Monthly Archives: May 2018

This week I have been mostly working with manuscripts (in Paris).

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This needs no explanation. Manuscripts are simply entrancing. It’s partly purely their age: most of those I work with are about a thousand years old (plus or minus about 200 years). Holding something that old and extracting meaning from it is a thrill. That’s accentuated by both their physicality and the lives they contain, both of which I think are unique to working with medieval – or pre-paper – documents. These are pieces of animal skin, which you can smell, and on which you can see the beast’s hair follicles. They’ve been skinned and treated and scraped and stretched – and you can see the holes and tears where that process has gone wrong. Some of those holes have been stitched up, and you can see the thread that a hand, dead a millennium, pushed through it to hold it together. And that’s all before getting to the actual words, scratched into its surface, and the corrections – most often letters and words physically scraped away from the surface. Any medieval manuscript is an incredible thing, a living thing, a ‘hidden excitedly containing’ thing.

To answer the only question on any non-medievalist’s mind at this juncture: I wear gloves if the library demands it; most libraries don’t anymore (it desensitizes you to what you’re holding being, as I understand it, the major reason).

Then there’s the fun of visiting different libraries. This time, for me, it was the Bibliothéque nationale in Paris. I don’t speak any French, so I’ve been putting this off for ages even though it holds lots of the manuscripts I need to look at. The manuscript rooms at big libraries are usually just what you’d expect: loads of wooden shelves, leather work surfaces, and old carvings and soft light, and full of old scholars pursuing the threads of a life’s work. The Paris one is – again, as you’d expect – a beautiful place to work. And the staff were outrageously patient and helpful, despite my total inability to communicate in the language of the country I’d chosen to visit. I felt quite at home by there by the end of today, and sad to be leaving.

The glass walkway across eighteenth century buildings to reach the manuscript room
The glass walkway across eighteenth century buildings to reach the manuscript room

I worked with one fine and one magnificent book this week. My preferred approach is to spend two days with a manuscript. The first, I spend leafing through it, getting to know it a bit. If there’s another detailed description of it, I don’t usually read it until after the end of the first day. That’s partly so I come to it fresh, partly so I can keep remembering how much there is for me to learn because I’m often very very wrong in my conclusions, and partly because I’m lazy. So that first day is of pure exploration. What texts does it contain? How many people worked on it? About when and around where might they have worked? How did they decorate it? How did they put it together? Did other people leave marks of reading it afterwards? These are the questions I’m asking.

Bibliotheque nationale Francois Mitterand site entrance
Bibliotheque nationale Francois Mitterand site entrance

And then the second day I transcribe – that is, I copy out, as closely as I can – whatever copy the manuscript has of Saint Christopher’s story. That’s a really effective way of forcing me to look extremely closely at how the scribe(s) worked, to notice all the corrections and mistakes and weird little features to the way they operate. It also means I’ve got a bank of Christopher texts to compare with one another, but we’ll come to that another day.

In brief, because this is my first post about working with manuscripts and so it’s already a bit longer than usual, what I love the most – and the reason why Paris, BnF, latin MS 3801 was ‘magnificent’ for me – is chaotic and messy work. Like every other sentient being, beautiful and perfect projects take my breath away: I’m not an idiot; I can see the Lindisfarne Gospels knocks the pants off anything I work with. But what really gets my juices flowing is something that lots of people have worked on in different ways, where styles collide, where – even better – a novice scribe has had a go for a few lines and then been told to go away to practise on wax a bit more. That brings us full circle, really, because (for me) it’s in the flaws, cracks, imperfections, and oddities that you see the stories; where you see the lives. I like to try to imagine the conversations that happened as this object was passed from one person to another, to feel the effort involved in making letter shapes perfect when someone else is watching. Paris 3801 has a very complicated story to tell, and there’s no space to tell it here (also, I haven’t worked it all out yet), but it’s just the most unbelievable privilege to become a part of its story, to become someone else whose eyes have searched its surface, and whose fingers have felt its pages. I’m not sure how it fits any definition of utility, but it’s bloody brilliant.

This week, I have mostly been thinking about play.

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This has been fun. Partly because reading and thinking about playing is itself quite a lot of fun. But also because I love diving into an entirely new topic about which I know nothing and finding out what’s going on inside it. Sometimes this is a case of acquiring a language for thoughts I’ve already had; sometimes it’s a case of looking at things in an entirely new way. This week has been a bit of both.

I’m specifically interested in ‘play’ at the moment for two pieces of work: a paper I’m delivering at a conference in a month or so, and a chapter I’m writing for someone else’s book that’s supposed to be finished scarily soon. One’s about Saint Christopher and the other’s about Beowulf, but I think both are also about play; or that both can be enriched by using the language also used to analyse play (by which I mean here ‘make-believe’, or ‘sociodramatic’ play).

In most ways, this interest in play is another facet of the questions I’m asking about storytelling, which I wrote about last week, in terms of truth and fiction, and how meaning is made and so on. While I’ve enjoyed some of it, I’ve found a lot of analysis of storytelling (usually under the heading of ‘narrative theory’) pretty dull and empty, and haven’t feel particularly stimulated or challenged by it (which is not to condemn the field, by any means; it just hasn’t fed my fires during this particular quest).

So, before I did any of this reading, I was mostly focused on the way ‘play’ tells a story, with the participants inhabiting characters. I figured that understanding how it works a bit more might help me to be clearer about how stories and the telling of stories functions. So I dove into reading some pretty foreign fields – primarily educational theory – to see what they had to say for themselves. And it was just a boundless joy. It’s excited me to the point where I’m having to hold myself back just a little bit from coming up with entirely new papers and ideas and rein it in, at least until I’ve completed the things I’ve got started.

What’s exciting me now is thinking about, first, how some things really matter and have to be a certain way, while most things absolutely don’t and can become anything at all. The balance between rules and chaos intrigues me, and particularly the way it’s negotiated on or understood by all of the participants. This points towards the obviously fascinating aspect of play: how transformative it is of objects, environments, and participants – while also being a recognisably closed world, with participants able to step outside of ‘play mode’ at any moment. That stepping in and out of ‘play’ seems just magical to me (which probably says more about how irretrievably trapped in my own self-awareness I am than anything else). I’m also interested in the way play often consciously takes on known stories and then varies them, adding elements or looking before and after. My final major plank of interest is in how (when it works) play creates stories cooperatively, in effect constructing a community by agreeing what matters and taking account of other people’s concerns. This relates back to the stepping in and out, where participants agree to notice certain things that are said and done, and not others.

It’s going to take a bit of effort to move this forwards, I think. I’m looking forward to seeing my nephews next week and might try to talk to them about play and how it works, just to stretch my thinking a bit further and possibly to try to relate play and storytelling a bit more tightly. I definitely need to spend some time to allow the new things I’ve read to percolate before I return to apply them to my thinking about the telling of stories in hagiography and in Beowulf. So that all feels like a challenge, and like one I haven’t really got the time to face. But I like academic work when it’s like this: I feel as thought I’m looking out at something new, and that I don’t know what’s going to happen next; like I’m playing, I suppose. From being pretty confident that I had two pieces of work all done bar the writing up, I now don’t know what either of them will say.

This week, I have mostly been thinking about storytelling.

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I find this a surprisingly challenging thing to do, in part because it’s such a terribly broad topic. Storytelling is all around us; for a number of different research strands, it seems increasingly to be seen as what defines us as humans, the origin of language itself as well as socialization. Less fundamentally, it’s also currently very in vogue as an idea in medicine and management among – I presume – a large number of other fields. My major interest is in how stories changed and how they were used in different times and places; a good chunk of my work at the moment consists of looking at different retelling of saint Christopher’s story and being interested in what’s changed, why, and what impact that has.

I’ve had a lot of fun, over the last few weeks or so, reading some serious philosophy by people like Mary Midgley, academic analysis by a whole range of writers, and being particularly excited by discussions of their art as storytellers by Phillip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and – above all – the late and brilliant Ursula Le Guin. It’s been challenging and thrilling, and (as will probably be obvious below), a major challenge for me is working out how to pin down in precise terms what it is that I’m trying to say. Which is always worth thinking through, and often suggests that what you’re thinking about is worth thinking about – because what’s the point of working on something if you already know how to say it? (Like most things in life, this is a problem T.S. Eliot puts much better.)

At its simplest, though, thinking about storytelling means focusing not on what’s happened, but on how what’s happened is recounted or recorded. That means thinking about which events are selected for ‘telling’ – and which aren’t. It also means noticing what order events are told in – that’s often described as ‘plot’, as opposed to ‘storyline’. And which events, characters, or other details are focused on – and which are not. It also means paying attention to who is telling the story – a fictional or supposedly ‘real’ narrator or author figure, and how the presence of that figure affects the story’s meaning or feeling.

What I’ve been trying to do this week, though, is think in a slightly more abstracted way about how stories work; what it is that makes them have such significance. Encountering a story shows us, I think, that there is somewhere else; that where we are is not everywhere. It also shows us that the way we look at the world is not the only way to look at it. This is especially true when, as is so frequently the case in medieval texts, a story keeps telling us who is telling it – when we can’t avoid being aware that we are being forced to see the world through someone else’s eyes. By having that other-where and other-view revealed to us, we are forced to recognise the individuality of our own experience of the world, and indeed the uniqueness and specificity of our particular corner of existence.

Mostly as a result of this, I think that stories live in a different world from that of history. Once we have accepted the principle of an other-where, an other-when, and an other-view, the idea that there is a limited number of any of these others becomes absurd. Infinity becomes inevitable. Time becomes a matter of perspective. Stories do not exist in time; they are pulled into specific moments in time by storytellers and, as a result, when someone, something, or somewhere is connected to a story by hearing one or being incorporated into one, they in turn become tied into that trans-historical time. When a fighter becomes a hero, or a leader becomes a King, they don’t become immortal; it’s bigger than that. They step outside of normal time altogether, becoming part of an altogether different form of existence. They become abstracted from the merely human, and assume a different life entirely – which is part of the reason why stories become so flexible (there’s a link here to Platonic thought and essentialism that probably doesn’t need spelling out). A storyteller has the power to reach into that timeless plane of stories, and tie one little part of it to one little part of the here and now.

That’s what I’ve been trying to think through. As is obvious, I think, I’m still trying to think about it more carefully and clearly. Even though we live a storied existence in a world made out of stories (and not just because of the lowering presence of Fake News), I’m not at all sure that these lines of enquiry have any relevance at all to the wider world. But it’s certainly a fun, stimulating game to play, and it’s opened up lots of space in my head into which future research should flow.

This week, I have been mostly looking at liturgies.

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This does not, I grant you, sound thrilling or valuable. But it was an unknown unknown to me until about six months ago, so the process of developing some sense of what it’s all about has been interesting and, if you like that kind of thing, fun. Briefly, the story is this. A liturgy, or liturgical rite, is a record of When and How Things Should Be Done in a church. This, very occasionally, comes to the fore in public discussion: what promises should be said during a wedding, for instance, comes – to some extent – back to a liturgical question. Can the content be changed for individuals, or at times of social change? (Answer: yes. The Christina religion has always been a flexible and response social process for aligning a faith community with different social, economic, and political communities.)

Now, most of you will know that the Catholic Church is a unified, single church because (pretty much) the same thing happens in all of its services and buildings. It’s like going to a chain pub: you know what you’re getting, even if the quality of service and décor varies a bit. This is because, over more or less precisely my period (ca. 600 – ca. 1200) and through a huge range of different processes, Rome came to dominate western European Christianity to such an extent that its particular liturgical form – the Roman Rite – became more or less the only one. Before that, there were several different forms knocking around.

If you think that doesn’t matter, glance at the Brexit debate. One of perhaps two hearts of the Leavers’ position is the desire to escape foreign dominance, regardless of what actual impact that has on daily life or cultural or economic experience. It would take an entirely different blog to properly reflect on this, but I think that the (Roman) Catholic Church was the EU of the medieval world – and I mean that in both positive and negative terms. Choosing to adopt the Roman Rite (as England did, with a particular focus on the date of Easter, in the seventh century) is to take a specific, Euro-centric (if you like) position.

The start of the office for saint Christopher in an eleventh-century Spanish manuscript (BL Add 30845).
The start of the office for saint Christopher in an eleventh-century Spanish manuscript (BL Add 30845). Links to the digitized manuscript at the British Library.

Before the Roman Rite completely ruled the roost, there were some specific regional forms. These are sometimes called ‘the Gallican Rites’ as a collective, but as one of them is called ‘the Gallican Rite’, I haven’t found that especially helpful. So I go with the problematic term ‘pre-Roman Rites’ (problematic because the Roman Rite existed at the same time, and the name gives the impression that they were primitive – feeding into a view of history which believes that Time Eternally Progresses, and alos because it’s a pretty ugly term). The pre-Roman Rites I know about are the Gallican Rite (French), the Celtic Rite (Irish, but exported to everywhere an Irish bar now exists), the Ambrosian Rite (north Italian, centred on Milan), and the Hispanic, or Visigothic, or Mozarabic Rite (Spanish, centred on Toledo close to Madrid).

That’s a lot of rites.

These are interesting for me because my saint, Christopher, was included in the Ambrosian and Hispanic Rites, but didn’t make the Roman (until much later). As far as I can tell, not enough evidence exists to say whether he was or wasn’t in the Gallican or Celtic forms. And his story took radically different forms in each of those liturgical rites. So I now have a Spanish tradition and a north Italian tradition, reaching back to the sixth or perhaps the fifth century. This is pretty big news for me.

Who else cares? Well, if you’ve read this far then you’ve probably found the story interesting (or are eagerly looking forward to correcting me; please do). So you might just find it interesting in its own right (ha ha), which I think it is, too. I find it humbling (perhaps also humiliating) to discover such immense fields of information about the lives lived by vast numbers of people about which and whom I still know more or less nothing. Church liturgies sound arcane and irrelevant, I get that. But this is the rhythm of daily life, the tv soaps and football matches, for the vast majority of people who have lived in Europe for the last two thousand years. It’s always fascinating to see that Things Were Not As They Are. No-one practising the Gallican Rite in Lyons on a Tuesday in 703 AD would imagine that it would ever change, just as many today struggle with the idea of their church (or soap, or newspaper, or social media platform) changing. And the effort of finding out about these things has also been humbling. I’ve had to (try to) read things in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek translated into Latin. I’ve looked at loads of websites of individuals and institutions that I never knew existed. I’ve remembered – again – that to understand early medieval England, I’ve got to try to understand early medieval Europe. I’ve felt connected. I’ve felt tiny. And, just as I’ve started to feel that I’ve got some sort of grip on the outlines of what this particular vasty vista is all about, I’m going to have to turn away from it and work on something else, with the knowledge that this world lies in wait, with huge potential for future research and understanding.

What’s this all about?

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What do I do all day?

My research is into the use and adaptation of the story of saint Christopher in early medieval western Europe. By ‘early medieval’ I mean from about 600 until about 1200 AD; by ‘western Europe’, I mean an area more or less equivalent to the western half of the Roman Empire, stretching (very roughly) from Sicily in the south to England in the north; from Portugal in the east to Germany in the west.

In this period, Christopher hadn’t yet become a giant man who searches for a powerful ruler to follow and ends up trying to carry the Christ child across a river before being martyred for his faith. (I think that story originated in southern Germany in the thirteenth century and became super popular shortly thereafter.) He was an individual from a tribe of cannibalistic dog-headed people who comes to know God and goes on to convert a city while being tortured and martyred. (The violence remains, though the dog-head got lost.)

The giant, beast-headed Christopher grips onto the walls of the city while people stare in horror.
Saint Christopher, on Stuttgart, Württembergischen Lb, cod hist 415, fol. 50r.

Although in many ways it’s a pretty standard sort of saint’s life I think this is an interesting story for two big reasons. First, he had a dog’s head. Come on, that’s pretty interesting: a monster as a hero; a non-human teaching people how to live; an outsider bringing disturbing but ultimately positive transformation. Second, he wasn’t from anywhere identifiable to people in western Europe and had no relics (things that could be connected with his physical existence) anywhere in the west; unlike many saints, he didn’t have a local centre promoting his legend and making sure it was popular. Many – perhaps most – saints and their relics were essentially used as a form of tourist attraction; the equivalent of a minor town promoting some object they’ve found that Churchill once touched. That Christopher had none of that suggests (to me) that where his story was read and adapted, it was because people found him and his story of intrinsic value.

Most of my work, then, involves looking at different copies of the legend from my period. There’s over a hundred of them (that I’ve identified so far) in various places across Europe. When I find them, I read them, copy them out, and compare them with other versions. I’m interested in what’s been changed – deliberately or accidentally – and what difference it makes to the story. I’m also interested in what sort of collections the story is put into, and whether that makes any difference to its ideas or impact. In the end, I hope to be able to produce editions of the various versions – perhaps a digital edition of all of them if I can. And to build a database showing the contents of manuscripts containing saints’ lives, so I and others can ask similar questions about other saints. And to produce a study of different uses of the same story in different places and different times.

This is not going to change the world. In many ways, it’s exactly the sort of thing that Robert Halfon MP thinks is a waste of time. I get that (though I don’t understand why he doesn’t apply the same criteria to other things in life). But I still think it’s both exciting and worthwhile. Partly because stories are, fundamentally, what we’re made out of, and both the base story of Christopher and the story of the development of his legend are pretty good ones. Partly because holding a thousand-year-old piece of goat skin and seeing how it’s been touched, scratched, and marked allows me to connect with other humans who lived unimaginably different lives, and attempt to share that connection with my students and readers. But also because, done well, this project should form a tiny, tiny part of building towards a deeper understanding of how communities use stories to shape and think about themselves and their world.