Some spam a few days ago offered me a free copy of ‘Baby Laughs: The Naked Truth About the First Year of Mommyhood’ by Jenny McCarthy. Other than the obvious points that I have no idea who this woman is and that I would be reluctant in principle to own any book containing the word ‘Mommyhood’ in the title, this did get me wondering how transferable the ‘truth’ about new motherhood is. There is a lot in the experiences of pregnancy and caring for babies/small children that does seem either universal or at least very common. Giving birth did make me feel that ‘woman’ is more than a cultural/social construct (though admittedly not all women give birth). And I did start to feel I had a new insight into high rates of infant mortality in historical times when I was having terrific struggles breastfeeding and L was not putting on much weight. Recently, I’ve also been reflecting that even the toddlers of hunter-gathers presumably have to be ‘toilet-trained’, in the sense of knowing when and where to urinate/defecate and the hygiene rituals/taboos around these acts, which don’t come naturally. More specifically, it seems to me that the real divide for modern women is between those that who are mothers and those who are childless/childfree and that this is now a far more significant life-cycle event than marriage for women. Similarly, Edward has discovered a whole new community of fatherhood as a topic of discussion that can unite the most disparate men; even those whose children are long grown up seemingly have etched into their brains some of the trials of babies.
On the other hand, while experiences and problems have a lot of commonality, solutions are immensely varied across cultures and times. What I was taught as best practice when weaning had already been superseded within a few months, while what our mother’s generation learnt about babycare seems archaic if not positively dangerous. One of the most frustrating things about being a middle-class mother, having had a professional career and with highly-developed ‘analytical skills’, is how there isn’t a best-practice with babies or toddlers that works consistently. Despite what books may suggest, babies aren’t consistent with each other or even internally consistent: what works one time or for some mother may for completely unfathomable reasons be unsuccessful in another situation. I sometimes felt that the only way to deal with L when she was crying persistently was to try in turn all the possible solutions and by a random process (or because she’d got fed up anyhow), she’d eventually stop. Equally, I would like to think that the reason L is so unfussy about what she eats (in contrast to many other toddlers and myself when young) is that I reared her just right. However, the fact that the daughter of a contemporary, (who I’m sure reared her child equally well), is an incredibly finicky eater suggests that I may just have been lucky. Maybe it’s this feeling of the randomness of success in child-rearing (and indeed in whether or not you have a good birth etc: NCT members I met, who are all for natural childbirth seem to have a disproportionately high rate of caesareans, while a wimp like me who was prepared to have all the painkillers I could get was lucky and got by on only gas and air), that makes the whole experience so difficult for the middle classes. We’re used to being in control of our lives and knowing what to do, or else being able to find out: it a blow to self-esteem at some level to realise (as I have done) that the carers at L’s nursery, who are not particularly well-educated and whose literacy and spelling is often fairly shaky, are nevertheless far more competent, patient and long-suffering when it comes to dealing with a grizzly baby or stroppy toddler. It was all be so easy if only middle-class babies had read the same earnest books that middle-class mothers do, rather than being the clueless bunch they clearly are!

24/7/05

Just been reading (or rather skimming) William Kelly, Pope Gregory II on Divorce and Remarriage (Rome, 1976), a bizarre exercise in Catholic canon law/theology. This devotes 300+ pages to an analysis of 6 lines of a letter from 726 by Pope Gregory II which allows the remarriage of a man whose wife is so ill as to be incapable of intercourse. Kelly’s aim is to prove that the church’s teachings on indissoluble marriage has always been consistent throughout history, because ‘If it were established that the Church’s present teaching about indissolubility reflected only one aspect of Western tradition, that teaching would be much more vulnerable, more open to question…’ [For what it’s worth, I don’t think Kelly does show church teaching as consistent. He argues convincingly that the most likely case being dealt with is what he calls ‘antecedent impotence’ (the woman was unable to have intercourse at the time of marriage). He also shows that from the eighth century onwards, clerical writers are arguing that antecedent impotence in men makes a marriage invalid, and that therefore it’s likely that this was held to apply to a woman as well. So far, so good. But as he shows, there’s no discussion of antecedent impotence before the seventh century in the church. Given the early church’s stress on the indissolubility of marriage, it seems likely that therefore they implicitly considered a marriage in these circumstances as valid (especially since consummation wasn’t seen as a necessary part of marriage). In other words, while the eighth century pronouncements on antecedent impotence may not have contradicted any explicit earlier views, they probably were at odds with the church’s previous teaching: hence the doctrine has changed.]
The wider point this got me thinking about was how difficult a devout Catholic historian’s life is when researching the Middle Ages. Does he/she admit all the problems, corruption and dubious doctrines of the medieval church or pretend that it was all OK really because of infallibility, consistency etc? In contrast, being a liberal Protestant historian of the early medieval church, as I am, is a spiritual doddle. I can blame all the bad points of the church on Catholic bad influence or misunderstandings, while taking all the good aspects as an example of the preservation of the authentic apostolic tradition. (I suspect it would be harder to be an Anglican historian of the sixteenth/seventeenth century, when you could get a close up view of just how nasty and intolerant the Church of England has historically been). The one really difficult point of my years studying church views on morality has been realising how accepting the church was right from the earliest times about the institution of slavery: that is a depressing thought.

We have been adopting the Sir Humphrey approach quite a lot with getting L to do things now she’s in the terrible twos. This is something I remember from an episode of the comedy Yes Minister, where Sir Humphrey Appleby is explaining how you get a minister to do what you want while preserving the illusion of his free choice. The secret is to give him briefing papers outlining two possible options, either of which is acceptable to the civil service. This works surprising well with L and at her age you don’t have to make the options that different e.g. when she’s balking at putting on her shorts, ‘Which leg do you want to put in first?’ However, a couple of nights ago, when we were employing our standard method of getting her to go upstairs: ‘Do you want to walk upstairs or be carried up?’ she came back with the devastating answer: ‘ I want to think about it.’

Some rather belated comments on my last (part) day at IMC. I started with two sessions on life cycles: youth and then masculinity (which I was speaking on). Unfortunately, I had to miss the third, on old age. An interesting paper by Susan Stewart on children in law courts in the thirteenth century. As always with legal cases, it’s the small anecdotes that really give the texture of the period. In inquests on children (she reckons they only happened when there were property concerns) there were several mentions of children being killed by pigs, though also some road traffic accidents (presumably carts). In the criminal courts there was one disturbing case where a boy was prosecuted for theft of some clothes by his own father. The father apparently tried to get the son to implicate his mother and his siblings in inciting the theft, so he could get his whole family hanged. Fortunately, the courts rejected this and instead the father was taken into custody. This supported her overall conclusion that the courts did tend to treat the underage less harshly in general. She also highlighted the problems of deciding the age of children in a culture with no written birth records. It tended to be done by the court seeing the children and trying to decide from their appearance how old they were. It might actually have worked quite well if jurors etc had children about the same age; I can now tell the difference between an eighteen month year old and a child of 2+ in a way I never could before I was a mother.
Another interesting paper by Nic Percivall on teenagers in Iceland, showing that there seemed legally to be some kind of transition point between 16 and 20, with some protection still in this period, even though they had new rights. She thought this may have given a useful buffer zone for them. My paper seemed to go OK, though there was a bit of overlap with papers from earlier sessions. I think it shows that there aren’t that many Carolingian sources on old age: George Minois may have a point in seeing the early Middle Ages as indifferent to age.
The final paper I heard was Theo Riches on heresy in eleventh century Chalons/Arras. He was arguing for a redating of one letter on heretics and therefore that there were only two occurrences of heresy in the period, not three. His wider point was that historians have tended to focus on heresy, rather than heresies, seeing all the occurrences as linked together, as outbreaks of wider social discontent. His model is instead of inherent tensions and contradictions in the church system itself, leading to repeated but separate opposition. He also argues that discussions of heresy tell us more about the authors than the heretics: there isn’t accurate representation of heretical beliefs. Back to the eternal problem about the gap between texts and realities…

It was only when I had left the International Medieval Congress and started looking at newspapers again that I properly realised that I’d just been staying in the home town of Britain’s first suicide bombers. (I’d heard one or two vague rumours only at IMC). I felt mildly interested, no more. If you live or stay anywhere in urban England nowadays, there’s probably a Muslim community in the town and I’ve now got quite used to this. (Coming from Sussex, which is very white, I used to find any ethnic communities strange at first). A few months ago there was the trial of a would-be bomber from Gloucester, where we used to live. (On the other hand, that’s nothing compared to some of the things whites in Gloucester do: we were there just after the discoveries of the crimes of Fred West, the serial killer.)
A few days in Leeds has given me absolutely no insight into why suicide bombers might come from there (from a suburb at the other end of the city from us). Though I suppose it does make a kind of sense that it was northerners, not southerners (or even Londoners) who attacked London. I think it would be harder to summon the callousness for such an act if you regularly travelled on the tube and knew the stress of it at rush-hour at the best of times, and what a mix of people travel on it. I don’t know whether you carry out such an arbitrary attack if you could imagine yourself the victim of the same thing. (Or maybe this is naïve, knowing that there are conflicts, such as Northern Ireland, where both sides have used terrorism).
Some of us at the conference were idly speculating that we ought to run a conference on medieval terrorism. (Before anyone thinks this is tasteless, almost all of the group either work or study not just in London, but in the area targeted, which is one of the heartlands of academic London). However, apart from the Assassins (and I’m not sure how much of that is history, rather than myth, since it’s Not My Millennium), there aren’t actually many examples of terrorism in its modern form of small groups of non-state actors targeting civilians randomly in order to spread alarm. What there was a lot of was terrorism in what I believe its original (French revolutionary) sense is: the use of terror tactics by states/quasi-states. Charlemagne’s mass executions and ethnic cleansing, all the chevauchees of the Black Prince, the free mercenary companies etc. I suppose the small terrorist group really has to wait till the invention of explosive and the mass media to be able to achieve widespread devastation and publicity from relatively small-scale acts. (Even the 11th September atrocity was tiny in its results in comparison to e.g. the two destructions of Magdeburg in the Thirty Years War and World War II).

A hot, tiring and very interesting day yesterday (Tues 12th). I did the full works – four sessions, plus the evening Medieval Academy of America lecture and it gave me an awful lot to think about.
First session was one of the Texts and Identities strands. An interesting paper by Allan McKinley on early eighth century donations in Alsace, arguing that you can see different donation patterns by landowners depending on the extent of their land-holdings. It could have done with a handout to give more of the details (it’s hard to follow charter details just verbally), but it’d be interesting to see if patterns hold up elsewhere.
Standout paper of the session was Charles West on changes in advocacy from the Carolingian period to twelfth century. Is main argument was that advocacy was being thought of in conceptually different terms in the two periods: in the Carolingian period it was essentially a holistic relationship at the interface between churches and the secular legal system, while by about 1100 it had become a bundle of legal rights, regulated by charters rather than capitularies. He’s arguing that there are lots of other examples of this disaggregation of earlier symbols in the period and that this is the real change between Carolingian and later structures. Gave me a lot of things to think about, as I’m belatedly trying to come to terms with ‘l’an mil’ and the historical arguments.
Second session was on early medieval families and property transfers. Interesting case study by Genevieve Buehrer-Thierry of family of Bishop Hitto of Freising in C9, where, because it’s a ‘clerical lineage’, there are a lot of property transfers going via women, so strong ties of brothers and sisters/nephews and uncles, while husbands aren’t necessarily very significant in these specific transfers. Also Sylvie Joye talking about early medieval raptus (abduction) and how that affected brother and sister relationships. In theory, brothers should help serve as protectors of their unmarried sisters, but Visigothic law in particular suggests abuses in which since a woman might lose her patrimony if she didn’t get consent for her marriage, some brothers were surreptitiously encouraging elopement/abduction of their sisters, so they got a bigger share of the inheritance. Sneaky!
For the third session I felt like a change and so went off to an art history/archaeology session n early medieval goldsmithing. Lots of pretty pictures of very desirable jewellery. Also Martin Carver on smithing and other craft work found during a dig at Tarbat monastery in the Highlands. I’d been to this, so was interested to hear more archaeological details, but the most intriguing bit at the end. There’s evidence for a small church there in the 6th and 7th centuries, but it only really expands and starts major craft work in the 8th century. Among the material produced there are a number of very fine stone cross slabs, being produced at just the same time as Pictish stones elsewhere on the Dornoch peninsula with secular/pagan motifs. So this suggests a monastery could be accommodated for 200 years in the Pictish kingdom alongside other religious traditions, without seeming conflict – an interesting sidelight on mission/religious accommodation in the area.
The final session I went to was on Carolingian matters. Gerda Heydemann was contrasting Einhard’s translation of Roman martyrs to near contemporary attempts to build up the cult of St Bavo (whose monastery also got some of Einhard’s relics). What are the different strategies used for promoting the power of local confessors as against Roman martyrs? Steffan Patzold was usefully pointing out that Carolingian texts on consensual rule aren’t always just neutral statements of accepted norms, but can be polemical themselves, and in particular the Hincmar’s discussions of the need for a group of wise counsellors for the king in 879-882 is against the background of his losing influence at court. Hincmar’s praising of old counsellors as wiser and his eulogies of the good old kings are largely due to him being an old man faced with ever younger rulers. There was also a very thought-provoking paper by Christina Poessel on Carolingian honour, looking at whether you can define the Carolingian elite as a honour group. As she points out, honour is a terribly slippery concept, but it is useful for showing dynamic processes, as opposed to the more static concept of nobility. (As I pointed out, the concept of de-nobling is very rare in the texts, although dishonouring is frequent. Christina was similarly talking about how honour is essentially given (transitive)). Very interesting stuff, but I’m not sure if the sources say enough to construct a detailed theory.
Finally, in the evening I went off to Roberta Frank on ‘When Norse was Hip’. I thought at first this might be a rather embarrassing attempt by a medievalist to be ‘with it’, but she does actually have interesting comparisons. She used among other cultural phenomena Norman Mailer’s idea of hip as the rootless outsider, unafraid to travel alongside death, which has obvious parallels to the Viking experience. She was also looking at how Anglo-Saxon culture was impressed by the glamour of Norse culture even when hostile to the Northmen as a whole: such as the complaints of Alcuin and others about the adoption of pagan dress and hairstyles, Anglo-Saxon playing with Norse kennings and motifs in poetry, the fascination with the supposedly Viking boar helmet. The comparison of ‘The Wife’s lament’ with blues about ‘the man who done me wrong’ suddenly didn’t seem so far-fetched. I’m not well enough up on Insular culture to know if all the parallels work, but certainly very intriguing on the power of particular images of the outsider to impress even the ‘square’.

12/7/05

Today is the second of my three days at the Leeds International Medieval Congress. Yesterday was an unusually truncated start, since I only arrived mid-afternoon (and thus missed papers by several of my friends). The highlight of the one session I did get to was Danuta Shanzer on the souls of children in late antiquity. Starting from a reference in Virgil’s description of hell to the souls of children, who may not be the ordinary ahoroi but instead aborted foetuses, she looked at examples of Christian texts discussing the souls of children and especially those who had not been baptised (and thus were
technically not saved). The Apocalypse of Peter and the Visio Wettini have images of aborted and exposed children denouncing their parents in hell for their killing of them, and in some versions seem to imply that the children themselves are not in hell, but able to look down there from some better place. It’s a very striking image – good job the pro-lifers haven’t taken up that one yet. Danuta was also looking at the treatment of the Holy Innocents in the afterlife and how they were said to have been baptised by martyrdom to avoid the problem that they are otherwise unbaptised. Her overall point was a
question about what such treatment of such marginal souls represents. Is this some variant of popular religion, that doesn’t think that ‘innocent’ children should be sent to hell, or is there a developed theological view on such topics?
Most off-putting bit of the day meanwhile: finding out that I hadn’t got a job I applied for only when I meet/hear from a friend of mine who has got it. (Second time in a few months). I’m pleased for them, but it’d be helpful if universities could at least tell you when the decision is going to be made so you know you haven’t got it.

We were lucky: none of our family and friends that we know of were directly caught up in the bombings in London on Thursday, and I wasn’t in London that day. But I do travel regularly on the tube between King’s Cross and Russell Square and sometimes walk past the BMA building in Tavistock Square, two of the locations of the bombs. So I found myself thinking, that if I’d been really unlucky, it might have been me. Then, like almost everyone who goes to London regularly, I suspect, I realised that life must go on. London is where the jobs are, a lot of the libraries I need to use, the theatres and museums and seminars I want to go to. To stop going to London might make me safer (no-one would think it worth bombing Hitchin), but it would diminish my life. And statistically, it’s still very unlikely that anything would happen to me.
I think the response to the bombings has been impressive, in its calmness and its thoughtfulness. My supervisor was going to a conference that day in Senate House, just near Russell Square. The conference went ahead anyhow: it was on ‘States and Empires’ and thus probably seemed fairly relevant. She said none of her family and friends were directly affected, so maybe she could afford to be more objective, but added that it did make her think about those places where such occurrences are daily events. I was thinking about that too: Baghdad, Jerusalem, Belfast at the height of the troubles. We’re lucky it doesn’t often happen here. And the stoicism of Londoners is noticeable too: I liked the comment from Simon Hoggart in the Guardian: ‘One of the gloating claims from a group that may have carried out the bombings announced that "Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic". Well, it didn't look like that. "London is now a bit fretful about how it's going to get home," would have been closer.’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,1524723,00.html).
I’m also pleased that there doesn’t seem to be any urge to bomb anywhere else in retaliation (admittedly, Britain’s forces wouldn’t be up to it, anyhow, but there seems no desire for it). And at least for the moment, there doesn’t seem to be much of a backlash against innocent Muslims. The right-wing Murdoch tabloid the Sun, even had a front-page cover featuring two people reported missing, one Christian, one Muslim (they were beautiful girls, of course, it can’t change its prejudices entirely). I think the form the bombing took is significant here. It was clearly indiscriminate: not aimed at the elite, or the military or even particularly a symbol of capitalism. The tube and the buses are where all the Londoners are: rich and poor, of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. British Muslims have suffered casualties just like other ethnic/religious groups, and their religious leaders have also been quick to condemn such behaviour. And I think the police and security services have realised that if they are going to track the bombers and prevent future attacks they need to get information from Muslim communities in London, not alienate them. It’s hard to start a ‘clash of civilisations’ in Britain, where society is such a mix of cultures anyhow. I hope that continues.