Tag: medieval

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Oxford Medieval Studies Lecture, Hilary 2022

I was delighted to be asked to present the lecture in Medieval Studies for this year, and to be able to use it as an opportunity to present new work on the earliest Latin Maimonides. Many thanks to Henrike Lähnemann, Mark Williams, and Oxford Medieval Studies for inviting me. Although the internet failed us at the time, I was able to have a version of the lecture recorded to share here.

And don’t miss the trumpet fanfare and lovely introduction by Henrike that we caught before the wireless failed:

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J.K. Knauss’s Seven Noble Knights

Cover for J.K. Knauss Seven Noble Knights

Jessica Knauss’s novel, Seven Noble Knights, brings to life a story from an epic poem that doesn’t exist. The tale of the seven sons of the noble Lara family, killed in vengeance during the tumultuous tenth century, is known to us today first from Alfonso X’s thirteenth-century Estoria_de_España and the Chronicle of 1344. Scholars infer from these two late sources, an original epic poem, whether an indigenous creation or one inspired by the epic poetry of the French, and they debate whether it and other early stories that found their way into the chronicle tradition are wholly imagined or have a basis in historical fact. I have myself written about a different tale from that period found only in later histories, that of Bernardo del Carpio, and I argued that story did have a basis in history, so I was eager to read Knauss’s version of this powerful story.

At first I was thrown off, because I was expecting a historicized version that takes the tale out of its later written form and situates it into the grim tenth century. What Knauss has done instead is to write the lost epic poem into the visual and material world of the thirteenth/fourteenth-century of its sources for it, much like, for instance, T.H. White did with the Arthurian tales in The Once and Future King, which placed later stories about a maybe-fifth-century king in a sort-of late medieval England of the imagination, a kind of no-time no-place. Once I realized what she was doing (and truly, only the five or six of us in the world who have spent too much time thinking about tenth-century Spain would be thrown off in this way), I settled down to enjoy the wild ride Knauss takes us on.

What I liked most about this book, is how true Knauss is to the spirit of her materials, and how uncompromising she is to the values of their time. Seven Noble Knights has the feeling of the epic poem it imagines. This is a world of blood and sex, of vengeance carried out personally by hand. These people are alien to us, what they care about, what makes them angry and how they deal with it, and Knauss allows them to retain this strangeness. Her use of language and her imagery emphasizes this sense of distance. These are not the characters of usual twenty-first century historical fiction, whom we imagine as “three-dimensional” because of their fictive interiority. Knauss’s characters are figures in the way that the characters of medieval literature are figures. We often call (or dismiss) them as stereotypes but I think Knauss’s book shows how powerful this kind of writing can be.

I felt this especially vividly with the character of Doña Lambra, who is the pivot point around whom so much of the action turns. While the centrality of the women to this story might surprise modern readers, it shouldn’t. Mercedes Vaquero, who has written brilliantly about this story and others like it, has argued that one of their roles was to create a space to discuss the fraught question of noble lineage, and women’s roles in creating and perpetuating it, and that women themselves may have been the patrons for these stories. I kept thinking of Vaquero as I was reading, and when I got to the end, lo, I discovered that Knauss had been her PhD student.

I think this novel will appeal to readers searching out a different kind of historical novel than most of what is published right now, a novel that doesn’t “bring you back in time,” but rather immerses you in a strange world and an unusual-to-us kind of story-telling.

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An Interview With…Me!

I was delighted to be interviewed by Kristen Geaman about my book recently for the Royal Studies Journal blog. You can read the interview and a review of my book here.

I am thrilled by the interest the Royal Studes Journal has shown in Her Father’s Daughter. My argument in the book is that the female royal power I was seeing was not a consequence of personality or chance historical circumstances, but was rather part of the structure of how power was organized. When I was working on the book, I wanted to write it in such a way that it would be useful as a possible model for people thinking about gender and power in places and periods very different from medieval Spain. The Royal Studies Journal has helped me greatly to reach some of that audience.

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Race in the Middle Ages

Medieval historians need to do a better job of talking about race.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, at least since last January when I attended a panel on race in medieval European history at the AHA and was part of another panel on “relevance” in the study of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe down the street at the MLA. I’ve been thinking about it in a more systematic fashion over the last few months as the Lexicon Project — a group of faculty and students at the University of Chicago who gathered initially to talk about the lexicography of sexuality and gender — has expanded its focus and its community this quarter to discuss race, and as a goad to our discussion, we’ve been reading a range of scholarship in the area.

I have also been thinking about it because instead of working on hagiography and dialogue and nuns, as I thought I’d been doing now, my attention has been called back to the project I began my career as a medievalist with, back to the thirteenth-century archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. I’m working on two things at the moment — an article on Jiménez de Rada’s globalism, and a longer piece on Jewish and Christian intellectual exchange and competition.

 Working on the article has made me realize what an awful lot of evidence historians of medieval Spain have left on the ground, evidence that could be used for a rich and fruitful discussion of race in the Middle Ages. Working on the other project has returned me to something I observed in my first book, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain, about the difference between the contemporary historiography of medieval Christian-Jewish relations and the historiography of medieval Christian-Muslim relations. As I wrote in 2004:

“The perceived breakdown in harmony between Jews and Christians is perceived as a puzzle, as a problem, and different factors are adduced by scholars to explain this perplexing state of affairs. By contrast, conflict in relations between Christians and Muslims is taken for granted and seems to need no explanation.”

At the time, the model of difference I was using was that of alterity, inspired somewhat by David Tracy’s Dialogue with the Other and Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. I think now that race might have been a more effective and sharper tool for understanding the difference between those two historiographies. Put simply, most of us who study Christian-Jewish relations in medieval Iberia are Jews of one kind or another. We’re of an age that we grew up, one way or another, in the long shadow of the Nazi racialist project. The one thing, perhaps, that unites us is that we know we do not want to be a race. We know what happens when Jews become a race. We’re just like you! we say. We’re white! We’re European/American/Canadian! It’s weird that you guys did all those awful things to us but we’re willing to let bygones be bygones if you let us into your universities! And we’ve been very leery of allowing race to be one of our categories of analysis for interpreting the Middle Ages, and we pretzel ourselves into knots trying to avoid it, as the news mounts up from the Tree of Life, from desecrated cemeteries, from Twitter and 8chan, that a race is not something you choose for yourself; it is something others ascribe to you.

And into this historical moment comes Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. I remember the man who became my doctoral advisor, Jocelyn Hillgarth, lamenting in the very first session of the very first class I took with him that no one wrote big books any more, no one took risks or made big arguments. This is a big book. And what it offers us is a way to cut through the anxiety medieval historians have felt about speaking of race in the Middle Ages — fears of anachronism, fears of a teleology that begins with us, obsession with biology, with vocabulary, with colour, with DNA, all these things that have made us wishy-washy and hesitant.

Race has no substantive content, Heng says. Race has no substantive content. Rather, it is “one of the primary names we have — a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes –that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the greatest import to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.”(p. 3, 27) I’ll emphasize some of words I think are key in this formulation: Race is a name. The phenomena it describes are repeating and grave. It demarcates differences that are essentialized as foundational. These differences are used as the basis for differential distributions of power.

Race is not a single “thing.” It is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences.” (p.3, 27) And it is one of the factors that creates the European subject.

This is not a review of Heng’s book. For one thing, I haven’t finished reading it. I’m sure there are places where I will disagree with this interpretation or that — I can already see a few spots where my own argument would be different. That’s not the point. I don’t take this as the last word. I take it rather as an invitation do further work, and as a gift of a powerful tool that we can use for understanding when differences that are religious or ethnic or physical or gendered become racialized (and when they don’t or haven’t and how this changes or doesn’t over time). Talking about race in the Middle Ages is not going to be about finding a particular word used, or a physiognomy described, though those may be the clues we use as evidence. Each case has to be argued on its own merits. We will disagree.

Time to get to work.

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Thoughts on “Medieval Imaginings”: Medieval History and Historical Fiction at Northwestern University

MedievalImaginings
The books have been signed, the taxis boarded for O’Hare, but before we all move on to the next adventure, I wanted to write about few of the things I learned and lessons I valued from yesterday’s conference, “Medieval Imaginings: A Celebration of Historical Fiction.” Organized by Barbara Newman as one of the last events sponsored by a Mellon grant that has brought so many exciting ways to think of the Middle Ages, not only to Northwestern University, but to all of us in the Chicago area, the day gathered together students and teachers, historians and literary scholars and writers, as well as a few people who were all of the above.

Cecelia Holland, last but not least, was my favourite part of the day. She read a few passages to us from her 1997 novel about the Templars, Jerusalem, and every time she stopped, I wanted to shout, “No! Keep reading! I have to know what happens next.” But even more than that, she talked about how, when you write about the past, the past must connect to the present. The past is gone; we are here, and it is for us that we are writing. Before she started reading, she spoke about the place she was in when she began the book, about teaching prisoners how to write, about how she loved them and how they were desperate and hardened, hopeless and full of longing, and how writing gave them the chance to be themselves again. We could see those prisoners in the Templars she described, Rannulf and Mouse the rest.

I learned other things too. From a thoughtful discussion of sources and the uses we make of them between Paul Strohm and Bruce Holsinger (whose Invention of Fire we eagerly await), I discovered that I am more fearful of the claims made by historical biography than historical fiction. I know this comes from reading Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone as an impressionable youth. Its twin story lines of biographer and subject force us to recognize all that the biographer can never know. I learned that my own initial stirrings of an idea to write a novel about the medieval pilgrimage to Compostela must have begun very close to my reading of Sharan Newman’s novel with the same theme, Strong as Death.

We spent a little too much time talking about Dan Brown. We don’t get upset when someone writes something wrong about the Middle Ages that sinks like a stone; we get upset when it sells a lot of copies and makes a lot of money. My own explanation, not voiced at the conference, for the popularity of The DaVinci Code (and 50 Shades, and Harry Potter) is that they are easy to read, their themes and claims are big, and they satisfy a longing we have for a shared text, now that the Bible no longer fills that space. One question that came up over and over again was whether we are doing the right thing, drawing on the past for the needs of the present, slicing it up and making stories out of it with beginnings, middles, and ends; with character arcs and conflict resolved. What if people read what we write and…believe us? And what if we’re wrong? As we are, as we all are because, remember what Cecelia Holland said: the past is gone. My serious answer to this question is that I would not put my name on any piece of writing I was not prepared to stand behind, with all of its longing, and failure, to hear and convey a voice that is not my own. This is as true of my historical as my fictional writing. My flippant answer (But felt no less strongly. Maybe felt more strongly.) is that, who cares if it is wrong and they believe it? The only problem would be if, “and they believe it,” meant, “and so they stopped telling stories of their own.” Of course it is wrong. I read a history and I tell a history, then you read it and out of that your own history emerges, and together a great chain of stories continues to grow, connecting us and allowing us to share in each other while becoming more thoroughly our selves. Long live stories, and the people with the courage to tell them, and believe them.

I think the writer at the conference may have been the best historian in the room.

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The Back of the Polyptych

A lot of my readers know that image on the cover of my novel, Pilgrimage, is a detail from a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a polyptych (that is to say, a panel painting that folds up) that had once been an altarpiece. The altarpiece as a whole is quite incredible, and shows scenes from the life (and death) of Saint Godeleva; in my novel, the mother of my heroine, Gebirga. The panel even includes images of the blind daughter who inspired Gebirga, so I was delighted to be able to use a part of it for the cover. Here it is in all its glory:
MasterofGodelieve

Well, not quite all its glory, as I discovered this evening. As an altarpiece, this polyptych would have hung behind and above the altar of a church. Polyptychs were designed to fold closed during Lent and other times of penance, concealing their beauty from the congregation. The closed doors of the polyptych would often have different painted scenes on their backs. You can see how this works in this link to the Ghent Altarpiece, which shows how it looks both open and closed.

It wasn’t until tonight that I discovered what was on the back of the doors of the Godeleva altarpiece. When closed, the four panels each show a different saint, with kneeling donor portraits in front of the saints on the far left and far right. Here is how it looks:
JamesNicholas
It was the two saints on the left who immediately caught my eye. I recognized them right away. The bishop in mitre and cope, holding his crook and a book was obviously Saint Nicholas, rescuing the three boys who had been chopped up and put in a barrel. Saint Nicholas, or at least his relics, play an important role in my novel. In their silver reliquary, they are Gebirga’s prized possession, carried with her on her journey until she relinquishes them so they can travel back to the Low Countries from Spain by boat. And as all Dutch children know, every year Saint Nicholas sails again from Spain around this time to reward them with treats. And the saint on the far left? The saint with staff, and pilgrim’s purse and hat, his neck ringed with scallop shells?

That is none other than Saint James, Sint Jaakob, Santiago himself.

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Gebirga’s Dog

shutterstock_96854167 copyAn author may think she knows what her book is about, but she only really discovers what it’s about when it moves into the hands of her readers. I have always had the most terrible time distilling my novel into a “pitch” sentence, but thanks to my friend Kyle I can tell you now that it is a book about a girl and a dog who go on an adventure.

And what a dog she is. Her name is Liisa, and after Gebirga, she was the second character to populate my novel. If I were going to send Gebirga out into the world blind, I reasoned, the least thing I could do is give her a dog. Of course, the formal origin of the seeing-eye dog was not until after World War I, when they began training dogs to work with soldiers who has lost their sight during the war. But centuries before that, children’s alphabets had “B is a Blind Man, led by his Dog,” and so I felt it was fair to use a wise dog in my novel. But what kind? The breeds we know now were largely fixed in the last century or so, though many have medieval origins. We know most about medieval hunting dogs, because a good deal was written about them. We also know about medieval lap dogs, and both hunting and lap dogs appear in illuminations. We know rather less about what other kinds of working dogs would have looked like, though we know they existed. Dogs guarded sheep and property long before the Middle Ages, and sheep dogs would have been common in sheep-rich Flanders. So I chose to make Liisa the long-ago ancestor of the Belgian sheep dogs we know today, in the slightly rarer white version. This photograph is a remarkably good likeness of Liisa, considering she lived long before colour photography.

So that is what she looks like, and her instinct to protect Gebirga is built into her bones. I grew up around working dogs. My father and grandfather hunted, and my grandfather always had a dog, a yellow or black Laborador retriever. Remembering the bond between my grandfather and his dogs, like they were one person in two bodies when it came time to work, helped me think of the connection between Gebirga and Liisa. So Liisa is a little bit Nena, a little bit Sally, a little bit Tricky, a little bit Taffy. But mostly Sally.

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PIlgrimage, History, and Historical Fiction

When I would tell fellow academics I was writing a historical novel about my period, their eyes would widen and the questions and comments would come, always friendly and supportive, maybe a little wistful:

–Really?
–Is it hard?
–I could never do that; I don’t have enough imagination.
–How do you find the time?

(Answer: you make the time)
Reading historical fiction as a child (Rosemary Sutcliff, Jean Plaidy, Georgette Heyer…) was a huge part of why I became interested in history, so the link between historical writing and fiction was there from the beginning. Now my friend David Perry (another medieval historian who pushes his own writing beyond the confines of the academy) has written a thoughtful essay on fiction and scholarship that discusses my novel, Pilgrimage and Bruce Holsinger’s A Burnable Book:

Fictionalizing Your Scholarship: Writing a novel is hard to do well, but it can serve as a powerful way to share your research with a wider audience

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PILGRIMAGE news

A few very nice things are happening.
A lovely article appeared in the University of Chicago Magazine about PILGRIMAGE. The image at the bottom of this post is from the tomb of Sancha Ramirez that is discussed in the article. You can read it at the link here:
Novel Pilgrim
On October 26th, I will be talking about the book and doing a reading at the Seminary Coop Bookstore:
http://www.semcoop.com/event/lucy-pick-reads-and-discusses-pilgrimage
And on October 29th, I will be the featured speaker at the Divinity School’s weekly Wednesday Lunch. Follow the link to sign up:
Wednesday Lunch

Tomb of Sancha Ramirez
Tomb of Sancha Ramirez

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Reading the Medieval Camino

Fromista
Fromista
I thought a word about the sources in English that I used for my historical novel, PILGRIMAGE might be interesting both for readers, and also for modern pilgrims who have tackled (or dream of tackling) the Camino to Santiago de Compostela. One of the wonders of the Camino Frances is not only that it is such an old track, but that there has been so much written about it over the centuries. I think knowing something of the history that created the road only enhances the journey. And it is not a history primarily of dates and politics, but one of art and architecture and real people with hopes and dreams and fears tracking off into the unknown (to them) world. My own heroine takes a roundabout route before joining the road through France via Arles and Toulouse. She takes the Camino Aragones before joining — after a few plot-required detours — the Camino Frances.

The first source pilgrims who are interested in the history and origins of the route usually encounter is the engaging and wonderful twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Guide to Compostela. I link to the Italica Press translation by William Melczer, which is also available in a Kindle edition, for those pilgrims who would like to carry it en route. I would not suggest you replace your modern guidebook with it, however. Let’s just say that Aimery Picaud was a little optimistic when he described the length of each stage…

The Miracles of St. James accompanies the Pilgrim’s Guide in manuscripts, and is now available in its own translation. The gem of this book is its translation of the medieval sermon “Veneranda dies.” If you want an idea of how they thought of the Camino in the twelfth-century, and the origin of traditions (and complaints) that are still relevant today, this is the place to look. Exerienced pilgrims will discover many differences, of course, but I think you will be surprised to see how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If your primary interest in the Camino is its art and architecture, and if you want to know more about what you might see along all the main roads in France and Spain, you might like Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: A Gazeteer by Paula Gerson and Annie Shaver-Crandell. I found it an invaluable resource for imagining my heroine’s journey.

A resources designed more for the modern pilgrim, because it describes what you will see stage by stage, is David Gitlitz and Mary-Jane Davidson’s The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook. It doesn’t provide trail directions or the addresses of albergues but it is an excellent source for explaining what it is you will actually see on the road and what it all means. I returned to it over and over again while writing.

If you would like to know more about the history of medieval Spain during the time when the pilgrimage road to Compostela was becoming popular across Europe, you could take a look at Bernard Reilly’s The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain: 1031 – 1157. And last but not least, if you prefer some pictures while you are reading, and want to delve deeper into relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews in the peninsula, check out The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture.

Happy reading and happy walking!