pawn can become the black queen, and a white pawn, the white queen.79 In general, however, a pawn receives an ad hoc negative evaluation as a pitiful figure able to move only straight ahead one space at a time and able to move diagonally only when capturing another higher-ranking piece. So it follows that common people can gain something only by dishonorable means. For di Cessolis, chess became the image of a precisely stratified social system in which representatives of each order took specific places in the social hierarchy, with specific tasks allocated to each and which, starting with the king, illustrated the inter-dependence of each representative to his/her specific social order. The rules of chess perfectly expressed the idea of social cohesion, the indispensable solidarity among the various components of society.80 Moreover, as the treatise on chess describes it, the inter-relationship of the various estates was directed at the achievement of peace and social order in a society whose stability and firmness were guaranteed by strong hierarchy. di Cessolis’ treatise achieved an unusual level of popularity81 measured by its translation into all the vernacular languages of the time— medieval German, French, English, Swedish, Catalan, etc.82 We can conclude that from this moment on, the representation of society as a chess game occupied an important place in the consciousness of the medieval individual. ***** 78 Liber de moribus, “Eorum enim magna est auctoritas, cum personam regis gerant, et ideo vacuo tabulario exsistente, per totum tabularium quasi per regnum discurrunt...,” 34. 79 Liber de moribus, “Nam a primo quadro, ubi situati sunt, possunt ad tertium progredi, eo quod secure intra regni confinia consistent. Cum vero extra regni terminus prosiliunt, uno quadro contenti simper in directun ascendant...,” 34. 80 Liber de moribus, “Nam si quis eorum poterit ad dictam lineam pervenire, si albus fuerit… reginae albae dignitatem acquisitam retinent…Si vero aliquis popularium niger fuerit, …eodem modo in directum ad lineam adversorum nobelium sine damno pervenerit per virtutem, reginae nigrae dignitatem et processum acquirit,” 34-35. 81 Liber de moribus, “Est autem sciendum, quod populares ascndentes in rectum, si quem nobilem vel popularem invenerint qdversarium, et hunc in angulis, ipsum a dextris et sinistris capere et occidere possunt,” 35. 82 See on this subject: A. van der Londe, Geschichte und Literatir des Schachspieles, (Berlin, 1874), 29, 132-134 (Beilage).

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So, we must return to the original question we posed: why did medieval writers find it necessary to turn to the new ideal model of social order—chess? We know that for a long period, the so-called threefunction model remained a perfectly adequate metaphor for describing medieval society. The change in social metaphors needs explanation, but it is difficult to agree with the opinions of several German historians that the work of Jacopo di Cessolis was merely a moral-didactic treatise, interesting from a rhetorical point of view, rather than as a manifestation of the history of social thought.83 For this reason we will present our interpretation of the changes occurring in the social imagination at the end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th centuries. Combining the content of the treatise with an analysis of the external conditions of its composition, a whole array of suggestive conclusions arises. Above all, as we have already noted, Jacopo di Cessolis wrote his treatise during the period of the interregnum. It is well known that at the end of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1273, during the period of the election of Rudolf Habsburg, German society lived through an epoch of disorder and anarchy, which destroyed the edifice of a strongly organized social hierarchy. Viewed from this angle, a treatise symbolizing society in the form of a chess board with every piece representing a specific status, ordo, and situation in society, suggests that the author inserted elements of order and stability in an effort to overcome the disorder dominating society. Moreover, Jacopo’s treatise suggests that previous triple models were no longer capable of integrating the growing number of new professions, occupations, and statuses, which were understood as social categories in the Middle Ages. We have seen that di Cessolis’ treatise describes an exceptional variety of socio-professional categories (even more so in its transcendent translation by Konrad von Ammenhausen into high medieval German). During this historical period, the growth of towns and the appearance of new occupations led to more complex social stratification, caused by the increased social mobility of urban social groups.84 In short, a social restructuring occurred. Assuming this was the case, we can surmise that it is likely that the treatise expresses a 83

On this subject, see J-M. Mehl, La noblesse d’apres Jacques de Cessoles…, 526. See E. Isenmann, Die deutsche Stadt im Spätmittelalter, 1250-1500, (Stuttgart, 1988). 84

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degree of uneasiness on the part of the author—as a cleric—regarding the growing mobility of various social groups. As a consequence, the chess model of society aimed not so much at expressing the increasing complexity of social stratification and ongoing social transformations, but rather at impeding the mobility of new orders by indicating to each social status its specific place, just as it existed on the chessboard. In their effort to include the new socio-professional boundaries in the ideal model, the clerics sought the means to subordinate these social categories. Therefore, clerics used the game of chess as a metaphor for the new social order since the chess pieces permitted better classification of social differences. In order to avoid excessive social shifts, clerics strove, via their sermons, to instill a strong adherence to the principles of social stratification into the consciousness of their congregations. These presentations were not simply products of reality, although they were clearly modeled on it. Nevertheless, their interconnection was neither direct nor did it follow a straight line. Many gradations existed between representation and reality. The chess model of society was not a method to describe medieval society as much as a means to exert influence on its development. If we keep in mind that the intended audience of the treatise was the aristocracy, we can regard di Cessolis’ goal as not only to reproduce reality, but to modify and “improve” it—not only to describe society, but to reform its ways. In this manner, as we proposed at the outset, the tie between social processes and their representations apparently contains more than one meaning.85 Moreover, in regard to principles of social construction, the chess model demonstrates the new concept of ordines. We have already mentioned that the criteria of social deployment in the medieval world were very diverse. What did the new chess classification contribute in principle? At the beginning of his treatise, di Cessolis promises to tell us about the obligations (officia) and morals (mores) of the orders, yet he writes more about the latter. Consequently, his categories of social stratification are moral rather than social. They contain few innovations, for as we have already noted, in the medieval world social strata were based on moral criteria. In the chess 85 Henri Martin expressed this idea more cogently, “Il ne s’agit en rien de photographie de la structure sociale.” (It is in no way a question of a photograph of the social structure.) See Martin, Mentalités médiévales, 129.

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model, the principle seems to be exactly the same: in writing about the representatives of the nobility, Jacopo creates imago virtutis, a form of virtue for every figure/order. Thus, in the case of the nobility, the discussion follows moral-social categories. However, in moving to the characteristics of commoner pawns, di Cessolis employs yet another principle, primarily utilizing occupational categories. It is possible that precisely in that period a gradual transformation occurred—moving from the hierarchy of social and transient categories to a more precise taxonomy of practice and knowledge, applying such principles as the seven mechanical arts and the seven liberal arts to stratification.86 The treatise on chess seems to echo this new hierarchy. di Cessolis’ treatise offers yet another innovation brought to life by deep social changes. In the view of medieval people, the tri-partite model guaranteed social stability, which, in their opinion, excluded equality and presupposed hierarchy. The tri-partite model assumed three social strata symbolizing, more often than not, three functions—military, religious, and productive (oratores, bellatores, laboratores). However, how can we include a fourth estate, merchants and tradesmen, in this intellectual construct? By moving from the odd number “three” to the even number “four,” we complete the transition from a tri-partite to a four-part system and therefore eliminate the parallel earth-heavens with its faces of the Holy Trinity, the nine angelic choirs, and so forth.87 Until the 13th century, the tri-partite model apparently served society, but urban growth and the development of new strata in society—artisans, merchants, and university graduates—exposed difficulties in the three-function model, which apparently no longer reflected the new social realities. Nevertheless, the appearance of a new metaphor by no means indicates that previous social metaphors—such as the corporeal or the three ordines—were entirely supplanted in medieval consciousness.88 In seeking new schemes and principles for social construction, medieval thought created numerous four-part models 86 In the opinion of several scholars, precisely during this period there occurred a special re-evaluation of the role of the artes mechanicae, creating a new concept of the “mechanical arts” more closely corresponding to the liberal arts. See, F. Alessio, “La filosofia e le artes mechanicae nel secolo XII” in Studi medievali… 6 (1965), 70-161. 87 See Martin, 89-90. 88 For how the corporeal metaphor was disseminated throughout Germany at the beginning of the 15th century see, Bierschwale and Plessow, 70-75.

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of society consisting of four, eight, and twelve elements. In his sermons, Jacques de Vigri distinguished twelve categories, among which he listed crusaders, pilgrims, artisans, sailors, widows, seigneurs, money-lenders, and others. Eustache Deschamps composed “Le lay des douze estats du monde” (The Lay of the Twelve Estates of the World), in which, following the four classifications of ordines (clergy, warriors, peasants, and merchants), he writes of judges, artisans, bankers, notaries, doctors, clergy, and, finally, the king.89 Doubtlessly, this scheme also reflected social reconstruction because along with bankers, it also recognized doctors and lawyers. Hence, while recognizing the dangers to the social order arising from new social groups, intellectuals kept creating new and more realistic models, differing from the tri-partite, in an attempt to secure social harmony. The simpler the scheme, the greater its strength in resisting reality and serving ideological goals, specifically as in our case: the interests of the aristocracy and royal power.90 In the semiotic chess model, the most important number is eight, a multiple of four—eight representatives of the nobility, and eight commoners. Their appearance expressed the changes in social stratification and the origination of new professions. This peculiarity adds an external democratic façade to the chess model, yet it also indicates some instability in society in the context of idealized representations of the medieval world. Similarly, the social metaphor on the one hand masked subordinate relationships and on the other created the harmony and stability necessary for its functioning. Specifically in that regard, it is possible to speak of a fairly strong tie between the treatise and social reality. In any event, the chess model was suitably flexible to reflect all the changes that occurred in medieval society at the dawn of a new century; although it is hardly worth insisting on the evolving changes in social imagination. Nevertheless, the appearance of a new metaphor by no means indicates that previous social metaphors—such as the corporeal or the three ordines—were entirely supplanted in medieval consciousness.91 Translated by Alexandra S. Korros 89

Martin, 90. V. Honemann, “Der Beitrag der mittelalterlichen Schachtraktate zur Beschreibung und Deutung der menschlichen Gesellschaft,” in Chess and Allegory, 37-57. 91 For how the corporeal metaphor was disseminated throughout Germany at the beginning of the 15th century, see Bierschwale and Plessow, 70-75. 90

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ARON GUREVICH’S MEDIEVAL INDIVIDUAL YURI ZARETSKY, BORIS STEPANOV

Studies of the history of the medieval individual occupy an important place in Aron Gurevich’s legacy. After initially addressing this theme at the end of 1960s, he continued writing and reflecting upon it until the last days of his life. What is Gurevich’s contribution to the understanding of the individual in medieval culture? Which circumstances contributed to his turn towards the study of the medieval individual? Which metamorphoses did this study undergo? Finally, how does Gurevich’s work on this subject relate to the changes in Russian humanities in the last decades? These are the questions this article seeks to answer. The History of the Individual The emergence of the history of the individual is associated with Jacob Burckhardt, the famous historian of Renaissance Italy.1 His major thesis affirms that the modern individualistic type of man appeared during the Renaissance and this appearance marked the beginning of the modern period in history. Using Jules Michelet’s formula “la découverte du monde, la découverte de l’homme” to describe this event, Burckhardt stressed the second part of the definition, “the discovery of man.” What is particularly important is that Burkhardt filled this metaphor with solid content and convincing examples. At the foundation of Italian Renaissance culture lies one central and revolutionary idea—man’s awareness of his individuality. The whole book essentially represents a description of the social and cultural transformations provoked by this new understanding of the individual.2 However, Burckhardt indicated not only the time and place but also the “mechanism” of the emergence of the new European indi1

Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel, 1860). See Felix Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt (Princeton, 1990), 58-59, 68. 2

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vidual. He took for granted that the individual and the personal “I” have always existed, though in a latent form, in the same way as a plant’s seed sprouts only under certain conditions. Regarding the Middle Ages, Burckhardt wrote: [b]oth sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil...Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air…The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.3

He explained this transformation through three interconnected cultural changes: the development of new perceptions about man and his capacities, the use of ancient heritage as the foundation for those perceptions, and the switch of interest from divine to earthly.4 It is important to note that Burckhardt did not seek to create some kind of a new universal paradigm for the development of European civilization. His understanding of history, though largely based on Enlightenment ideals and his own conviction that there was an unbroken connection between the past and present, did not embrace the idea of progress in history, neither was he preoccupied with humanity’s future.5 Yet, in Europe from the end of the 19th to the late 20th century, his conception came to be perceived precisely as progressionist. Moreover, his thesis of the fundamental rupture between the traditionalist Middle Ages and the individualist Renaissance that gave birth to modernity gained maximum attention. Yet later twentieth-century historiography would develop tendencies critical of Burckhardt’s ideas. A series of medieval studies published after World War II elaborated on a new cutting-edge period from which one could inaugurate modern civilization. In France, Marie-Dominique Chenu launched the idea of the rise of individual religious consciousness in the twelfth century. He filled the metaphor of “discovery” with more meanings: “la découverte du cosmos, des

3 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore, (Oxford, 1945), 81. 4 Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture? 59. 5 Ibid., 66-67.

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nombres et de l’homme.”6 Chenu also declared that during the twelfth century man’s self-discovery as a subject occurred, “l’homme se découvre comme sujet,”7 and that Peter Abelard was the first modern man.8 The idea of the medieval origin of modern European individualism became particularly widespread in England and in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. These years were marked by the appearance of a whole series of publications justifying, on the material of social, religious and literary history, the use of the metaphor “the discovery of individual” in regards of the 12th century.9 This medieval model of “the discovery of the individual” was most clearly expressed in British historian Collin Morris’ 1972 book, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050-1200.10 Besides an extended argument in favor of such a “discovery,” the book reexamines Burckhardt’s view of the origins of modern European individualism. According to Morris, man acquired the feeling of individual sometime between 1050 and 1200, and this individualistic shift in culture was connected not with the legacy of antiquity but rather with Christianity.11 It is worth noting that this approach turned out to be quite traditional in its essence; following Michelet and Burckhardt, medievalists still looked at the historical past from the perspective of “discovery of man.” As John Benton remarked, the “growth” of individualism or the “discovery” of individuality continued to be associated with the “Renaissance,” whether the medieval or the “real one,” and was explained in the same manner as the industrial revolution. The basic thesis remained the same: the phenomenon emerged in Western Europe and then spread to the rest of the world. Thus historians’ main task consisted in proving that “emergence/discovery” occurred in the Middle Ages rather than in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and not in Italy but in France.12 6

Marie-Dominique Chenu, L’éveil de la conscience dans la civilisation médiévale (Montreal, 1969), 15. 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Ibid., 17. 9 Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, 1977); Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry 1000-1150 (1970; repr. London, 1986); Robert Louis Benson and Giles Constable, Introduction to Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1982), xvii-xxx. 10 Collin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 (London, 1972). 11 Ibid., 10-11. 12 John F. Benton, Culture, Power and Personality in Medieval France (London, 1991), 315.

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In the 1980s, historians began expressing general misgivings about the very opposition between the concepts “individualism” and “collectivism,” which now appeared as an oversimplification of very theoretically challenging questions. Thus, Caroline Bynum and Natalie Zemon Davis argued that the integration of a person into his/ her social unit—be it family, clan, monastic order, social group, guild or state—did not deprive him or her of having individual feelings and even an acute sense of self-awareness. On the contrary, a high degree of social integration seemed to facilitate such awareness in the twelfth-thirteenth as much as in the sixteenth centuries.13 Thus, Burckhardt’s approach, based on the humanistic idea of the free individual, was gradually discredited by the end of the 20th century. Roy Porter summarized growing scholarly discontent with previously accepted models of history of the European individual as “it’s time to rethink our received grand saga of the self.”14 The History of the Individual in Russia Until recently, the theme of the history of the individual did not develop as an independent subject of research in Russia. Understanding the past, based on the unconditional validation of an individual as it happened in Europe starting from the Enlightenment, was uncommon here. The only exception were the “Westerners” of the middle and the second part of the 19th century, who declared the prime importance of an individual and sought to apply this ideal not only to understanding Western European but also to Russian history15. Accordingly, Burckhardt’s model of the individual’s liberation from the “chains” of super-personal entities, which presupposed the priority of the individual, did not become prevalent among Russian historians who adopted another, more sociological Western model, which could be 13

Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Bynum, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley, 1982), 82-109; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery, eds. (Stanford, CA, 1986), 53-63. 14 Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), 8. 15 Vissarion Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete Works], 13 vols. (Moscow: Akademia nauk, 1956) 11: 556: “Now human personality is for me higher than history, higher than society, higher than humanity. This idea is the idea of the whole century!”

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formulated as the “role of the individual in history” or “popular masses and the individual in history.” Practically all studies on this topic were undertaken from the perspective of the correlation between an individual and society or the individual and the masses. At first this model found a fertile ground in the ideology of the nineteenth century populist (narodnik) movement; then it was further developed by Russian Marxists, most notably in George Plekhanov’s famous 1898 essay, On the Role of Individual in History.16 Later, when Marxism became the official ideology of the Soviet Union, this model exclusively dominated Soviet social and human sciences. Nevertheless, prior to the 1917 October Revolution, the situation was more complex. Prominent nonMarxist liberal Russian scholars and thinkers such as Konstantin Kavelin (1818-1885), Nikolai Kareev (1850-1931), Maxim Kovalevsky (1851-1916) and Paul Miliukov (1859-1943) approached this theme from various theoretical positions. In regard to Russian views on Western and particularly Renaissance history, the influence of Burckhardt’s model is quite evident in the second part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The ideas of a prominent Russian historian Mikhail Korelin (1855-1899), who related progress in history to the development in European culture of humanistic individuals, provide an example of this influence.17 The founder of the most influential school in Russian medieval studies, Ivan Grevs (1860-1941), stands as yet another example. Nevertheless, the works of Grevs’ students and disciples Lev Karsavin (1882-1952) and Petr Bitsilli (1879-1953) began to critically re-examine the perception of Renaissance individualism and the notion of “the Renaissance tragedy.”18 It is noteworthy that in Russia the formation of the history of culture as an independent field of humanities was precisely connected to polemics concerning the Renaissance and the Middle Ages and focusing in particular on Renaissance individualism.19 16

Georgi Plekhanov, K voprosu o roli lichnosti v istorii [On the Question of the Personality’s Role in History] (1898, repr.: Idem. Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia[Selected Philosophical Works], 5 vols, (Moscow, 1956) 2: 46. 17 Mikhail Korelin, Ocherki ital’ianskogo Vozrozhdeniia [Essays on the Italian Renaissance] (Мoscow, 1896). 18 Piotr Bitsilli, Mesto Renessansa v istorii kul’tury [The Place of Renaissance in the History of Culture] (1927; repr. St. Petersburg, 1996); Lev Karsavin, Dzhordano Bruno [Giordano Bruno] (Berlin, 1923). 19 Liudmila Sychenkova, Kultura Zapadnoi Evropy v rossiiskom gumanitarnom znanii [Western European Culture in the Russian Humanities Scholarship] (Kazan, 2000), 243.

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Official Soviet historiography of the Renaissance and Reformation largely carried on the Burckhardt model, which fit the Marxist concept of history’s revolutionary development. However, in their studies, Soviet historians emphasized not the history of the individual but the socio-economic preconditions for the development of Renaissance culture, such as the growth of cities, commerce, capitalism, bourgeois class, etc. They treated the Renaissance individual according to Friedrich Engels’ formula, which proclaimed that the new type of man was the product of the progressive character of early bourgeois society.20 Twentieth-century innovations in the humanities, particularly in understanding the history of the individual, had only a minimal impact on Soviet historians. The necessity of ideological opposition to “bourgeois science” made practically impossible Soviet scholarly participation in discussions that would determine the future development of humanities and social sciences in the Western world. Only during the period of the “thaw” following Nikita Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 did the liberalization of the intellectual atmosphere change the situation to a certain degree. During the 1960s, theoretical discussions on historical scholarship, dynamic development of studies of history of culture, formation of new branches of humanities, active interest in scholarly activity abroad and interactions with foreign scholars all occurred. In the late 1950s-early 1960s studies of “world culture” were officially recognized,21 leading to the creation of the journal Vestnik Mirovoi Kultury (Herald of the World Culture), which lasted from 1957 to 1961. However, the most significant event in Soviet humanities was the formation of a small group of scholars on the periphery of official academia who, defying the pressure of Soviet ideology, took the human being as their main subject of study. In 1958, one of those scholars, St. Petersburg based Dmitry Likhachev, published his monograph The Person in Old Russian Literature.22 In the monograph, Likhachev relates the evolution of Old 20 Cited according the Russian edition: Friedrich Engels, “Dialektika prirody” [Dialectics of Nature] in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Sochineniia [Works], 47 vol. (Moscow, 1959), 14: 109. 21 In the middle of 1960s, the Soviet Academy of Sciences created the Scientific Council on the History of World Culture. 22 Dmitry Likhachev, Chelovek v literature Drevnei Rusi [The Person in Old Russian Literature] (Moscow and Leningrad, 958).

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Russian literature to the development of personality and self-awareness. According to Likhachev’s conception, in Old Russian literature human personality was at first revealed through a series of actions, then through the description of some psychological characteristics and states. Finally, man acquires individual character, enabling him to retain his wholeness regardless of changing circumstances.23 Such an approach, which considers the evolution of Old Russian literature as a process of individualization, permitted relating this literature to Western European literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In other words, this approach permitted the inclusion of ancient Russian literature into the common European context. In the 1960s, many important developments occurred in Soviet humanities: several scholars united under the leadership of Yuri Lotman to form what would become the renowned Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics; pioneering studies of historical poetics, comparative literature and myth were launched and Mikhail Bakhtin’s immensely influential book on Rabelais was published.24 As Aron Gurevich noted some years later, many of these works had a major influence on his initial interest in the project “man in history.” What he found attractive in these research developments, among other issues, was “determined refusal of official ideology,” which was “in both cases perfectly conscious.”25 Gurevich and the Search for Personality in the Categories of Medieval Culture The appearance in 1972 of Gurevich’s book Categories of Medieval Culture became a significant event in 1970s Russian and Soviet intellectual life. The book contained not only a new understanding of the Middle Ages as a cultural whole, but also offered a new approach to the study of the history of culture. Very soon the book was translated into fifteen languages, receiving universal acclaim, which was quite unusual for a Soviet historian’s writing.26 To a great extent, this suc23

Ibid., 72-73. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984). 25 Aron Gurevich, Istoricheskii sintez i shkola “Annalov” [The Historical Synthesis and the “Annales” School] (Мoscow, 1993), 11. 26 Aron Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, G.L. Cambell, trans. (London, 1985) [hereafter: CMC]. 24

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cess occurred because the book stood at the forefront of the cultural transformation in the humanities and social sciences taking place in the 1960s and 1970s. In medieval studies, French scholars of the Annales school led this transformation. Works by Jacques Le Goff, Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and others became important scholarly references and later the object of Gurevich’s polemics. Primarily, Gurevich and Annales had a common interest in the studies of “mentality”—the means of perceiving the reality or system of perceptions determining people’s behavior in society.27 Gurevich came to his conception of medieval culture and the medieval individual’s place in it through research in a field seemingly unrelated to the studies of culture—the agrarian history of the early Middle Ages. However, it was this work that led him to frustration not only with the dominant conception of feudalism in Soviet historiography, but even with the very principles of historical science as defined by official Marxist ideology. His interest in the Neo-Kantian legacy played the prominent role in his reevaluation of historical epistemology. Based on this legacy, he developed his own understanding of the “historian’s craft,” at the foundation of which lay the recognition of two subjects: man in the past and the historian striving to obtain knowledge about this past.28 Gurevich’s innovative approach rests on his treatment of a key notion such as “culture.” He was critical of the commonly accepted notion of culture as the creation of an educated elite. In Categories he offers another interpretation of culture—as the “worldview” or the “world model”29: “By culture, anthropology understands the world picture and behavioral practices of... groups of individuals that con27 On Gurevich’s perception of the “Annales’ school,” see Aron Gurevich, “Medieval culture and mentality according to the new French historiography,” in European Journal of Sociology, 14 (1983), 1, 7-195; Idem, “Marc Bloch aujourd’hui: histoire comparée et sciences sociales,” Actes du Colloque Marc Bloch, Paris, 1986 (Paris, 1990), 403-406; Idem, “Approaches of the ‘Annales School’ from the history of mentalities to historical synthesis,” Scandia, LVIII (1992), 141-50; Idem, “Annales in Moscow,” The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, Miri Rubin, ed. (Woodbridge, 1997), 239-248. 28 Aron Gurevich, “Istoriia i psikhologiia,” [History and Psychology], Istoriia— neskonchaemy spor [History—Endless Debates] (Moscow, 2005), 407-426, 415. 29 Gurevich routinely uses semiotic terms and categories like “semiological system,” “diachronic-synchronic” and others. However, unlike the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, he uses these concepts rather in the context of Max Weber’s ideal types. Gurevich, CMC, 13: “[…] the word ‘world view’ is not used in any special cybernetic sense…”

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tain all the major components of life...Therefore I understand culture as a world model.”30 The book reconstructs the medieval “worldview” through the analysis of such categories as “time,” “space,” “right,” “wealth,” “work,” “property” and, finally, “personality.” The inclusion of the latter into the most important categories of medieval culture is noteworthy. This inclusion reveals not only the author’s attempt to restore a more human essence to historiography but also to the “rehabilitation” of the medieval personality, whose existence Burckhardt’s dominant model of “discovery of man” did not even consider. We must note that in applying the concept of “personality” to medieval man, Gurevich asserted himself as a convinced supporter of the rehabilitation of this man and of this historical period in general. This new understanding of medieval man could not come without Gurevich’s critical reevaluation of the concept of feudalism dominant in Soviet historiography. At the basis of his reevaluation lay his refusal to use Marxist socio-economic abstractions. He also altered his approach to his studies: instead of examining feudalism from the point of view of capitalism, he decided to investigate it by examining archaic, pre-feudal social developments.31 Such a change of vector, as he remarked later on, allowed him to see “collective social structures built on the individual basis.”32 Analysis of social organizations built on personal relations subsequently led to the reevaluation of feudal society as a society of total non-freedom. While admitting the limited opportunities for individual expression in pre-feudal and feudal societies, Gurevich discovered a certain, particular type of freedom in archaic, traditional social relations. His inquiry into the dilemma of medieval “non-free freedom” resulted in questions about medieval man’s values like honor, dignity, wealth, etc. Gurevich related this phenomenon of “non-free freedom,” which he later identified as “archaic individualism,” to the existence of a specific social group—the free peasantry—

30 Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aaron Gurevich,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005), 1, 121-157, 142. 31 Aron Gurevich, “Nachalo Feodalizma v Evrope” [The Beginnings of Feudalism in Europe], in Selected Works, 2 vols., (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1999), 1: 228. 32 Ibid.

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which existed “even in the most feudalized European countries throughout the whole medieval period.”33 Gurevich often remarked that his experience in studying Scandinavian countries played an extraordinary role in the formation of his views on the Middle Ages. This experience turned out to be very important for more than his critique of established historical models; it provided him, according to his own words, with something even more precious—the new personalized perception of history: I had in front of me numerous and various texts that remained silent, unable to provide answers to the questions about the exploitation of peasants, the structure of the community and other traditional Marxist subjects. I remained perplexed until I finally started hearing the voices of the people who actually wrote those texts and for whom those texts were written. Then these texts informed me about different matters: about those people’s social and natural environment, man’s place in it, his beliefs, passions and behavior, his magical practices, rituals, imagination, his pagan gods and ideas about the other world.34 […] In sagas bonds are far from being voiceless objects of their lords’ exploitation—they play various social roles, but, most importantly, they are living, thinking and feeling beings, who feel love, jealousy, hate, greed, envy and other emotions. I underline: they are not just objects or subjects. This awareness forces a historian to choose another strategy of analysis.35

Yet it must be noted that in Categories of Medieval Culture the overall vision of the history of the individual still corresponds to the Marxist model, according to which the liberation of the individual is related to the advent of capitalism. According to Gurevich, under feudalism, especially at its earliest stages, “Man was not aware of himself as an autonomous individuality; he belonged to a whole, in whose framework he had to perform the part duly allotted to him.”36 Only the victory of capitalistic relations freed the individual from the corporative structures and made him a free individual.

33 Aron Gurevich, “Feodalizm pered sudom istorikov, ili o srednevekovoi krest’ianskoi tsivilizatsii” [Feudalism Judged by a Historian or Regarding Peasant Civilization], Odissei [Odysseus] (Moscow, 2006), 11-49. 34 Aron Gurevich, “Dvoiiakaia otvetstvennost’ istorika” [The Historian’s Double Responsibility], History—Endless Debates, 601-621, 610-611. 35 Aron Gurevich, “Put’ pryamoi kak Nevskii prospect,” ili Ispoved’ istorika” [The Path as Straight as the Nevsky Prospect or a Historian’s Confession], History— Endless Debates, 483-484. 36 Gurevich, CMC, 300.

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However, in spite of a general dependence on Marxist reasoning, Gurevich’s primary attention was already concentrated not on the task of showing the process of the liberation of the human personality from medieval ties, but on the task of revealing the singularity of medieval personality in its dissimilarity with the individual of the modern period. Rather than stressing the “underdeveloped” character of the medieval individual, Gurevich underlined this individual’s uniqueness. His point of departure is the notion that “throughout history, the human personality has in one way or another always identified itself as such […] Man has never been a faceless item in a herd.”37 Gurevich insisted that the modern sort of individual represents a historically concrete human type but not the only possible one.38 Moreover, he explained medieval man’s association with collective structure not through economic reasons but by a system of values which predominated in the medieval period.39 Such values, though they differed from modern ones, did not preclude the existence of individual consciousness in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, Gurevich concluded that medieval man had a clear concept of the human personality—as answerable to God and possessing an indestructible core, the soul. Yet, he argued, it did not constitute individuality in our sense of the word: “The insistence on what is common to all, typical, on the universal…militated against the formulation of any clear idea of human individuality.”40 Gurevich’s approach freed the concept of the medieval individual from critical, condescending undertones through which all historical varieties of personality were evaluated against the “height” of the modern European type. Rather, this concept became a theoretical instrument useful for studying any historical period. What’s more, Gurevich proclaimed the study of the medieval individual to be the most important goal of medieval historiography, “All the elements of medieval culture that I have studied—time, space, law, work, and wealth—interested me first and foremost as aspects of human individuality, angles of its worldview and behavior, in other words as a

37

Ibid., 296. Ibid., 296. 39 Ibid., 300: “What is wanted from the individual, what constitutes his social virtue, is not originality, not difference from others, but rather the degree to which he can make himself an efficient unit in the social group…” 40 Ibid., 306. 38

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means of human self-awareness.”41 Remarkably, Gurevich is quite aware that concepts he used in Categories—such as “medieval man,” “medieval individual” or “medieval personality”—are highly abstract and might appear hollow from the point of view of concrete historical scholarship.42 Yet, he believed that the study of such an abstraction as “medieval individual” was not only acceptable but also necessary. The theme of the medieval individual continued to be present in Gurevich’s research in the 1970s and 1980s. It recurs in his analysis of ancient Scandinavian epics, medieval popular culture, relationships between learned and popular cultures, as well as in other subjects of his study. At this time the scholar also turned to new subject—medieval perceptions of death and the after-life. This subject became important for the development of Gurevich’s understanding of the medieval individual and also resulted in animated polemics with his French colleagues Philippe Ariès, Michel Vovel and Jacques Le Goff.43 Gurevich believed that these historians supported the idea of the “discovery of the individual” in the 11th-13th centuries, which he had always opposed. According to French scholars, one of the major expressions of this “discovery” was the formulation of the idea of “small eschatology,” the step from the concept of the collective judgment at the end of times to the individual judgment at the end of each life, as well as the formation of the idea of purgatory.44 Jacques Le Goff in particular spoke of the growth of individualism caused by the secularization of society and deep socio-economic transformations produced as a result of development of cities and commerce.45 Gurevich strongly argued against such reasoning. Defining his position in regards to the “birth of the purgatory,” he indicates a firm opposition toward evolutionism. In his arguments with his French colleagues he emphasizes that ideas of purgatory and small eschatology emerged much earlier than the 11th century and coexisted in the consciousness of European Christians with the notion of collective Last Judgment. Concerning the personal attitude toward the after41 Citation from the new updated Russian edition of CMC: Aron Gurevich, Selected Works, 2, 228. 42 Ibid. 43 Aron Gurevich, The Historical Synthesis and the Annales School, 227-258. 44 Ibid., 242-244. 45 Ibid., 257-268.

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life, Gurevich considered it to be Christianity’s organic feature.46 He emphasized the complexity of the problem of the medieval individual. According to him, changes in the development of individual consciousness were not progressive; advancements were often accompanied by retreats. In addition, Gurevich insisted on the coexistence of mutually exclusive ideas in the minds of medieval people. He related this paradox largely to the complex relationship between learned and popular cultures.47 The latter, which he called “the culture of the silent majority,” would interest him in particular from the 1980s when he had turned to the new kind of sources: sermons, visions, parables and exempla.48 Discussion of Individuality and Personality in History Gurevich’s new turn to the subject of the history of the individual belongs to the period of perestroika (ca. 1986-1991). During this time when the iron curtain fell, Soviet historians gained wider access to foreign publications, participated in international conferences, published translations of works by famous foreign scholars and openly discussed important professional issues. One of the significant signs of the renewal in humanities occurred when Aron Gurevich, Iuri Bessmertny and their colleagues created the annual Odysseus. This journal, with the evocative subtitle “Man in History,” was supposed to trace a new program for historiography’s development in Russia oriented toward the study of history of culture. The central place in the second issue of Odysseus (1990) belonged to the publication of a discussion in which many famous Russian scholars—philologists, historians, philosophers and linguists took part. The theme of the discussion, suggested by one of Gurevich’s colleagues and friends, Italian Renaissance scholar Leonid Batkin,

46

Ibid., 243. Gurevich, Istoriia istorika [History of a Historian] (Мoscow, 2002), 230-231. 48 Gurevich found especially important for his purpose the work of the German thirteenth century preacher Berthold of Regensburg, who formulated an original interpretation of the Latin concept ‘persona,’ attributing to it, under the influence of popular culture, not the traditional theological meaning but a secular one. Aron Gurevich, Srednevekovy mir: Kultura bezmolstvuiushchego bol’shinstva [The Medieval World: the Culture of the Silent Majority] (Moscow, 1990). 47

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was “Individuality and Personality in History.”49 As Batkin proclaimed in his introductory article, “the concepts ‘individuality’ and ‘personality’ need philosophical and historical clarification.”50 One of the major questions discussed in the volume was the role of concepts such as the “individual” and “personality” in the typology of cultures. Batkin’s approach relied on two propositions: the semantic similarity between the concepts “personality” and “individuality” and their common opposition to the concept of the individual. Furthermore, Batkin insisted on the necessity of reserving the term “personality” exclusively to the specifically modern European type of individualism. He believed that scientific methods in general, including those of the Tartu school of Cultural Semiotics or the history of mentalities, were inadequate for studies of man and his consciousness in history. Batkin sees the reason of this inadequacy in the attempt to read texts as “things”—in other words, as passive bearers of information—which historians must make “speak.” He finds an alternative in Mikhail Bakhtin’s “culturological” approach, which considers the text itself as a “personality,” as a “expressively talking being,” with whom the researcher should begin a dialogue.51 From this theoretical perspective, Batkin attempted to build an integral multi-dimensional model of the emergence of the European personality52. According to Batkin, the individual develops into personality only after becoming a self-conscious source of change in cultural values, and transformation of this sort does not occur until the Early Modern period. Correspondingly, the shift from “non-personality” to “personality” occurred precisely during this historical period. Thus inadvertently Batkin’s model largely returns to Burckhardt’s traditional reasoning. Gurevich firmly opposed this position. He asserted that the concept “personality” was still applicable to the Middle Ages under condition that we do not consider that the notions of “personality” and “individuality” were identical, but apply the former only to identify 49 “Individual’nost’ i lichnost’ v istorii (diskussiia)” [Individuality and Personality in History (Discussion)], Odysseus 1990 (Moscow, 1990), 76-89. 50 Ibid., 6-8. 51 Leonid Batkin, “Dva podkhoda k izucheniiu istorii kultury” [Two Approaches to the Studies of Culture], Pristrastiia [Predilections] (Moscow, 1994), 34-54, 44-45. 52 Leonid Batkin, Evropeiskii individ naedine s soboi [The European Individual Alone with Himself ] (Moscow, 2000).

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the internal world of medieval people. In this case “personality” becomes just one of the abstractions that historians use to study traditional as well as contemporary societies, such as, for example, “culture,” “civilization” and so forth.53 In his polemics with Batkin, Gurevich speaks as a social historian and a follower of the anthropological approach, which recognizes human personality as a midpoint between society and culture. This means that any individual is a personality since he/she represents a “microcosm” or a “receptacle” holding the entire cultural system of a given time period while his behavior is determined by this very system.54 In other words, the term “individuality” is specific to certain cultural and historical conditions while personality is an “inalienable quality of any human being living in society.”55 This is why Gurevich insists on the necessity of studying not a separate individual but the potential which a “given culture is able to provide for the development of personality.”56 In regards to the question of “exceptional personalities,” according to Gurevich they are not the source of shift in cultural values, as in Batkin’s understanding, but the result of a specific combination of common features in a given culture. It is possible to suppose that Gurevich’s position, in addition to being scholarly, also had ethical impulses. He considered as one of his major tasks the rehabilitation of the Middle Ages and in particular of medieval popular culture. In his own words, he sought to overcome “the conspiracy of silence” organized by aristocratic chroniclers and writers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages against the “silent majority.”57 In the Batkin-Gurevich polemic, which seems to be important not only for the sake of clarifying Gurevich’s position but also for the sake of understanding the state of mind of Russian humanities scholars, we can discern three levels of argumentation. The first is related to the subject of the polemic, which is obviously man’s perception of the self as it is preserved in various historical documents. On this level historians basically agree with each other, for they both accept that man as a carrier of certain idea of the self, which separates him from the rest of creatures, has always existed. Only the form of this 53

Individuality and Personality in History, 76-77. Ibid., 84-85. 55 Aron Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism, (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, MA, 1995), [hereafter: OEI], 14. 56 Individuality and Personality in History, 86. 57 Ibid., 85. 54

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idea changed. Both scholars believe the historian’s task consists in “correct” description of these forms in different cultural and historical contexts. The second level of argumentation is conceptual. On this level, discussion often digressed into a terminological debate about what should be understood under the terms “personality,” “individual” or “individuality.” The terminological difficulties are especially aggravated by the lack of symmetry between the basic notions used in Western scholarship on the subject—“individual,” “individuality,” “personality,” “self”—and their Russian equivalents, as well as by the impossibility of finding an exact equivalent to the Russian word lichnost’ in Western languages.58 Finally, the third level is methodological. Can historians use the terms “personality,” “individual” or “individuality” to study societies which did not know those terms? Here again the scholars’ understanding of the term lichnost’ which we will translate here, faute de mieux, as “personality,” will determine their answer. Batkin attempted to define this term as precisely and as strictly as possible, relying on the idea of the modern European personality. Thus his answer to the above question was negative. Gurevich used ethical considerations, and his aim was the rehabilitation of medieval man. Therefore, he answered the same question positively. Their vivid scholarly polemic continued for several consecutive years. Modern readers would find these scholars’ isolation from the important theoretical and historiographical debates of the end of the 20th century rather peculiar. Neither Batkin nor Gurevich took into consideration the recent contributions of their foreign colleagues working in the same field. Both worked independently, based on their own individual scholarly experience. Yet their discussion is important for understanding the more than twenty year-long efforts of both historians to form a new conception of the history of culture in Russia.

58 About the specificity of the Russian word lichnost’, and difficulties in its translation see Derek Offord, “‘Lichnost’: Notions of Individual Identity,” Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881-1940, C. Kelly and D. Shepherd, eds. (Oxford, 1998), 13-25.

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The Individual and Society in the Medieval West The Moscow Сolloquium, “Les Annales hier et aujourd’hui” (October 3-6, 1989), dedicated to the French school’s 60th anniversary, underscored Gurevich’s recognition by the international community of historians. It was at this colloquium that Jacques Le Goff asked Gurevich to write a book about the individual in medieval Europe. As Gurevich later recalled, this offer came as a complete surprise to him while, at the same time, it answered his most cherished hopes: I had thought about such a project myself, but I am certain that I did not express it. How this fellow read my thoughts, I don’t know. When you are presented with such a serious offer, you are supposed to say something like “well, let me think about it for couple of days …” Instead I immediately bit into it and said, “I agree!” I did not know yet how things would take shape but I just felt that this offer was auspicious for my life.59

Le Goff’s offer was more than a great challenge; it was simultaneously the highest sign of recognition for Gurevich’s work on medieval individual. Now Gurevich was to present his well-defined views on the medieval individual to the judgment of the international scholarly community. This new book, The Origins of European Individualism60 marked, in the eyes of many, the apex of the thirty-year scholarly quest that Gurevich had begun at the end of 1960s. This quest began even prior to the publication of The Categories of Medieval Culture with his critical reevaluation of the concept of feudalism and his innovative 59 Boris Stepanov, “‘Byt’ dal’she v storone mne kazalos’ nevozmozhnym…’ Interv’iiu s A. Ia. Gurevichem” [‘To continue being uninvolved appeared impossible to me…’ An Interview with Aron Gurevich], Nove Literaturnoe Obozrenie [New Literary Review] 81 (2006), 183. 60 The book first appeared in German as Das Individuum in europäischen Mittelalter (Munich, 1994). Despite the author’s insistence, the book’s titles in European languages do not distinguish between the terms ‘individual,’ ‘individualism’ and ‘personality’ and once more revive the evolutionary approach to the problem, which Gurevich tried so hard to avoid. Besides the abovementioned English edition see in Italian, La nàscita dell’ individuo nell’ Europa medievale (Rome, 1996); Spanish, Los origins del individualismo europeo (Barcelona, 1997); French, La naissance de l’individu dans l’Europe médiévale (Paris, 1997). The Russian edition of the book, substantially revised and updated, is Individ i sotsium na srednevekovom Zapade [Individual and Society in the Medieval West] (Moscow, 2005). Whenever possible I have provided the corresponding citations in the English edition. Otherwise the Russian edition is cited in my translation. (Translator’s Note.)

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studies of ancient Scandinavian societies. In The Origins of European Individualism, Gurevich recapitulated his Scandinavian “experience” by including it as an “early stage” of history of the European individual, the stage preceding the “classical” Christian Middle Ages. Gurevich finds proofs of existence of this stage in Elder Edda and other ancient Scandinavian sources, defining this individualism as archaic. He insists on the existence of this archaic individualism because “neither economically, nor socially, nor psychologically, was man dissolved in the collectivity. He represented a relatively separate unity, selfishly pursuing his own interests.”61 According to Gurevich, this Northern Germanic type of individualism provides a valuable argument against a purely evolutionary approach to the problem because it undermines the idea of the “birth of individual” at any particular moment, either during the high or late Middle Ages, as well as the perception of the history of the individual as gradual progress, culminating around the Renaissance.62 The Origins of European Individualism and several articles published at the end of the 1990s—beginning of the 2000s63 also articulated Gurevich’s resolute dismissal of the dichotomy individual-society: The individual does, and indeed can, exist only within society. The medieval individual is absorbed into the social macrocosm […]. Each micro-group adheres to certain values which are, in part, specific to the social microcosm in question and in part common to…the society as a whole; the individual becomes part of that culture by assimilating those values. As the individual does so, he or she becomes a personality.64

The historian also insists on the conceptual differences between his historico-anthropological method and previously dominant methods of Ideengeschichte, which considered culture as an exclusive product of the intellectual elite. In the Origins of European Individualism, in particular in its Russian edition, Gurevich persistently criticizes not only the positions of Jacob Burckhardt and Leonid Batkin but also followers of the concept 61

Ibid., 52-53. Ibid., 137. 63 Among them: Aron Gurevich, “From Saga to Personality: Sverris saga,” From Saga to Society, Gísli Pálsson, ed. (Middlesex, 1992), 77-87; Idem, “Persona Towards the History of the Concept of Personality in the Middle Ages,” Culture & history 13 (1995), 1-24. 64 Gurevich, OEI, 89. 62

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of medieval “discovery of individual”—Marie-Dominique Chenu, Collin Morris, John Benton and others. He reproaches them for the artificial separation of the individual from society, attributing to the medieval epoch an agenda of individualism essentially irrelevant to it. Gurevich considers the “progressive” view on history inadequate: there was “no straightforward evolutionary progression from the individual of the Middle Ages to that of the New Age, because these individuals were different human types […] different—not alien but simply different—and needs to be understood with all of his or her inimitable qualities.”65 Gurevich is just as critical of his own approach to the problem of the individual in the past, in particular in Categories of Medieval Culture, where “the personality of medieval man hasn’t yet become the subject of special analysis and was examined in a rather traditional evolutionary perspective.”66 Departing from such a perspective, Gurevich seeks to create a historical picture that would reflect the entire complexity of the history of the medieval individual which, according to him, was far from linear, but rather full of inconsistencies and various ups and downs.67 In his attempt to accomplish this task he uses various methodological approaches and constantly presents historical figures, episodes, phenomena and documents that “fall out” of evolutionary logic or defy it completely. However, the very endeavor to create a whole picture of history of the medieval individual in all its complexity reveals the internal paradox of Gurevich’s approach. While stressing the inadequacy of the evolutionary approach, the author is unable to completely free himself from it; while trying to present a comprehensive description of medieval consciousness, he can only present fragmentary view; while emphasizing the unique and independent character of the medieval individual, he continues comparing it to the modern European type. Gurevich himself is fully aware of these paradoxes. Addressing his readers in the introduction, he questions the very possibility of an all-inclusive holistic description of medieval personality: “A comprehensive, properly balanced investigation of this question is a task for the future, and I fear, a rather distant one.”68

65

Ibid., 251. Gurevich, Individual and Society in the Medieval West, 21. 67 Gurevich, OEI, 251: “The gradual emergence of the individual…was not by no means a smooth process: it moved by fits and starts, sometimes even backwards…” 68 Ibid., 4. 66

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**** The Origins of European Individualism became an organic part of Jacques Le Goff’s series “Making of Europe”69 and turned out to be in high demand in a modern Europe in pursuit of its new pan-European identity. Yet the appearance of the book was due first and foremost to the author’s reflections about the country in which he lived: This book is the work of a Russian historian, and I must confess that the subject of the individual and individuality is now coming into its own unprecedented force in my country. In the past, the totalitarian regime suppressed the individual and individual initiative in all spheres of life…Not merely was the word ‘individualism’ a term of abuse, but accusations of free expressions of human potential, talents and interests could provide grounds for persecution. To save our society from catastrophe, to revitalize it and to create a new intellectual climate, the question of the individual has to assume truly central importance. Russia cannot be drawn into European civilization (and I see no other way out of the present crisis) without adopting certain values fundamental to that civilization.70

Gurevich’s persistent attention to “personality” as the central category of medieval culture may be better understood in the light of the concrete circumstances of his life and work. His decades-long resistance to the pressure of official Soviet collectivist ideology played a major role in his choice of the topic. Furthermore, his decades-long forced isolation from the international res publica scholaram and his lack of recognition as a scholar in his homeland led to his focus on the inner personal world. As he later said himself, studies of medieval personality were closely interconnected with his reflections on his own life: At certain stage of my work on the medieval individual I felt the need to write about myself. I tried to look at my own development as a historian…At this point I realized that the subject of the book emerged not only because of my interest for medieval culture…but also due to my reflections about myself.71 69 Other books of this series of Blackwell Publishing include: Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food (1994); Leonardo Benevolo, The European City (1995); Umberto Ecco, The Search for the Perfect Language (1995); Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: centres and peripheries (1998); Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200-1000 (2003); Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (2003); Michel Mollat, Europe and the Sea (Oxford, 2003) Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe 400–1500 (Oxford, 2007). 70 Gurevich, OEI, p. 4. 71 Gurevich, Individual and Society in the Medieval West, 372.

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Although Gurevich did not intend to directly influence Russian society with his studies of Western medieval culture, his work had a significant impact both inside and outside academia. He is definitely one of the most famous historians of the second part of the twentieth century in Russia and the best known contemporary Russian humanities scholar abroad. Yet what is most important is that his ideas strongly influenced Russian historiography. Indeed, all Russian students and professors of humanities, and not only they, are familiar with Gurevich’s concepts of “world picture” or “world model.” His assiduous promulgation and popularization of the Annales school and of historical anthropology had a profound effect on the new generation of Russian intellectuals. In other words, modern Russian scholars can hardly imagine not only historical research but also developments in humanities in general without acknowledging the contribution of Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich. Translated by Yelena Mazour-Matusevich

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salute to aron gurevich

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SALUTING ARON GUREVICH1 JACQUES LE GOFF

The renowned Russian medievalist Aron Gurevich has turned 80 this year. I shall attempt here to discuss all that historiography of the twentieth century owes to him. Gurevich’s work was written and elaborated upon against the background of the problems of researching and writing history in the erstwhile Soviet Union, and later in the early years of Russia’s “desovietisation.” Aron Gurevich was a robust intellectual and scientist, not a dissident. He was able to work in modest research posts and above all managed to establish intellectual relationships and exchanges with historians in Western Europe; this enabled his work to be translated, read, admired and discussed outside of Soviet Russia. If Aron Gurevich succeeded in keeping abreast of the historiographical revolution in the West, and in particular in recognizing very early the renewal of the discipline led notably by the movement of the Annales in France, the principal impulse of the renewal of his own historical and methodological thinking came from his personal endeavor, which points to his very original personality. The path he chose was multidisciplinary, but it privileged two concepts in particular that are themselves a synthesis of multifaceted areas: that of anthropology and that of culture.2 Privileging culture in this manner was also a way of posing an alternative to Marxist economic determinism. This direction was inscribed within a larger European (and international) moment of liberation from the dictatorship of the economy, Marxist and non-Marxist. Yet Gurevich never excluded economics from his vision of the history of human society; rather, he preferred to view it through the eyes of culture—the mentality of human beings—for he was greatly interested in the French history of mentalities, though all the while maintaining a certain distance from it. His attention in particular was focused upon the new personage in 1 Reprinted from Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval History Journal, 7 (July-December 2004), 163-167. 2 “Medieval Culture and Mentality according to the New French Historiography,” Archives européennes de Sociologie, 24 (1983), 167-92.

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medieval European society, the merchant. He has given us an elegant essay, “The Merchant,” in a collection edited by him, The Medieval Merchant, published in Italian in 1987 and in French in 1989. Concepts from anthropology led him to wider horizons, which he then opened up to French historians—medievalists in particular— bearing the label of historical anthropology.3 This concert allowed Gurevich to explore the history of those people as well as social groups which were neglected, if not excluded, by the narratives of the traditional grande histoire. Two domains in particular became the focus of in-depth study: one being geographical and cultural—the Scandinavian world and the other social and cultural—that of “popular culture.” Gurevich devoted several of his works to Scandinavian culture— his first love, which he never abandoned—one of the bases and sources of his rich historical vision. The Viking Raids, published in Moscow in 1966, was the first. His doctoral thesis of 1967 was The Free Peasants of Feudal Norway. His essay History and Saga appeared in Moscow in 1972, followed by Edda and Saga in 1979. In the same year, Norwegian Society of the High Middle Ages was published in Moscow.4 One should add to this ensemble the important article “On Heroes, Things, Gods and Laughter in Germanic Poetry,” which appeared in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (vol. 5, pp. 105-72), where we encounter once again his deep interest in Nordic culture, in mythological literatures and epics (the literary source in important for him) and in a cultural phenomenon which was a subject which brought us together: laughter. However, Aron Gurevich is largely known in the West for his 1983 work entitled Categories of Medieval Culture, which was part of a prestigious series of the Editions Galliard. The Italian translation of another work in the preceding year, The Origins of Feudalism, with a foreword by Raoul Manselli (new edition in 1990) brought Gurevich recognition in Italy. It owed its favorable reception in Italy to, among other factors, its advocacy of a Gramscian, more-open interpretation of Marxism. 3 “Histoire et Anthropologie historique,” Diogène 151, 1990. As an example of his links with Italian historians one might add Anthropologia e cultura medievale (Turin, 1991). 4 Gurevich has also treated the problem of the birth of the State in Norway in the collective volume J.M. Claessen, ed., The Early State (The Hague/Paris, 1978), 40323.

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Among the categories of medieval culture, there is one to which Gurevich has accorded a special interest, and justly so because it is fundamental: the conception of time. Out of this engagement came the article “Time as a Problem of Cultural History,” published in the collection Cultures and Time by UNESCO in 1975 (157-76). Aron Gurevich succeeded in carrying out fruitful dialogues with historians belonging to different academic cultures so as to highlight both his proximity to them as well as his distance. French historians have been particularly privileged in his “Invitation au dialogue: Lettre aux historians français,” published in The Bulletin of Information (no. 64, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, 1990) and in his study La synthèse historique et l’Ecole Annales (translated into Portuguese in Brazil, 2003). However, when he published his German work, Das Weltbild des mittelalterlichen Menshen (Munich, 1980, second edition 1982), he transformed and rejuvenated the concept of Weltanschauung, precursor of the notions of mentality and the historical imaginary. One of the principal concerns of Aron Gurevich’s research and reflection was the history of popular culture, its links with scholarly culture, its meaning for plebian groups of the past—above all medieval societies. This becomes evident in his German publication Mittelalterliche Volkskultur (Munich, 1987) and in his French edition La culture populaire au Moyen Age. Simpli et Docti (Paris, 1996). The latter was reprinted in German as Mittelalterliche Volkskultur: Probleme zur Forschung (Dresden, 1986) and in English as Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception. On the relations between peasants and saints, we have his very original essay in Italian, Condini e santi (Turin, 1986), and on the beliefs of the illiterate regarding the links between the here and hereafter, the book in German, Himlishes und irdisches leben. Bildwelten der schriftlosen Menshen in 13 Jahrhundert (Dresden, 1997). Finally, Gurevich also did me the honor of comparing, in a spirit of friendship, his ideas with mine on the relations between popular and scholarly cultures in the article “Popular and Scholarly Medieval Traditions: Notes in the margin of Jacques Le Goff’s book,” The Journal of Medieval History (vol. 9, 1983, pp. 71-90). He returned to these problems in a book based on a particularly rich original source, brought to light by the Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident medievale at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales: the exempla, or moral anecdotes with which

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preachers peppered their sermons. The book, Culture and Society of Medieval Europe as Viewed by Contemporaries: Exempla in the 13th Century, was published in Moscow in 1989. Gurevich has also made a major contribution to the much discussed problem of the emergence of the individual in the medieval West. On the related problem of property rights, a notion handed down from Roman law that was subsequently obliterated by the feudal conception of a hierarchy of rights, Gurevich published a pioneering article in Annales E.S.C., 1972, “Representation and Attitudes towards Property during the High Middle Ages, pp. 523-47. Ten years later he went even further with “Au Moyen Age: conscience indicidualle et image de l’au-delà” (Annales, E.S.C., 1982, pp. 22575). Finally, he contributed to Faire l’Europe (part of the European historical collection published in five languages, an overarching study), and the French version of his contribution, La naissance d’individu dans l’Europe médiévale, was published in Paris in 1997 by the Editions du Seuil. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Aron Gurevich established, together with the medievalist Yuri Bessmertny, the journal Odysseus, which was determinedly international and open to new horizons of historical research of which he had been the grand pioneer in Russia. He also published general methodological articles on the historian’s craft such as “Une voie directe comme le boulevard Nevski” or “Les confessions de l’historien” (Odysseus, 1992). All this did not interfere with his expressing himself yet again in international journals such as UNESCO’s Diogène with the article “La double responsabilité de l’historien” (No. 168, October-December 194, pp. 67-86). Finally, Gurevich was Chief Editor of Dictionaire de la culture médiévale, published in Russian (Moscow, 2003). I hope that history in general and medieval history in particular will continue to benefit for a long time from the luminous studies of this great Russian medievalist. Translated from French by Harbans Mukhia.

writing medieval history: an interview

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WRITING MEDIEVAL HISTORY: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARON GUREVICH1 YELENA MAZOURMATUSEVICH

Introduction Prior to my meeting with Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich in Moscow in January 2003, I spent several years studying his works, starting with Problems of the Genesis of Feudalism in the Western Europe, which I read as an undergraduate, and Categories of Medieval Culture, which I read as a graduate student. I became particularly intrigued by Gurevich’s position toward Bakhtin and presented a paper on this subject at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK in July 2002. There I met a prominent philosopher from the Moscow State University, Professor Svetlana Sergeevna Neretina to whom the idea of this interview belongs. I am very thankful to her, for the thought that I could actually meet the scholar whose work I admired through books for so many years would never occur to me. Even after having obtained his agreement in advance, it was not easy convincing Gurevich to grant an interview. He was understandably wary after a long period of hardship, being denied an academic pension until Vladimir Putin came to power, never having been paid any royalties for his book publications, and being severely handicapped by his loss of sight. We met twice at his Moscow apartment for several hours during a bitter cold January when we would lose the use of our fingers by the time we reached his street. At first Aron Iakovlevich was reserved but gradually became animated, filling the room with his famous charm and wit. The questions were prepared ahead of time, again thanks to S.S. Neretina, who hosted our little expedition at her Moscow apartment and provided us with Gurevich’s Russian publications and critical literature. The interview was conducted in Russian, recorded, transcribed, and then translated into English. The translation is my own. The interview was recorded and 1

This interview was originally published in Medieval History Journal, 2 (2004), 169-197 and in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005), 121-158.

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edited by Sean Bledsoe of KSUA 91.5 FM radio, Fairbanks, Alaska. My thanks go to Mark Hamilton, President of University of Alaska Fairbanks, and UAF provost Paul Reichardt for grants, which made this project possible. The idea was to publish the interview, with Le Goff’s preface, in time for Gurevich’s 80th birthday. Le Goff, although ill himself, immediately agreed to write the preface, thanks to the intercession by Harbans Mukhia. Gurevich’s anniversary was also celebrated by a special seminar organized by the Center for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India in March 2005. Despite our original agreement, Gurevich’s initial response to the interview’s English translation and publication was similar to his reticence before our first meeting. He expressed discontent at the fact that we published “the whole thing” because he now believed to have said “too much” and objected to the interview’s publication in Russian. Thus he censored and cut the Russian version of the interview published in Arbor Mundi in April 2005. Fortunately, he changed his mind and ended up being very pleased with our celebratory efforts and especially with Le Goff’s preface. The unabridged Russian version of the interview was finally published by S.S. Neretina in the online philosophical journal VOX in May, 2007.2 *** Aron Iakovlevich belonged to the World War II generation of scholars who could still profit from the excellent academic training of the old, pre-revolutionary masters like historian Alexander Iosifovich Neusykhin. However, he did not belong to the new generation of aggressively Marxist “red professors” like Nina Sidorova, Alexander Danilov, Alexander Tchistozvo, Zinaida Udal’tsova, and Evgenia Gutnova, whose growing influence prevented Gurevich from teaching in Moscow for most of his career. For sixteen (“his best”) years, Gurevich taught at the provincial university in Kalinin (now Tver’), spending his life in trains commuting between Moscow, where his family remained, and in the “fetid” student dormitory, where at first he did not have his own room. Gurevich’s situation was further “aggravated” by his Jewish origin. Thus, Kalinin’s university rector thought that even this unenviable position was too good for Gurevich, trying on several occasions to fire him. Even after the fall of com2

http://vox-journal.ru, 2, ( May 2007).

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munism, Gurevich was not offered a teaching position at Moscow University, still dominated by aging ex-Marxists and their disciples. According to my last phone conversation with Aron Iakovlevich, in summer 2005, Marxist attacks continued even then, for, as he put it, “communism is over but the leftovers remain.” Ironically, following centuries-old practice, Gurevich’s official Russian obituary, which appeared immediately following his passing away, presented a glossy picture of his career as a high-status Russian historian celebrated and covered by special honors in his homeland. It is clear from the interview that Gurevich admired Mikhail Bakhtin, thanks to whom the idea of “culture” was introduced to the study of the humanities, later to become the focus of the literary, linguistic, philosophical, and historical studies associated with Tartu’s school of “culturology” and its foremost representative, Yuri Lotman.3 Furthermore, Gurevich appears to be the first to have understood the importance of Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony as applied to medieval historiography. In Categories of Medieval Culture, he stresses the utility of Bakhtin’s theory in historical studies. Yet, in spite of his seemingly boundless admiration for Bakhtin, Gurevich has been brave enough (for Bakhtin had already been “consecrated” by the Russian intelligentsia) to challenge some of Bakhtin’s notions. In Categories of Medieval Culture, Gurevich addresses an issue that Bakhtin carefully avoided—the specifically Christian character of medieval civilization. Unlike Bakhtin, Gurevich emphasizes the impact of Christianity as the primary factor in the formation of the medieval Weltanschauung, determining its concepts of time, space, order,

3 Yuri Lotman (1922-1993), one of the “unknown scholars,” as Julia Kristeva puts it in her article “On Yuri Lotman,” [Publications of the Modern Language Association 109 (1994), 375], was a student of Vladimir Propp, and editor from 1964 of Sign Systems Studies, a journal of Tartu University (Estonia) where he was a professor. Considered the first Russian structuralist, he studied semiotics and authored more than 550 works, including many published posthumously, e.g., Besedy o russkoi kul’ture [Discussions on Russian Culture] (St. Peterburg, 1994); O poetakh i poezii [About Poets and Poetry] (St. Peterburg, 2001); Istoriia i tipologiia russkoi kul’tury [History and Typology of Russian Culture] (St. Peterburg, 2002); and many others. Together with Julia Kristeva he founded the International Semiotics Association, of which he was the vice president in spite of the fact that, persecuted under the Soviet regime, he was not allowed to travel abroad. He introduced the Russian term kulturologia (“culturology”), which refers to the study of culture or the philosophy of culture (not to be confused with “cultural studies” as understood in North America).

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monetary relationships, nature, social organization, and so forth.4 Among other concepts, Gurevich also reconsidered Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, addressing the fundamental distinction between ancient and medieval views on time and space.5 Moreover, Gurevich questions the idea of carnivalesque realism for being artificially isolated by Bakhtin and taken out of the larger context of medieval culture.6 He also challenged Bakhtin’s ideas on popular medieval culture in his book Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception.7 Although Gurevich had always closely followed historical research in Western Europe, he, like many of his European colleagues, seemed to be less aware of the latest developments in North American scholarship. Also, his seeming indifference in regards to some of the “hot” topics in North American academia, like women’s and gender studies, can be explained not so much by his intellectual isolation, but rather by the character of the Soviet regime and the fact that Gurevich belonged to the World War II generation of scholars who tasted the last wave of Stalinist repression. It was simply a question of priority: when the scholar’s ultimate aspiration was to preserve his intellectual independence, human dignity, and scholarly integrity within the senile monster of an oppressive and spurious regime, such individual resistance absorbed him entirely, not leaving time or energy for anything else. Having one’s own voice has always been a luxury in Russia, preserved at a particularly high cost by very few individuals. Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich is among those chosen few thanks to whom

4 Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 104: “The transition from paganism to Christianity was accomplished by a radical restructuring of temporal concepts in medieval Europe.” Ibid., 111: “The Christian orientation of time differs both from the orientation of classical antiquity, directed towards the past alone, and from the messianic, prophetic fixation . . . characteristic of the Judaic conception of time.” 5 In July 2002, I presented the paper “Bakhtin versus Gurevich: Complimentary and Conflicting Conceptions of Medieval Culture” at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds. With this provocative title, I hoped to stir the audience and my hopes were fulfilled. As a result of this presentation, I was invited to Moscow and met Aron Gurevich in person. 6 Gurevich, “Annales in Moscow,” in The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, Miri Rubin, ed., (Woodbridge, UK, 1997) 247. 7 Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth, trans., (Cambridge, UK, 1988; reprinted 1993).

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Russian scholarship did not turn into a monologue and may yet aspire to become polyphonic one day.8 July 2008 Interview Definitions Yelena Mazour-Matusevich: There are dozens of definitions of the medieval period. How would you define the “Middle Ages”? Aron Gurevich: The term Middle Ages has lately become highly debatable. People lived in the Middle Ages not knowing they lived in the Middle Ages in contrast to people who live in modern times who are aware of it. Medieval people understood themselves either as a people living in a continuous Christian history that started in the first century of our era or as descendents of the Roman Empire. By the way, until 1806, until Napoleon, it was believed that the Roman Empire continued to exist. Medieval people understood these two traditions, one Roman and another Christian, in a very complicated and complex way because these traditions mingled in one paradoxical entity. The concept medium aevum only came to exist in the fifteenth century with the efforts of the periodization of the Latin language. The division of history in different periods came even later in the second half of the seventeenth century. The modern understanding of the term Middle Ages is extremely confused. Usually, this term is applied to the period of a thousand years from the fifth to the fifteenth century. I use this definition for the sake of convenience.

8 See also Aron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, Jana Howlett, ed., (Chicago, 1992). For recent criticism on Gurevich’s historiography, see Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz, Moderne Konturen historischer Anthropologie: eine vergleichende Studien zu den Arbeiten von Jacques Le Goff und Aaron J. Gurjewitsch? (Frankfurt am Main, 1994); Jan Pomorski, W poszukiwaniu antropologicznego wymiaru historii, Aron Guriewicz i Carlo Ginzburg: interpretacje (Lublin, 1998); Nancy Mason Bradbury, “Popular-Festive Forms and Beliefs in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne,” in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, Thomas J. Farrell, ed., (Gainesville, FL, 1995), 158-79, at 159, 161-63, 177–78. Bradbury recommends Gurevich’s work as “an important corrective” to methodological problems in Rabelais and His World. Gurevich’s criticism of Marxist historiography may be usefully contextualized by Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London, 1992).

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Several years ago a famous Italian historian, Massimo Montanari, published an interesting book, The Culture of Food, in which he openly refuses to operate with the concept of the Middle Ages.9 According to him, ancient history continued well into the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the Middle Ages did not start until the second millennium. Jacques Le Goff supports the view that the Middle Ages started around the third century and continued up until the eighteenth century. Now we have come to the point when political history gives you one definition, socioeconomic another, the history of religion a third one, and so forth . . . When Le Goff insisted that the Middle Ages continued to the eighteenth century, he seemed to stress the fact that in the consciousness of the popular masses the medieval tradition continued to survive up until this point. For example, the belief of French people that touching the king can cure skin diseases continued until 1810. Therefore, the definition of the Middle Ages depends upon your perspective and problematic. Regardless of our attitude, we are bound to use the concept of the Middle Ages, but every historian needs to be clear about what he understands by this concept. I personally believe the Middle Ages continued up until the Reformation. However, I am much less concerned with this concept than the concept of feudalism. As you know, I wrote my first book about this subject, Problems in the Origins of Feudalism.10 In the conclusion I admitted that “I don’t know what feudalism is, and I am unable to give its definition.” Back then I was criticized by my communist colleagues as anti-Marxist, cosmopolite, and all the rest that goes along with it. One of my critics even stood up at a meeting and said, “What is this outrage? Gurevich wrote an entire book on feudalism only to say in the end that he doesn’t know what it is?!” So what? I studied feudalism thirty more years and I am even less capable of giving a definition than ever, because in order to define the subject one needs to cut its hands and feet and, probably, the head as well! Thus, in 2002 I even published an article in my journal, Odysseus, with an intentionally provocative title: “Feudalism and the Middle Ages: Problems of Definition.”11 Around ten years ago, Susan 9

Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food, Carl Ipsen, trans., (Oxford, 1994). Gurevich, Problemy genezisa feodalizma v Zapadnoi Evrope, cited above in note 3. 11 Aron Gurevich, “Feodalism i sredniie veka: problemy opredeleniia” [“Feudalism and the Middle Ages: Problems of Definition”], Odissei [Odysseus] (2002), 261– 94. 10

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Reynolds published an important monograph devoted to this problem. Its merit consists in reexamining the concept of feudalism.12 Of course, fiefs, lords, and knights existed, but the term feudalism only came into use at the end of the seventeenth century and only in the writings of lawyers concerned with land rights and legislation. From French lawyers this concept migrated to English economists and French philosophers of the Enlightenment, and then became a matter of fact for centuries. However, we should be extremely careful in using this term. First of all, we should never forget the influence of Marxist theory on the periodization of history. Every time we say feudalism we are speaking in Marxist terms, applying the historical schema “from primitive society to communism.” For, according to Marx, feudalism is nothing but a stage in the development of humanity. Therefore, the concept of feudalism is ideologically charged. Indeed, where do we observe feudalism? It existed only in western and central Europe; to spread this concept to the whole of humanity is a dishonest method. I suggest that we drop this term altogether. It has already happened with the concept of Renaissance, for where did the Renaissance take place? In Italy, in France, maybe in England. Did it happen in China, India, Japan, Georgia, Armenia, and so on? Some historians desperately tried to prove that it did, but their attempts entirely failed. History does not operate according to universal laws and concepts as Marxists tried to make us believe, but follows concrete phenomena that never repeat themselves. All these isms never work and only corrupt historical science. The Middle Ages and feudalism are not equivalent to each other, though. First of all, we cannot talk about the Middle Ages in the non-Christian countries. The Middle Ages are European and Catholic. Also, because of the endless variety of socioeconomic systems that existed in Europe during this time, it is an unforgivable simplification to reduce all of them to feudalism. Slavery, clan society, even tribal elements, continued to exist throughout the Middle Ages in different forms. By the way, slavery reached its most perfected and cruel state in the United States when slaves’ work became the major element of the economic system. The ancient world never knew this level of cruelty or this level of productivity. The same can be said about Russia, where slaves represented the absolute majority of the population. Both American and 12

Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994).

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Russian slave systems fell in the later nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages, free labor played a far greater role than historians previously imagined. In many regions peasants only slightly depended on or were completely independent of the landlords. I believe that it is the variety of coexisting socioeconomic structures that is far more characteristic of the Middle Ages than feudalism. Georges Duby YM: What do you think about the reaction of French historians to your work? AG: When my book Categories of Medieval Culture was translated into French, Georges Duby wrote a preface to it, which was rather positive. However, he reproached me for operating on too broad a scale without taking into account the diversity between the south and north, different regions and time periods. I agree. However, I have only two arguments to defend myself. (1) If I took into consideration the endless variety of medieval culture, the book would have become a collection of fragments, almost a sort of a textbook. I understood well that broad generalizations are acceptable under only one condition: that I don’t intend to write a history of medieval culture, but rather attempt to present, as it sounds better in German, Weltbild, which means the medieval worldview. Georges Duby is one of the greatest medieval historians of the twentieth century, a man of great knowledge. However, he started his work in the 1950s and belongs to this generation of French intellectuals who spent their youth under the influence of Marxism. Marxist reasoning is stronger in Duby’s work than in the work of other historians. Thus, he connects everything with social-economic development. I agree that medieval society was rather a system, where economy, love, religion, and so forth were mixed as connected elements. Therefore historians need to reach some kind of synthetic view of this society, which is very difficult. Duby chose a Marxist strategy as an “organizer” of disparate elements. Also (2), Duby, like many French historians, hardly knows what took place in the domain of philosophical and historical thought on the other side of the Rhine. Unfortunately, the antagonism between French and German historical schools has not outlived itself. This is why he did not even notice that, while criticizing me, he understood, even without ever using it directly, the concept of the ideal type

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created by the great German historian Max Weber. The ideal type represents the summary description of all that took place during the period that the historian is studying. However, the ideal type represents the foundation of historical research, which always needs verification by concrete material. In the process of research, the ideal type inevitably suffers modifications and sometimes might turn out to be altogether irrelevant. What I wrote in my Categories of Medieval Culture is the characterization of the ideal type as understood by Weber and not of the entire medieval culture. The category of time YM: I find your ideas about the category of time the most fascinating part of your book. Did you change your point of view about this concept since Categories of Medieval Culture? AG: No, I didn’t change my attitude toward the category of time. As far as I know, it was Mikhail Bakhtin who first introduced the concept of chronotope or rather chronotopos.13 However, he did not develop this concept in his books, and his examples did not convince me. It seems to me that, since we are talking about the concept of chronotopos, we should choose material that illustrates the close connection between time (chronos) and space (topos). I found such material, for example, in the Songs of the Nibelungen, the epic of the Germanic people. There, the main character, when lost in a different topos, immediately loses all his heroic qualities and is transferred to a different chronos. My analyses of exempla, that is, didactic texts that are very common in medieval literature, also discovered many expressions of chronotopos. In short, the concept of chronotopos offered me an opportunity to work closely with the concepts of time and space in medieval literature. If you wish, one more example of chronotopos, debatable, but interesting. Historical sources repeatedly describe the same curious phenomenon that took place in Italy from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries. When a pope died, the people closest to his environment behaved in the strangest way. As soon as he was dead, everybody abandoned his body, so that he was left alone without care, while in his residence and in town people were struck by panic, some kind of 13 See M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist, ed., Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans., (Austin, 1981), 84-258.

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temporal insanity, and they began to ruin, burn, and rob everything they could. This massive disaster would go on until the moment when a new pope was elected. Similar events took place when leaders other than popes died; sometimes cases of massive panic and destruction were observed after the deaths of English kings as well. After I learned about this phenomenon, I came up with a hypothesis (for a historian can only work with hypotheses—theories are for natural sciences), which I call the “mad hypothesis.” Maybe the world order and duration of time were closely connected in people’s minds with the person of their leader, spiritual or secular. In a sense, this leader incarnated time itself. So his death was like a hole, a breach, in time. Such examples help us to realize that the phenomenon of time itself may be determined not only by natural factors, but also or even rather by social and religious ones. For, in these cases, people did not simply turn into hooligans: they fell into a complete panic, which is a sign of catastrophic mentality. Speaking of the Middle Ages, we have to take into consideration the ever-present expectation of the end of the world. This expectation is called an eschatological mentality. For example, in Italy in the thirteenth century, crowds of flagellants tortured themselves trying to prepare for the imminent end of the world. The eschatological mentality is closely connected to the sense of time. YM: One example of such a mentality in recent Russian history immediately comes to mind . . . My mother told me about it. AG: Oh, I know what you mean. Of course, the latest example of this mentality is the death of Stalin, when people thought that it was the end of the world and the end of time. Stalin’s death proved that the eschatological psychology continued to exist in the Russian people. Therefore, it is wrong to connect this psychology only with the Middle Ages. Indeed, the term medieval is used indiscriminately! Everything that is backward, dark, and reactionary is called “medieval.” However, there are depths of the human consciousness that are far deeper than the Middle Ages. This type of irrationality can be found in tribal society as well as under communism. Evidently, the higher a culture’s education, the more this irrational stratum is controlled. Nevertheless, look what happened to us! A Georgian, hardly speaking Russian, uneducated, and intellectually inferior to the rest of his own group, became an idol of a great nation in spite of this nation’s rather nationalistic tendencies! How could it happen? What made this nation predisposed to this?

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YM: Why did you call your book Categories of Medieval Culture? The title makes one think of Aristotle . . . AG: You are correct. By the way, I’m rather unhappy about the title Categories of Medieval Culture. I should have called my book The Medieval World View, because I was only writing about the fundamentals of culture from its foundation or base without trying to embrace all its variety. The idea of personality YM: In The Origins of European Individualism, you define the concept of personality as the product of Christianity. Did the idea of personality exist in non-Christian cultures? AG: I am more and more inclined to think that the concept of personality or individuality, the way we understand it now, is a product of Christianity. In other cultures, the idea of personality is far less prominent. However, after Jacob Burckhardt, it is often thought that it was the Renaissance that gave birth to the concept of human personality. It is commonly believed that before humanism people identified themselves with a group profession and collectivity. Nonetheless, studies of medieval monuments show the absolute inaccuracy of this! The consciousness of one’s uniqueness existed quite well in the Middle Ages. St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and many others reflected on themselves, on the goal of their existence, sense of life, and so forth . . . Of course, these were the most educated people. On the other hand, studies of ancient Icelandic literature show that individual consciousness could be formed without Christianity, but then we are talking about a very different type of personality; it is, rather, ego, which is preoccupied first of all with glory, personal reputation, honor, and dignity. This type of personality is selfish, aggressive, and self-aggrandizing. The Christian personality is of a completely other nature, deriving from the paradox inherent to Christianity itself: on the one hand, Christianity encourages a deeply personal approach to life because Christians are called to be in a personal, private relationship with God; on the other hand, pride (that is, precisely the cherishing of one’s ego) is considered to be the worst sin, which must be overcome by humility, the most venerated Christian quality. The brightest expression of individual spirit erupts right near the beginning of the Middle Ages—of course, I mean St. Augustine.

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Therefore, I believe that the western European personality is rooted in Christian ethics and religion. We can be ten times the atheists, but we still speak the language of Christian culture. I don’t believe the Marxist thesis that the masses create the history. Who created monuments, manuscripts, and music? Individual geniuses. Of course, there is a censorship of the collectivity, but in the beginning is always an individual talent. Beginning with Petrarch we speak of a new, European type of personality, which is not equivalent to the human being, in general. When you say personality, I immediately ask: “What kind of personality are we talking about? To which time period and which social group does it belong?” Elite versus popular culture YM: Do you believe in the existence of two separate medieval cultures, elite and popular? AG: In the 1980s, Soviet historian Leonid Batkin published an article, “Two Methods in the Definition of Culture,” in the journal Questions of Philosophy.14 One method, incarnated by your humble servant, consists in studying mentalité, which means the historicalanthropological approach. Using this method, we are trying to study recurrent phenomena and to penetrate non-elite levels of consciousness. According to Batkin, there is a second method, which consists in studying the individual achievements of the greatest minds such as Abelard, Eloise, Dante, and Petrarch. Batkin affirms that by studying the achievements of individual geniuses we might be able to penetrate the essence of the culture in which they lived. According to this way of thinking, Leonardo da Vinci’s ideas and deeds would be representative of the culture of his time. Why? I can’t understand this . . . I think Leonardo da Vinci was the extreme limit of human genius! Even if we take somebody like Peter Abelard, we can see that, even if he expressed the general intellectual climate of his time, he was certainly an original thinker. To imagine that his views were shared by, say, French city-dwellers, monks, and knights (without mentioning peasants, who represented eight-tenths of the population) is inappropriate. Abelard never pretended to speak for everyone, for he lit14 See Leonid Mikhailovich Batkin, “Dva sposoba izuchat’ istoriiu kul’tury” [“Two Methods for Studying the History of Culture”], in his Pristrastiia: Izbrannye esse i stat’ i o kul’ture [Pursuits: Selected Essays and Articles about Culture], 2nd ed. (Moscow, 2002), 163-85.

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erally spoke a different language, had a different thought process, and so forth. Finally, not everybody became a father of scholastics, but just him. Am I right? Therefore, I think that such extrapolations “from great minds to the rest of society” appear to me extremely unconvincing. Therefore, the second method of studying culture, although lawful, should not be applied to studies of the rest of the population. We cannot extrapolate the conclusions based on Thomas Aquinas, Abelard, or Nicolas of Cusa to everybody. The other people, who didn’t read because they were illiterate, who did not write chronicles and theological treatises, had their own worldview. YM: Can we ever reach their worldview? AG: I will tell you one interesting episode. There is a book by Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, in which he describes some very interesting incidents.15 For example, he discovered, in the protocols of the north Italian Inquisition around 1600, documents concerning a certain miller, Menocchio, who, since he was literate, read books. To his misfortune, he came upon some pieces of medieval erudition. His library didn’t represent any system. Therefore, he understood this literature as he could—with his peasant, uneducated intellect—and created his own philosophy, based on his disparate readings. He shared his views with so many people that finally the Inquisition became interested in this self-professed, talkative philosopher. They interrogated him and warned that if he continued to spread his views he would get in big trouble. He shut up for a while, but then his extroverted nature took over and he continued not only to philosophize, but also to spread his theological perspective. So, around the year 1600 there were two blazes: one was Giordano Bruno’s and the other this talkative miller’s. For more than four hundred years we have venerated Bruno’s memory while knowing nothing about his unfortunate compatriot Menocchio. This comparison is very instructive—on the one side, the elitist culture, though heretical, for Bruno contested all fundamental principles of creation; on the other side is the peasant miller. Ginzburg discovered, through this story, how a person from a popular milieu understood the information received from theological lit15

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi, trans., (London, 1980).

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erature. In his uneducated mind, this information was dissected, selected, restructured, and, of course, distorted. Out of this process emerged his self-made philosophy. Therefore, it’s not so much this poor Menocchio that we’re interested in, but the mechanism of understanding and transforming the information that took place in minds of other self-made intellectuals from a popular milieu, who accidentally come into contact with high culture. The example of Menocchio shows that there might be a way to penetrate the consciousness of people who are not Peter Abelard or Nicolas of Cusa or even Campanella, but simple people—the plebeians. Therefore, what Batkin called “two methods of studying culture” is only one method, which consists in an attempt to understand the dialectic of culture from its elite to its simpletons, comparing them without mixing. Concerning studies of medieval high culture, there are certainly possibilities of new discoveries, but, in the end, this approach belongs to a well-known category of Ideengeschichte or Geistesgeschichte. That is what historical science studied in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. With all due respect to Ideengeschichte, we have to admit that we have new historical methods, which approach studies of culture differently. Dialogues with Vladimir Bibler: What is the simpleton? YM: Could you tell me about your discussions with Vladimir Bibler? AG: My dialogues with Vladimir Solomonovich Bibler, an extraordinary Moscow philosopher unfortunately yet unknown in the West, and my friend of many years, were very productive.16 I always gave him my articles and manuscripts before publishing them, because I wanted to interact with this extremely talented and attentive man. Although he wasn’t a historian, I was always interested in his commentaries. Sometimes they affected my work and sometimes they did not. YM: I would like to know what you think about his definition of simpleton, the concept you often use in your work. AG: In his famous article concerning the definition and understanding of the concept simpleton, Bibler suggested that the simpleton was to be found not only in an uneducated, illiterate popular milieu, but also in the depth of consciousness of scholars, clerics, and 16

Bibler, “Obraz prosteca i ideia lichnosti v kul’ture srednih vekov,” in Chelovek i kul’tura [Man and Culture], Aron Gurevich, ed., 81-95.

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so forth. I think there is a truth to this, but I have to tell you that his approach didn’t change my ideas on the subject. Of course, from the point of view of divinity, we all, from the pope to the last illiterate man in the God-forgotten corners, are simpletons. No education can help us to get closer to God. Our souls are tiny and naked in front of God and, from the point of view of God (if only we could speak of such a point of view), all souls are equal. So, whether you are a great philosopher or mentally retarded, it makes no difference to God, or, within the tradition of the Orthodox Church, it is even better to be a fool! In his studies of the idea of the simpleton, Bibler discusses some general religious models of a philosophical, not historical, nature. This discussion digresses outside of concrete historical material. Medieval culture is full of paradoxes. From the philosophical point of view, polyphony and unity are mutually exclusive, but in history they coexist very well. For example—if we talk again about the afterlife—when is the human soul judged? Right after death or at the end of time? Medieval sources show that, in the consciousness of common believers, these two judgments coexisted—the individual judgment, otherwise called small eschatology, and the collective judgment, called great eschatology. From the philosophical point of view, this is totally impossible. So what? Human history is not rational; it does not develop according to philosophical principles. Medieval people may seem so strange not to notice these paradoxes, but we shouldn’t be afraid of contradictions. Religious consciousness cannot be without them. I always admitted that the mentality of the lower stratum of society was not entirely separated from the higher. At the same time the mentality of the elite bears traces of popular consciousness. Very often members of the church hierarchy and the educated elite did not belong to this class by birth, simply because this religious elite did not reproduce itself as a result of celibacy. Members of the clergy came from different classes and groups: peasants, townspeople, knights, and so forth. Therefore they bore the genes, you might say, of what Bakhtin called “popular culture.” To what degree the achievement of high culture could reach down below to the consciousness of the illiterate masses is a very complicated question.

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Mikhail Bakhtin YM: It seems to me that in your books and articles one can perceive a constant dialogue with Bakhtin’s ideas. Could you clarify your attitude toward Bakhtin’s work? AG: You see, Bakhtin was a genius, but he wasn’t a historian. Add to this that he had such a tragic life: after years in the Gulag, he was exiled to Saransk, a tiny and deeply provincial town, where he was deprived of access to scholarly literature. He created a fascinating, seducing concept of carnival culture.17 However, he knew neither academic literature nor historical sources on the subject. Later it was proven, for example, that a lot of what Bakhtin attributed to Rabelais was known from the monuments of medieval literature. Anyway, Rabelais was not medieval; he lived in the middle of the sixteenth century! Indeed, Bakhtin did not know the Middle Ages at all, while he fully shared the anti-medieval prejudice of his time, thinking that medieval literature was unworthy of attention. YM: What about Bakhtin’s idea of carnival? AG: He let himself draw conclusions with which it is impossible to agree now. For example, his idea that the carnival is antireligious and anti-official by nature because official culture is fundamentally serious, unable to laugh, based on fear, and “scary and scared,” is totally inaccurate. We know that medieval church culture was not at all foreign to laughter and merriment, and that feasts, processions, and carnivals took place not against the will of the Church, but with its active participation! As a matter of fact, carnival is not a medieval phenomenon either—it simply didn’t exist in the Middle Ages! Carnivals only started at the beginning of the fifteenth century in large, western European cities. It is an entirely urban phenomenon. The second problem with Bakhtin is his evolutionism, which has been the real curse of historical science in general. He traced the carnival to the bacchanalian rituals of ancient Rome. However, it is impossible to establish and prove this connection. Indeed, the similarity between carnival and pagan religious rites of antiquity is very superficial and misleading. It is certain that Bakhtin created the myth of carnival, which seduced everybody. For example, a famous Russian historian, Pinsky, was ecstatic about Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais. Back in 1965, when I was myself under the charisma of Bakhtin’s 17

See M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

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thought, I was asked to write a book review on Rabelais and His World for the journal Questions of Literature. However, when I started to study the material closely, I saw in what ways Bakhtin was wrong.18 You have to understand—Bakhtin’s book had a liberating effect; it used a completely different (from the Marxist) terminology and operated with a new conceptual system. For example, he introduced the concept of carnival as a universal phenomenon. Everybody got excited and started to compare different cultures, forgetting that carnival is exclusively a phenomenon of Christian Europe. This concept cannot be spread to other cultures! Then scholars started to talk about the “carnivalization” of culture, without which, from now on, no culture could be understood. Another concept of Bakhtin’s, that seduced everybody, was ambivalence. Humanities scholars started to see ambivalence everywhere—for example, if you eat soup it is ambivalent to the main dish, which is ambivalent to the dessert! I don’t want to undermine the importance of Bakhtin’s work. I just want to define it. You see, there are books that develop an original concept, which, under closer examination, turn out to be erroneous. However, the original book is far more useful to science than dozens of scholarly works striving to prove that 2 + 2 = 4 and that “Russians like kasha.” Bakhtin brought up the problem of popular culture without caution, without precision, but he forced historians to look at this problem for the first time. This is his primary merit. He influenced the humanities in a far more profound manner than those who spend their lives meticulously proving the obvious. YM: Bakhtin’s notion of people or folk has always made me feel quite uneasy. I intuitively resented it as fictitious, fake . . . What do you think about it? Could it be affected by Lenin’s theory about two cultures? AG: As for the concept of people, understood as a progressive force opposing power and religion, and his idea of sharp opposition between popular and clerical cultures, I don’t think that Bakhtin was directly influenced by Lenin’s theory. However, I can see the basis of such a parallel, for it is true that, in Bakhtin, people or folk become populist abstractions. This concept of folk is, like carnival and ambiv18

Aron Gurevich, “Smekh v narodnoi kul’ture” [“Laughter in Popular Culture”], Voprosy Literatury [Questions of Literature] (1966), 207-13.

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alence, the fruit of his imagination. This “laughing majority” is yet another charming myth. Also, we must remember that worshipping simple people, the folk, was proper to Russian intelligentsia well before Bakhtin (Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, for example) and that this folk-loving tradition must have influenced him. YM: What about the idea of an independent popular medieval culture? AG: Bakhtin spoke of the popular culture of the Middle Ages without any knowledge of it. Nowadays I’m not even inclined to use the concept of popular culture at all, but rather of two strata of medieval culture—high and low—which not only stand in opposition to each other, but also intermingle and interact. I don’t think there were two medieval cultures, but only one; and I believe that popular culture should not be represented as autonomous. Second, I gradually came to the conclusion that the idea of popular culture itself is very dubious. The cultural elite was not estranged from popular culture, and elements of high culture penetrated the illiterate masses. This clerical elite of the Catholic Church that Bakhtin opposed to medieval “merry folk,” where in reality did it come from? Because of celibacy, this elite did not reproduce itself, but absorbed the best, the most talented representatives of all social classes, including the lowest. These people brought with them elements of their original culture. Therefore, I am trying to avoid using the term popular culture. YM: To what extent, in your opinion, were Bakhtin’s ideas about the medieval world influenced by his personal experience? AG: It is important to keep in mind that Bakhtin wrote his book in specific social conditions, and I think that the basis of his extremely dark image of the medieval clergy and religion is rather to be found in the darkness and horror of his own time, of Stalinist oppression and despotism. Notwithstanding, when I was mature enough to debate all this with him, he had already died. I never saw him alive, only dead, at the funeral. I could have visited him, but I was too intimidated and shy. Now I bitterly regret it. YM: I could not help noticing that while talking about the Middle Ages, when the whole of life was centered on religion, Bakhtin never uses the words piety, prayer, religiosity, faith, and so on. Do you think that this reflects his personal beliefs? AG: Judging from his funeral, Bakhtin was an Orthodox Christian. However, Bakhtin’s book of 600 pages doesn’t even contain the word God. A book about medieval culture without any mention of God!

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How could he manage?! I understand, of course, that it doesn’t mean he was an atheist. It might simply mean that he wrote the book under censorship, but it is, I agree, striking. By showing official culture as exclusively dark and inhuman, he definitely misrepresented it. YM: I have found, through my personal experience, that it is still almost unacceptable to doubt publicly Bakhtin’s ideas in the West . . . AG: Criticizing Bakhtin in Russia remains a risky business. A long time ago I presented a paper in which I cautiously criticized Bakhtin’s theory. After the presentation, I was surrounded by well-wishing, excited ladies, who politely let me know which points of my criticism of an authority such as Bakhtin were improper. By now, everything that Bakhtin has ever said is considered as an absolute and divine truth, for according to the old Orthodox habit, he has been already included within the sacrosanct system of national idols, in spite of the fact that he never provided any justification for it. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the names Bakhtin and Gurevich makes me feel uncomfortable. YM: To what degree, in your opinion, were Bakhtin’s views affected by the Marxist climate of his time? AG: I do not think that Marxism played a big role in Bakhtin’s theory. Of course, in the 1920s he could not avoid the Marxist school of thought and its overwhelming influence, but I doubt any serious Marxist influence on his theory of two cultures. Be that as it may, his ideas of dialogue, dialogic culture, as well as chronotope are far more important than his concepts of carnival and folk culture. Static versus dynamic: Disagreements with Jacques Le Goff YM: Some critics perceive you as just a faithful follower of the Annales school and particularly of Jacques Le Goff. However, I find that your views often differ from the opinions of the French historian. Could you elaborate on this? AG: Yes, if you wish, although I consider Le Goff a far more significant historian than your humble servant. I worship him. Anyway, there is one aspect of the popular stratum of culture that interests me in particular. In my book Problems of Medieval Popular Culture, I wrote that one of the characteristics of popular culture is, in general, its stability or, in other words, its lack of flexibility and resistance to change. This does not mean absolute stagnation, but popular culture

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changes extremely slowly, not at a revolutionary, but at an evolutionary pace. In order to trace these changes we need to observe immense periods of time. Very often, medieval historians discover that a phenomenon observable, for example, in the 1200s is still present during the Renaissance and even in modern times. One must take into account this “stickiness,” viscosity, and immobility of popular mentality. Why do I insist on it? By definition, historical science studies the changes that take place in human society. We compare, therefore, what was with what it became, and how what it became is different from what it was. History is focused on change. A scholar of medieval culture discovers that, together with dynamism, medieval culture displays a static tendency to hang on to tradition, a resistance to change. I would put it this way: high culture is dynamic while low culture is static. You might know the famous book by Jean Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound, about the greyhound Guinefort . . . ?19 YM: I saw the film! AG: It’s a real story that happened to Etienne de Bourbon, a Dominican monk, around the year 1260, when he discovered in one French village people worshipping a greyhound as a saint. The legend says that this greyhound, whose name was Guinefort, belonged to the local lord. Guinefort was alone with his master’s baby son when a snake or some kind of monster attacked the baby. Guinefort defended the baby and killed the monster. When the lord came back, he saw the baby lying on the floor, fallen from his cradle, and Guinefort covered in blood. The lord, thinking that Guinefort attacked the child, killed the dog. Sure enough, he quickly realized that he killed the dog unjustly and that, in reality, Guinefort saved his son. The repentant master built the dog a splendid grave. However, for the local peasants, Guinefort became the protector of babies, whom they implored when their babies were ill or in danger. Etienne de Bourbon, terrified by this cult of an animal worshipped as a saint, forbade this worship and destroyed Guinefort’s grave. The most interesting thing is that a French historian in the 1870s, that is, seven hundred years later, went to the same village where peasants told him the same story of Saint Guinefort. This kind of extreme superstition persisted in spite of everything and shows to what extent historical development at a low stratum of society continues along different temporal param19

Jean Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1983).

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eters from high culture. In high culture you have science, art, philosophy, while in the low, you have Saint Guinefort! Therefore, we have a problem: the static and dynamic aspects of historical development. Thus, we have to pay attention not only to changes, but also to the absence of them. Continuing about static and dynamic . . . ten years ago in Germany, a dissertation was published on the subject of historical anthropology. The author noticed differences in the treatment of this subject between Le Goff and myself. Le Goff stresses dynamic elements, while I insist on static. For example, Le Goff explained that in the thirteenth century one can observe the movement of values “from the skies to the earth,” in his expression. That is, people’s attention was not concentrated exclusively on God anymore, but shifted to earthly business: the development of cities, manufacturing, crafts, et cetera. This is true, but it seems to me that he exaggerated the speed of this process a little bit. Of course, secularization did take place, but to what extent this process touched all levels of society is a question open to debate. It is necessary to underscore that most of the beliefs, customs, traditions, and family relations remained unchanged for centuries. I insist on it, because I think that historians, as a rule, underestimate this parameter. Do you know why? Because at the foundation of European historical science lies the assumption, not always appropriate, but taken as a given, that the foundation of the historical process is evolution and progress, the evolutionism that I mentioned earlier. For example, Bakhtin, while talking about an inherently mobile nature of popular culture, never realized the contradiction in his argument. If popular culture had existed, according to him, since almost pre-historical times, before finally making its way into literature through Rabelais, it means that for the two thousand preceding years popular culture remained static! I don’t want to develop this question, but I think that the sooner historians renounce any given ideas and assumptions, the sooner they will make new discoveries. YM: I also remember reading your criticism of Le Goff in Miri Rubin’s compilation of articles for his seventy-fifth-year anniversary . . .20 AG: Ah, you have read it, too? You have a lot of questions and they are all interesting. 20

Gurevich, “Annales in Moscow,” in The Work of Jacques Le Goff, 239-48.

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YM: Thank you. I love your work. AG: Yes, I also criticized Le Goff ’s work The Birth of Purgatory right after its publication.21 Le Goff is a wonderful historian; I admire him. However, even he cannot free himself from Marxist simplifications. In his book he wrote that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we observe the beginning of a new European consciousness, a different attitude toward the world, time, and knowledge. Le Goff connects the appearance of purgatorium to this new consciousness. The world after life, of eternity and timelessness, penetrates time because purgatorium is hell, for a while, which can even be reduced by prayers, indulgences, and so forth. Le Goff argues that changes in social life and the appearance of the middle class led to the appearance of purgatorium, the middle state. This is nothing but typical, albeit refined, Marxist evaluation: changes in the base lead to changes in the superstructure. However, there is no proof that purgatory did not exist before. The noun purgatory didn’t exist, but already in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries we have visions of hell where some sinners suffer forever, but some mild sinners can eventually be liberated after purging in hell. It is true that it was not called purgatorium, but ignis purgatorii. This means that, much earlier, Christians formed an idea, or rather, a hope that even sinners after long, unbearable suffering will finally be forgiven. Also, the idea of a lower and higher hell existed from the beginning. Furthermore, eastern Christianity never developed the idea of purgatory. So maybe it is not very wise to connect the idea of purgatory with the rise of the middle class in cities. Perhaps we should pay attention to the fact that religious ideas could be formed not only on an exclusively material basis, but by the world of emotions, fears, and previous religious beliefs. Maybe, when we study the history of religion, we should not address exclusively material and social factors. AG: You want more disagreements? YM: Yes, please. AG: There are some other disagreements with the Annales school. First of all, we have to understand that historical anthropology developed almost exclusively on French material. I look at Europe from 21 Jacques Le Goff , The Birth of Purgatory, Arthur Goldhammer, trans., (Chicago, 1984); discussed by Gurevich, “Annales in Moscow,” in The Work of Jacques Le Goff, 245-47.

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the outside, plus I am a specialist in Scandinavia, mostly Norway and Iceland. I know the medieval world of the North, which French historians disregarded. With their typical disdain toward anything north of France, they found no interest in those over there sitting in the cold and wilderness, frozen into the ice! Well, they have the Gulf Stream, but why would the French care? However, the pre-Christian North is very fascinating, because since Christianity reached the North of Europe much later, pagan beliefs persisted longer. In Scandinavia, we find many literary documents written in all these ancient languages that allow us to understand the worldview of these people. We don’t have this luxury in Roman Europe, because Latin was the written language of the official culture, while nothing remained of the language spoken by people who did not know Latin. Scandinavian sources are a real laboratory wherein I can try experiments Le Goff can’t even dream about. These sources allow us, through the language, to penetrate the mysteries of people’s consciousness. So on one side, I have the suffering of Russian history, and on the other, my Scandinavian preparation. However, Le Goff is my mentor and I share most of his ideas. He is the most talented historian of the school of Annales, to which I belong as well, except that they live in Paris and I in this quite different, cold place. Culture or civilization? YM: What is the difference between the terms culture and civilization? AG: The word civilization has replaced the word culture in France. I personally use the concept culture, although not in the traditional sense of the word. By traditional I imply the meaning attributed to the word culture in the nineteenth century. I use this concept in the anthropological sense. Half a century ago, the book The Definition of Culture was published, which gave several definitions of culture borrowed from anthropological research.22 There are dozens of definitions of culture. However, regardless of this multitude of definitions, the anthropological definition of culture is the most coherent. By culture, anthropology understands the world picture and behavioral practices of small and large groups of individuals that contain all the

22 Gurevich refers to two books by Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960), American anthropologist: Configurations of Culture Growth (Berkeley, 1944); and The Nature of Culture (Chicago, 1952).

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major components of life: wealth, space, time, sex, mythology, family, warfare, et cetera. Therefore, I understand culture as a world model. YM: Could you define the concept of mentality? AG: There is also the concept of mentalité that first appeared in works of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.23 In my opinion, this concept of mentalité is very close to the concept of culture discussed above. French medievalists of the school of historical anthropology worked on the concept of mentality. Mentality is not an individual thought. It is a system of beliefs incarnated in the acts and language of the culture that are shared by a group or a civilization. It is a cultural vocabulary, or rather, language. One can ask a person, “What are your religious and political views?” and he or she will answer something; but try to ask anyone about his mentality—nobody is able to answer. Mentality is one aspect of culture. All people have a mentality, even if they are not conscious of it. In this respect we all resemble Mr. Jourdain from Moliere’s Bourgeois gentilhomme, who was astonished to find out that he spoke prose all his life without knowing it. Mentality is the language of culture that only representatives of this particular culture can master. However, I always fear definitions. That is, in the last judgment, I would say, “My Lord, I don’t know what culture is, mentality, or civilization, and I’m not going to tire you with a list of all the things I don’t know! Forgive me.” However, I can say that the lack of exact definitions cannot prevent us from historical phenomena, and if my studies and observations look persuasive and provoke interest, I think I have succeeded. For what is a definition? To define means to limit, to cut from the subject anything which is not the subject. What is outside of mentality? Everything is mentality. What is outside of culture? Everything is culture, so the absence of definition doesn’t bother me. The lack of exact definitions is unacceptable in physics, mathematics, and chemistry, but an obsession with definitions in the humanities can be as dangerous as an absence of them in the natural sciences. Therefore we should not be afraid of contradictions and lack of clarity. However, I am very cautious with the term civilization. Not because I deny the existence of civilizations, but because in Russia this concept took a different meaning. The concept of civilization came into use in the 1980s. Its appearance seems 23 Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, The Birth of Annales History: The Letters of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Henri Pirenne (1921-1935), ed. Bryce Lyon and Mary Lyon (Brussels, 1991).

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to be caused by the post-communist desire to avoid traditional Marxist definitions such as “the method of production of material goods” or “social formation.” The concept, civilization, appears to be non-ideological, but it is difficult to define. Marx clearly explained what he understood under the method of production. However, when I started to read my colleagues’ research on civilization, I started to suspect them, and I think, not without foundation, that they simply replaced Marxist terminology with this vague word civilization so as not to appear as narrow-minded, old-school Marxist historians. I believe they failed to demonstrate how the concept of civilization differs from the Marxist concepts of social formation and so forth . . . It appears to me that, by using the term civilization, they did not abandon the Marxist concept of basis and superstructure. Rather, for them, civilization became a sort of combination of base and superstructure. Our Institute of Universal History even has a research group devoted to their studies of civilization. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure what they busy themselves with: they did not produce any work of importance on the subject. The concept of culture is much more productive, because it offers an opportunity to reexamine the basic parameters of historical knowledge. YM: What do you think about the development of historical science? AG: I believe that since the 1960s historical science has evolved so much that it represents a different historical science now. This new historical science wants to study people who lived before us as if from inside. It’s a new approach, which leads to a new understanding of the Middle Ages. For example, how can we understand what the people in the Middle Ages thought about the afterlife? One might say, “Well, open Dante and find out,” but Dante was an extraordinary genius, almost an extreme expression of human genius, and it is apparent that his description of the afterlife is deeply personal and poetic. It cannot be taken as representative of medieval mentality. We cannot judge what simple people thought about the afterlife based on Dante’s masterpiece. However, there are other writings, with absolutely no artistic value, that can reveal the ideas of the average person regarding the afterlife. These documents are called visiones, or reports, written by people who thought that they had traveled through hell and purgatory. Before, nobody was interested in these kinds of texts, but the new historical science puts new accents, offers a different view of the past, brings up new questions, and these new questions demand

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a nontraditional source and/or a broader understanding of sources. In the light of all that I’ve said above, I am more comfortable with the concept of culture than the concept of civilization. Mark though, that the question of culture and civilization is rather scholastic. I am using the concepts that work for me and give me the opportunity to work with concrete material. If I succeed, the victors are never judged! If I’m wrong, then we will have to talk about it in a different way. The spectrum of Christianization in Europe YM: Some historians question the decisive role of Christianity in Europe, affirming that its impact on the popular masses was significantly lower than we used to think . . . AG: I believe that the process of Christianization differed greatly in different parts of Europe. For example, I would not compare Christianity in the West with Christianity in Russia. First, Christianity in the West started much earlier (from the first century a.d.). Second, Christianity in the West took varied forms. For example, the philosophical transformation of Christian dogma that allows us to talk about the philosophical Christianity of the elite is a phenomenon totally absent from the Christianity of the East. I don’t want to talk about Eastern Europe because it’s not my specialization. Fifteen or twenty years ago, French historians questioned the entire concept of the Christianization of Europe. Some scholars went so far as to say that this Christianization is a myth. They argued that Christianity penetrated only the high elite, philosophical minds, but never reached the large masses, which remained predominantly pagan. According to this point of view, the Christianization of the masses only started with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation—that is, Protestantism—because then the Bible became available for individual studies and reading. Only from the sixteenth century on did both Protestant and Catholic clergy start to pay close attention to the spiritual education of the masses, organizing Christian Sunday schools, church schools, starting to print books, and so forth. That is, only from this point on did Christianity reach all God-forgotten places. I, personally, totally disagree with this point of view. Which Christianity are these scholars talking about? There are at least three phases of the Christianization of Europe. First is early Christianity, which was the religion of the absolute minority, a small sect. The next phase is a massive Christianization that took a thousand years. Naturally, by

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becoming a religion of the masses, Christianity loses a lot. Of course, Christianity remains pure and faithful to its origins for the absolute minority of Christians: mystics, saints, hermits, and deep believers. What can we say about the simpleton and uneducated peasant? This is what I am interested in. In order to understand the level of Christian consciousness in common people, I studied Libri penitentiales from the early centuries until the thirteenth. It’s a very interesting source because these books list sins and their penances. The very existence of such books shows that between the Christian ideal preached by the Church and reality a gap existed that the Church tried to bridge. It is difficult to say to what degree the Church succeeded in bridging this gap. However, I do not think that ordinary people were just pagans out of whom the Church was trying to make Christians. Rather, in every new generation, the Church felt obliged to continue its religious education or reeducation. Here we are dealing with a different kind of Christianity than the one in the first century following Jesus. Then, after medieval Christianity, the Reformation with Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli is, again, a different kind of Christianity that I would call rationalized. It is true that, with time, religious feeling seems to fade away, but we cannot deny that Christianity continues to exist within the modern world. To what degree this modern Christianity is capable of motivating people’s behavior is another question. Now we are living in the third stage of Christianity, which we have a hard time quantifying or qualifying because we belong to it. Medieval Christianity is a separate phenomenon that cannot be examined from the standpoint of either the first centuries or modern times. I believe that these medieval people, including those living in the most remote corners, were indeed Christians. They knew the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria, went to liturgies, made their confessions and performed deep penance. At the same time, they committed actions that clearly have nothing to do with Christianity—idolatry, witchcraft, magic, and so forth. Why? How was that possible? First, let’s ask ourselves, what is a saint? According to the Church, a saint is a God-chosen person whose whole life is devoted to the search for God. However, common people understood the saints quite differently. God is powerful, but he is far from people, whereas here in their own region there is a holy man. He is considered holy because he is capable of doing miracles—curing children from disease, preventing draught, and so forth. People address themselves to

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him when they have a toothache, when they lose their loved ones, when they are scared, that is, when he can help them. At the same time, being the people’s saint was quite a dangerous business, because saints were not only venerated, but also suspected, because in the popular consciousness they could cause not only beneficii, but also maleficii. This means that, under the thin layer of Christianity, we have a thick mass of what the Church considered superstition. The fact that the Church was fighting these superstitions throughout medieval history shows that its success in the struggle was extremely relative. Witch-hunt YM: In your book on popular culture, I read that the witch-hunt was not characteristic of the early Middle Ages. Why do you think it developed later? AG: The witch-hunt is not characteristic of the early Middle Ages. Only starting from the second part of the thirteenth century and continuing into the fourteenth century we observe the persecution of heretics and sorcerers, and then from the fourteenth century on, these persecutions dramatically increased. What is a witch? The notion of a person endowed with supernatural power is universal. Witches are found in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. They are both venerated and suspected. When the suspicion overpowers the veneration, the tribe simply gets rid of this person—by suffocation, drowning, cannibalism, or exile. In medieval Europe, however, we see quite an interesting phenomenon, unfortunately little known: common people continue to believe in witches while the Church forbids them to, explaining that no woman can be so powerful as to induce fortunes and misfortunes. Thus, it is common people, not the Church, who accused women of evil deeds and brought them to local religious authorities, who, on the contrary, told them that they were wrong, mistaken, that the accused women were not evil creatures capable of committing acts of supernatural malice. Later on, the situation totally reversed itself, for the Church started to believe popular complaints concerning witchcraft, gradually taking upon itself the role of judge and prosecutor. However, witch-judges were not interested in whether these men or women were actually guilty of the malificii of which they were accused. They were interested in whether the accused had a relationship with the devil.

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Consequentially, the Church took the initiative in witch-hunting and developed the idea of the anti-Church, headed by Satan himself, regularly assembling his servants on the Sabbath, forcing them into a sexual relationship with him in order to serve him by corrupting the maximum number of Christian souls. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, Europe became an arena of massive witch-hunting. YM: Why did it happen? AG: I have a personal hypothesis about this change in the Church’s attitude toward witchcraft, but I am not sure about it. It is commonly believed that cultural and religious values are always created by the elite, and then in vulgarized, popularized versions they slowly reach other strata of society. Marx said “an idea becomes a material force when it conquers the masses.” It is accurate. Sometimes we can even prove that this process of vulgarization actually took place. However, there is and always has been another, opposite movement, from the lower to the higher stratum. I believe that, in the case of witchcraft, the Catholic Church actually gave in to the pressure of the populace and not vice versa. It would mean that the Christian elite was somehow connected to the masses and even subject to their influence. YM: In the West it is commonly thought that witch-hunting was mainly caused by misogyny. Do you agree with this point of view? AG: In the 1950s and 60s there was a French researcher, Robert Mandrou, who analyzed documentation on the witch-hunt.24 His research showed the complexity and controversial character of this phenomenon. We commonly think that the witch-hunt consisted of accusing some unfortunate people, mostly young girls, of being witches, torturing, and then exterminating them. Yet in France, as well as in Spain, there were recurrent cases when women denounced themselves by declaring that they had sexual relationships with Satan and with demons. Here, we are dealing with an odd psychological 24

Robert Mandrou (1921-1984), a disciple of Lucien Febvre, worked for the journal Annales, économies, sociétés, civilisations (1954-1962); he together with Georges Duby invented the concept of the history of mentalities. Mandrou’s books include, among others, Histoire de la civilisation française in collaboration with Georges Duby, 2 vols. (Paris, 1958; 3rd ed., 1964); Introduction à la France moderne, 1500– 1640: essai de psychologie historique (Paris, 1961; rev. ed., 1998); De la culture populaire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1964; 3rd ed., 1985); Classes et lutes de classes en France début de XVIIe siècle (Messina, 1965); La France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1967; 6th ed., 1997); Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1968); Les Fugger, propriétaires fonciers en Souabe, 1560-1618 (Paris, 1969); Possession et sorcellerie au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1979).

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phenomenon. A young girl, no different from any other young girl in her village, suddenly accuses herself of being the devil’s servant. For example, in Sixteenth-century Spain, there were scandalous incidences when the central organization of the Spanish Inquisition had to investigate a group of young girls who accused themselves of having regular intercourse with the devil. The Inquisition found out, with the help of physicians, that these girls were virgins and had falsely accused themselves. They were released. (Can you even imagine that the same thing could happen under Stalin? Under Stalinist repression people were subject to such tortures that they falsely admitted the most absurd accusations, but nobody was ever acquitted.) Here, nobody accused these girls, but they indicted themselves! There were also cases when these self-denounced witches were burned and rehabilitated postmortem, which is always easier. So, you see that this phenomenon is complex and diverse. For example, everywhere in Europe, those accused of witchcraft were tortured, except in Great Britain, because in Great Britain jurisprudence was different, and, in general, the British are the British. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, that is, in modern times, when witchcraft was at its peak, a whole new type of literature came into existence. This literature was written by learned men who developed a theory as to why it is necessary to suspect women of witchcraft, how to detect them, and what to do with them. It is at this time that the terrible book Malleus malefi carum, which means “hammer against witches,” came into being. In some cases we can clearly see that witchcraft was an expression of misogyny. In some cases there were villages and towns in which, after such a “hunting season,” the number of women dropped drastically because they were either exterminated or ran away. It is true that the majority of victims were women, but, in some regions, the percentage of men was very high. Misogyny YM: Recently feminist perspectives have become extremely popular; a lot of literature has been written . . . What is your attitude toward this new development? AG: Well, even if misogyny is partly responsible for witch-hunting in Europe, I must tell you that all this feminist literature the West is so obsessed with inspires in me a great deal of reservation. I understand that the history of people is the history of men and women, but

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when the attention is focused on only one group of people, it leads to inaccurate conclusions, useful only for today’s fashion, but not for a true understanding of history. I, personally, doubt that a matriarchy ever existed. It is a nineteenth-century theory that was never proven. Everything is relative. The Icelandic sagas, for example, show that women played an impressive role in Nordic societies, not only in a domestic capacity, but as the guardians of male honor. Oftentimes, these women were the ones who forced their husbands to react in a dutiful manner to insults or to seek revenge. In the fourteenth century, all of Scandinavia was governed by Queen Margaret, while in the rest of Europe female rulers were nonexistent. I also would not say simply that in the Middle Ages women were oppressed. I would say that the attitude toward women was paradoxical: on the one hand, women were never as idealized as in chivalrous culture; on the other hand, they were socially oppressed. YM: It is sometimes thought and taught that it was Christianity that led to the oppression of women in Europe. Do you agree with such statements? AG: Actually, I think it’s incorrect; never were women as elevated as in the cult of the Virgin Mary. She was actually worshipped even more than her son. For example, in the thirteenth century, women in one small Italian town worshipped the local statue of the Virgin. Once, they noticed that the face and hand of the statue were covered in perspiration. They wiped the statue, but sweat appeared again and again. Everybody was puzzled as to why the statue was sweating; then one scholar explained it in the following way. Jesus Christ became so irritated by the enormity of human sins that he ordered his angels to announce the end of the world. The angels already trumpeted once and then his mother started to beg him not to do it. Between the divine son and his mother a struggle began, but she wouldn’t give up. At the moment she was fighting to save humanity, she perspired and the believers witnessed it. That’s the story, and there are a lot of medieval legends like this. For example, another legend says that the Virgin Mary would not allow a criminal to hang, even if the criminal was condemned justly for a horrible crime, because the Virgin Mary doesn’t represent justice, but rather mercy. If the divine son is merciful yet also just, his mother bears unconditional love. I think that this cult, by itself, brings a light to the Christian attitude toward women

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and children. Also, among saints, one quarter are women, and some of these holy women were extremely powerful. Evidently, we can repeat endlessly that life in the Middle Ages was dominated by men. It is a given reality. However, studying women as a different category does not attract me (maybe I’m a misogynist myself ) . . . The only positive thing I see in this feminist development is that the new documents and new resources dealing directly or indirectly with women are now brought to light, and this is productive. In general, a historian can register certain phenomena, ask a certain question, but before this phase, he needs to choose his sources. All these three phases— choosing the sources, asking the questions, and registering facts—can be done well; however, after these three phases, the historian must explain his f ndings, and that is when major diffi culties occur. Unfortunately, it often happens that an explanation comes not from the material itself, but from the historian’s ideology. It is necessary to understand the difference between explanation and understanding, erklären and verstehen in German. There is a big temptation in the humanities to use a model taken from the natural sciences, because in the natural sciences there is always a cause and effect. This is what Marxism is—social physics. For example, Marxism says that the stronger the pressure on the working masses, the stronger the masses’ resistance against it, leading to uprisings and revolutions. Yet, historical reality doesn’t correspond to this model at all! Erklären (to explain) works with positivistic models, while verstehen (to understand) implies a deeper penetration into the essence of the phenomenon. What is understanding? It’s an attempt to penetrate the consciousness of a people who lived in a different time, based on their own criteria. The idea of fatum AG: Do you have more questions still? Really? So, what else do you want to ask? YM: Do you think predestination is more of a Christian or pagan idea? AG: This idea existed in all levels of society, although it is not Christian, for the concept of fatality is very easy to understand, even for the illiterate. I think people are naturally inclined toward this idea. That’s why in all human societies there is fortune-telling, proph-

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esies, and so forth . . . However, I discovered that the idea of destiny, or fate, expresses itself very differently in Latin and Germanic Europe. In the Germanic world, destiny is not just fatality, but a force formed, at least partially, by the individual himself. For example, in one of the sagas, the Lay of Atli, the main female character, Gudrun, in the last moments of her life, kills her sons and feeds their flesh (I can’t tell you whether it was a kebob or stroganoff ) to her husband, Atli (the Scandinavian epos can win world records in macabre details!). What does it mean? She nourishes her own destiny. This is an active position in life, which I did not find in the Romance languages. Recently, I expressed a hypothesis on this subject. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation prevailed in every Germanic country and nowhere in Latin Europe. Maybe the answer lies in their attitudes toward destiny—more passive in the Roman world and more active in the Germanic? The afterlife YM: Why do you think modern Christians, unlike their predecessors, all seem to believe that they safely go to paradise after death? You hear it over and over again in the United States this confidence: “Grandpa went to God, or aunty is with the Lord now.” How do you explain this shift? AG: Around twenty years ago, there was a book published in the United States called Reflections on Life after Life by Raymond A. Moody. In this book, an American physician describes the experiences of his patients during clinical deaths.25 In all these descriptions of experiences, the soul would leave the body, see the light at the end of the tunnel, through which they would see their deceased friends and relatives, and then come back to their bodies. I became interested in this book because, in the Middle Ages a special genre existed called visiones that recount how people would die temporarily and then come back to tell what they saw. Interestingly enough, while twentieth-century American souls all had exclusively positive visions of the afterlife, medieval souls reported quite the opposite: that the majority of people were in hell, and only a very small minority was saved. No medieval “witness” ever traveled to paradise. Isn’t it remarkable that none of the American witnesses reported any visions 25

Raymond A. Moody, Jr., Reflections on Life after Life (Boston, 1978).

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of hell? I think that this positive, exclusively pleasant and comforting vision of the afterlife is just part of a modern worldview preoccupied first of all with comfort in every aspect of life. Look, in modern American civilization, all efforts are directed toward eliminating suffering, pain, crisis, and loss. Everything is taken care of, everything is planned in advance and invested in: you have a bank account, a little house, a retirement plan, medical insurance, anesthesia, et cetera. All is well, except one little problem—death. So, they wonder how they can have a free and guaranteed ticket to paradise as well. They cannot deal with discomfort or pain, so death becomes a kind of family reunion. This Moody, either he is a complete fool or a charlatan. I think you can be religious, but to mix religious belief with science is unacceptable. Autobiography YM: Please, tell me about yourself. AG: I was born in Moscow. My mother was born in Nerchinsk, a small town in the far east of Russia, to a secular Jewish family. The end of the nineteenth century was not only the time of the peasant colonization of Siberia, but also a time when business-minded people, merchants of Jewish origin, moved to Siberia, where they assimilated with the Russian population and lost their connection to the Jewish ghettos and communities. My mother is a good example of this assimilation, for she knew no Yiddish and practiced no religion. My father died when I was a year and a half old, so I cannot say anything about him. Therefore, I am from a Russian-Jewish Moscow family. YM: How did you become interested in history? AG: During my last years in high school, I visited several engineering schools during open-house days and quickly understood that machinery and mechanisms did not particularly excite me. However, my love for history was still a childish hobby. I started university during the Second World War—I was not drafted due to my weak eyes. Albeit, I was mobilized to work in a military factory, and for the first two years I studied via correspondence. I started reading on my own. Some studies, especially by the historian Petrushevsky, impressed me, and I started to acquire a real passion for historical studies. Except when I was twenty years old, I became interested in the history of the Bolshevik party, for I wanted to understand the origin of Stalin’s dic-

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tatorship. Very soon I came to my senses and realized the total impossibility of studying the subject. At this particular moment, I received the best advice ever given to me. I was told that, no matter what my field is, I should study with Professor Alexander Neusykhin, who was a medievalist. Soon after, I fell in love with the Middle Ages. He and his collaborators taught me how to work seriously. Then I gradually understood that Russian historical science, as it was taught, had outlived itself. Nevertheless, I was extremely lucky as I still had the chance to study with scholars of the prerevolutionary historical schooling. They kept to the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, and I believe that their refined manners influenced me even more than their ideas. I always intuitively liked to hang out with old people who still kept the treasure of the old Russian intelligentsia untouched. But, sooner or later, I understood that an exclusively Marxist approach to history led to a dead end. Coming to this conclusion, I found myself alone and with lots of troubles. YM: Did you ever experience anti-Semitism from the Soviet regime? AG: Of course, I did, how could I not? Evidently, my problems were doubled as I was a Jew. When I was four years old, I went to a private day care on Vozdvigenka Street in Moscow. One day my mother was told that one of the mothers found out that I was Jewish and could not allow her child to go to the same day care. So my mom had to put me in another day care. When I graduated from the university, a famous historian, Kosminsky, recommended me for graduate school. I had straight A’s. I was accepted, but the next day a government decree concerning all Jews was announced. AntiSemitism had been the state policy since 1943, and it was 1947. All Jewish graduate students were excluded. For nine months, I fought my way back to graduate school, and due to some unexplainable luck, I won—the only Jewish graduate student who was accepted back! I defended my thesis in 1950. Normally, I should have had a teaching position in academia, but there was none for me. I couldn’t find any job, even as a high school teacher. At the last moment, I found a position as a history professor in Kaliningrad (Tver’) State Pedagogical University, where I taught from 1950 to 1966. My family remained in Moscow, and I came to visit them on the weekends. This pedagogical university was atrociously provincial, and I served my sentence there for sixteen years! However, it was there that I started to study and learn Scandinavian languages and finished my postdoctoral dissertation that

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I defended in 1966. So I left when I was twenty-six and returned when I was forty-three. I spent my best years in dirty trains and, excuse me, a putrid dormitory at the pedagogical university where, in the beginning, I, a professor with a Ph.D., didn’t even have my own room, but only a bed in a big room with other students. Add to this that the chancellor of the university was incessantly looking for a way to fire me for the same “good” reason, but he didn’t succeed, because I’m a damn lucky fellow! In 1966 I was invited to teach at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, but, already in 1970, they fired me from the same institute for the same reason. Obviously, nobody called me “Dirty Yid,” but believe me, it wasn’t necessary. It was understood. I will spare you the colorful details, although, as the saying goes, both God and the devil are precisely in the details. Anyway, from 1970 on I began teaching at the Institute of World History. However, I was not allowed to travel abroad, despite the fact that I was invited everywhere. I only crossed the border of my beloved homeland after Gorbachev’s Perestroika. I traveled all over Europe, Australia, and North America. I was assailed with invitations. For me it was a culture shock—I had lived in a world in which even the thought of traveling abroad was impossible, so I did not even question or regret it. I read about Italy, Paris, and so forth, but to imagine that these places actually existed and could be walked on, touched, and smelled, that I could work at their universities’ libraries, present papers at conferences, and meet foreign colleagues was inconceivable! I only started to travel abroad when I was sixty-four, the age when normal, self-respecting people usually retire. At my present age all the people I respect, except Leo Tolstoy and Goethe, had already died.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY1 ARON IA. GUREVICH 1950s • Krestianstvo iugo-zapadnoi Anglii v donormanskii period (Problema obrazovaniia klassa feodal’no zavisimykh krest’ian v Uessekse v VII-nachale XI vv.) [The Peasantry of South-Western England in the Pre-Norman Period: the Problem of the Creation of a Class of Feudal-Dependent Peasants in Wessex from the 7th to the beginning of the 11th centuries]. Dissertation. Moscow, 1950. • “Bol’shaya sem’ia v severo-zapadnoi Norvegii v rannem sredenvekov’e,” Srednie veka [“Large Families in North-Western Norway in Early Middle Ages,” Middle Ages], 8 (1956): 70-96. • “Aus der Wirtschaftsgeschichte einer oströmischen Stadt,” Bibliotheca classica orientalis, I, 1 (1956): 17-18. • “Angliiskoe krestiansvo X-nachalo XI vekov,” Srednie Veka, [“The English Peasantry in the 10th-beginning of the 11th centuries,” Middle Ages], 9 (1957): 69-131. • “Vozniknovenie klassovogo obshchestva u drevnikh germantsev i slavian,” in Prepodavanie istorii v shkole [“The Emergence of Social Classes among Ancient Germanic and Slavic Tribes” in Teaching History in Secondary School], (co-author with Yu.V. Bromlei), 4 (1957): 31-40. • “Norvezhhskaia obshchina v raneee srednevekov’e,” Srednie Veka [“The Norwegian Community in the Early Middle Ages,” Middle Ages] 11 (1958): 5-27. • “Nekotorye spornye voprosy sotsial’no-ekonomicheskogo razvitiia srednevekovoi Norvegii,” Voprosy Istorii, [“Some Contentious Issues Concerning SocialEconomic Development of Medieval Norway,” Problems of History], 2 (1959): 113-131. • “Osnovnye etapy sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi istorii norvezhskogo krestianstva v 13-17 vekakh,” Srednie Veka [“Principal Stages in the Social-Economic History of the Norwegian Peasantry in the 13th-17th centuries,” Middle Ages, 16 (1959): 49-76. • “Problemy sotsial’noi bor’by v Norvegii vo vtoroi polovine XII - nachale XIII vekov v norvezhskoi istoriografii,” Srednie Veka [“Problems in Norwegian Historiography of the Social Struggle in Norway during the Second Half of the 12th-early 13th Centuries,” Middle Ages], 14 (1959): 132-153. 1960s • “Nekotorye voprosy sotsial’no-ekonomicheskogo razvitiia Norvegii v svete dannykh arkheologii i toponimiki,” Sovetskaia Arkheologiia [“Some Questions Concerning the Social-Economic Development of Norway in Light of Archeology and Toponimics,” Soviet Archeology), 4 (1960): 218-233.

1

The editors have attempted to include every major book and article by Gurevich as well as the major translations of his works into other languages.

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• “Osnovnye problemy istorii srednevekovoi Norvegii v norvezhskoi istoriografii,” Srednie Veka [“Major Issues of the History of Medieval Norway in Norwegian Historiography,” Middle Ages], 18 (1960): 163-192. • “Norvezhskie bondy v XI-XII vekakh,” Srednie Veka [“Norwegian Bonds in 11th-12th centuries,” Middle Ages], 24 (1963): 24-54. • “Norvezhskie leylendingi v Х-ХI vekakh,” Skandinavskii Sbornik [“Norwegian Lailandings in the 10th-11th centuries,” The Scandinavian Review, 7 (1963): 7-43. • “Norvezhskie bondy v XI-XII vekakh,” Srednie Veka [“Norwegian Bonds in 11th-12th centuries,” The Middle Ages], 26 (1964): 3-26. • “Die freien Bauern im mittelalterlichen Norwegen,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Universität Greifswald, 14 (1965): 237-243. • “Geschichte und Sozialpsychologie,” Sowjetwissenschaft: Gesellschafts-wissenschaftliche Beiträge, 3 (1965): 323-336. • “Niektóre aspekty badania historii spolecznei,” Zeszyty teoretyczno-polityczne, 1 (1965): 70-81. • “Datskie burgi i pokhody vikingov,” Voprosy Istorii [“Danish Burgs and the Viking Conquests,” Problems of History], 1 (1966): 215-218. • Pokhody vikingov [The Viking Conquests], (Moscow, 1966). • “Skandinavskie strany v XI-XV vekakh,” in Istoriia Srednikh Vekov. [“The Scandinavian Countries in the 11-15th centuries,” in History of the Middle Ages], textbook for college students, vol.1. ed. S.D Skazkin, (Moscow, 1966), 422-237; second edition, 1977, 334-345. • “Allgemeines Gesetz und konkrete Gesetzmässigkeit in der Geschichte,” Sowjetwissenschaft: Gesellschafts-wissenschaftliche Beiträge, 2 (1966): 177-193. • “Smekh v narodnoi kul’ture srednevekov’ia” (review of M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World ), Voprosy Literatury [“Laughter in Medieval Popular Culture,” Problems of Literature], 1966, 6: 207-213. • “Nachalo epokhi vikingov,” Skandinavskii Sbornik, [“Beginnings of Viking Era, The Scandinavian Review], 12 (1967): 128-148 • “Dejiny a schéma,” Kultúrny zivot, Bratislava, 35, (1967):10. • “Bogatstvo i darenie u skandinavov v rannem srednevekovie,” Srednie veka [“Wealth and Gift-Bestowal among the Ancient Scandinavians,” Middle Ages], 31 (1968): 180-198. • “Individ i obshchestvo v varvarskikh gosudarstvakh,” in Problemy istorii dokapitalistichiskikh obshchestv [“Individual and Society in the Barbaric States,” in Problems of History in Pre-capitalist Societies], Book 1, (Moscow, 1968), 384-424. • “Problema zemel’noi sobstvennosti v dofeodal’nykh i rannefeodal’nykh obshchestvakh,” Voprosy Istorii [“The Problem of Landownership in Pre-Feudal and Early Feudal Societies,” Problems of History], 4 (1968): 88-105 • “Wealth and Gift-Bestowal among the Ancient Scandinavians,” Scandinavica, 7 (1968): 126-138. • “Vremia kak problema istorii kul’tury,” Voprosy Filosofii [“Time as a Problem in the History of Culture,” Problems of Philosophy] 3 (1969): 105-116. • “Istoriia i sotsial’nayaia psikhologiia: istochnikovedcheskii aspekt,” Istochnikovedenie. Teoreticheskie i metodologicheskie problemy [“History and Social Psychology: Problems of Sources,” Studies of Sources, Theoretical and Methodological Problems] (Moscow, 1969), 384-426. • “Chto takoe istoricheskii fakt?” in Istochnikovedenie. Teoreticheskiie i metodologicheskie problemy [“What Is a Historical Fact?” in Studies of Sources, Theoretical and Methodological Problems] (Moscow, 1969), 59-88. • “Il tempo como problema di storia della cultura,” Rassegna sovietica, XX, 3 (1969): 1-17.

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• “Space and Time in the Weltmodell of the Old Scandinavian Peoples,” Mediaeval Scandinavia, 2 (1969): 42-53. • “Was ist die Zeit?” Kunst und Literatur, 5 (1969): 489-509. 1970s • Problemy genezisa feodalizma v zapadnoi Evrope [Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe] (Moscow, 1970). • “Predstavleniia o vremeni v srednevekovoi Evrope,” in Istoriia i Psikhologia [“Concepts of Time in Medieval Europe,” in History and Psychology] (Moscow, 1971), 159-198. • “Saga and History. The Historical Conception of Snorri Sturluson,” Mediaeval Scandinavia, 4 (1971): 42-53. • Istoriia i saga [History and Saga], (Moscow, 1972). • Kategorii srednevekovoi kul’tury [Categories of Medieval Culture] (Moscow, 1972). • “Représentation et attitudes à l’égard de la propriété pendant le Haut Moyen Age,” Annales, 27, 3 (1972): 523-547, • “Makrokosmos i mikrokosmos,” Historyka, 3 (1972): 23-51. • “K istolkovaniiu Pesni o Rige,” Skandinavskii Sbornik [“On Understanding the Song about Riga,” The Scandinavian Review] (1973): 159-174. • “Narodnaia kul’tura rannego srednevekov’ia v zerkale ‘pokoiannykh knig’,” Srednie Veka [“Popular Culture of the Early Middle Ages in the Mirror of ‘Penance Books’,” Middle Ages], 37 (1973): 28-54. • “Iazyk istoricheskogo istochnika i sotsial’naia destvitel’nost’: bilinguizm v srednevekovoi Evrope,” in Sbornik statei po vtorichnym modeliruushchim sistemam [“The Language of Historical Sources and Social Reality,” in Collected Papers on the Secondary Modeling Systems]. Ed. Iurii Lotman, (Tartu, 1973), 7375. • “La concezione del tempo nell’ Europa medievale,” Rassegna sovietica, XXIV, 3 (1973): 43-80. • “Edda and Law. Commentary upon Hyndloliod,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi, 88 (1973): 72-84. • “Tripartitio Christiana—tripartitio Scandinavica,” Kwartalnik historyczny, 3 (1973): 547-567. • “Razvitie feodal’nykh otnoshenii i ikh osobennosti,” in Istoriia Shvetsii [“The Development of Feudal Relations and Their Particularities,” in History of Sweden] (Moscow, 1974), 83-105. • A középkori ember vilаgképe, (Budapest, 1974). • “Iz istorii narodnoi kul’tury i eresi, lzheproroki i tserkov’ vo frankskom gosudarstve,” Srednie Veka [“From the History of Popular Culture and Heresies: False Prophets and the Church in the Frankish State,” Middle Ages], 38 (1975): 159-185. • “K istorii groteska: verkh i niz v srednevekovoi latinskoi literature” [“Regarding the History of Grotesque: high and low in Medieval Latin Literature,”] Academy of Science, Literature and Language Series, 34, 3(Moscow, 1975): 317-327. • Srednevekovy geroicheskii epos germanskikh narodov, [Medieval Heroic Epos of Germanic Peoples: Beowolf. The Older Edda. The Song of Nebelungen] Preface, comments, ed. (Moscow, 1975), 5-26, 707-749. • “Le comique et le sérieux dans la litérature religieuse de Moyen Âge,” Diogène, 90 (1975): 67-89. • “Le temps comme probleme d’histoire culturelle,” Les cultures et les temps, (Paris, 1975): 257-276.

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• “Skandinavskie strany v XII—XV vekakh,” in Istoriia srednikh vekov [“Scandinavian Countries in 12-15th centuries,” in History of the Middle Ages] ed. S. P. Karpov, 1, (Moscow, 1997): 456-467. • “La sintesi storica,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica, 2 (1997): 47-73. • “Chelovecheskoe dostoinstvo i sotsial’naya struktura: Opyt prochteniya dvukh islandsikh sag,” [“Human Dignity and Social Sructure: Experience Reading Two Islandic Sagas”] Odyssei, (1998): 5-30. • “Kul’tura srednevekov’iia i istorik kontsa XX veka,” in Istoriia Mirovoi Kul’tury: Nasledie Zapada [“Medieval Culture and Historian of the End of the 20th Century,” in The History of World Culture: the Western Tradition], (Moscow, 1998): 210-318. • Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Jacques Le Goff, Lucien Fevbre, Le Roy Ladurie, Annales School, in Kultorologia XX vek [articles in Cultorology of the 20th Century, Encyclopedia], (St. Petersburg: 1998), co-author with D.E. Kharitonovich, accordingly: vol. 1: 80-81, vol. 1: 392-393; vol 1: 400; vol 2: 287; vol 2: 359. • “Teoriia formatzii i real’nost’ istorii,” in Kul’tura i obshchestvo i srednie veka-ranee novoe vremia [“Theory of Formations and Reality of History, in Culture and Society in the Medieval-Early Modern Periods] Collection of Essays, (Moscow, 1998): 10-33. • “A Gift Awaits an Answer. A Page from the Cultural History of Society,” in Festschrift in Honor of Janos Bak, (Budapest, 1999): 333-339. • “Srednevekovy kupets,” in Gorod v srednevekovoi tsivilizatsii zapadnoi Evropy [“The Medieval Merchant,” in The City in Medieval Western Eurupean Civilization], (Moscow, 1999), vol. 2: 46-79. • “Bakhtin en zijn theorie over het carnaval,” in Homo Ridens. Humor van de oudheid tot heden, ed. J.Bremmer & H.Roodenburg (Amsterdam, 1999): 71-?. • Izbrannye trudy. 2 vols. 1: Drevnie germantsi. Vikingi; 2: Srednevekovy mir [Selected Essays. 1: Ancient Germans. Vikings; 2: The Medieval World] (Moscow-St. Petersburg, 1999). • “Individu,” in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’Occident medieval, ed. J.Le Goff, J.-C. Schmitt, (Paris, 1999): 512-522. • “La doble responsabilidad del historiiador,” Diógène, 168 (1999): 61-77. • “Istoriia mental’nostei i sotsial’naya istoriia,” Vestnik rossiiskogo gumanitarnogo nauchnogo fonda [“History of Mentalities and Social History,” Bulletin of the Russian Humanities Foundation], 3 (1999): 94-101. • Individas viduramziu Europoje, (Vilnius, 1999). • “Menschliche Würde und soziale Struktur. Versuch der Interpretation zweier isländischer Sagas,” Mediaevistik, 12 (1999): 229-256. 2000s • “Istoriia kul’tury: beschislennye poteri i upushchennye vozmozhnosti,” [“Cultural History: Innumerable Losses and Lost Possibilites”], Odyssei, (2000): 53-57. • “Skandinavistika i medievistika,” [“Scandinavian and Medieval Studies”], Odyssei, (2001): 94-103. • “K ponimaniiu istorii kak nauki o cheloveke,” in Istoricheskaia nauka na rubezhe vekhov [“Towards an Understanding of History as a Science about Man,” in Historical Science at the Turn of the Century] (Moscow, 2001): 165-174. • Jednostka w dziejach Europy (sredniowiecze), ed. Zdzislaw Dobrzyniecki (Gdansk, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Marabut, Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2002). • “Srednevekov’ie kak tip’ kul’tury,” in Antropologia kul’tury [“Middle Ages as a Type of Culture,” in Cultural Anthropology], 1 (2002): 39-55.

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• “’Feodal’noe Srednevekov’ie’: chto eto takoe? Razmyshleniia medievista na grani vekov” [“Feudal Middle Ages: What are they? Thoughts of a Medievalist at the Turn of the Century”], Odyssei, (2002): 261-293. • Slovar’ sredenvekovoi kul’tury [Dictionary of Medieval Culture], (Moscow, 2003), editor, preface and the following articles: “Ved’ma” [“The Witch”]: 62-66; “Vikingi” [Vikings]: 73-78; “Vremya” [Time]: 96-100; “Dary: Obmen Darami”[Gifts: Offerings and Exchange of Presents]: 129-134; “Detstvo” [“Childhood”]: 139-143; “Krestiane” [Peasants]: 239-247; “Kuptsy” [Merchants]: 247-253; “Lichnost’” [Personality]: 260-270; “Mikrokosm i Makrokosm” [Microcosm and Macrocosm]: 281-282; “Pir” [Banquet]: 359-360; “Potustoronnui Mir” [Afterlife]: 376-380; “Pravo” [Law]: 381-386; “Prikhod tserkovny” [Church Parish], 393-394; “Propoved’” [Preaching]: 394-397; “Pytka” [Torture]: 400-404; “Rostovshchik” [Moneylander]: 413-415; “Smert’” [Death]: 493-496; “Strashnii Sud” [The Last Judgment]: 505-508; “Sudebnye presledovania zhivotnykh” [Trials of Animals]: 508-511; “Sud’ba” [Destiny]: 511-515; “Saga” (together with E.A. Gurevich): 438-446; “Exemplum: 594-597. • Az individuum a középkorban, (Budapest, 2003). • “’Vremia vyvikhnulos’’: poruganie umershego pravitelia” [“Time Dislocated: the Desecration of the Dead Ruler”], Odyssei, (2003): 221-241. • “Konets Sveta ili Karnaval? Otvet Boitsova” [The End of the World or Carnival? The Answer to Boitsov”], Odyssei, (2003): 250-255. • “Kommentarii ochevidtsa,” [The Witness’ Account], Odyssei, (2003): 297-302. • “Chelovecheskaya lichnost’ v srednevekovoi Evrope: real’naia ili lozhnaia problema?” Razvitie Lichnosti [“Human Personality in Medieval Europe: A Real or False Problem?” Development of Personality], (2003): 1: 24-31; 2: 29-40. • A Síntese Histórica e a Escola dos Anais, (Sao Paulo, 2003). • Introduction, “Historians and the Arts—an Interdisciplinary Dialogue” in Images in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Approaches in Russian Historical Research, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, Svetlana I. Luchitskaya, Judith Rasson (Medium Aevum Quotidianum. Sonderband XIII) (Krems, 2003): 9-12 (in co-authorship with Svetlana I. Luchitskaya). • Istoriia istorika [The History of an Historian], (Moscow, 2004). • “Gumanitarnoe znanie … ne dolzhno boiat’sya neyasnostei i paradoksov” [Humanitarian knowledge … let’s not be afraid of the lack of clarity and pardox”], Arbis Mundi, (2004): 11: 201-219. • “On Concepts, History and Autobiography: An Interview,” (publ. Yelena Mazour-Matusevich), The Medieval History Journal, 7, 2 (2004): 169-197. • Individul оn Evul Mediu European, (Iasi, 2004) (in Rumanian). • “Prorochestvo v Proshlom” [“Prophesy in the Past”], Odyssei, (2004): 398-403. • “Sergei Sergeevich Averintsev (1937-2004),” Odyssei, (2004): 143. • “Medieval European Individuality,” in World Public Forum “Dialogue of civilizations,” Bulletin 2, (2004): 1: 105-114. • “Nachalo srednevekov’ia” in Kul’ura Mira [“Early Middle Ages,” in World Culture, (an enclyclopedia for children)], (Moscow, 2004): 367-393. • “Srednevekovaia kartina mira,” in Kul’ura Mira [“Medieval World Picture,” in World Culture (an encyclopedia for children)], (Moscow, 2004): 393-45. • Pokhody vikingov [The Viking Conquests], (Moscow, 2005). Second edition. • “Writing Medieval History: An Interview (Yelena Mazour-Matusevich),” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35, 1 (2005): 121-157. • “Istorik u verstaka,” Interview, Otechestvennye Zapiski [“Historian at the Workbanch,” in Fatherland Notes] 5 (2004): 100-114.

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• “O prisvoenii proshlogo. Otkrytoe pis’mo L.T. Mil’skoi,” Srednie Veka [“About the Appropriationof the Past: An Open Letter to L.T. Mil’skaya,” The Middle Ages], 66 (2005): 408-414. • “Dialektika sud’by u drevnikh germantsev i drevnikh skandinavov,” in Mifologema zhenshchiny—sud’by u drevnikh kel’tov i germantsev [“Dialectics of Destiny among Ancient German and Scandinavian Tribes,” in Mythology of Woman: Destiny Among Celtic and Germanic Peoples], (Moscow, 2005): 12-22. • “Pozitsiia vnenakhodimosti,” [“Position of Outsideness”], Odyssei, (2005): 122130. • “Istoriia—neskonchaemy spor,” in Medievistika i Skandinavistika: stat’i raznyh let, [“Hisory—the Endless Debate” in Medieval and Scandinavian Studies: Articles from various years], (Moscow, 2005). • “Istoriia v chelovecheskom izmerenii (Razmyshlenia medievista),” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie [“Human Dimension of History (Reflections of a Medievalist),” New Literary Review], 75 (2005): 38-63. • Izbrannye trudy: Kul’tura srednevekovoi Evropy [Selected Works: the Culture of Medieval Europe] (St. Petersburg, 2006). • “Feudalism pred sudom istorikov, ili o srednevekovoi krestyanskoi tsivilizatsii,” [“Feudalism Before the Judgment of Historians, or About Medieval Peasant Civilization”], Odyssei, (2006): 11-49. • “A propos des interprétations de la Rígsþula,” Proxima Thulé, 5 (2006): 73-89. • Izbrannye trudy: krestianstvo srednevekovoi Norvegii [Selected Works: the Norwegian Medieval Peasantry], (St. Petersburg, 2006). • Historikova historie, (Praha, 2007). • “Dvoiakaia otvetstvennost’ istorika,” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’ [“The Double Responsibility of the Historian,” in Social Sciences and Modernity], 3 (2007): 74-84. • Contributor, Kul’turologia, Encyclopedia, ed. S. Ia. Levit, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2007): “Marc Bloch” (together with D.Ya. Kharitonovich), 1: 230-231; “Georges Duby” (together with D.Ya. Kharitonovich), 1: 613-615; “Jacques Le Goff” (together with D.Ya. Kharitonovich), 1: 1134-1136; “Smert’” [Death] (together with D.Ya. Kharitonovich), 2: 494-495; “Srednevekovie” [Middle Ages], 2: 569-575; “Lucien Febvre” (together with D.Ya. Kharitonovich), 2: 788-789. • “Dialog sovremennosti s proshlym, Kategorii srednevekovoi kul’tury 35 spustia” [“The Dialogue of Modernity with the Past: Categories of Medieval Culture 35 Years After”], Odyssei, (2007): 5-18. • “Grekhopadenie moskovskikh medievistov: diskussia 1949 i ego posledstviya,” [“The Fall of the Moscow Medievalists: the Discussion of 1949 and Its Consequences”], Odyssei, (2007): 341-349.

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contributors

377

CONTRIBUTORS János M. Bak, a medieval historian, is Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) and Central European University (Budapest). Peter Burke was Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, until his retirement and he remains a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Andrew Cowell is Professor of French and Italian, as well as Professor of Linguistics, at the University of Colorado. His two areas of research are medieval literature and culture, and Native American traditional literature and culture. In both areas, he focuses on applying anthropological approaches to literary genres such as epics and traditional oral narratives. Jean-Pierre Delville is Professor of History of the Christianity at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). He is a specialist in history of Biblical exegesis in the 15th and 16th centuries. His interests extend to the history and the interpretation of Christian thinking and Christian practices in the late middle ages. Charles J. Halperin is the author of Russia and the Golden Horde (1985) and The Tatar Yoke (1986). He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Russian and East European Institute of Indiana University (Bloomington). Thomas M. Izbicki was recently a librarian and adjunct associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is now a Humanities Librarian at the Alexander Library, Rutgers University. His publications focus on Pope Pius II, Nicholas of Cusa and Juan de Torquemada. His recent publications include: Reform, Ecclesiology and the Christian Life in the Late Middle Ages (2008) [collected articles 1998-2006]; Nicholas of Cusa, Writings on Church and Reform (2008). Alexandra S. Korros, co-editor, is Professor of History at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a specialist in late Russian imperial institutional history and most recently the author of A Reluctant

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Parliament: Stolypin, Nationalism and the Politics of the Russian Imperial State Council, 1906-1911 (2002). She is also Aron Gurevich’s first cousin. Eve Levin is Professor of History at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, specializing in pre-modern Russian and Balkan history. Her major publications include Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs (1989). She is currently preparing a monograph on the experience of illness in 16th to 18th century Russia, examining folk therapies. Since 1997, she has been the editor-in-chief of The Russian Review. Svetlana Luchitskaya is a member of the Department of Historical Anthropology, Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She is particularly interested in the history of the Crusades. Roger D. Markwick is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, School of Humanities and Social Science, The University of Newcastle, Australia. His Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography in the Soviet Union, 1956-1974 (2001) won the Alexander Nove Prize in Russian, Soviet, and PostSoviet Studies for 2001. He is currently writing a book on “Women, War and the Stalinist State, 1941-45.” Yelena Mazour-Matusevich is Associate Professor of French at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Her major publications include Le siècle d’or de la mystique française: de Jean Gerson (1363-1429) à Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (1450?-1536) (2004) and many articles, seven of which are devoted to the work of Aron Gurevich. Harbans Mukhia is Professor of Medieval History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, now retired. Editor, The Medieval History Journal. Eva Österberg, distinguished professor of History, Lund University, Sweden has been the vice president of Committee International des Sciences Historiques (CISH) and is a member of several academic associations and academies in the Scandinavian countries as well as in Academia Europeae. She has published numerous works on cultural, social and women´s history, including Crime and Social Control in Medieval and Early Modern Swedish Towns ( with Dag Lindström,

contributors

379

1988), Mentalities and Other Realities (1991), Folk förr: historiska essäer ( 1995), People Meet the Law ( with Sölvi Sogner, 2000). She has also edited three volumes on the cultural history of violence, with Marie Lindstedt Cronberg, Våldets mening: Makt, minne, myt (2004), Kvinnor och våld: En mångtydig kulturhistoria (2005), Våld—representation och verklighet (2006). Her recent book is about friendship in discourses and practices in Europe from the antiquity until today, Vänskap—en lång historia (2007). Michael Richter is professor of history at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He is a specialist in the history of medieval Ireland. Boris Stepanov is senior lecturer and Chair of the history and theory of culture, Russian State University for the Humanities and senior research fellow, Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities of the State University Higher School of Economics. One the main themes of his research is the history of Russian historical theory and historiography of the Middle ages. He is the author of several articles on historical methodology and theory of history of such noted Russian historians as Lev Karsavin, Ivan Grevs, Aron Gurevich, Leonid Batkin. Now his scientific interests are concerning intellectual communities and social and cultural contexts of historical knowledge, particularly, contemporary Russian historical periodicals. Yuri Zaretsky is Professor of History at the State University— Higher School of Economics whose work centers on the history of self-narrations in medieval and early modern Europe and on the theory of history. He is the author of Renessansnaia avtobiografiia i samosoznanie lichnosti: Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pius II) [Renaissance Autobiography and Individual Self-awareness: Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pius II)] (2000); Avtobiograficheskie Ja: ot Avgustina do Avvakuma [Autobiographical Selves: From Saint Augustine to Protopope Avvakum] (2002) and editor of two collections of texts: Srednevekovaia Avtobiografiia [Medieval European Autobiography] and Drevnerusskaia avtobiografiia [Old Russian Autobiography] (both to be published in 2008). He has written numerous articles on Western European Medieval and Renaissance autobiographical writings, Old Russian autobiographical writings, history of subjectivity, and recent developments in the theory of history and historiography.

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names index

381

NAMES INDEX Abelard, Peter 303, 338-340 Adalberon of Laon 281 Afana’sev, Iurii 65 Agrippa, Menenio 280 Aleksei Mikhailovich, Tsar 125, 127, 132 Alighieri, Dante, see Dante Amalrik, Andrei 26 Ambrose, Saint 195 Anselm, Saint 206, 208 Aquinas, Thomas 235-236, 339 Afanasii, Archbishop of Kholmogory 115 Ariés, Philippe 72, 75, 312 Artsybashev 90 Augustine, Saint 137, 257, 262, 195, 215, 337 Augustodunensis, Honorius 279 Averintsev, Sergei: 248-249, 252, 264265, 268-269, 271 Avrekh, A. Ia. 23 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 4, 5-6, 10, 54, 56-57, 62-63, 66, 69-71, 75, 77, 79, 176-177, 247-275, 278-279, 307, 314, 327, 329331, 335, 341-345, 347 Barg, M. A. 20, 63-65 Batkin, Leonid 313-316, 318, 338, 340, 271 Bayless, Martha 251 Beard, Charles 70 Beard, M. 70 Beliavskii, M. T. 33 Benton, John 303, 319 Beowulf 177-179 Bernard of Siena 285 Bernard, Saint 195-196, 262, 267, 337 Berthold of Regensburg 277, 313 Bessmertny, Iu. L. 2-3, 20, 34, 63, 313, 326 Bibler, Vladimir 3-4, 254, 340-341 Bingen, Hildegarde de 204 Bitsilli, Petr 305 Bledsoe, Sean 328 Bloch, Marc 14, 60-61, 70, 72-73, 76, 78-80, 350 Bourbon, Etienne de 346-347 Bonaparte, Napoleon 331

Bonaventure, Saint 192, 198-202, 206, 223 Bonetskaia, N.K. 249 Bradbury, Nancy Mason: 250-251, 255, 331 Braudel, Fernand 60, 64-65, 69-70, 72-73, 75, 78-79 Brezhnev 12, 41-42, 46, 51, 56, 63, 65, 67 Bruno, Giordano 339 Burckhardt, Jacob 70, 301-306, 309, 314, 318, 337 Burke, Peter 7, 267 Bynum, Caroline 237, 304 Campanella, Thomas 340 Camus, Albert 257 Caulibus, Johannes de 192, 206 Chaunu, Pierre 72, 75 Chenu, Marie-Dominique 302-303, 319 Chermenski, E. D. 23 Chistozvonov, A. N. 20 Claire d’Assise (Claire of Assisi), Sainte 197 Collins, Dr. Samuel 117, 125-126 Cornillon, Julienne de 203 Cusa, Nicolas of 233, 339-340 Cyrène, Simon de 194, 206-207 Daniel, Iulii 15 Danilov, Alexander I. 19-21, 28, 30, 6364, 328 Danilov, Viktor 44 Danilova, L. V. 20, 63 Danilovich, Sergei 33-34 Dante 338, 352 Davis, Natalie Zemon 304 Delumeau, Jean 71, 270 Delville, Jean-Pierre 9 Deschanes, Eustache 299 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 271, 344 Duby, Georges 3-5, 60, 72-74, 76-77, 79, 250, 308, 334, 350 Ehrenburg, Ilya 15 Eliade, Mircea 253-256, 258-259, 263, 268, 273-274

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names index

Emerson, Caryl 270 Engels, Friedrich 18, 33, 54, 306 Engelstein, Laura 57 Eugenius IV, Pope 227, 232-233 Evil’merodag 284 Febvre, Lucien 53, 60-61, 69-70, 72-74, 77-78, 350 Fedor Ivanovich, Tsar 88, 100, 124, 130, 132 Fedotov, Georges 247, 254, 265 Filometer 284 François d’Assise (Francis of Asissi), Saint 195-200, 218, 226 Frederick II 283 Freud, Sigmund 43, 48, 261 Freyre, Gilberto 70, 79 Fuger, Etienne 282 Gachev, Georgii 248 Gargantua 279 Gefter, Mikhail 44-45, 50, 59, 66 George, Michael 251 Geremek, Bronislav 60 Gerson, Jean 225, 266 Ginzburg, Carlo 339 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 362 Gorbachev, Mikhail 36, 362 Grevs, Ivan 305 Groote, Gérard: 214 Gurevich, Fira 10, 13-14, 24, 27, 29, 38-39 Gurevich, Lena 13-14, 16, 38-39 Gutnova, E. V. 20 Gutnova, Evgenia 328 Habsburg, Rudolph 296 Hackeborn, Mechtilde de 204 Halphen, Louis 72 Hamilton, Mark 328 Harpham, Geoffrey 254 Helfta, Gertrude de 204 Hirschkop, Ken 271 Honemann, Volker 289 Hugo of Saint-Victor 282, 286-287 Innocent III 278 Isabella of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy 229 Isidor of Seville 281 Iurganov, Andrei L. 80 Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), Tsar 9, 13, 24, 81-103 Ivanov, A.T. 247

Jacopo di Cessolis 283-285, 287-289, 291-292, 296, 298 John of Salisbury 280-281 John of Wales 278, 289, 293 Kan, Alexander 24, 29, 34 Kareev, Nikolai 54, 305 Karsavin, Lev 55, 305 Kavelin, Konstantin 305 Kazhdan, Alexander 24 Keenan, Edward 24-25 Kharitonovich, D. E. 39 Khrushchev, Nikita 15, 17, 23 41-42, 44-46, 51, 56, 67, 306 Kivelson, Valerie 133 Kliuchevskii, V.O. 48, 54 Kon, I.S. 47, 49 Korelin, Mikhail 305 Kosminsky, E.A. 361 Kovalevsky, Maxim 305 Kristeva, Julia 8, 329 Kurbskii, Andrei 25 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 3, 308 Le Goff, Jacques 3-5, 7, 60-62, 73-79, 250, 253, 262, 308, 312, 317, 320, 328, 332, 345, 347-349 Lenin, V. I. 17, 23, 44-46, 54, 59, 343 Leont’ev, Aleksei 47, 49 Lescot, Jean 219 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 53, 182, 253 Likhachev, Dmitri 70, 82, 248, 306-307 Linetski, Vadim 247 Liublinskaia, A.D. 55 Livak, B.G. 47 Lock, Charles 249 Lotman, Yuri 4, 57-58, 66, 71, 307, 329 Louis XII, King of France 230 Ludolphe le Chartreux 192, 208-211, 214, 224-225 Lur’e, Iakov S. 82-83, 85, 95, 101 Luria, Aleksander 47-49, 70 Maillard, 216-217, 224 Makhlin, Vitaly 248 Malinowski, Bronislaw 53, 71 Mal’tsev, Semen Elizarev syn 84, 96 Mandelstam, Osip 255 Mandrou, Robert 72, 74, 78, 350, 355 Margaret, Queen of Denmark 357 Marie-Madeleine 202, 216, 222 Marlowe, Christopher 185

names index Marx, Karl 18, 21, 33, 53-54, 59, 64, 333, 355 Mauss, Marcel 53, 71, 182 Mendel, Arthur 17-18 Meyerson, Ignace 48 Michelet, Jules 271, 301, 303 Mikhail Fedorovich, Tsar 132 Mikhailovskii, N.K. 48 Miliukov, Paul 305 Moliere, Jean-Baptiste 350 Molotov, Vyacheslav 23 Moody, Raymond A 359-360 Montanari, Massimo 332 More, Sir Thomas 259 Morris, Collin 303, 319 Moser, Dietz-Rüdiger 71, 251-253, 255, 273 Mukhia, Harbans 328 Nebuchadnezzar 284 Neretina, Svetlana 327-328 Neusykhin, A. I. 19-20, 54-55, 328, 361 Nietzsche, Friedrich 260, 263, 268 Novosil’tsev, I. P. 85-86, 93, 96-99 Ouy, Gilbert 256 Parygin, B.D. 46-47, 49 Patlagean, Evelyne 77 Patriarch Nikon 111 Paul, Saint 194-195, 280-281 Pekarchik, Stanislav 60 Porter, Roy 304 Peter I, the Great, tsar 120, 122-124, 129, 131 Petrarch, Francesco 338 Petrushevsky, Ilya Pavlovich 361 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy 227, 229-230 Pinsky, Anatoly 342 Pisemskii, F. A. 84-86, 90, 93, 96-97, 100 Plekhanov, George 47, 305 Plisetskaya, Ma’ ia 13, 26 Porshnev, Boris 45-47, 50, 66 Presniakov, A. Ia. 44, 54 Propp, Vladimir, 70, 79, 329 Putin, Vladimir 327 Rabelais, Francois 56, 63, 71, 248, 251, 259-260, 265, 270, 272, 275, 307, 342343, 347 Raoul of Cambrai 177, 179

383

Reichardt, Paul 328 Reynolds, Susan 332-333 Rickert, Heinrich 54 Robinson, James H. 70 Roland 168, 177-179 Romanov, B. A. 43-44 Romein, Jan 70 Rozhkov, N.A. 48 Rubin, Miri 227-228, 348 Rubin, Vitaly 25-27 Rudé, George 53 Rus, Kievan 43 Ruysbroeck, Jean 192, 211-214 Sakharov, Andrei 16, 26 Sardes, Méliton de 195 Saussure, Ferdinand de 53 Schatzgeyer, Caspar 258 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 73, 75, 77-78, 137, 346 Schönau, Élisabeth de 204 Seniavskaia, Elena 42 Sharansky, Anatoly 26 Shepherd, David 249 Shifman, Israel 13, 30 Shtaerman, Ye. M. 20 Sidorova, Nina 328 Siegfried 177 Siniavskii, Andrei 15 Skazkin, S. D. 20, 32-34, 55 Sobolev, G.L. 47, 50 Sofia, regent 122, 124 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 16 Soreth, Jean 216, 223 Southern, Richard 79 Stalin 12, 15, 23, 25, 41, 43-44, 47-48, 50, 54, 306, 336, 356, 361 Stallybrass, Peter 253, 260-261 Stelbin-Kamenskii, M.I. 55 Suso, Heinrich 211, 214 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilytch 13 Tchistozvo, Alexander 328 Tertullian 195 Theodosius, Roman emperor 156 Thomas à Kempis 192, 215 Thorgilsson, Ari 162-163 Todi, Jacopone da 202 Tokarev, S.A. 48 Tolstoy, Leo 344, 362 Topolskii, Ezhi 60 Toynbee, Arnold 260

384

names index

Turner, Victor 71, 179 Udal’tsova, Z. V. 36, 338 Umnogo-Kolychev, F. I. Boyar 84-85, 89-90, 101 Uspenskii, Boris 57-58, 66, 71 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 72 Vincent of Beauvais 283 da Vinci, Leonardo 338 Virgin Mary 357-358 Vitkin, M. A. 20 von Ammenhausen, Konrad 296 Vorontsov, I. V. 84-86, 89, 96-97, 100

Vovel, Michel 312 Vygotskii, Lev 47-49 Wallon, Henri 48 Weber, Max 54, 64, 335 White, Allon 253, 260-261 Windelband, Wilhelm 54 Zerbolt de Zutphen, Gérard 214-215 Zguta, Russell 110 Zhdanov, Andrei 12 Zhukov, E. M. 30, 50 Zimin’, Alexander A. 24-25 Zubkova, Elena 42

concept index

385

CONCEPT INDEX “Absolute, Epic” Time 178 Alexandria, Egypt 86 Alterity 188 Amulets 106, 121, 131 Andechs, Bleeding Host 234 Angels 119, 230, 236, 266, 281, 357 Annales School 41, 53, 56, 59-67, 69, 72, 75-79, 308, 321, 345, 349 Anthropology 71, 73, 74, 78 Antichrist 132 Archaic Individualism 318 Aristotelian Conceptions of Heroism 174 Astrology 128 Atlaqkviða (The Lay of Atli) 170 Audience 167, 176-179, 187-188 Bards 159, 163 Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament 241-243 Berber Societies 180 Blood Relics 231, 235 Blood-letter 123 Bloodletting 114, 116, 131 Bolsena, Miracle 234 Books of Hours 227, 229-231, 236, 240, 243 Brezhnev period 41, 51, 56, 63 British language 157 Calendar 114, 161 ‘Carnival culture’ 54, 56-57, 62 Categories of Medieval Culture 2-3, 62, 66, 74, 252, 258, 307-313, 317, 319, 324-325, 327, 329, 334-335, 337 Champmol, Charterhouse 228-229 Chancellery 109, 114, 116-117, 125-129 Charm 120, 113, 119, 123 Chansons de geste 8, 168, 177-178, 186, 188 Children 119, 123 Chivalry 169 Church 105-108, 114-115, 132-133 Clergy 125, 131 Commodity 174 Communion, Physical and Spiritual 234, 236-240

Convent 124 Corpus Christi, Feast 235-236, 238-243, 280-281 Crime 107, 117-118, 133 Criminal 115, 117, 119, 121, 129 Criminality 109 Cultural history 41, 43, 48-49, 51-53, 65, 67 Cultural Marxism (Humanist Marxism) 42 Culture Hero 167-168 Culturology/‘Culturological’ revisionism 45, 51, 56, 62-63 Death 171-178, 180-181, 188 Demonology 105, 107 Demons 107, 112 Deus qui nobis sub sacramento, Prayer 230, 236, 242-243 Devil 107, 111-112, 119, 129 Devils 115, 119 Dicuil 160-161 Dijon, Bleeding Host 227, 231-235, 243, 245 Discovery of Man 301 Discovery of the Individual 303 Disease 106, 108, 111-113, 117, 119, 122, 127, 133 Doctor 116-118, 126, 128-129, 131 Eddic Poetry 174, 272 Elder Edda 272, 318 England 82, 85, 90, 93, 96-100, 102 Epic Distance 182 Epic Heroes 177 Epic Society 185, 189 Epic Time 178, 187 Epic Tradition of the Middle Ages 167 Epic-type Cultures 177 Exorcists 115 Father 142, 147, 152 Females 122 Feudalism 308-310 Fili(d) 158-159 Folklore 131

386

concept index

Fortune-telling 124 Foundational Violence 180 Functionalism 182-183 Gift Cultures 173-174 Gift-giving 173-174 Giving 182 Greek 113, 128-129 Grim Humor 176 Healer-witch 121 Healers 106-110, 115, 119, 121, 124, 131, 133 Healing 106, 109-112, 114-117, 120, 122, 124, 130-132 Health 111, 127, 131 Herbal 113-115, 120-122, 126, 131 Herbs 106, 113-118, 121-124, 127, 129, 131 Heresy 105, 110, 132-133 Heretical 115, 127 Heretics 114, 132 Hero 167-168, 171-174, 176-178, 181, 188 Heroic 167, 180-181 Heroic Lay 167, 173, 177-178, 181, 186188 Heroic Poetry 167, 177 Heterodoxy 70, 115 High-value 174 Historical Anthropology 41-42, 65-67, 71, 73-74, 78, 321 Historical Psychology 41-42, 44, 47, 50-52, 56-57, 59-60, 66-67 Historico-anthropological Method 318 History of Culture 305-307 History of the Individual 301 Honor 168, 171, 173, 179-180 182 Hosts, Bleeding 227, 231-235 Hosts, Elevation and Veneration 238-240 Hosts, Reserved 240 Iceland, medieval vernacular literature 155, 159, 163-164 Icons 115, 132 ‘Ideal Type’ 54, 64 Ideengeschichte 318, 340 Illness 106, 108-109, 111-113, 119, 127128, 131, 136 Imbolc 161 Incantations 106, 111-113, 117-118, 122124

Individuality 301, 303, 310-311, 313-316, 337 Indulgences 239, 348 Infants 110 Inquisitors 115 Integrities 186 Integrity 171, 185 Interdisciplinarity 53 Iona 159 Ireland, medieval vernacular literature, 155, 159, 163-164 Irish law 158 Manuscript culture 158 Slaves in Iceland 161-163 Íslendigabók 161-162 Janissaries 93, 99 Jerusalem 86 Jews 227-228, 232-233, 239-240 Khrushchev period 41, 45, 56, Landnámabók 162-164 Latin language, lingua franca of the Roman empire 156 –, lingua sacra in Ireland 157 Lindisfarne 159 Longue durée 75 Lugnasad 161 Magic 105-106, 110-111, 113-115, 123124, 128-129, 131, 135-136 Magical 108-110, 113-115, 121-122, 127, 132, 135 Magician 124 Marxism 42, 54, 61, 63, 70, 76, 305, 334, 345, 358 Marxism-Leninism 41, 43-44, 51, 57, 62-64 Marxist Historical Psychology 50 Marxist social psychology 44-51 Marxist Sociology 49 Materialist determinism 43 Medical 108, 113-115, 119, 126-129 Medical Professionals 127, 129 Medicinal 116, 121, 124 Medicine 107, 109, 113-115, 117, 120122, 125-128 Medieval Audiences 178 Medieval Culture 307-313 Medieval Europe 41, 53 Medieval Individual 301, 308, 311-313, 317-320

concept index Medieval Personality 309, 311-312, 319320 Memorableness 174 Memory 173-174, 176 Mentalité/Mentalities 41-42, 52, 55-56, 60-63, 65-67 Mentality 77, 323, 325, 336, 342, 350-352 Middle Ages European, Catholic 81 Medieval Islam 81 Medieval Japan 81 Midwife 123 Miraculous 115 Modern “Individual” 168-169 Modern Individualism 169 Monasteries 114, 125, 137 Monk 117 Monstrances 229-230, 236, 239, 241-243 Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics 307 Moser, Dietz-Rudiger 71, 251-252 Mother 147, 152 Multistructuralism 62 Neo-Kantianism 54, 56, 63 Neo-Leninist revisionism 44, 51, 62 ‘New History’ 70 Nibelungenlied 178 Odysseus 3, 15, 313, 326, 332 Ogam 157 Old Belief 115, 119, 132 Old Norse Heroes 168 Old Norse Heroic Lays 167, 178 Orthodox 111, 113-115, 120 Orthodoxy 112, 120 O sacrum convivium, Antiphon 230, 235236, 241, 243 O salutaris hostia, Hymn 229, 230, 236, 242-243 Ottoman Empire (Turkey) 82, 85, 93, 96-100, 102 Pagan 111 Paganism 131 Palladius 157, 162 Papar 161 Parliament 89, 93, 97, 101 Past and Present 70 Patrick, Saint 157 Peace of God Movement 169 Peasants 106-109, 112, 116, 123, 131 Penances 132

387

Perestroika 36, 65-66, 313, 362 Personality 307, 309 Pharmacist 116-117, 126, 128 Pharmacy 126 Pharmacy Chancellery 109, 114, 116-117, 125-129 Physician 114, 125-128 Pilgrimage 117 Plague Winds 127 Poetic Edda 170 Popular Culture 73-74, 76, 105, 131, 312313 Positivism 60 Post-Soviet Cultural History 52 Post-Soviet Historians 41 Potlatch 180 Prague Linguistic School 59 Prayer 110-113, 115, 119-121, 131-132 Prestigious Objects 174 Priest 119-120, 125-126, 130 Priesthood 120 Primitive 167 Primitivism 168, 183 Prosper of Aquitaine 157 Purgatory 312 Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist 228, 231-235, 241, 243 Reciprocal Relations 171, 177 Reciprocity 139, 171-173, 177, 179-180, 182 Reflexive Distance 188 Reflexivity 135, 168, 177, 183, 189 Reichstag 90 Relics 114-115, 132 Renaissance 301-307 Renaissance Individualism 305 Revisionism 60 Rikstag 89 Ritual Sacrifice 180-182, 186-187 Rituals 112, 120, 131, 179 Rome 82, 86 Russia And Renaissance 81 Not part of Roman empire 81 Russian Church 132 Russian Historiography 321 Russian Humanities 301, 315 Russians 106, 108, 119, 130-131 Sacred 170, 179-180, 182 Sacrifices 180-181, 187

388

concept index

Saints 115 Saints’ Relics 114, 132 Scotti (Gaels) 160 Sector of Methodology (Institute of History, Moscow) 45, 50, 66 Sejm 89, 101 Self 302-304 Semiotics 43, 54, 57-58, 62, 71, 79 Senses 237 Sign 173 Skalds 163 Social Mood 47, 49 Social Psychology 41, 44-46, 48-52, 58, 66 Socio-Historical Psychology 44, 51-52, 59 Sorcerers 105-106, 108, 112, 118, 123 Sorcery 110, 116, 118-125, 127, 129-131, 133 Soviet Cultural History 41 Soviet Historians 306, 313 Soviet Historical Scholarship 41 Soviet Historiography 41-42, 48, 54, 306 Soviet Socialism 43 St. Petersburg/Leningrad school (historical linguistics) 44 Stalin period/Stalinism 41, 47 Stockholm 86-88, 96 Structural poetics 57 Structuralism 182-183 Subjectivity 169-170, 176, 185, 187-188 Sugorskii 86, 90 Superstition 108, 131 Superstitious 108

Sweden 82, 84-85, 88, 96-98, 100 Symbol 173, 184 Symbolic 173-175, 177, 188 Tamerlane 185 Tartu School 57-59, 70 Thaw 306 The Individual and Society in the Medieval West 317 The Origins of European Individualism 317-318, 320 The Song of Roland 168 Torture 106, 118, 123-124 Totalitarian 41 Traitor 123 Transsubstantiation, see Real Presence Treason 115, 121-122, 133 Violence 105, 107, 136, 145, 167-171, 174-176, 180-189 Vows as a Monk 117 Vulgate 2156 Vygotskians 51 Wife 109, 112, 116, 119, 121-122 Wilsnack, Shrine 233 Witch 105-112, 118, 121, 123-124, 131 Witchcraft 105-107, 109-110, 115, 117125, 127-133 Woman 118-120 Women 106, 108-109, 113-114, 120, 122123, 142-148 World Picture 308, 321 World Model 308-309, 321

Later Medieval Europe Managing Editor Douglas Biggs ISSN: 1872-7875 Brill’s Later Medieval Europe series deals with all aspects of European history and culture from ca. 1100 to ca. 1600 (with the majority covering the Late Medieval time period of 1100-1500). All areas of Europe will be included; however, there will be a focus on the territories of modern-day France, Germany and Great Britain, as well as on the Low Countries. Economic, social, political history and the history of culture and mentality will also be given special emphasis. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Armstrong, L., Elbl, I. & M. M. Elbl (eds.). Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe. Essays in Honour of John H.A. Munro. 2007. ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15633 3, ISBN-10: 90 04 15633 X Butler, S.M. The Language of Abuse. Marital Violence in Later Medieval England. 2007. ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15634 0, ISBN-10: 90 04 15634 8 Thiery, D.E. Polluting the Sacred. Violence, Faith and the ‘Civilizing’ of Parishioners in Late Medieval England. 2009. ISBN 978 90 0417387 3 Doležalová, L. (ed.). The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 17925 7 Mazour-Matusevich, Y. & A.S. Korros (eds.). Saluting Aron Gurevich. Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18650 7 Turner, W.J. (ed.). Madness in Medieval Law and Custom. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18749 8 brill.nl/lme