Edward Gibbon's "The Decline + Fall of the Roman Empire": Kindle Book Review

As editions jumble and formats collide on Amazon for such classics, I'll explain Kindle versions. The public-domain ones for free or a buck or two are the Anglican reverend H.H. Milman's 1838/45 version, interspersing his commentary--which about Gibbon's anti-religious musings, was defensive. J.B. Bury's 1897 ed. can be downloaded elsewhere than Amazon. Bury kept his comments appended after Gibbon's famous footnotes. These older eds. online differ somewhat in presentation; some relegate footnotes and some place them within the main text after every relevant page.

David Womersly's abridgment of his 3 vol. 1990s ed. in Penguin provides eleven complete chapters and footnotes. Hans-Friedrich Mueller's 2003 abridges the Modern Library 1987 ed. Mueller assures us in his preface that the whole work still should be read and consulted. He admits in his task a different emphasis than, say, Milman. Keeping in the religious, political and institutional concentrations, he excises 2/3: battle details, genealogies, ethnologies, and footnotes. Mueller avers this fits contemporary concerns and aligns with relevant issues. On the Kindle, it's elegantly legible.

Daniel Boorstin's original introduction remains, preceding a critical essay by Mueller and Gibbon's preface. The maps are small, as they were copied from the paperback ed. What remains are parts of every chapter. Mueller indicates where cuts or excisions occur so one may consult the full text. He does provide parts of all 72 chapters for a "continuous narrative." The complete Womersly set sits on my shelf. But I chose this condensed ed. for the ability to take notes and highlight passages, which I wouldn't do in my tomes. And for road trips. ( Amazon US 9/10/17)

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s "Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol": Book Review

Look around an Eastern-themed gift shop or Asian-inspired garden and you may see a benevolent, rotund and inevitably smiling Buddha. Imported into Western culture, the familiar icon enters popular culture as a good luck symbol and a self-satisfied sage. What today's viewers of such images forget is that, less than two centuries ago, whatever was known or rumored about this wisdom teacher emanated more often from demonic or pagan connotations, rather than cheerful or chubby depictions.

This shift in representation has taken nearly two thousand years to spread, far from the homeland near the Himalayan foothills and Indian plains of the historical Buddha. An expert scholar on Buddhist culture at the University of Michigan provides readers with a compendium excerpting over eighty accounts of what the Buddha meant to the forebears of Christians (and, now and then, Muslims and Jews) who attempted to fit this acclaimed personage into their worldviews. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s {Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha} takes up the conversion of the Buddha "from stone to flesh." That is, the statues and the portraits of this venerable personage filtered into the imagination of travelers and scholars. They might be mystified or terrified of what they heard or guessed about this fabled or feared entity, and they regarded him or it with "profound suspicion." Simply put, until 1801, the Buddha was not recognized as the founder of what the West invented as Buddhism. For previous tale-tellers, he was known only as an idol.

Lopez records over three hundred names for the Buddha between 200 and 1850. The litany stretches back to Clement of Alexandria around that first date. This Church Father distinguishes the Hindu Brahmin priests from non-Hindu followers of the "Boutta, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours." Not bad for the first attempt at defining the change from Gautama to Sakyamuni, from a pampered prince to a wise deity bestowing favors on his worshipers.

The professor's introduction sums up the intricate patterns of information about the Buddha as they were transmitted from the Indian subcontinent into the Middle East and across the many Christian and Islamic empires. Tellingly, for nearly a millennium, few reports of the Buddha found their way west. Marco Polo's celebrated chronicle ranks sixth among eighty-odd entries, for instance. After this report, however, versions multiplied along the trade routes set up by Christian missionaries and traders with China. Emissaries at the Great Khan's court linked with Armenian, Persian and papal contacts visiting Mongol rulers. These East-West ties tightened in the 1600s after the Reformation.

Among these, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci epitomizes the ambition of the Catholic Church to win over the Chinese. Fr. Ricci also speaks for the dismissal of the Buddhist teachings brought to China from India as a "disaster." Neither a "genuine record of the history of this religion" nor "any real principle upon which one can rely" exists within this faith. For it "lacks the arts of civilization and has no standards of moral conduct to bequeath to posterity." Ricci credits the lack of knowledge of Buddhism abroad with a rationale for denigrating its doctrines. The Jesuits may have adapted Chinese customs as their own to win over the rulers, but they persisted, as with Ippolito Desideri in Tibet, to oppose Buddhism

Other Westerners added their own reactions. These tended to be negative. They offered many adaptations of the Buddha, often without recognizing the true roots of the idol in a historical figure. Yet, Lopez cautions, no single Buddha biography is accepted across Asia. No canonical text exists.

Rather than posit a true Asian vs. false Western dichotomy, Lopez asks "whether the Buddha, then and now, here and there, is the product of a more complex and interesting process of influence." Therefore, Lopez allows many texts to nestle and jostle against each other, refusing to rate them. This approach fits into Lopez' career, spent producing learned works demystifying Buddhist tropes. While the collection of polyglot voices may daunt, he offers cogent introductions for each diverse inclusion.

For then as now, knowledge of languages varied. Motivations multiplied. Conversion of the "pagans" led to negative attitudes, such as Ricci articulates. Catholics encountering monasteries eerily like their own recoiled as if they walked into the haunts of devils. Gradually, spurred by archaeological, linguistic and military exponents, interest in what became defined as Buddhism supplanted a terror of its teachings. Ethnographic enthusiasm grew in the 1700s and 1800s. This anthology concludes, fittingly, with the 1844 monograph of Eugène Burnouf. This scholar of Old Persian and Sanskrit pioneered the presentation of a human Buddha, rather than a stone idol. And from that juncture, Western sympathy began for the founding figure of a world religion and/or an appealing philosophy.

"The myriad idols coalesced into a single figure, who then became a historical figure, a founder of a religion, and a superstition became a philosophy." So Lopez sums up the transformation. Textually-based Buddhism remains dominant in the West, parallel to the quest in the 19th century for an historical Jesus. Whether such pursuits have resulted in reform or regression is left up to the adept. (Spectrum Culture 4/4/17; Amazon US with slight changes 4/20/17)

"The Vikings": Book Review

First off, that titular word's more a verb than a noun. Derived probably from {vík} for inlet, bay or fjord, the derivation suggests a pirate lurking within these waters, going {a-viking}. Second, while the Vikings receive a bad reputation, and their descendants may revel in such, the peoples of Scandinavia who undertook such raids did so not merely to carry out rapine, but to break out of a stratified, limited society. This led war-bands to assemble. Violence became institutionalized in the Northern lands.

The division of the peoples into a king {jarls}, (earls), {bóndis} (freemen) and thralls reminds readers of the harsher reality beneath the boasts and brawls of a militant troop. Slaves could be snatched up by raiders and delivered to Dublin or Byzantium markets. Without forced labor, farms could not operate, for the freemen had to serve in the royal levy. Some farmers sold produce in town. Others sought their own fortune {a-viking}. While they invaded monasteries such as Lindisfarne and gained ecclesiastical condemnation early in the medieval period, the Viking targets, one of the joint authors of this book avers, were selected not out of a desire for desecration as much as sudden self-valuation. 

The Church and State did not collude to restrict aggression outside the English Saxon kingdoms. Therefore, the Vikings aimed for lucrative centers, whether monks lived there or lay-folk in a trading port or river town. Those privateers marshaled against the Continental or British and Irish storehouses formed a "fundamental combat group," with ties beyond blood linked to a gift economy connecting a warrior to his lord. Freely pledging their troth, the fealty of a Viking to his commander could be tenuous rather than permanent. 

The flexibility of this arrangement enhanced their fighting tactics. The combination of nimble sailing and rapid mobility enabled shield-walls, with soldiers formed up to five deep in a phalanx. These "artificial tribes" as {Jomsvikings} formed professional cadres. Norwegian king Harald Hardrada tried to claim the throne of England in 1066, using this arrangement. He met his doom at the hand of Harold, Godwin's son, who too soon after was forced to rush to Hastings with the same battle plan, only to lose his exhausted men and his own life to another Viking descendant, William the Conqueror, less than three weeks later. The intricate web of those from the North who sought a greater share of the Northlands draws in many from the territories; Harald had been a mercenary in nascent Russia and among the Byzantines as part of his long and storied career as a Viking overlord.

This wanderlust compelled some such as Harald to journey south. The Russians, Greeks and Arabs all called these intruders Varangians. A guard of this name protected the Byzantine monarch in the city his guardians called Miklagarðr, that is, “big wall/stronghold.” One roamer gave his name to Russia. Others fared as far as Newfoundland to settle, if temporarily given their combative temper and disdain for the natives. The lively illustrations in this little volume will appeal to those curious about how the Vikings dressed, fought and celebrated. Motivated to join Odin in Valhalla, those fallen in a bravely conducted struggle found reward with more daily fighting in their eternal hall, followed by feasting. 

The last section of this primer explains the function of the longship. These crafts evolved to carry trade and terror more widely. But the voyages must have wearied even doughty crews. For no fixed seats were installed on the vessels. Instead, for that same flexibility, rowers made do with crates. 

This colorful compilation of excerpts from the military publisher Osprey's series of historical guidebooks lacks some cohesion, not to mention a proper introduction and conclusion. Marketed as a "gift book," the results will appeal to the fan of strategy, war-games, history and re-creation of venerable warriors. They sought fame in this world and continual strife, if for play themselves, in the next realm. (Spectrum Culture 1/19/17; Amazon US 2/16/17)

Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"Hic sunt leones" 

Would you consider the audio edition of The Name of the Rose to be better than the print version?

I read the novel when it was translated, in the early '80s, in William Weaver's fluid voice. Hearing it, decades later, enlivened the discussions on theology and poverty, truth and superstition, that enrich so much of these erudite pages. I recommend the audio version.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Name of the Rose?

The climactic scenes carry along the antagonist and protagonist's clashing perspectives on what should be known by people, under authority of an organization or leader. versus what they are entitled to speculate upon and figure out freely. It sounds dense and can be, but Umberto Eco's skill survives the translation and audio renderings, and it's engaging debate.

What does the narrators bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

The three narrators (uncredited alas as to who does what) convey the accents of some of the more memorable monks and ecclesiastics well. The Latin is read very smoothly, and with an understanding of it, for those of us who can remember our courses in it, and the challenge of keeping in-depth discussions lively as well as the central mystery succeeds by their talents.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No. I had to portion this out an hour or so at a time. It's a lot to take in, the pace can be slow, and the demands of the ideas presented as well as the strange setting and medieval mindset all reward concentration in smaller segments. It can weary you at longer intervals.

Any additional comments?

It's a credit to Eco, Weaver, and these three actors that they managed to make debates over the poverty of Christ and the role of Aristotle so gripping, in my opinion even more so than the central whodunit intended as the page-turner. This is a rare novel of ideas that succeeds. (Audible US 2/1/17)

Bernard du Boucheron's "The Voyage of the Short Serpent"

Yes, that title is symbolic. This short novel can be read in a sitting. It takes a mock-medieval style to report, from alternating and eventually contrasting narrative voices, what happened on an episcopal mission commanded by the Pope to reclaim the Norse lapsed into heathenry in faraway Greenland.

It's more of a conceit than a full-fledged work. Hester Velmans' translation may capture the starched, satirical, and savage qualities of the original French, but the effort feels fussy and overly stylized in English. So does the effort to which the author strains to capture the tone of a chronicle or correspondence, given the friction of the attempt to counter the wiles of the Inuit, here titled "publicans," who lure the dwindling Norse into their seal-hunting, sexually suspect and sinful mores.

A few good lines show the potential. Early on, frostbite claims victims on the bishop's ship. Having been forbidden to eat their own rotting flesh to survive, one shipmate rebels. "One of them replied that the season was not Lent, and proceeded to devour his own toes." I admit I liked some of the dour and deadpan recitals of increasing woe, as the rescue attempt to scare and shame the Norse back to Christian fidelity, compared to the odd temptations of dissolute abandon among the natives, lure the Catholic contingent into their compromises, to survive in New Thule increasingly hostile threats. (Amazon US 11/25/16)

Franco Mormando's "The Preacher's Demons": Book Review

Bernardino of Siena was an extraordinarily popular preacher during the first half of the thirteenth century. His fame exploded suddenly, and his sermons drew in many all over Italy. In spirited, earthy, conversational language, he urged his listeners to reform their lives in fidelity to the Catholic faith.

So far, nothing unsurprising. But Harvard historian Franco Mormando delves into the archives to go beyond hagiography. In this well-researched and accessibly narrated 1999 study, he presents a Franciscan friar who sought to suppress the freethinkers, whom he condemned as heretics and as witches--a latter category that his contemporaries in the crowds seemed less worried about than him.

Also, he combated the "sodomites," a blanket term that seems to call into scrutiny and damnation any who violated the strictly procreative and marital relations permitted the faithful. As with heretics, Mormando demonstrates how these relatively small elements threatened the social framework and religious power which orthodox teaching inculcated. He studies the sermons within their context and rather than selecting portions out of context, as many scholars do, he seeks a total understanding of the circumstances, despite a sketchy record of much of the saint's life and career, to relate this to us.

Finally, Mormando looks at the anti-semitic depictions Bernardino promoted. He finds a more varied picture. Some portions call on Catholics to love (in a general way) their Jewish neighbors and to help them; other sections castigate them in the all-too-familiar fashion. But the historical portrait is more nuanced here than Mormando's predecessors and indeed some of Bernardino's confreres in the mendicant orders have perpetrated. The saint wavered, thus. in how he advised regarding the Jews.

In closing, the historian finds the anxiety Bernardino conveyed emanated from his own heart. Left orphaned at a young age, raised among four domineering women, left to the care of the Franciscans, these factors may have marked him deeply. "Undisguised animal fear" drove the men and women of early Renaissance Italy, despite its many achievements, in ways that all of us also know all too well.
(Amazon US 12-9-15)

Mauro Civai + Enrico Toti's "Siena: the Gothic Dream": Book Review

This "new guide to the city" that dramatically occupies a Tuscan hilltop is neither a coffee-table heirloom nor a conventional guidebook. While small in size, its scope ranges over the highlights. In Christopher McConnell's extremely faithful (I reckon as it repeats the sometimes awkward diction of what I suppose is the Italian) translation, this 1992 authorized and city-sponsored guide encourages us to regard the fortified vista as pilgrims. We seek the monuments, rather than restaurants or lodging.

For this aims at erudition and elegance. It opens with a survey of the town and its medieval planning. Three sections, one for the City, one for Camollia, one for San Martino, divide the center into its thirds. Each can be studied and itineraries followed by hand drawn maps on the pages. Illustrated richly, a glimpse of the paintings, architecture, history, and panoramas of Siena open up for a viewer.

Despite the slightly stilted tone that Civai and Toti take, it conveys therefore the Italian insider's style, rather than a tourist's perspective. This can seem disorienting, for much still evades translation. But for an armchair or a real traveler, this remains an intelligent if eccentric introduction to Siena, when few such books going deeper than a few photos and text are available to English-language readers.
(Amazon US 12-9-15)

Mary McCarthy's "Venice Observed": Book Review

While this seems less known than its 1959 predecessor The Stones of Florence, I liked it more. McCarthy reveals in framing vignettes more about where she stays, and the irascible, over-familiar family she resides with. Also, the book is set up thematically in chapters that don't just roam over the abundant art, but focus on characters and topics that let this erudite author convey information better.

I am reviewing a large-format illustrated edition of this 1963 book. With end-notes on the art photographed, and short essay by an art professor, it better meets the needs of readers who are not as familiar with the considerable context necessary for appreciating the displays written about and shown. She starts by noting that no corner of Venice can be kept from the tourist, and that residents must share its passageways with all, for all must walk its labyrinth. She then tells of how the ideally placed port gained its "loot" and why it prospered and then declined. The fate of its Jews in the ghetto and the rise of the Most Serene Republic's "only thinker" the friar Paolo Sarpi enliven the tales told.

Its glory years with Giorgione and Carpaccio, Titian and Tiepolo follow. A trip to the islands of Murano and Burano conjures up their appeal, or the limits of such. McCarthy regales us from a time fifty-plus years ago when Burano's fisherfolk looked different than Venetians, and when beggar children still could be found in the ghetto. Her Venice already feels very distant to a traveler today.

This is dated, of course, but for the way it conjures up some of the theme-park ambiance of Venice, recommended. It's an elegant but accessible introduction, and with the notes, one can learn about the artists and architects responsible for forging this island kingdom out of marble against the salty sea.
(Amazon US 12-9-15)

Miri Rubin's "The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction": Book Review

Very straightforward. In 120 pp. of text, this London-based medieval historian applies her knowledge to chapter 1's overview of a time in the "middle" according to the Renaissance humanists, but of course continuing from the Roman times into that early modern period with less disruption and more continuity than supposed. Rubin stresses the more seamless and less dramatic divisions that permeated a long medieval period, in some areas ending as early as the 1300s and in others going as far as into the 1800s.

Chapter 2, "People and their life-styles" covers such issues as what colorful clothing men, women, and children wore respectively in Norse Greenland, and then on the next page, shows how the medieval notions of the humours effected what people were expected to do and how they were assumed to act on their nature. She often, as her sources show, draws on very specialized monographs for her examples. These may not be that accessible to general readers, but she does provide recent studies by scholars of each topic. While literature and popular culture may not earn as much attention, and while philosophy and theology are submerged, this remains a quick primer.

"The big idea: Christian salvation" comes next, and unsurprisingly Rubin shows how this filtered into all walks of life. The illustrations of sculpture and art are well chosen to enliven the impact of Christian piety upon the masses. Similarly, "Kingship, lordship, and government" treats this subject briskly, if in less space. I found the religious element more stimulating, by contrast. The effects of belief and popular piety gain verve, while the theories of how rulers dominate felt more stolid.

"Exchange, environments, and resources" looks at the environmental impacts. The use of the forest (as she tells, from the Latin for "outside,") is deployed here to show woodland management. Rubin reminds readers how rather than untamed wilderness, the woodlands were often a locale of careful attention and frequent visits by many people from different ranks and for diverse reasons.

"The 'Middle Ages' of 'others" treats not only Muslims and pagans in passing, but the persecuted Jews. Their precarious position, as they found themselves dependent on rulers, was difficult. Often they had to convert and even then, as in Spain, they remained under suspicion. Maneuvered into go-betweens for finance and trade, they were often pawns of unscrupulous Christian regimes.

Finally, "The 'Middle Ages' in our daily lives"  suggests in universities, especially, ties to our own times. As Rubin says, the Middle Ages can be manipulated for unions and radical reform, or for conservative and traditional lifestyles. Its thousand years, here summed up rapidly by necessity, suggest a period as complicated and free of stereotype as any other for our European ancestors.
(Amazon US 5-8-15)

Johannes Fried's "The Middle Ages": Book Review

The Western world's "progression towards a culture of reason" over a thousand years, between classical decline and colonial ascendance, results in this dense but readable narrative. In about five hundred pages, Frankfurt historian Johannes Fried tells the story of the Middle Ages. He emphasizes the mental as well as material shifts necessary to understand this transitional epoch, even as he blurs its beginning and endings. Rejecting neat chronology, Fried favors the evolution of rational mentality.

He begins with Boethius, the last of the classical thinkers. A Christian but also a Neoplatonist, he was among the final generation connected to the legacy many in the Church sought to eliminate. Fried defines the Catholic replacement for thought by its avoidance of abstraction, a loss of systematic or categorical organization, and a lack of "mental acuity and of methodically controlled thinking". Visions and dreams swayed decisions for all.

Pope Gregory the Great exerted papal ambitions early on, even as he favored faith rather than the faint lessons of the crumbling classical learning which he inherited. Furthered by an alliance with the Franks, Rome's resurgent clerical power extended as its protege Charlemagne united the Christian West. Fried, in this very German-centric study, details from his native heartland the impacts of European unity. The Holy Roman Empire sought to continue Rome's complicated legacy, creating a lingua franca of Latin for its relatively educated court. Classical texts began to be preserved. The motto of "knowledge before action" inculcated order into the Carolingian schools. A rational modus operandi began, as time was studied and human activity within it was appreciated for its own sake. This nudged a retreat from portents and miracles as if guides for living.

This shift from divinely inspired to logical paradigms did not happen quickly. Fried's notable, if inevitably submerged, contribution in such an immense book comes from his attention to mentalities. Kings "would explain their motivations by means of signs, gestures, and rituals" in Carolingian times. Millenarian fears grew as the dreaded apocalyptic year of 1000 neared. Systems by which the living could remember the dead, and intervene to accelerate the entrance of the departed into heaven, spurred ecclesiastical renewal. Monastic innovations, legal classifications, clerical and royal reforms ensued. The "two powers doctrine" of separating priests from prelates to rule the Earth became contentious. Throughout, Fried tracks centuries of struggle as secular forces contend against popes.

"The world was out of joint. The papacy was split, the successor to the throne of Saint Peter was preaching war, the abbot of Cluny was embroiled in the dispute between the king and the pope, the mysteries of faith were being openly questioned, there were monks preaching on the streets, and fanatical mobs roaming the countryside slaughtering Jews." So Fried sums up the situation at the end of the eleventh century, as the Crusades commenced. "Everywhere, civil war seemed to be raging while Byzantium teetered at the verge of collapse, and many believed the advent of the Antichrist was nigh--where was peace in all this, and the power of prayer and salvation?" This passage demonstrates the verve with which Fried describes medieval events, and vigor helps offset many slow passages about Ottonians and Hohenstaufens, which his German audience may appreciate more.

Fried injects a dramatic style now and then, especially when praising those who advanced reason. "This heavily persecuted individual, whose only crimes were to have fallen in love with a woman and displayed consistent reasoning--and to have openly admitted to both--this thinker who was cast adrift by his peers, but who pioneered the whole concept of free will and paved the way for the expression of human freedom and must count as one of the great minds of the world": so Fried dramatizes the influence of philosopher Peter Abélard. Peter Lewis' translation reads fluidly in such moments.

As the later medieval period began, imperial hegemony, an urban boom, usury, debtors' prisons, Islamic and Jewish learning entered the Western European experience, as feudalism began to fade. What replaced this system were nascent empires and emerging nation-states, but popes fought back. As Innocent III phrased it, his papal reign shone like the sun. Secular powers could aspire only as far as the full moon, reflecting Rome's solar splendor. The laity and clergy, eager to emulate this illumination, popularized devotion rather than learning. But this move unsettled the popes, who implemented inquisitions and spies to root out heretics, the origins of our own persecuting societies.

"All profit can be turned to salvation", in the estimate of the zealous Franciscan friars who pioneered an "ethics of money". They served as confessors to the growing mercantile and bourgeois classes in the cities. These priests tried to "alleviate the fear" that the poor brethren's wealthy patrons "felt for their eternal souls" during confession on account of their business schemes. Rediscovery of fundamental truths about human destiny stoked rational inquiry as well as doubt among the faithful. Humanists investigated nature and plumbed law and logic. Jurisprudence, coherence, and a concern for the common good grew. Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham gain Fried's acclaim as secular proponents who challenged papal politics. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV earns Fried's admiration for his emulation of Paris, as the ruler built Prague into a center of learning and of civility.

Such progress was slowed but not terminated by the Black Death. By the end of the fourteenth century, globalization dominated the European outlook. Still, old habits persisted. "Reason thirsted after secrets, belief, and miracles; enlightenment, it seems, always comes up against frontiers that frustrate it." Fried's snappish epilogue targets Kant as a purveyor of Enlightenment canards that demeaned earlier efforts to understand the world. Fried rejects this blinkered view of the Middle Ages "as a kind of self-inflicted intellectual immaturity". Instead, he champions Abélard's "systematic doubt" as a harbinger of the truer enlightenment whose origins arise far earlier. His erudite study traces our evolution towards reason, worldwide exploration, and rational procedures to a dynamic medieval period. This is the springboard to the modern era, as innovation won out against stagnation.
(Amazon US 2-7-15 and PopMatters 2-19-15)

Nancy Brown's "Ivory Vikings": Book Review

Nancy Marie Brown, who knows the Icelandic and Norse sagas well in the original, is an ideal and enthusiastic chronicler of the modern battle among scholars to prove the Icelandic rather than the Trondheim (Norway) origin of the chessmen found on the Isle of Lewis two centuries ago. Despite the subtitle claiming "the woman who made them," careful scrutiny of her opening remarks closing her preface, and repeated in the "Queens" chapter, reveal many qualifying "ifs" and "she could have" for Margret the Adroit's crafting of the pieces.

She follows a logical set-up. The rooks title a chapter on the composition of the Lewis pieces. The bishops tell of who may have commissioned their making. Queens, of course, bring in Margret's suggested role. The pieces would have been gifts for kings. And, knights have championed their impact since the 1800s. Pawns, too, are appended, as the sources Brown draws upon and integrates.

The Vine version is a galley, so I am not sure if color illustrations will replace the monochrome ones I reviewed. But this should be a handsome book. Brown writes in a lively style, incorporating Gudmundur Thorarinson's recent argument for an Icelandic provenance for the chess pieces, and she documents the debate over the past centuries among medievalists that led to the current one. As a medievalist by training, I liked her evocation of the world of the Church around 1200, and the overlay of Viking and pagan influences that spread across the North Atlantic, along of course with these little ivory archeological treasures. (Amazon US 7-14-15)

Richard Kieckhefer's "Magic in the Middle Ages": Book Review

This book meets the needs of advanced students who need a introduction to this topic. Richard Kieckhefer specializes in medieval belief systems, so he is suited for this difficult subject to summarize in 200 pages. He examines magic as a "crossroads" where high and low, clerical and folk, popular and learned cultures intersect. He stresses a difference, however, between natural and demonic models.

He reminds us on pg. 16 that our data is tainted. Those attacking magic tended to record their critiques. Those practicing it tended to hide their lore from the persecutors and the client alike. And for the illiterate, their attitudes are difficult to recover, given the power of the elite over this knowledge, used both to suppress and to spread practices often outside the ambit of the Church. Yet here, too, overlap occurs, for clergy sought to learn secrets, and rituals involving magic took elements from the dominant as well as the indigenous suppositions still surviving from paganism and classics. Islam disseminated its own concepts, and so did alchemy, nascent science, and astrology. The author gives a cogent account of the last category; he captures the appeal of love charms well on pp. 81-3. (I cite the 1990 ed.)

"Historians can set up all the conceptual walls they want, but they should not be surprised when medieval people flit through them, like ghosts." (18) Magic was not the province of women, monks, or physicians. Kieckhefer follows distribution as a "common" type over much of medieval Europe.

Yet as he concludes, he turns to the witch hunts of late medieval and early modern times, and he notes how women were made vulnerable to attack. They lacked the power men had to resist, when the clerical and legal institutions were arrayed against them, and when suspicion by neighbors heightened the precarious condition of a local healer, a midwife, an herb-gatherer, or a quarrelsome village scold.

These everyday events were exaggerated into terrors perpetrated as a conspiracy of devil worshipers was imagined, and when those putting trust (and this itself is hard to measure) in spells or potions, charms or amulets, fearful of exposure, gave over the weaker among them to save their own skins. Reading Kieckhefer, as a counter to the more sensationalized depictions of this era, or the more romantic fictions, a balance for the reader will arrive, and one may want then to explore this deeper. (6-13-15 to Amazon US.)

Paul Kingsnorth's "The Wake": Book Review

Schoolchildren, in a more Anglocentric era, used to know "1066 and all that." While fewer today may remember that year and the momentous Norman Conquest, Paul Kingsnorth retells once-familiar tales of that invasion and two years of its devastating aftermath, through the speech of Buccmaster.

In a postscript, the author explains why he chose a "shadow tongue." Kingsnorth defines his invention of an Old English counterpart that he employs, without capitalization and with a modified orthography faithful to etymology, as "a pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today." The results slow any reader down. Even with my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, I found this prose forced me to halt my pace. You cannot skim this. Therefore, the writer's bold decision to force us into an alien mindset succeeds. If you enter a few chapters deep into this novel, you hear and think and feel akin to the farmers and churls who found their language, their loyalty, and their land wrenched away.

This disorientation features cleverly, through a theme pushed aside from chronicles or textbooks.  Buccmaster follows the ways of the old gods, before Christ. As a comet flies overhead in 1066, a harbinger of doom for King Harold and the Saxons, Buccmaster rejects what "is a raedel for dumb folc" for "the bocs and the preosts the bells the laws of the crist it is not lic they sae." He believes, but in the denigrated Wayland the Smith, the World-Tree of Norse lore, and the "eald" forces of nature.

He rejects "this god from a land of dust where there is no night" as a foreign import, imposed by Rome and then by the forces who bless the "bastard" William of Normandy in his assault upon England. Buccmaster, a proud landowner if, as he reminds us and his listeners constantly, of but "three oxgangs," holds in contempt those who oppose his defiance of the Church and of the new Crown. We hear events as he and his villagers do, first as rumors from afar. He knows his fate will be subsumed to that of his fellow English, but he fears weakness. For 1066 is a "year will be lic no other in the lifs of all men in this land." For Buccmaster of Holland, in Lincolnshire's fens, senses doom.

Kingsnorth's saga follows the reaction to double threats to Harold's reign. As Buccmaster's two sons are called to join the English "fyrd" of conscripts to fight a Norse rival for the throne, the narrator sees his wife "frettan lic a moth who cannot reach the bright mona through wattle." Dreams, voices, visions begin to trouble Buccmaster. Soon, a tale-teller arrives in the hamlet to announce: "geeyome has cum in scips from the frenc and all is gan." All is gone. William's scorched earth policy follows.

With the imposition of Norman rule grim tidings dominate. Buccmaster and a few followers flee to the woods for safety. They long to "becum grene lic the leafs and the grass who lifs lic the fox and the wolf who is wilde lic the hafoc and the crow with teeth what tears from the enemi small bite and small bite until all the meat is gan." (There is a glossary for some of the more elusive terms appended.) This passage shows Kingsnorth's skill at transcribing speech and thought in an innovative manner. Reading this version of English, its roots emerge and remain vivid throughout The Wake.

Being a founder of the ecological Dark Mountain Project, Paul Kingsnorth displays keen sensitivity to the natural realm that the "grene men" seek to inhabit. Norman plunder, rape, murder, and the brutality that any war incites, by cavalry or by guerrillas, make this a sobering account of resistance to colonial and papal power. Contemporary resonance to this campaign resonates, even as the author wisely keeps this within the disconcertingly pastoral settings of Lincoln and the forests around fens.

Their furtive actions will stretch on too long, as the two years of Buccmaster's maneuvers and stops wear down his small band and the reader. But this is the cost of verisimilitude, for any campaign is given over to languor, doubt, and boredom rather than rousing derring-do. As Norman fortresses rise over the garrisoned towns, "thralls mac the castel to mac them selves thralls." Kingsnorth reminds us in his afterword how 70% of Britain today remains in the hands of 1%, and he wonders how this unequal distribution of land and wealth has compromised the fortunes of his homeland ever since.

Two real-life episodes, of the rebel Hereward the Wake and the kidnapped Bishop Turold, frame this novel. But the emphasis rests with the defiant men and bloodied women in the margins. Those who watched these events linger, still anonymous after a millennium. Their tongue was torn out and grafted to French manners, Their Saxon gods capitulated. But in The Wake, their words fought on.
(New York Journal of Books, 10-8-15)

R.H. Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism": Book Review

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The phrase “Protestant work ethic” may have been invented by German sociologist Max Weber over a century ago, but economic historian R. H. Tawney (1880-1962) adapted it to British culture before and after the Reformation. In his 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Tawney, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, surveys late medieval and early modern justifications that reconciled a pious livelihood with financial gains.

Catholic teachings narrowed the scope of one’s earthly ambitions, according to God’s plan: “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Bound by morality, this medieval influence continued into the 16th and 17th centuries. Despite the Reformation, profits allowed for the merchant or worker remained narrow and constrained by doctrine. Yet this restraint withered within the post-Reformation momentum unleashing individual ambition.

Tawney crafts vivid images throughout his book to enrich its style. “Into commerce, industry and agriculture, the revolution in prices … injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving away all customary relationships.” As both a scholar and Christian Socialist activist, Tawney here echoes Marx, who in The Communist Manifesto noted the frenzied and fearful rush of capitalist growth following feudalism during this transformed era.

By the time of the Puritans, a shift away from Christian social teaching regarding usury and cupidity occurred. Tawney credits this to increasing lay involvement against the clerics of the Church of England. Puritan and Dissenter factions, who resented ministerial needling, instigated a lay revolt.

The Anglicans lost their royal role “as an independent standard of values,” and Puritans helped overthrow King Charles I in the English Civil War. This populist revolt weakened hidebound aspersions against the benefits of monetary accrual. Traditions reinforcing hierarchical relationships between the laity, clergy and rulers gave way to mercantile expansion and invention. Puritans elevated the value of hard labor and honest enterprise, if judiciously and ethically pursued, to further the service of God himself.

“Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man,” Tawney observes, “who ascribes his achievements to his unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert.” Modern readers may find his prose musty, but Tawney’s donnish tone sparkles with moral power. He analyzes the learned arguments of centuries past and never hesitates to add his own views.
 
Before the Industrial Revolution, Tawney concludes, the spiritual and the economic spheres reversed. Perhaps this turnabout was necessary to enable the British to break out of a stodgy mindset. The clerical control of free enterprise that dominated the previous centuries was weakened, and the rise of the individual worker and the power corporate culture combined to push the Church aside. While preachers continued to castigate the evils of avarice and greed, their lay congregants increasingly minded their own business. Whatever discipline that Christian teachings had exerted was torn away by the modernizing impulse to enrich one’s self — and one’s investors. It was reasoned that a businessman’s success might well demonstrate God’s reward for energy and wise investments, no matter that the clergy counseled frugality, modesty and self-effacement. The British thus compartmentalized faith from profit.

The new Verso edition is reprinted from a 1938 Pelican Books imprint and does not offer any editorial updates. It reproduces Tawney’s 1937 preface in which he critiques Max Weber’s theory, but lacks any attempt to place the work in a modern context. This is an unfortunate oversight in an age when clashes over the role of religion within morality and the economy are as relevant as ever, a time when Pope Francis addresses Congress and the United Nations. (Spectrum Culture 10-2-15)

Stakeholders

How many were burned for witchcraft? Feminists in the 1970s asserted in "The Burning Times" that nine million women met this fate. Anne Barstow's Witchcraze estimated 100,000. However, recent historians lower this to 40,000-50,000. Also, about a fifth were men, further complicating figures on this controversy.

My FB feed today generated a Halloween 2013 essay  "What Witches Have to Do With Women's Health." In Salon, Soraya Chemaly links to Barstow as "the latest scholarship."

As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English explain in the 2010 revision to their classic book “Witches, Midwives & Nurses,” between the 14th and the 17th centuries, tens of thousands of people were killed as witches. Estimates range, but the latest scholarship puts the number at roughly 100,000 people, 80-85 percent of them women. By the mid-16th century there were villages where all but one woman had been killed for practicing witchcraft.

Looking this up, I figured nearly twenty years ago may not be the most recent research. In the preview of the Ehrenreich-English book online, on pg, 14, they explain in the 1973 original (only the introduction is updated) that they relied on figures of between 50,000-100,000, and that others have claimed as many as a million murdered. They cite the leading American historian of the witch hunts, John Demos, in a necessary aside, that those killed were but a fraction of those accused or suspected.

I did find in my reviews medievalist Jeffrey Burton Russell's 2007 revision of Brook Alexander's A History of Witchcraft. This expert on witchcraft reckons 60,000 victims hanged or burned for heresy. Russell and Alexander remind us of the difficulty of defining victims. "Sorcerers, heretics, and pagans" comprise a triple definition of a "witch". If 4:5 are women, this may align with the estimate  accepted by reputable scholars today. Relying on accusers, as on hearsay, may lead to devilish errors.

"Barlaam and Josaphat/ In Search of the Christian Buddha": Book Review

Canonized unwittingly as St. Josaphat, a corruption of "bodhisattva," the Buddha, condemned as an idol worshipped by his duped followers, had his story transmitted after long centuries within the hagiography translated to convert the Japanese in the 1600s. So runs one of many twists in Barlaam and Josaphat, translated by Peggy McCracken and introduced by Donald S. Lopez, as a Penguin Classic. 

Gui de Cambrai (around 1220-25) adapted the story into French verse; McCracken renders it efficiently into modern English. Gui takes the core elements of the Buddha legend. 1) The prediction that the prince will be a saint or a king. 2) The ensuing protection by his father the king to keep him from the sights of the world. This ruse fails, as a series of chariot rides reveal mortality, sickness, age, and death to the coddled lad. 3.) Then, seductive women seek to dissuade the prince from his destiny and enlightenment as he vows to depart the palace for a life of asceticism. But first, to fulfill his duty, he fathered an heir, as a prince who is expected to carry on the royal family line.

What the medieval teller adds, Lopez in his brief introduction and McCracken in her 2014 edition (if short on footnotes) show, is an elaborate disputation between Greeks (ahistorically if entertainingly including Plato's brother and a nephew of Aristotle for good measure), Chaldeans, and pagans. They integrate fine stories in succession cobbled from ancient lore, and this transmission as with the larger storyline contains inherent interest for how this comes down through to the early eleventh century in Old French. We get clever glimpses into the culture, as when perverse sex earns condemnation in a comparison to chess. Those engaging in "a shameful game" allow themselves "to be mated from the corner." The hectoring narrator goes on: "The clerics were first to adopt it, and they taught the game to knights. The deed is base--anyone who would leave the clearing for the woods is like a base peasant." (100-101) Finally, the teller shakes free of the vice he despises, and the story later elaborates into a set-piece about the Crusades, with the characters off to a holy war. Another addition is the use of the disputation between the body and the soul, a medieval trope, to fit neatly into the frame-tale's theme of renunciation for sacrifice, and the leaving of one's family to seek a higher path.

This tale was one of many which told the Buddha's story with nobody suspecting this until the 1600s. While a chronicler of Marco Polo's journey caught on to a resemblance, modern scholars in the 19th century, investigating the sources for the misunderstood origins of Shakyamuni, or Prince Siddhartha, finally figured out the elaborate and entangled transmission gone haywire much later. Lopez, as a noted scholar of Buddhist reception in the West (see Prisoners of Shangri-La on Tibet and The Scientific Buddha for attempts to reconcile the historical Buddha with post-Darwinian science), is well-suited to convey these crossed messages. Joined by medievalist Peggy McCracken, the two seek to explain In Search of the Christian Buddha: How An Asian Sage Became a Christian Saint (also 2014) the origins of the tales told throughout the Middle Ages, as the Buddha's story was embedded into narratives and biographies which asserted often the superiority of non-Buddhist ideas.

The tale of Barlaam and Josaphat was one of many which told the Buddha's story with nobody suspecting this until the 1600s. A 1446 editor of Marco Polo's journey caught on to a resemblance. Then scholars in the 19th century, investigating sources for the misunderstood origins of Shakyamuni, Prince Siddhartha, finally figured out elaborate, entangled transmissions gone haywire.

Here's the basics. In Persia in the 8th c. a Muslim writer compiled Bilawhar and Budasaf.  Armies of Islam had begun entering northwestern India, the first home of Buddhism. They spread the stories westward. Arabic preserved some of the core tale's triple elements mentioned above. A century later, the Muslims conquered the Christian kingdom in what is today Georgia. Refugee monks fled to Jerusalem and turned the Muslim story into a Christian one, the Balavariani. A Jewish translator four centuries on took the story from Arabic and sent it west again, via Muslims, into Moorish Spain, where it would turn The Prince and the Hermit via Hebrew and much later, rendered into both German and Yiddish.

Greek and Latin stories, once attributed to John of Damascus in their beginnings, kept the idea that the prince learned about God from a hermit, Barlaam. This turned into stories as told in lives of saints, such as the very popular Latin Golden Legend or Legenda Aurea, by Jacobus de Voragine.

The authors err repeatedly on p. 139. While Franciscans are mendicants, they are not monks. Benedictines are not mendicants but they are monks. Additionally, the hagiographer of Ss. Barlaam and Josaphat and many others, Jacobus de Voragine (Jacobo de Varazze), was not a "monk belonging to the Benedictine preaching order" but a Dominican mendicant friar of the Order of Preachers.  Another aside: the book relies on paraphrases of the main texts and one loses some idea of their various styles, lengths, and flavor. Textual excerpts might have helped key in readers as to their strengths or weaknesses, cited more directly. Primarily summarized, the source texts discussed float past rather than sink in.

Back to the authors' main narrative, part of the spark of this tale comes when the stories of saints get sent to Japan by those seeking to win the natives away from Buddha to Christ. The irony is dealt with lightly by Lopez and McCracken, but it cannot be denied. Condemning idolators, the story of Josaphat is used against those supposedly worshiping false gods such as Xaca, the name garbled from Shakayamuni.

Subsequent thinkers, clued in bit by bit to such garblings, sought to deploy them differently. For some in the early 19th century, the discovery of the historical roots of Buddhism in India led them to propagate a bold claim. Buddhism and Christianity were purer as world religions open to all. Judaism and Hinduism were grounded in tribal identities, and not open to adoption by other peoples. Furthermore, the "Aryan" roots of Jesus who studied in the East were purported. Buddhism could be seen here as an attempt to detach Christian origins from Hebrew tribalism.

Others enticed by folklore found appeal in those three core stories repeated. They also liked the tale of three caskets in it, used by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Finally, another tale of women named as "geese" to a curious boy seeing women for the first time (cited in Boccaccio's Decameron) reveal intriguing tidbits, as elements of folk narrative dispersed across time and space into tales.

Still others saw in Buddhism a palliative to other faith. In it nestled human striving, and purer motives rather than superstitious, quasi-Catholic accretions. Some sympathetic to Protestant reform or humanist progress sympathized therefore with attenuated evidence of the antiquity and durability of the Buddha's presence over so many different times and places. On the other hand, those who liked to sneer at the Church found plenty of ammunition in the ironic canonization of St. Josaphat by Buddhist persecutors. Lopez and McCracken aver some of this guilt underlies the fascination recent scholars have had in the eager reception of this tale's provenance and message. Even if the trace elements of the Buddha's coming of age story are faint by the time they are detected by recent critics, the telling manner in which critical reception "seems to dissolve in the presence of the Buddha," a theme Lopez often analyzes, may account for--if not excuse--the appeal of a sage without priests, ritual, or dogma.

As Lopez repeats a phrase from his "scientific Buddha" book in 2013: "The goal of the Buddhist path is not creation but extinction." (37) The authors here conclude that the aim of Buddhism is not perpetuation of narrative or allurements of story, but a rejection of the pleasures of palace and princes. Separation from the enticements of this world is necessary. As the editors insist, for Buddhism, "The goal is to finally stop dying." (222) Flawed by change and doom, this world is not transcended as in Christian or Muslim terms for future reward but by renunciation of family, goods and attachment to all that would impede separation from its glittering delights. The Christian story of Barlaam and Josaphat sought to lure listeners away from the secular to the spiritual realm of the Church, and to ensure princes listening took care of pious hermits. But as Lopez and McCracken hint, these durable tales also sought to keep alive the very system that Buddhism seeks to put to an end.
(Both reviews edited and revamped a bit to Amazon US 7-28-14: Barlaam and In Search.)

Donald R. Howard's "Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World": Book Review

This provides one of the liveliest narratives on medieval times that I can recall; the added bonus that a leading Chaucerian wrote this just before his death in 1987 adds poignancy, given the final line of the text proper contemplates eternity. Donald R. Howard navigates the difficult path between speaking to his fellow scholars and welcoming a wider audience into the author's works, life, and times. He does this with verve; he shows what Chaucer would have seen and what he did read and where he did travel. He reminds us of how far Chaucer roamed, even if he was a bookworm who preferred staying in London.

The challenge, as Howard admits, is that facts for the Middle Ages are few, and liable to change. For much of this, Howard has to reason on probabilities. For instance, I consulted this wanting more on Dante and Boccaccio, given as a grad school prof (himself a medievalist) asserted Chaucer was likely the first person in England to read the Commedia, as he knew Italian so as to make his diplomatic visit there. Howard supplements this fact with supposition--Chaucer may have met Boccaccio, may have had a quarrel with him, may have therefore not cited him by name in his later literary works, may have rubbed a man twice his age the wrong way. This is all intriguing, but as Howard might have admitted, he has had to fill out much of the bare bones of Chaucer's record with such insights, and so the book turns more a depiction of Chaucer's world and works than his life, and this does fill the book. It is more readable, but it does have to make tangents.

It does, however, with insight. As Howard presented the pilgrim's perspective well in earlier studies, so here. He shows how the mental map of a traveler inverted, so a vague Earthly Paradise atop the half of the sphere named Asia beckoned, whereas Jerusalem was at the center, and bisecting the other half are Europe on the left, and then near the Devil's sinister hand, and Africa on the other quarter. He adds that the Southern Hemisphere was debated as possible back then, and that Columbus did not think any more than many then that the earth was flat. So, in a few pages, Howard corrects crucial ideas many have about medieval lore. He aligns his pitch at both scholars and everyday readers.

This tone sustains the interest that keeps the pace moving along. Howard has to compress a lot about the Canterbury Tales into the latter parts, the sections many may want expanded. Howard's previous The Idea of the Canterbury Tales book may be recommended as is his shorter one on pilgrimage as more in-depth on crucial topics. What provides this book's verve and infuses its pages is Howard's fascination with Chaucer and his time and influences, and now, as fewer turn to this author and his works for pleasure or even for coursework, this biography merits your time and your immersion.
(Amazon US 10-14-14)

Harriet Rubin's "Dante in Love": Book Review

This popular take on the appeal of the Divine Comedy has been criticized for errors, but it also conveys what Harriet Rubin calls herself in the afterward: an "impressionable reader" ready to learn. Yes, she fumbles on pp. 8-9 the Guelf-Ghibelline definition (although the endnote tries to explain), and she gets wrong T.S. Eliot's tutelage at Harvard, long before he could ever have been taught by the Dantista Charles Singleton. Lord Peter "Whimsey" by translator Dorothy Sayers is another unfortunate blunder. She elsewhere claims--contrary to the norm that suggests 1269-1289, usually 1284/5 by Salvino D'Armate in Italy-that corrective lenses were invented around 1300 but not put into frames until much later for fear of altering nature; this is left as so many of her references dangling or vague, but it does show her diligent passion in recording every fact or literary snippet she comes across that may enliven what after all remains a spirited presentation of the High Middle Ages.

Rubin appears to be as interested in this period, 1290-1322 or so, as Dante. Like Henry Adams, whom she channels in a detailed evocation of Abbot Suger in Paris squaring off against St. Bernard, much of the contents here demonstrate a keen desire to organize a lot of impressions around an aesthetic theme. But like Adams (for all his splendid prose), Rubin can rely on dated sources (Will Durant is cited often) and she seems like Dante the pilgrim himself (whom she elides with the author, against critical common sense) to wander from a direct way. But as with the digressions put into the mouths of many in the afterlife, so in Dante in Love: The World's Greatest Poem and How It Made History (2004, not to be confused with A.N. Wilson's own popular account, from 2013, titled Dante in Love with no grand subtitle): much of the adventure comes off on the byways from the high way.

From early on, Rubin makes claims that don't always get backed up. "There is nothing else like it in literature: a work of genius that explains how it was created." (25) She asserts that troubadours invented the language of love between two people, and that the Romans named Paris as Lutetia which she translates from "lux/light" rather than the usual hunches which find a Celtic root from mice or one from Latin as to a swamp or a marsh. The Romans themselves may have garbled the etymology, confusing it with "lux," but the reality appears to favor, given Paris's location, a far muddier origin.

Back to the main theme, "Dante shows how to turn loss into salvation" (29), but Rubin does not to her credit wander off into making this a self-help book for today as some do. But neither does she ground Dante's poem in its time enough, despite this historical emphasis. She reckons that we enter the realm as does an ant on a Moebius strip, and we see Dante use his medieval memory palace conception to conjure up an interior space turned textual place, through his consciousness. This eludes facile explanation, but "we are in Dante's world as thoroughly as he is in God's." (94)  Rubin strives to get at this core achievement, but at least in summing up Purgatorio, she reminds us of a key factor in its shift away from the Inferno and Paradiso. Dante is no longer an observer but in stage two of his quest, he participates in the process. For, between the eternal states, "time, change, and hope" transform souls undergoing cleansing, and day and night alternate, as in our own earthly world. (187)

She tries to cram in a lot about purgatory's evolution, as she cites Jacques Le Goff, who argued for its "intermediacy" as mathematically consistent, economically sensible (as mercantile interests and a middle class expanded clerical-lay dichotomies) and logically as a second chance by 1300. But this had arguably, as Georges Duby in his own tripartite scheme had suggested, been emerging already. She does, as many commentators do, rush past much of the second and third segments of the Comedy. Like many readers, she finds the first part the most engaging, although her close reading of it is scattered and diffused, for she makes so many detours. And she fumbles how, for instance, the Zohar and the feminine presence of the Shekinah have direct bearing on Beatrice, much as Rubin may wish to connect such suggestive influences. She keeps raising provocative or curious points, but then she drifts away from them. The book needed a stronger editor and another round of revision.

On a brighter note, Rubin varies verse translations, and these, often paired with the Italian text, allow readers to glimpse Dante's craft. I liked Philip Wicksteed's slightly more old-fashioned versions, and W.S. Merwin's from Purgatorio show as do John Ciardi's and Allen Mandelbaum's overall the translator's inability to stick to a word-for-word echo, given compression Dante exerts on his lines. 

By Paradise, which Rubin claims as not the Persian word for "garden", but "par-dheigh" for dough--this again shows her wandering, for in her wish to tie this to manna and famine, she omits the PIE etymology for the latter choice (233). This derivation is much more distant and possibly in medieval times unknown, compared to the Edenic concept which appears more relevant to Dante's conception. But at least Rubin stays on task in medieval terms, to compare Dante as a palimpsest to God as text (226) by the end of the vision, and as in her earlier excitement over Bologna's grey streets and lively university in this period, Pope Boniface's humiliation, Guido Cavalcanti's boasts, and Primo Levi's powerful attempt to recall--so as to teach a French guard some Italian at Auschwitz-- the cantos when Ulysses met Dante, Rubin shares ideas and their origins with energy and enthusiasm.

She even tells how ascetic diverged from athlete by medieval times, and how infant expresses a lack of speech in its meaning, and how company emerged from the corporate entities who boasted bread. In such asides, this book educates. Critics of it may be slightly chastened by the circumstances in which it was completed, for in the acknowledgements, Rubin dedicates it to her late partner, who the year before died of a brain tumor, revealing to them both the infernal, purgatorial, and heavenly nature of the same sort of suffering undergone by mortals whom Dante characterizes so vividly (Amazon US 10-11-14; see also Prue Shaw's invaluable thematic 2014 study, Reading Dante)

William T. Vollmann's "The Ice-Shirt": Book Review

After "Europe Central" and "Imperial," I figured I was ready to return to begin this first installment of Vollmann's gradually unfolding chronicle "Seven Dreams", which imagines the conflicts between natives and European settlers throughout what's now the U.S. and Canada. Vollmann's attracted to frontiers, to clashes between civilized and indigenous peoples, and to raw evocations of longing, loneliness, hostility, and tension. A formidable talent, inevitably seen if a "bastard son" of Thomas Pynchon, Vollmann, born twenty years after that reclusive genius, shares the polymath, world-encompassing, and manic drive of that postmodernist pioneer. But I'd aver that in his travels and his journalistic, conversational style, the younger writer strives towards more empathy for those trapped within systems. He talks to the down and out in American hobo camps, in Third World conflict zones, and in cribs where teen prostitutes huddle. He reports from battlefields as well as archives. Pynchon himself appears more accessible in his later fiction, and like Vollmann, he nods to quotidian, pop-cult detritus, as much as arcane lore and recondite legend, in big books.

Surpassing Pynchon in production years ago, if Vollmann can keep traveling and then tapping, might he rival neither Dickens nor Tolstoy but Balzac's La Comédie humaine which comprises over ninety published and over forty unfinished segments? Contrasted with Pynchon, who after all took seventeen years between "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Vineland" (which overlaps with Vollmann's symbolic terrain), and whose seven novels despite some of their heft add up to a comparatively compact stack five decades on, Vollman's oeuvre from a writer now in his mid-fifties overwhelms. I'm barely getting started, after 700 pages of 2005's WWII novel "Europe," and 1300 pages of "Imperial," its data amassed from a neglected corner of Southeastern California. I've commented at PopMatters on the latter tome's prolix penchant. Vollman's obsession generated carpal-tunnel syndrome, sixteen-hour days typing the second of "Seven Dreams" by the age of thirty. Still, he's forgivable for getting every fact down, refusing cuts. I understand that compulsion to record, for if not him, who? When? Michael Wood, reviewing "Europe" in the NYRB, judged how Vollmann's ability signals a rare pair: he's "both stylish and garrulous, a combination I thought impossible until I started to read him." 

Vollmann's 1990 saga about Norse-native contact starts slowly. He forces you over seventy pages to adapt to the mindset of marauders, and in the manner of medieval tales, he repeats motifs and phrases until you adjust to the violent, endemic tribal mentality of revenge, pride, rivalry, and honor. While this insistence may appear repetitive, so were these sources, the Icelandic stories themselves. Then he does the same, in briefer span, now in everyday tone, with Inuit origin myths. That sets up Leif the Lucky, son of Eirik the Red, who lands in Vinland. Let the first of many culture clashes commence.

Vollmann therefore allows us to shift gradually from our own expectations of pace and brevity to those of a thousand years ago. There, characters may barely appear, may be given but terse backstory, and we must tease out motivations and contexts. Vollmann does this and does not: as his notes document, he may expand the situation for his needs, or he may go along with the primary text's terse declarations. He, another storyteller, then merges with his inspirations, bringing us back in time. This reminded me of Michel Faber's omniscient narrator at the start of "The Crimson Petal and the White." Few historical novelists mediate to allow contemporary audiences enough of a chance to ease in, and to adjust our sensibilities away from a one-click, fast-forward milieu to one where the story accrues incrementally. Impatient readers, we begin to leave the patter of our own times (although as Vollmann keeps himself in the narrative as a 1987 traveler, current times never recede for long), and we start to follow the thoughts and conversations of Victorian parlor, or polar-bound or mead-hall, conventions. 

Impatience opens the novel: Norway feels too small. Iceland seems too settled. Exile or flight appears the only options for thuggish, stubborn, or deluded dreamers, caught up in a common, magically transmitted sensation of all-encompassing snow that shrouds one in illusory but convincing warmth. Vollmann explained to Larry McCaffery how "the characters in The Ice-Shirt see some way of escaping from whatever they are, either by changing their locations and going to Vinland, or becoming the sun, or whatever. That may or may not be an illusion on their part, but at least it’s their hope not to be fixed."  

The Inuit share this restlessness, as even the first two beings created in their white world wonder at fulfillment: "What is loneliness? Does the lonely space between two rocks vanish when spanned by a spiderweb?" (93) The novel then shifts into the contacts between the Norse who, having settled Iceland and Greenland, seek another shore in Markland, Slab-Land, and Vinland: the Atlantic fringes of what today the descendents of later coastal settlers and explorers know as the Maritime Provinces.

First, Eirik's daughter--by a mother who may not be a being we'd recognize--Freydis, seeks her own quest. She has been captivated by the shirt of the title, and the dream which will compel her to leave Greenland to seek Vinland's promise, for her own greed and her own power. However, on her mission, she first must climb a peak in Greenland. "Blue-Shirt Glacier was a pillar to mark her way. The sun wheeled round and round the mountains, making each snow-tip orange in turn while the rocks fell and the ice shattered, instantaneously swelling the roar of waterfalls, and the creeks trickled and the tundra meadows moved scarcely a muscle in the world. It was all unspeakably grand and beautiful. The world was still being created here." (177) Vollmann excels in a set-piece passage which follows, as Freydis proves herself and meets her foe, her lover, and her dark lord, Black Hands.

In Vinland, Freydis lures her rival Gudrun into the fray. "Oh, just as the Bear-Shirt made men see red-leaf forests through a hot rainy haze of blood; just as the Blue-Shirt made the wearer's world glitter cold and grand and beautiful in a thousand twinkling mirrors, so the Gold-Shirt glared and shone like the sun's eye" (242). Freydis goes to hell and back; others trade scraps of coveted red cloth and pails of milk to the Skraelings, as the Norse gain fur and amass riches. But the natives grow restless, and soon clashes among the settlers and against the natives put an end to the Vinland colony.

Vollmann over about 350 pages of narrative, enriched by his sources, glossaries, and commentary, dips in and out of the tale. He mixes lengthy digressions to bring his characters into the conflicts of the original sagas, and he blends his conversations with the natives on Baffin Island and Greenland. These show how the imagery he immerses this book in reverberates a thousand years later. As a fellow traveler to the former Slab-Land, Baffin, tells him in 1987: "If you hear a river moan, you know it has life." (211) In this novel, despite some languor in Vollmann's endemic drive to not leave a detail or a factoid out of his presentation, the stylistic leaps and the thematic sprawl produced attest to his dogged determination to recreate the mood of the Norse who possessed a similar desire for success. Their failure, and the predicament of those who, a millennium later, find themselves again colonized by Scandinavia, across the lands near the North Pole, leave their own telling mark on us. 

The last pages of "The Ice-Shirt" narrative tell over the past five centuries of the Skraelings captured and forced to board the English or Danish ships taking them back as souvenirs for the Europeans. A poignant coda, this allows Vollmann to contrast the homeland of those who call themselves the Inuit, "the People" in Greenland today. Of their counterparts to the south, on Vinland, known as the Micmac to the French, it appears that they survive, but again, in a manner beholden to those who supplanted them as they moved west across the ocean. 

That western impact resumes in the early 1600s with the second installment in "Seven Dreams" which appeared in 1992, "Fathers and Crows." As Vollmann told The Paris Review, he started to test out his craft with "Ice." Compared to "Fathers" and then (back to the Inuit) in "The Rifles," his debut "Dream" has its rough spots; he finds his stride in the next volume, which expands its Canadian plot: it's five hundred pages longer than "Ice." (Except for paragraphs one and two: Amazon US 11/28/13)

P.S. For "Ice" insight, see 1) Heloise Merlin at her blog June 24, 2013. 2)  James Gibbons Bookforum June 2005. 3) McCaffery introduces a 2004 Vollmann anthology, placing his friend firmly in a less post-modern and more post-Pynchon category. Yet this editor connects Vollmann to early Pynchon, for Vollmann "seems able to unweave the fabric of modern history, then put it together again in a new garment showing off the features of this history in ways we've never seen before". ("Expelled from Eden" xx) Speaking of garments that Dream protagonists don metaphorically (or, as in "Ice", as mythic totems) which manifest the coming of ice, axes, iron, Christianity, and capitalism to North America, Vollmann titles two more Dreams with "Shirt". Part four in the series "The Poison Shirt" will pit Puritans against natives during King Philip's War in Rhode Island, and part seven "The Cloud-Shirt" will be set in a Navaho uranium mine later in the last century (ibid, 450). "The Dying Grass" (projected for 2015, part six) is mooted to cover the Nez Perce in the Northwest rather than Hawai'i as once suggested. Ted Gioia champions such conceptual fiction, which "plays with reality, rather than defers to it". This decades-in-the-making project began in the slurry of concrete and speculation.  Vollmann first mused on the Dreams when he pondered how a parking lot in San Francisco's Tenderloin got that way. What happened before this continent was paved over by us?

P.P.S. As he wrapped up an interview with Madison Smartt Bell in the Paris Review 163 (Fall 2000): "All I want to do is be able to have my freedom and do the things in life that I have always wanted to do. I want to see all of these unknown places, walk on the frozen sea as often as I can, and see the jungles. I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure."

Ronald Hutton's "Pagan Britain": Book Review

This expert on past and present paganism revisits this topic, revising his 1991 survey of practices in the ancient British Isles to narrow it to Great Britain. He peers back thousands of years at rituals, monuments, and remains to surmise how people sought to connect with the sacred and the natural. Those two force-fields mingled in intricate ways, many of which may elude their stony, bony, material traces. Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at Bristol University, conveys an immense amount of scholarship in a cautious but lively manner. As with his previous books, he combines graceful prose with an awareness of the dangers of reducing this perplexing topic to romantic, lurid, or airy phrases.

Not that this factual compendium turns stodgy. While any serious presentation of such material means dry stretches will intervene, Hutton keeps a brisk pace. Endnotes pack a lot of references for scholars to pursue, but Hutton keeps his narrative academic yet accessible. The evidence being very limited for both prehistoric and early historic Britain, constraints emerge as scholars compete to advance their interpretations. Hutton shows readers frequently how current attitudes towards religion, immigration, feminism, and imperialism warp various theories applied to the archeological record, and how such an endeavor draws in diverse fields, so that scholars wind up discussing and debating across their typical divides.

Sometimes, bewilderment or enchantment seeps through Hutton's diligent recitals of digs and finds. Paleolithic images at Creswell Crags include in his captions "d) Shapes taken by some to be dancing women, and by others to be long-necked birds. e) So-called 'vulva' figures -- female genitalia or animal tracks, or something else altogether." These remind me of Borges' sly lists of Chinese marvels.

At Langdale Pikes, a remote Neolithic "factory" for stone in Cumbria's Lake District, Hutton allows us to glimpse the material and the spiritual as they blend. "The climb to the site is still long and hard, and anyone who makes it enters a world where wisps of clouds still drift along the surface of the land, and silence is usually absolute save for the voices of the wind and of thunder, and where pieces of rock, broken by frost or storm, come loose from their places and roll crashing down from the slopes of scree. It is a place where the majesty of stone is most evident, united with that of the heavens themselves." Such excursions are rare in this book, but necessary, for we view through a professor's eye the measured vision, in steady narration, the awe that accompanies so much analysis.

Stones shape into megaliths, dolmens, patterns. These by the New Stone Age after around 3000 BCE challenge conjectures that they paid homage to a Great Goddess, or that they stood for farmers who conquered hunters, or that they marked boundaries of sacred spaces and/or armed fortresses. Hutton weighs various arguments, but leans towards ambiguity. Often, the closer the evidence gets to the present-day technologies applied to interpret the traces, the less secure the previous theories become.

Even if much has vanished, the stones remain in henges and circles. So do hints of timber-circles and in tombs in turn, the slow pace of many millennia can be sensed. Systems may have been embedded very long in the British archipelago. The average Orkney Islands burial shrine held but eleven bodies over thirty to fifty generations, indicating those interred there must have been particularly favored. Avebury's stone henge was assembled over a thousand years; a Saxon-era village now surrounds it.

This antiquity attests to the wonder with which earlier Britons regarded these monuments. Its most famous site reveals prehistoric burials nearby by visitors from the Continent, marking its long fame. Stonehenge has been mythologized for at least the past nine centuries in writing, and it functions "as a mirror in which modern people can reflect and justify their own prejudices, ideals and expectations". For instance, the two most recent interpretations of Stonehenge neatly contradict each other. One proposes it as a place of magical stones and healing. The other regards it as a stony necropolis, balanced by a nearby gathering place which by its timber affirmed the powers of life.

For the next period, those doughty classifications of short, dark Neolithic inhabitants invaded by what archeologists termed on account of their imported pottery the Beaker People, and then tall, fair Celts who swept in from the Continent, meet their dismantling. Instead, genetic evidence traces trade across the North Atlantic and beyond, when smaller waves of immigrants--then as now--arrived to exchange goods, mate, and settle down with the islanders. Barrows with burials of bodies and bling faded as a warrior elite grew, and as their artifacts and cremated urns gained prestige in cemeteries.

These shifts cause some to attribute them to new beliefs, brought perhaps along with the new imports. Britain chilled, from its South of France ambiance, into Scandinavian levels of cold before resuming what is closer to today's weather. What emerged as its new set of "ritual practitioners" sparks dissent. Hutton in previous books has analyzed paganism then and now, and this Druid cult past and present.

He sums up these studies and balances them fairly against the counter-cultural champions of "avant-garde spirituality". Ley lines, astro-archeology, and earth mysteries emerge in the past few decades as the fringe battles the mainstream, and as science and magic square off in the press. Hutton explains that professors rarely rush to defend their archeological turf, as they face derision if correct and dismissal if their findings fail (as they will) to please those who ally with "poetic truth" instead. However, as his endnotes evoke, he graciously thanks many among these ranks for their contributions to widening the scope of scholarship, to take in sounds, colors, lines of sight, and mythic resonances.

Throughout Pagan Britain, Hutton places his own work within these "power politics of knowledge in the modern age" nimbly. He manages to reach out to mavericks whom most scholars ignore, while he advances mainstream scholarship. As an historian, he may be well placed, being slightly outside the archeological camp but trained in the analytical methods his own field shares, while being a fellow traveler who reports from the ranks of British iconoclasts, the unifying theme of his career's pursuit.

By late prehistory, whatever the former neat divisions of Bronze and Iron Ages now give way to, the ripples of the power that will be Rome enter Britain, perhaps as early as 400 BCE. While Julius Caesar will not land in Britannia to report on Druids until 55 BCE, goods and culture earlier shift far to the north of the Empire, as it comes closer. Outmoded conceptions of Celts as a triple threat of art, languages, and "race" as Hutton explains now adjust to a proto-European Union model, where whatever the continental peoples were before Rome, they seem to have possessed some common cultural elements to loosely unite many diverse nations. These presences, when excavated from land or water, may by a sensational media gain notoriety if the bodies of early Britons preserved in bogs as "Druid priests" or human sacrifices. Hutton knows too well the dangers of promoting sagas as fact. As with chalk figures still seen on hillsides, or Iron Age coinage, the evidence enduring creates its own problems of meaning, and figuring out what is sacred and what is secular eludes those who now try to decipher the "intractable nature" of evidence. But, one case cheered me as typical of this search.

Near my ancestral farmhouse, since the mid-1980s reverting to ruin in Ireland, stands what Hutton terms a "burnt mound" (fulacht fiadh in Irish eludes easy translation from "bloody-flesh spit for wild animals/deer"). These are found by the thousands across the archipelago, serving as the primitive equivalent of a hot tub. Professors long figured these were for heating stones to plop in to cook meat. Recently, some conjectured them as logically a place for not only feasting but, in damp weather, warming up in a sweat lodge tent; two scholars in Galway experimented with brewing barley ale via a modern mock-up. Hutton genially figures all three speculations, from evidence, meet his criteria. I dutifully add that a prosaic use has been posited, if less invigorating, just as necessary: doing laundry.

With the Romans, recognizable baths arrived, along with the historical record's advent. Yet debates over interpreting the depth of British adaptation of Roman ways continue over the evidence found of idols, inscriptions, and images from a presence that at its height numbered 55,000 troops and up to four times the amount of civilian support for that imperial occupation. Given headless corpses have been often interred, as Hutton shows, four plausible explanations can be conjectured for their presence. An image of a comely nude woman, escorted by two clad if somewhat stouter females, may be a Venus between two nymphs, or a Christian postulant readied for baptism by a pair of matrons. These examples testify to the difficulty of distinguishing native from Roman impacts on beliefs, a process accelerated in later centuries when Romanization had settled in enough to cause some to revert to a retro-paganism as Christianity began to rise, and later as legions withdrew from Britain.

This overlap between persisting Roman and nascent Christian practices, in a time of tumult during the fifth century, creates another difficult period for archeologists and historians to puzzle over. The records of what some would even then claim as the coming of dark ages reflect their Christian panic. All the same, two hundred years ensue in which the historical record, the economy, and the culture appear to have suffered dramatic cessation, as far as the British pagan legacy can be followed. For, while in the east a Germanic-Scandinavian paganism brought by invaders replaced it, this seems to have wiped out previous pagan practices. In the west of the island, descendants of the Roman colony adapted Christianity in its similarly Roman version, which appears to lack continuity with the Roman occupation, nevertheless. Discontinuity reigns: while the genetic and landscape evidence shows little sign of dramatic British change, the linguistic break from Latin and Celtic and the ethnic divisions persisting between Saxon and native run deep for many centuries after islanders convert to Christ.

While Arthurian fiction imagines shamans, wizards, and magic, Hutton remains firmly suspicious of any Anglo-Saxon presence for such "cunning men" persisting as pagan rather than as eventually Christian, and he repeats his research affirming the lack of any truly pagan practitioner of magic after the medieval acceptance of Christianity in Britain until the twentieth century, allowing for a few from inconclusive reports who may have been instead deluded or plain insane. Over a few centuries, the scattered redoubts of paganism surrendered to a relentless force. Pagan and Christian rulers fought over which petty or restive realm would be Christian or pagan; for a while, common people wavered back and forth, too. But while indigenous worship was rooted in the local, the Christian manifestation demanded elimination of any rivals, as "more aggressive, determined and monopolistic" a regime.

Yet, Hutton avers that medieval Christians conveyed four patterns that aligned with their pagan predecessors. Polytheism persisted by a cult of saints aligned to trades or holy wells, by a "provision of new figures who offered a parallel service". Ritual observances led to seasonal festivals, worship opened up spaces for female participation, and male priests kept presiding over sacrificial altars. But, there was no "continuing allegiance to the old deities in preference to Christ" even as rites, usages, ideas and festivals as "trace-elements" were absorbed into Christian and/or popular superstitions.

Herne the Hunter and Ceridwen as Mother Goddess appear, as "back-projections" of modern unease about progress or patriarchy, not pagan deities who have managed to elude 1500 years of Christian crackdown. Hutton examines the Green Man, sheela-na-gigs, labyrinths, hillside chalk giants, as he weighs this evidence for and against his position. Fair-minded but confident, Hutton strengthens his previous arguments which doubt what others have claimed when looking at these as manifestations of the pagan. These artifacts "echo" ancient images and practices, rather than confirm direct survivals.

In conclusion, four-hundred pages of this solidly presented, thoughtful narrative (given the sheer mass of material to sift through and present for both a scholarly and a mainstream audience, no small feat; my only regrets are too few maps and few typos) repeat a characteristic humility for this affable yet eminent scholar of paganism. This is a big book on a vast subject, presented intelligently. It reminds us of how quickly academic "proof" can shift, and the twenty-odd years since his 1991 study reveal how technology and our own mentalities filter into dim corners of the past. Hutton, shedding light into passage tombs, beheaded skeletons, and runic scratches, stays sober but spirited as he takes us through thousands of years of enigmatic, jumbled remains. While "The Quest for...." and "In Search of..." appeal to those who speculate as if ancient mysteries can be resolved at last, Dr. Hutton knows better. He reminds us of "how much we cannot know" as "an opportunity and a strength" rather than as an embarrassment or a hardship" when examining the "common resource" of evidence.
(5-5-14 Amazon US and to PopMatters