War and Peace: My First Conference Presentation and My Weekend at Purdue (Part IV)

(Part I, II, III)

I was supposed to be the second of two people speaking at the third session. The other person, whom I have never met and shall remain nameless, did not show up to the conference. So I got a full session all to myself to speak about David Reubeni. This presentation was based on a paper I did for Dr. Robert Davis and I intend to use it in some form for my dissertation. My presentation was on the political thought of David Reubeni, an early sixteenth century Jew who claimed to be an ambassador from several of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Reubeni wandered around Europe for several years attempting to form alliances with various Christian powers to fight the Muslims and was taken seriously by a number of important people, including Pope Clement VII. I argue that Reubeni managed to create a power structure around himself and claimed the sort of authority usually reserved for states. His initial success in this endeavor was due to his claim that he was a representative of a political state and a man of noble birth.

Throughout his diary Reubeni continuously strives to portray himself as a man capable of using violence. Like a political state he and his followers use “legitimate” violence against those who do not have “legitimate” power and, by doing so, bring “peace,” “justice” and “order” to all. The fact that Reubeni represented a state and acting against individuals who did not represent states, by definition, meant that his acts of violence were legitimate and that they were just and that the actions of his opponents were, by definition, illegitimate. In keeping with his interest in violence, Reubeni took a great interest in the instruments of violence such as swords, armor and particularly guns and his ability to possess and use them. I offered an analysis of several episodes found in Reubeni’s diary, where we see him playing the role of a statesman, engaging in acts of violence and thereby attempting to bring about justice, order and peace.

My intention was to move beyond the traditional issues regarding Reubeni - Reubeni the messianic claimant and Reubeni the con-man. He may have been a fraud, but he was also a brilliant political thinker, with a plan of action built around issues pertaining to this world and not just apocalyptic expectations. Ultimately, and this is the main point of my dissertation, I wish to, following in the footsteps of Norman Cohn and Richard Popkin, challenge the distinction between apocalyptic Messianism and earthly politics.

If readers of this blog are interested I might post a fuller version of the paper As I was the sole presenter at this session I spoke for a little longer than my allotted twenty minutes and we had a longer than usual question and answer session afterwards. The people in attendance were simply a fantastic audience so this session ended up going on for close to the allotted hour.

After attending a conference full of post modern liberal sophistry, I was looking forward to driving back to Columbus with Cory Driver. We were driving through rural Indiana (Sarah Palin’s real America) when we stopped at a gas station. In what can only be described as something out of a comedy sketch, the gas station was named Gas America.

I went inside and did not find Achmed the Dead Terrorist behind the counter. Instead I found what looked to be a perfectly normal American girl.

General Exams IV: Orals

Yesterday I came to the final part of my general exams, the oral section. Orals consists of being put in a room with all four professors on your committee and for two hours they get to ask you whatever they feel like. I would describe the experience of having orals with Dr. Matt Goldish, Dr. Daniel Frank, Dr. Robert Davis and Dr. Daniel Hobbins as being in the center of a free-wheeling conversation with four people who are way smarter than you, but are being very nice about it. Most of it was a blur to me. I passed so I guess I did a good job. Here is my attempt to present my orals based on what I can remember.

I started off with a brief introduction, where I gave a survey of my intellectual development as a historian up to this point. History has been a major part of my life since I was in second grade. The area of history that interested me has changed from time to time. In middle school I was a big Civil War buff. Later, in high school, I moved to World War II and the Russian Revolution. Going into college I was convinced that I wanted to do nineteenth century European political history. Then I came under the influence of Prof. Louis Feldman, the classics professor at Yeshiva University. I guess I turned to the medieval and early modern periods as a compromise between being a modernist and a classicist. This turn nicely dovetailed with another interest of mine from high school, the biblical commentary of Isaac Abarbanel. Abarbanel proved to be the main subject of most of the papers I wrote while I did my MA at Revel. When I came to Ohio State I intended to do a dissertation on Abarbanel, focused on a close textual reading of his work. Either I was going to work on the issue of his relationship to Kabbalah or his relationship to Maimonides. Dr. Goldish nixed both of these options, insisting that whatever I did, it should be more than just textual analysis and involve myself in examining the general context of whatever I wrote. In this regard Dr. Goldish has been a tremendous influence on me. For Dr. Goldish the major thematic in dealing with European Jewry is always how what we see with Jews is part of some larger trend that encompasses Christians as well. (His book, the Sabbatean Prophets, is a good example of this.) My fondest moments with him remain, sitting in his office talking about various Christian mystics and how they compare to what we find in Judaism. That should give you and idea of the sort of thinker he is.

The first to go was Dr. Hobbins. We started by talking about the issue of female mystics, which was one of the papers I wrote in the written exam. He noted that when I first came to him about preparing a reading list we talked about doing something about medieval universities. This topic disappeared and the reading list was taken over by Christian female mystics. He asked me if I thought that any consensus had been reached as to the nature of Christian female mysticism and if so what. I responded that the big issue that everyone seems to come up against is whose voice are we dealing with in the texts, the female visionary or her male priest. We next talked about discretio spirituum, particularly as it involved Dr. Hobbins’ dissertation topic, the early fifteenth century French theologian Jean Gerson. I supported Rosalynn Voaden’s contention that this whole process of discretion spirituum was a discourse that could be used to ones benefit depending on ones ability to play to the politics of the situation, not all that different from knowing how to handle Inquisition censorship in the early modern period. This brought Dr. Davis into the fray and we ended up talking about Richard Kagan, who he once studied with, and his work Lucrecia of Leon. In her case it was her blaming her priest and painting herself an innocent, ignorant girl and her priest saying that she duped him. Dr. Hobbins next went to the issue of the fourteenth century Scientific Revolution. Norman Cantor advocated that position; Hobbins was interested in knowing who else held this. I pointed to Charles Homer Haskins and the classic example of someone who put the Scientific Revolution into the Middle Ages. There is also the example of Amos Funkenstein, Dr. Goldish’s late mentor, who saw there being a direct continuity between the late Middle Ages and the early Enlightenment. Underlying all this was Dr. Hobbins’ interest in the late Middle Ages as not being an era of decline. (An issue that I had wisely taken a supportive stance on in the written part of the exam.) I ended up having to defend the notion that astrology presupposed a mechanized view of the universe in light of the fact that astrology did not all of a sudden enter Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I explained that this is a latent sort of issue. There is that element to astrology, waiting for someone to bother to use it. The other thing is, and this I should have been more forceful on, is that it is precisely in the early modern period that astrology becomes a major issue.

Dr. Davis, for his turn, opened by asking me about the difference between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We had some difficulty getting on the same page with this question. I assumed that he talking about periodization, something with little intrinsic meaning. We break times into given periods to suit our own convenience. The point that he was trying to make, which eventually came out, was that, yes, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many of the things we are used to associating with the Middle Ages and many of the things we are used to associating with the Renaissance are going on at the same time so we have the Middle Ages and the Renaissance going on simultaneously. He then when on to the topic of Jacob Burckhardt and civic ritual, which I discussed in the written exam. Dr. Davis, noting with a smile that Burckhardt was a free gift since he was not on my reading list, wanted to know how, in light of the very structured nature of civic rituals in the Italian city states, one could see this as promoting individualism. This line of questioning put me in a difficult situation since I do not support Burckhardt. Dr. Davis then went to the issue of the introduction of Greek into Italy during the fifteenth century. He managed to trip me up a bit here since my knowledge of the whole process is a bit vague. We next got onto the topic of magic, particularly within the context of the scholarship of Keith Thomas, Francis Yates and Stuart Clark. Here I got jumped by Dr. Frank for blithely remarking that Jews were not all that different from Christians. He managed to really back me into a corner on this since our sources when it comes to Jewish magic are basically all point to rabbinic magicians and not to lay magicians and we do not have an internal Jewish literature on Jews engaging in black magic.

Dr. Frank and Dr. Goldish led the final round of discussions. I was expecting Dr. Frank to bring up Karaites since I spent a good chunk of this past quarter in his office studying about them. He did not bother. Instead he asked me about comparing the Jewish reaction to Islamic culture as opposed to Christian culture. One of the major issues is the fact that Jews in the Islamic world were fluent in Arabic while Jews in the Christian world were, by and large, not using Latin. This got me going on about my memories of Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s class and him attacking Yitzchak Baer; “he turns himself over backwards to show how Rashi knew a word of Latin.” This led to a general discussion of Christian influences on Jews and I ended up talking about Baer’s argument that the Hasidai Ashkenaz were influenced by the Franciscans. Of course Dr. Soloveitchik hates this essay as well. (There is a funny story that I did not mention; those familiar with Dr. Soloveitchik might appreciate this. I asked Dr. Soloveitchik where Baer got the idea that Hasidai Ashkenaz were interested in animals just like the Franciscans were. He turned on me and said: “there is one person (Baer) who knows and he is upstairs. There is one reference in the entire Sefer Hasidim.”) Dr. Goldish next asked me about the issue of conversos, which I had written about and were there any other major historiographical issues besides for the one that I wrote about, whether they were actually practicing Judaism or not. I brought up Richard Popkin, Dr. Goldish’s other mentor, who argued that conversos played a major role in the rise of skepticism within European thought. I could not come up with anyone who actually disagree with Popkin so that was a dead end.

So that ended my orals. They sent me out of the room for a few minutes before Dr. Goldish invited me back in and congratulated me on becoming an ABD (All But Dissertation.)

General Exam II: Early Modern

Here is my second general exam. It was in Early Modern Europe and given to me by Dr. Robert Davis. Like the first exam it consisted of three questions, of which I had to answer two. I had twenty four hours in which to do it and I had a word limit of 2500 words. Again I went a little over the limit.

Part I: Renaissance Italy
Compare and contrast the ways that Martines, Muir, and Nussdorfer present the civil societies of Florence, Venice, and Rome respectively. What aspects do each emphasize or neglect? How do their approaches aid or limit their ability to provide a holistic explanation of the society they are trying to examine?


A major part of Jacob Burckhardt’s legacy to Renaissance studies was his emphasis on civic life, particularly festivals, parades and other forms of civic rituals, in order to define the Italian Renaissance. I cannot think of another field whose historiography is so dominated be these issues as Early Modern Italy. Burckhardt saw this civic life as a demonstration of a supposedly newly found individualism that had not existed during the Middle Ages. I would like to discuss three examples of scholars, Laruo Martines, Edward Muir and Laurie Nussdorfer. Each of these scholars, in their own way, confronts this issue of civic life in various Italian city states.

Lauro Martines is the most directly anti Burckhardt. In Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy, Martines, utilizing a fairly Marxist perspective, portrays the Italian republics not as beacons of humanism or individualism but as oligarchic structures, under the rule of various aristocratic families. What Burckhardt saw as the expression of a common culture that served to elevate everyone Martines sees simply as the manifestation of an oppressive aristocratic culture, one that was in decline; a narrative that owes itself in many respects to Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages.

One of the interesting things about Power and Imagination is that it is not really about Renaissance Italy, at least not as commonly understood. The book is really about civic life in Italy during the late Middle Ages. For Martines this is the real locus of the Italian Renaissance. It was during the late Middle Ages that you had the major economic revolution, which helped bring about the rise of the Italian merchant class, who then took power away from the aristocracy, creating the Republican civic culture of the Italian city states.

For Martines, what we usually associate as part of Renaissance culture is really merely a reflection of the upper class and its values. Martines makes a big deal how the forces that shaped the Italian Renaissance came out of the struggle between various oligarchic structures such as nobles against merchants, or between cities. He then paints the flowering of humanism as being an extension of this power struggle. While I do not disagree with Martines on this issue, I fail to see why this is important. Yes, Burckhardt’s claim that the Renaissance touched all classes and was a reflection of a common will is naive. Martines, though wishes to hammer on this issue as if it was something bad for some reason, something that serves to discredit Renaissance culture. I fail to see the point of all of this; as long as we treat Renaissance humanism and Renaissance art as part of high culture and do not pretend that it has any greater significance there should not be a problem.

Martines work on Savonarola, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Italy, can also be seen as being anti Burckhardt, though it is a very different sort of book. (And may I say a far more readable book.) It focuses on the city of Florence during the reign of Girolamo Savonarola (1494-98). Savonarola is the sort of figure who, if one is going to dogmatically insist on Burckhardt’s vision of the Renaissance, should not have existed. If Florence was so full of the spirit of “reason” and if everyone was embracing their newly discovered individuality and casting off the “chains” of medieval Christianity then how did this Dominican preacher take over the city and turn it into his own personal theocracy? This question becomes all the more damning in the hands of Martines as he presents Savonarola not as an anomaly but as part of the fabric of Florentine culture. Martines accomplishes this by calling attention to Savonarola’s connections to the Lorenzo de Medici and to Pico della Mirandola, who played a major role in bringing Savonarola to Florence, as well how Savonarola played a role in the thought of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, who experienced Savonarola’s Florence first hand. In as sense, Fire in the City is less about Savonarola than it is about Florentine civic culture leading up to Savonarola, during his reign, and in its aftermath.

Unlike Power and Imagination, Martines does not get caught up with his concerns of class conflict. The Florence he presents is one in which power functions on different levels, which interact with each other. There are the various city councils, which, for the most part, were the province of the upper classes, there was the Church and then there were the various street gangs, which contained a lot more aristocrats than one might have suspected. Savonarola interacted with all three of these power structures and each of them was crucial in his rise to power and his eventual downfall.

Edward Muir’s Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice is the most Burckhardt like of the works under discussion here in that he is the most invested in interpreting ritual as a means of analyzing society. He takes a far more anthropological approach than Martines; the influence of Clifford Geertz on Muir is readily apparent. In a sense one can see Muir as the anthropological apology for Burckhardt. He relies on the same sort of sources as Burckhardt did, visitor accounts and their descriptions of Venice and its customs. Of course Muir has no interest in waxing lyrically on how the Venetians cultivated the “human spirit” and represented true republican virtue. On the contrary, Muir deconstructs the discourse of Venetian liberty as the means to justify the existing power structures in place.

Venice was famous for its tradition of republican government and political independence. Venice was supposed to have been founded as a republic at the end of the Roman empire and had maintained its heritage throughout the Middle Ages. As Muir is quick to point, much of the history that the Venetians put out for themselves was pure myth. Muir exams the origins and development of this reputation, paying particular attention to the sixteenth century, when this myth of Venice was most potent. For Muir the civic rituals served both to uphold this legend and to maintain stability. The primary myths that Muir deals with are the founding of the city and its special relationship to St. Mark, who was supposedly buried there, its protection of Pope Alexander III in 1177 and his recognition of Venice’s special status and the rescue of twelve Virgin Mary statues from Dalmatian pirates. These legends served to grant a special authority to Venice, particularly in regards to fending off the claims of the papacy. It was not enough though for the Venetians to have such legends; these legends needed to be actualized within the public sphere. This is where ritual comes into play. Civic rituals such as the marriage to the sea and the bridge battles served to play out that image of the city as an ancient bastion of free republican men. This might have been a legend, but by engaging in these rituals the legend gained a reality all of its own.

In the discussion of Italian civic life the traditional focus has been on cities such as Florence and Venice. Rome in particular has generally been ignored. The problem with Rome is that it is overshadowed by the papacy. One can all to easily get the impression that the people of Rome were passive ciphers, ruled by the papacy, without any civic culture of its own. Laurie Nussdorfer’s Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII offers an important correction to this view. Focusing on the reign of Urban VIII (1623-44), Nussdorfer argues that the lay Romans managed to sustain a civic government under the absolutist regime of Urban VIII.

While Venice may have needed to invent a republican tradition going back to classical times, the city of Rome was the seat of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire; if any Italian state could claim to be the bastion of free republican people it was Rome. Nussdorfer analyzes the popular government that was in place, the Senate. It was based on the Capitoline Hill and saw itself as the heir of the Roman Republic. As such it possessed the traditional capital to more than hold its own against the papacy, even a pope as powerful as Urban VIII. Nussdorfer sees the Senate as representing lay members of the urban elite. It carried out the work of local government, and served as a symbol of the Roman voice in public life. In particular, Nussdorfer looks at specific events such as the plague threat of the early 1630s, the War of Castro (1641-1644) to show how the Senate, through the various lower committees was capable of challenging Urban VIII.

The problem with Burckhardt is that his narrative of the Renaissance was, in truth, an aristocratic narrative. It failed to seriously consider other aspects of Renaissance culture; worse it papered over these issues, thus denying that they even existed. As with Martines’ Fire in the City, Nussdorfer tries to move past the issues of free society versus aristocratic rule and high versus low culture for more holistic perspective. Nussdorfer analyzes different power structures and how they coexisted and competed with each other, thus giving us a more nuanced view of Renaissance politics. Muir in his own way also succeeds at creating a holistic picture of Renaissance Venice in that, while he is concerned with such upper class issues as republican freedom and classical antiquity, and the civic rituals created by those in power to perpetrate this legacy, he also considers how these issues affected lay people and how they participated in them, thus creating a Renaissance culture that truly does go from top to bottom.

[During the summer, when was reading Martines, I was meaning to write a post contrasting him with Burckhardt, but I never got around to it. So I ended up writing it after all.]

Part II: Early-modern Violence
2) Pretend you were asked to give a scholarly talk on Christian violence against Jews in early-modern Rome. Based on the reading you have done on violence, how would you structure your talk? What issues would you stress, which of the works you have read would you rely on most heavily and why? What tentative conclusions might you come up with?

[This is the one I chose not to do. I really am not familiar with the issue of anti Jewish violence in Rome. If I had to do this question I would have taken one example, the burning of the Talmud in 1553 and used that as a platform to compare it to medieval anti Jewish attacks carried out by the Church, particularly the Paris burning of the Talmud in 1242. This would lead me to discussing the debate between Kenneth Stowe and Jeremy Cohen on this issue. It is funny; now on both of my European history exams I have been given a question relating to Jewish history and both times this was the question I ended up turning down.]

Part III: Magic and Religion
3) Offer a thorough explication of Keith Thomas’ thesis in Religion and the Decline of Magic. Then select several of your other readings in religion and magic, such as Clark, Ruggiero, Christian, Mack (or others as you see fit), to show how more recent scholarship has modified, elaborated on, or rejected Thomas’ thesis. Draw your own conclusions.

Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England functions at two different levels and different readers may find themselves reading almost two different books depending on their interests and from where they are coming to it. First there is the micro issue; as the subtitle indicates, this is a book about beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. And when Thomas says England he very specifically means England, not Ireland, not Scotland and not even Wales. For this element of the book Thomas advances a very specific thesis; that the rise of Protestantism did not kill off magical beliefs in England. On the contrary the fact that Protestantism deemphasized the magical elements of traditional Christian beliefs simply allowed for the rise of more explicit forms of magic. For example if the local priest no longer engaged in exorcisms one could easily find a cunning man/wizard or a wise women/witch to step in to fill the void.

If this was all that Thomas was about Religion and the Decline of Magic would be of little interest to those not studying Early Modern England. There is another work interwoven within the book, which is of crucial importance to anyone studying Early Modern Europe. Using England as a case study, Thomas offers an overarching look at magic and other types of supernatural beliefs, common during the Early Modern period, and integrates them into the general narrative. Magic becomes critical for understanding popular culture and takes center stage in any attempt to deal with Early Modern social history.

Thomas postulates a medieval popular religion, based around magic, which continued from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern period, undisturbed by the Protestant Reformation or any of the major theological shifts that occurred within high intellectual circles. On the contrary, this popular magical culture, rather than be influenced by high culture, maintained a hold over the high culture.

The most important thing about Thomas is that he takes magic seriously as an intellectual endeavor pursued by rational and sane individuals. If Thomas had wanted to he could have easily written something like Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Thomas could have turned Religion and the Decline of Magic into a catalogue of all the foolish and “superstitious” things that people in Early Modern England believed in before they were “enlightened” by modern science. Thomas, though, allows us to confront Early Modern society with all of its magical beliefs and walk away still respecting the people who lived then.

As I have already pointed out, Religion and the Decline of Magic, is a book that goes off in many different directions. This is a book about many diverse fields, witchcraft, alchemy, astrology and prophecy. Thomas comes at the field from so many different directions, anthropology, intellectual history, history of religion and social history. On one hand this is a mark of his genius and makes for a very useful book. On the other hand, despite the book’s eight hundred pages, Thomas never adequately covers any one field, even in terms of just the English context. This creates a situation where Thomas, by definition, could never have hoped to be the last word. I would like to offer two examples of scholars, Stuart Clark and William Christian Jr., that come to fill in what Thomas does not adequately deal with, both in terms of geography and in terms of specific fields of study.

Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe deals with Early Modern perspectives on witchcraft. There is quite a bit on England though the spotlight is mainly on continental Europe. Like Thomas, Clark is interested in getting around the Whig model of witchcraft equals superstition, which equals rabid religious fanatics living in darkness unaided by the light of science. Also like Thomas, Clark does not see witchcraft as being either a mostly Protestant or Catholic phenomenon; witchcraft crossed religious lines and was a critical role in the common European culture. Clark, though, takes the issue of witchcraft in certain directions that Thomas either ignores or downplays. Clark focuses on witchcraft in terms of intellectual elites; for Clark, it is the elites who push the idea of witches. This allows Clark to make a far more effective argument for the importance of witchcraft and its fundamental “rationality.”

For Clark, the charge of witchcraft, that someone made a pact with the Devil, is premised, ironically enough, on a certain skepticism about the efficiency of magic. There is an essential shift between the charge of sorcery and the charge of witchcraft; with sorcery the issue is the malicious use of the supernatural, but with witchcraft the issue is the pact. If a person made a pact with the Devil, or some other demonic power, than they have committed an act of heresy and arguably an act of treason as well. It does not matter if Satan actually gave them any power or performed any wonders for them. In fact it makes perfect sense that witchcraft would be futile; clearly Satan is a liar and a fraud, with no real power, so obviously his promises are empty lies meant to entrap the hearts of the unwary. So the entire paradigm of superstitious witch hunters and their enlightened rational critics falls apart. Supporters of witchcraft charges, such as Martin Del Rio or Jean Bodin, were not less skeptical or less “scientific” than people like Johann Weyer or Reginald Scot, who opposed such chargers.

To take this a step further, witchcraft played an important role in the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. If one believed that Satan could not do actual miracles but could only use his extensive knowledge of the secrets of nature to create the appearance of a miracle and if Satan was now marshalling all of his efforts for one last effort to seduce mankind in these end of times than it would be only logical for the faithful to fight back through these same natural sciences. Through an ever growing knowledge of the natural sciences, both in its naturalistic and praeternatural varieties, one could combat Satan’s lies and demonstrate that he, unlike God, is unable to perform genuine miracles. Also, since it is the end of days, God is obviously going reveal the many secrets of the world that have lain hidden since ancient times in order to aid the faithful in their fight against Satan. So by pursuing the natural sciences one was taking part in this new revelation and helping to defeat Satan bring about the Second Coming. It is this sort of view that underlies the work, for example, of Francis Bacon and his New Atlantis.

William Christian Jr.’s Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain parallels Thomas in that Christian is interested in popular beliefs, in his case late sixteenth century Spain. Unlike Thomas, Christian is very focused on one particularly method and on one source, mainly a survey that was taken about the religious beliefs of those living in the Spanish Empire, during the later part of the sixteenth century. What was discovered was that the Catholicism practiced by those living even in rural Spain, let alone the natives in the New World, was not very deep and hardly in keeping with official Catholic dogma. Like Thomas’ sixteenth and seventeenth century Englishmen, the Spaniards of Christian’s sixteenth century rural Spain are continuing to practice their own particular brand of religion, one that dated back to the Middle Ages and was continuing unabated, despite any theological shifts such as the Council of Trent. This popular religion was heavily invested in the religion as magic paradigm, that religious rituals and objects contained a physical power, which could be harnessed to the benefit of the believer. If Thomas dealt with popular culture and the ways that it flowed into popular religious beliefs, Christian writes about popular religion and how it related to popular culture. Christian takes a far more sociological perspective than Thomas. While Thomas tends toward the anecdotal, Christian brings graphs and attempts to offer hard numbers. While Thomas is interested in giving a general picture of English popular culture, particularly as it related to the occult, Christian is keen on emphasizing the differences from place to place. In fact one of the main focuses of Local Religion (And probably the most tedious.) is his effort to catalogue local shrines and local saints to figure out which place had a shrine to which saint and how popular various saints were.

Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, while seeming to deal with just England, was a paradigm shifting book that changed the field of Early Modern history, forcing a radical reappraisal of the interrelationship of religion, magic and popular culture. Thomas, despite his genius, is not able, though, to fully explore this new world of his. What he does offer is a road map, which one can take, on one hand, when dealing with other European societies besides for England and also when dealing with the specific fields of the various supernatural and occult beliefs that played such an important role in fashioning Early Modern Europe.

General Exams 1: Medieval

Today I took the first of my written exams for my generals; it was for my medieval minor. The test was a take-home, open book, and open notes. I had twenty-four hours to answer the questions given with a 2500-word limit. Dr. Daniel Hobbins gave me three questions from which I had to choose two of them.

The question that I chose not to answer was:

When R. I. Moore published The Formation of a Persecuting Society in 1987, he brought the study of marginalized groups (Jews, heretics, and lepers) to the center of attention in medieval studies. Choose any three books and discuss each author’s approach and strategies for dealing with a marginalized group in European history. You may also address whether or not the author is in any way responding to Moore.

I was seriously thinking of doing this question. What I would have done was turn the question into a discussion of why the bottom dropped out from underneath the Jews in Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1096 you had the Crusades and the massacre of Jews in the Rhineland, but this is mob violence. Jews are still protected, both by the Church and by the secular authorities. In the twelfth century, the Church begins to take an interest in Jewish money lending. 1144 we see the first ritual murder charges. Later in the century, we have the first expulsion of Jews, which was carried out by Philip Augustus in 1182. This was rescinded and only covered a small area, greater Paris more or less. Things get really bad during the thirteenth century. Jews come face to face with full-blown blood libels and desecration of the Host charges. They are subjected to an intense missionizing campaign and the assault on the Talmud that came in its wake; the Talmud was burnt in Paris in 1242. By the end of the century, Jews have been expelled from England and by the beginning of the fourteenth century, they will be out of France as well. There are large-scale massacres, possibly even worse than the Crusades, in Germany, effectively bringing an end to that community as well.

R. I Moore’s theory is that this turn of events was connected, one, to the general persecution of other marginal groups such as heretics and lepers and, two, that the source for this persecution was the rising clerical and merchant classes, which saw Jews as unwanted competition. In essence, Moore sees this new persecution as being intimately connected to the twelfth-century humanist and economic revolutions.

There are a number of other works of scholarship that come to mind to compare Moore to. Dominique Iogna-Prat’s Order & Exclusion: Cluny and Christiandom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150) takes a very similar line to Moore. Focusing on the thought of Peter the Venerable, Iogna-Prat builds a case for a major shift amongst Christian thinkers toward viewing society as a whole as a Christian society; one that was active in a struggle with opposing forces, particularly Islam. Because of this the Church all of a sudden begins to take an interest in Jews and heretics within the borders of Christendom and begins to see them as a problem. Like Moore, Iogna-Prat sees the persecution of Jews as an extension of the move against heretics and other dissidents. Unlike Moore, Iogna-Prat directly connects this shift to the Church.

Jeremy Cohen, in his Friars and the Jews, argues that the key players in this shift were the newly formed mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. These groups, so Cohen argues, turned away from the Augustinian witness doctrine which had traditionally protected Jews. With the witness doctrine no longer applying, Jews become sitting targets for persecution.

Guido Kisch is a third perspective. His Jews in Medieval Germany, written during the 1940s, deals with Jews from the perspective of their status in various German law codes. His essential argument is that the introduction of Roman law into Germany, during the twelfth century, marked a downturn for Jews, because it specifically singled them out. No longer were Jews simply residents of the cities that they lived in; now they were in a special legal category all of their own. (Warning to all those that may be tempted into reading Kisch. Jews in Medieval Germany makes for a very effective sleeping pill and is useful for hand-to-hand combat. Handle with care.)

In the end, I chose not to do this question as it was taking me down a highly interpretative angle and it would be a distinctively Jewish history response.

Here is the first question I did and my response:

The study of medieval religious history over the past generation has drawn much of its energy and inspiration from the study of religious women. Compare the approaches to the study of medieval women in works such as those of Bell, Bynum, Caciola, Coakley, Elliott, Schulenburg, and Voaden. You may address common themes and questions, areas of dispute or conflicting interpretations, and the strengths and/or limitations of these studies.

During the later Middle Ages, we see numerous examples of female religious leaders, and movements. Women such as Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373) and Catherine of Siena (1347-80) took on highly public roles, daring to criticize the Church hierarchy. These figures have provided the gist of much of modern scholarship on medieval religious life. I wish to discuss several examples of this to show how different scholars have confronted this issue of a “women’s” Christianity.

In Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell offers a psychoanalytical analysis of the phenomenon of extreme fasting in the vita of Christian holy women. Bell makes the highly provocative comparison between medieval women fasting, holy anorexia, and the relatively modern phenomenon of anorexia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is a psychological disorder disproportionally affecting upper class teenage and young adult white women. Its chief symptoms are that the affected person takes an extreme interest in dieting and losing weight. This results in the person abhorring food and refusing to eat. When forced to eat the person will simply regurgitate what they ate. If not treated, the person is likely to starve to death.

According to Bell both medieval holy anorexics and modern suffers of anorexia nervosa, are responding to a lack of control in their lives, particularly as women. The very act of fasting is itself a submission to the demands of the outside world. For modern anorexics that outside world is that of a secular middle class. For medieval women that outside world was the Christian patriarchy of the Church.

In contrast to Bell’s psychoanalytical explanation for the attitude toward food displayed by certain medieval women, Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast, Holy Fast, attempts to approach the issue from the perspective of the medieval world view. Clearly, the women who starved themselves did not see themselves as merely trying to gain more control over their lives in the face of a patriarchal existence; they saw themselves as good Christians, acting in accordance with Christian theology or at least their understanding of Christian theology. This then becomes an opportunity for Bynum to reconstruct the theology of women in the late Middle Ages; one built around food, fasting, and the Eucharist.

Unlike Bell, who views asceticism as being separate from food, Bynum views food and fasting as being intrinsically linked to each other, rejecting the dichotomy between eating and fasting; they are all part of one continual narrative, Christ suffering in order to bring about the salvation of the world. Of course men, during this time period, also identified themselves with Christ’s humanity and enacted his suffering. Women, though, approached the issue differently from men in that women viewed this through the particular lens of their experience as women. Women, unlike men, give birth to children and nurse them. Their bodies bring forth life and sustain it; their very bodies are food. Women in the later Middle Ages saw the narrative of Christ’s birth and death in this light. The human Christ came out of the body of Mary. He is the food that the faithful literally eat. The priest bringing forth the Eucharist could be a woman bringing forth a child. Christ bleeding from the lance in his side could be a woman giving forth milk from her breast.

The other side of the image of Christ as the food that nourishes the world is his suffering on the Cross. According to Christian theology, Christ gave his very flesh to bring nourishment to the world. Women imitated this by giving over their bodies. Bynum argues that, while men also fasted, it is in the vitae of female saints that food becomes a central motif. You see women who become saints because of their fasts or because they live off of the Eucharist. With men fasting is incidental. Francis of Assisi fasted, but his fasting is seen in terms of his embodiment of the poor and naked Christ.

Dyan Elliott criticizes Bynum’s positive narrative and, in its place, offers a narrative of a downward decline in woman’s spiritual activity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. In the twelfth century, clerics seized on woman’s Eucharistic visions as proof of the Church’s teachings on Transubstantiation. Thus the female spirituality, which Bynum sees as a mark of the independent voices of women, was really something created by the male Church hierarchy in order to promote their own power at the expense of populist brands of Christianity, which were labeled “heresies.” Many of these “heretical” groups, such as the Guglielmites, granted women a larger role than in traditional Catholicism and allowed women to preach; women even appear as leaders in these groups.

Elliott makes her case by connecting various holy women to the Inquisition. Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) was the founder of the Inquisition. He was also a major sponsor of various holy women. He supported Mary of Oigenes (1177-1213) and the Beguine movement as well as Elisabeth of Hungary (1207-1231). Elisabeth of Hungary’s confessor was Conrad of Marburg (d. 1233), a close associate of Gregory IX. Conrad of Marburg, soon after Elisabeth’s death and after he successfully pushed for her canonization, became an inquisitor. Elliott argues that Conrad gained an aura of sanctity for himself because of his association with Elisabeth. This protected him from any opposition and allowed him to pursue heretics as he wished.

Elliot connects the very practices associated with female spirituality to the Inquisition. The practice of women torturing their bodies and the veneration of women as living relics was part of a shift away from martyrdom as the ideal to a new ideal that one should be dead to the world. The reason for this was that the Church was in a struggle against heresy and was actively executing heretics. As such the Church did not wish to allow these heretics to be turned into martyrs. Instead, the Church created a new ideal of living martyrdom and offered up women as useful manifestation of it.

In the long run, this process and mechanism for examining women, to see if they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit gave way, in the fifteenth century, to the creation of the process and mechanism for examining women to see if they were under the influence of the Devil. The same Inquisition culture that promoted the veneration of women, in the end, turned around and started hunting down women as witches.

Rosalynn Voaden sees prophecy as representing one of the very few areas in which women could be empowered even within a patriarchal system such as the Church. This empowerment depended on having access to the discourses found in the formal Church structure. Educated women could form useful alliances with members of the Church hierarchy and could translate their experiences in ways that men would understand.

The focus of Voaden’s work is on the concept of discretio spirituum. This was a methodology developed by clerics in the later Middle Ages to differentiate between people acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit and those acting under the influence of the devil. Voaden uses discretio spirituum to analyze the cases of two female visionaries, Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and how they were received by the Church; Bridget of Sweden was successful at navigating the discourse of discretio spirituum, while Margery Kempe failed at it. Margery comes across, in her writing, as a very forceful and independent personality while Bridget of Sweden comes across as a blank cipher. Margery Kempe took a strongly independent role for herself; even though she attempted to gain the approval of the Church, she failed to hold on to a spiritual director. While she gained the respect of many ecclesiastical authorities, she constantly quarreled with her spiritual directors and hence could not hold on to one. Bridget of Sweden succeeded in maintaining the aid of Alfonso of Jaen, who went on to advocate for her canonization. Margery Kempe seems to have been fairly unlearned, particularly in matters related to discretio spirituum, while Bridget of Sweden was relatively well educated and, in particular, understood discretio spirituum. Margery Kempe’s visions tended to be more corporeal, while Bridget of Sweden’s visions were of an intellectual nature. Margery Kempe was a married woman, who had abandoned her husband for life as a wondering pilgrim. Furthermore she engaged in activities that seemed to veer rather closely to preaching. Bridget of Sweden, though she was originally married, became a nun after the death of her husband.

Despite the fact that Bridget of Sweden was portrayed by Alfonso of Jaen as a meek passive servant of the Church, her status as a visionary made a major power. Kings and popes alike heeded her advice. She involved herself in the Hundred Years Wars, supporting the English. She played a crucial role in bringing the papacy back to Rome from Avignon. She did live as a cloistered nun, but traveled about, working to create her own order of nuns, the Bridgettines.

John Coakley in Women, Men and Spiritual Power, like Bell and Elliott, analyzes medieval female spirituality from a male-centric point of view. Unlike Bell and Elliott, though, Coakley has a more positive view of the women involved; they are more than mere puppets of their clergymen. In this sense, Coakley serves as a useful bridge to Bynum’s position. Coakley focuses on how male clergymen looked at the female mystics in their charge and integrated them into their spiritual worldview. As with Voaden, Coakley sees the subjugated state of women in the later Middle Ages as ironically serving to empower them.

Coakley builds his case around a series of case studies of various female mystics and their male clerical collaborators. The first relationship that Coakley deals with is that of Elisabeth of Schonau (1129-1164) and her brother Ekbert (c. 1120-1184). Ekbert was careful to show his control over Elisabeth. He inserted himself into his writing. It is he who decides what should be revealed to others. Ekbert was concerned with theological matters and used Elisabeth as a research assistant of sorts to help him get answers from above. For example, at one point he asks her if the Church father Origen was in Hell or not. Throughout the account of Elisabeth’s visions we find that the angels tell her to ask the learned doctors to explain to her what her visions mean. Elisabeth thus becomes a mere cipher, with which men of the Church could communicate with Heaven.

Hildegard of Bingen and Guibert of Gembloux (c. 1125-1213) had a very different sort of relationship. Guibert was different than Ekbert in that Guibert did not put himself forth as the gatekeeper for Hildegard. Guibert only came into contact with Hildegard at the end of her life. For the most part she managed to operate outside the model of female visionary male confessor champion. Guibert serves merely to record Hildegard’s actions and is of no real consequence.
While Elliott viewed James’ portrayal of Mary of Oignies in terms of being a supporter of priests with her Eucharistic devotions, Coakley sees James as granting Mary a level of power parallel to that of a priest. She did not deal with doctrine rather she was given knowledge about specific individuals. This allowed her to aid priests by letting them know about the states of the souls of the people in their care. Elliott sees this role of aider to priests, cynically, as pawns of the priesthood. Coakley sees this as a sign of independent power.

The relationship between Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua (1330-99) offers an excellent example of the final stage of evolution in the relationship between clergymen and female visionaries. Raymond consciously put himself forward as Catherine’s defender against those who doubted her prophecies or who questioned her refusal to eat. He is a witness to her life but is also an active partner in her labors.

Coakley, like Elliott, sees a downturn in the Church’s acceptance of female visionaries in the later part of the fourteenth century. The fact that Raymond had go as far as he did to defend Catherine’s sanctity demonstrates a growing skepticism on the part of the Church hierarchy. If the Church was beginning to show a greater level of interest in such women it was not in a way that boded well for them.

This answer of mine is essentially an abridged version of an essay that I wrote earlier in the year and posted on this blog. It is not cheating if you are cribbing off of yourself. I sent Dr. Hobbins an email asking him if I could just hand him the original paper. He said that it was fine to take from my paper but that I needed to give him a "new text." So I had to do some work on this answer.

Here is the second question and my response:


The standard historiographical model of the late Middle Ages sees this period as one of crisis and even decline. Many scholars of the past generation have attempted to modify this model or to discard it entirely. Describe the different approaches to the late Middle Ages in any general surveys (Cantor, Southern, Funkenstein) or monographs that you have read (e.g., Blumenfeld-Kosinksi, Elliott, Smoller, Coleman, Iogna-Prat, or any others). Are any general trends or shifts in attitude visible in these studies? Does the standard model still appear relatively intact?

The late Middle Ages often receives short shrift. The standard historiographical model of the late Middle Ages, from the end of the thirteenth century through the early fifteenth century sees this period as one of crisis and even decline. A good example of this, at a popular level, is Barbara Tuchman’s Distant Mirror. The problem with the late Middle Ages is that it suffers from being between the Scholastic “Twelfth Century Renaissance"” and the Renaissance of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries so it is likely to be overlooked even by traditional defenders of the Middle Ages. Also, the late Middle Ages saw a number of rather cataclysmic events on a number of fronts. There was the Black Death, which wiped out approximately one-third of the European population and would come back periodically every few decades over the next few centuries to wreak its havoc. The late Middle Ages saw the series of conflicts between England and France known to us as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). From the perspective of the Church, this was a difficult period as well, with the Great Schism splitting the Church (1378-1415) into two and briefly three factions. I would like to offer some examples of attempts to rehabilitate the late Middle Ages both in terms of the “grand narrative” and in terms of specific case studies.

Norman Cantor viewed the late Middle Ages as the “Harvest of Medieval Thought,” opting to, in essence, go with a long Renaissance and in include the later Middle Ages as part of the Renaissance:

The crisis of the later Middle Ages did not distract the intellectuals and artists of Latin Christendom from theory and creativity. On the contrary, the gloom and doom of the times made them think all the more deeply about the nature of God, the universe, mankind, and society. In the midst of devastation from pandemics, war, climatic deterioration, and economic depression, they exhibited a passion for learning of all kinds – for linguistic and literary innovation, for philosophical and scientific inquiry, for massive productivity and creativity in the visual arts. No era in western civilization left a heritage of more masterpieces in literature and painting or seminal works of philosophy and theology. (Civilization of the Middle Ages pg. 529)

Cantor holds up the work of Duns Scotus and William of Occam as the preeminent examples of late medieval thought. Particularly with Occam, Cantor saw the Scientific Revolution really as starting in the fourteenth century with the shift toward emphasizing empirical observation and the breakaway from Aristotle. This had to wait until the sixteenth century for its full flowering due to the lack of societal support, there were no University chairs devoted to empirical science in the fourteenth century, and the undeveloped state of mathematics at the time.

In light of the inherent limitations in the way of scientific progress during the late Middle Ages Cantor focuses on mystical developments. This, for Cantor, is a legitimate form of progress and not a mere sinking into superstition because he sees late medieval mysticism as being rooted in a certain individualism in that we see an emphasis on the personal relationship of the lay individual to God, to Christ and to the Eucharist, essentially unmediated by the clergy. This becomes an important bridge into Renaissance humanism. Cantor’s approach to such figures as Thomas a Kempis and Nicholas of Cusa owes a lot to his teacher Richard Southern and how he approached Anselm. For Southern, Anselm marked a major shift in Christian thought. Anselm argued that Christ had to come down in human form and died on the Cross as a man in order to pay the price of humanity's sins. According to the traditional understanding Christ, by taking on a human guise, tricked the Devil into trying to take his soul. By doing this Satan broke his original agreement with God that gave him a claim over the souls of mankind and, as such, the agreement became null and void. In the traditional perspective, human beings are passive spectators in a contest between God and the Devil. Anselm made Christ’s humanity, his life as a human being and his human suffering on Calvary, of central theological importance. This set the stage for a flowering of humanist thinking that expressed itself in theology, in philosophy and even helped bring about the rise of the medieval romance.

Laura Ackerman Smoller’s History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre D’Ailly, 1450-1420 is an example of the rehabilitation of one particular late medieval thinker from being pushed aside simply as an unoriginal thinker and, as such, unworthy of scholarly interest. Smoller acknowledges that from the perspective of simply looking at D’Ailly’s parts he was not an original thinker. What interests Smoller about D’Ailly, though, is how D’Ailly brought together such widely different currents as theology, astrology, Apocalypticism and church politics, creating something uniquely his own.

D’Ailly was one of the leading French theologians in late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the teacher Jean Gerson, the dominant figure in fifteenth century Scholasticism. The event that dominated D’Ailly’s life and thought was the Great Schism. The main focus of D’Ailly’s thought was his attempt to place this schism within the context of Christian theology. During the early years of the schism, D’Ailly saw this event in terms of the Apocalypse and the coming of the Anti-Christ. The Church was breaking up; such a disaster must prefigure the End of Days. Later in life, as D’Ailly became one of the leading figures involved in the conciliatory movement, first at the Council of Pisa in 1409 and then at the Council of Constance from 1414-1417, to get all the papal claimants to abdicate and allow the Church to be brought back together in the leadership of a new pope. In order to justify this new turn, D’Ailly turned to astrology. According to his astrological calculations the Apocalypse would not occur until 1796, leaving plenty of time for Church reunification.

Smoller is following in the footsteps of the late Marjorie Reeves in her incorporation of prophecy into the narrative of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the rise of naturalistic thinking. For Smoller, D’Ailly’s turn toward astrology and his attempt to work out a prophetic narrative of history has nothing to do with him being “superstitious.” D’Ailly is part and parcel of the shift toward a mechanized view of the world. D’Ailly saw history as being subjected to set laws with causes firmly rooted in the natural world; in this case the influence of the stars. This is not really all that far removed from the work of Kepler and Newton and their mechanized heavenly motions.

My final example of an attempt to rehabilitate the late Middle Ages as a time of legitimate cultural growth is Joyce Coleman’s book, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. Coleman presents medieval literacy as being aural based. That people read aloud either to themselves or to others even when they could do otherwise because they preferred hearing texts. Coleman posits the existence of an aural reading culture thriving particularly during the late Middle Ages where people where actively interested in reading, if not by their own power than simply by taking part in hearing others read.

Running through the book and tying it all together is an analysis of Chaucer. Chaucer has traditionally served as an example of the rise of a silent reader. At various points in his famous Canterbury Tales, and his less well-known work such as Troilus and Criseyde, talks about reading and addresses himself to a reader. This has traditionally been interpreted as Chaucer's writing with the assumption that his work would be read by privately by an individual. The fact that Chaucer also talks about people listening to stories is brushed aside as Chaucer giving a nod to traditional forms of narrative. Coleman rejects this interpretation of Chaucer and offers her own analysis of Chaucer using her theory of aurality. According to her reading of Chaucer, when he talks about a reader he is referring to someone either reading his work aloud to a group or someone having his work read to him. This reading of Chaucer has the advantage over more traditional readings in that it takes into account his references to the telling over of his work and the reading of it.

For Coleman, Chaucer and the aural mode of reading that he represents is an important piece in the creation of the reading society. It is not that print was invented in the fifteenth century and all of a sudden people went from being medieval illiterates to Renaissance literates. The Middle Ages, of course, was a far more literate age than the stereotype would suggest and there was plenty of illiteracy during the Renaissance. What is crucial here, though, was that the printing revolution in the fifteenth century came in the wake of reading revolution that occurred during the late Middle Ages. This mass rise in popular reading, both for pleasure and for business, brought about the rise of print. As such the late Middle Ages must be viewed as an important cultural watershed in its own right.

The work of scholars such as Cantor, Smoller, and Coleman offer an alternative perspective of the late Middle Ages. No one is trying to push away such calamities as the Black Death, the Hundred Years War and the Great Schism, but that is not the entire story. There is another side to this story which also has to be told. Similarly, on an intellectual front, there is more to the late Middle Ages than the hardening of Scholasticism into hard dogma, killing all original thought. This was also the era of Occam, of Cusa and of a Kempis. Even scholastics such as D’Ailly, who, at first glance, might seem to have been nothing more than redactors of the scholastic tradition, upon examination, also come into their own as important thinkers in their own right.

In this case, I also cribbed a little off of my earlier work, something that I posted here. I did go quite a bit over my word limit. I assume no one will really mind. Well next on the schedule is my exam in early modern history with Dr. Robert Davis. It will be in the same general format as this exam. I do not expect the same luck as I had this time around. I am looking forward to it. For now, I guess I should be packing to go home for Thanksgiving. I can start panicking again once I get through the weekend.

Of Prostitutes and Jewish Usurers: A Case of Medieval Christian Tolerance

Analogies were often drawn between the toleration of Jewish lending and the toleration of prostitution, which, by confining sin within limits and subjecting it to public control, helped to guarantee good order by preventing the seduction of innocent and respectable women at the hands of lecherous men. As Saint Augustine had written in his early treatise, De ordine, of the late fourth century, “ What can be called more filthy, more worthless, more wicked and dishonorable than whores, pimps and other such baneful creatures? But take away harlots from human affairs and you will trouble everything with unbridled lust and passion.” Sisto Medici seized on the parallel and concluded, after elaboration on Augustine and on the principle of the lesser evil, that “the wickedness of usury should therefore be permitted, no less than the brothels of harlots. … However, infidel women cannot be so generally or properly licensed to commit such fornication lest by their beauty the captivated souls of the faithful be seduced into infidelity, a danger which does not occur where usury is concerned.” (Brian Pullan, Jewish Banks and Monti di Pieta” pg. 71. The Jews of Early Modern Venice. Ed. Robert Davis and Benjamin Ravid.)

You have to give the medieval Church credit. They were very rational and logical in their own pragmatic way. The Church in Italy was remarkably tolerant of prostitution. The reason for this was that they believed that, if they banned prostitutes, men would be more likely to satisfy their lusts with other men. Better to tolerate prostitution than to tolerate homosexuality. As for the argument that if men went to non-Christian prostitutes they would be led to heresy; the rabbis in Spain thought along similar lines and argued that it was better to have Jewish prostitutes than have Jewish men going to non-Jewish prostitutes. (See David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence pg. 135-36)

This is also a very good example of a situation where hatred and tolerance could co-exist. Just because you hate someone does not mean that you are going to severally persecute them and you can like someone and still persecute them. The important thing is whether it is in your self-interest to tolerate someone or not. When trying to understand why Jews were tolerated in some places and persecuted in others the important issue is not whether certain places or rulers were “open-minded,” “enlightened” or “tolerant.” What really mattered was whether or not someone thought it was in their interest, or in the interest of society at large, to have a Jewish presence. If having Jews around served a constructive purpose then just as one tolerated the existence of other undesirables, such as prostitutes, one also tolerated Jews.

As an interesting side note, there is a connection here that Pullan does not mention. It was Augustine, who Pullan brings down as arguing for the toleration of prostitution, who formulated the famous “witness doctrine,” which became the basis for the toleration of Jews in medieval Christian thought. (We will be discussing this in detail in later posts. Stay tuned!)

Preparing For Generals

I am in middle of enjoying a relaxing summer of preparing for my general examinations, which I hopefully will be taking sometime this coming fall. How this works is that I have a committee of four professors, two to represent my major field, Jewish History and two to represent my two minor fields, Medieval and Early Modern European History. The test consists of a serious of written tests followed by an oral examination. For the oral examination I will be put in a room with all four of the professors on the committee and for two hours they get to question me for two hours.

During these coming months, I will mostly be posting on the material I am studying. To give you all an idea of what goes into general examinations I have posted my reading list. I have already read most of the books listed, but there is still a fair amount that I have not read and there is a lot that I have read that I need to review. Also several of the books listed are in the 700+ page range. No I am not panicking yet. (That comes in September.)

You are all welcome to join me in this merry endeavor.


Jewish History: Dr. Matt Goldish & Dr. Daniel Frank

Anti-Semitism

Andrew Colin Gow
1. Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age 1200-1600.
R.I Moore
2. Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250. Winter 2006
Joshua Trachtenberg
3. Devil and the Jews

Christianity
David Berger
4. Jewish Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages
Robert Chazan
5. Barcelona and Beyond; The Disputation of 1263 and its Aftermath
6. Dagger of Faith: Thirteenth Century Missionizing and Jewish Responses
7. Church, State and the Jew in the Middle Ages.
Jeremy Cohen
8. The Friars and the Jews
9. Living Letters of the Law
Shlomo Eidelberg
10. The Jews and the Crusades: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades
Hyam Maccoby
11. Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages
James Parkes
12. The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue

France and Germany

William Chester Jordan
13. The French Monarchy and the Jews
Guido Kisch
14. The Jews in Medieval Germany

Historiography
Gershon Cohen
15. Sefer Hakabbalah
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
16. Zakhor, Jewish History, and Jewish Memory.

Islam
Eliyahu Ashtor
17. Jews of Muslim Spain
Goitein
18. Jews and Arabs
Avigdor Levy
19. The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire

Messianism

Harris Lenowitz
20. The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights
Marc Saperstein
21. Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History.

Mysticism

J.H Chajes
22. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcist, and Early Modern Judaism.
Lawrence Fine
23. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship.
Matt Goldish
“Halakhah, Kabbalah, and Heresy: A Controversy in Early Eighteenth Century Amsterdam.” JQR 2-3(1993-94): Pg. 153-76.
“Review Essay New Approaches to Jewish Messianism” AJS Review 25. Looks at Idel’s Messianic Mystics and Lenowitz’s book on Jewish Messiahs.
24. Sabbatean Prophets.
25. Judaism in the Theology of Isaac Newton.
Moshe Idel
26. Kabbalah: New Perspectives.
27. Messianic Mystics
Ephraim Kanarfogel
28. Peering through the Lattices: Mystical, Magical and Pietistic Dimensions in the Tosafist Period.
Ivan Marcus
29. Rituals of Childhood
Gershom Scholem
30. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
31. On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism
32. Origins of the Kabbalah
33. Sabbtai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah
Joseph Trachtenberg
34. Jewish Magic and Superstition
Elliot Wolfson
35. Through a Speculum that Shines

Philosophy

Isaac Barzilai
36. Between Reason and Faith: Anti-Rationalism in Italian Jewish Thought 1250-1650
Seymour Feldman
“Prophecy and Perception in Isaac Abravanel.” Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism. Ed. Alfred Ivry, Elliot Wolfson, and Allan Arkush.
“The end of the universe in medieval Jewish philosophy.” AJS 11(1986): pg. 53-77
37. Philosophy in a Time of Crisis: Don Isaac Abravanel: Defender of the Faith
Sarah Heller-Wilensky.
38. Isaac Arama in the Framework of Philonic Philosophy. (Hebrew) Jerusalem. 1956.
Menachem Kellner
39. Principles of Faith
40. Must a Jew Believe Anything?
41. Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought: From Maimonides to Abravanel
Isaac Lawee
42. Abarbanel’s Stance toward Tradition
Daniel J. Lasker
43. Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages
Chaim Pearl
44. The Medieval Jewish Mind: the Religious Philosophy of Isaac Arama
Jospeh Sarachek
45. Faith and Reason: The Conflict Over the Rationalism of Maimonides. Hermon Press, New York. 1970.
Daniel Jeremy Silver
46. Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy 1180-1240. Brill. 1965

Politics

Ruth Wisse
47. Jewish Power.

Renaissance

Robert Bonfil
48. Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy
49. Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy
David Ruderman
50. Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe
51. The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham b. Mordecai Farissol
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
52. Between Worlds – The Life and Thought of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon



Society
Ephraim Kanarfogel
53. Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages
Jacob Katz
54. Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages
55. Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times

Spain
Yitzchak Baer
56. Jews in Christian Spain (2 vol.)
H.H Ben Sasson
57. “Generation of the Spanish Exiles and its Fate.” Zion 26(1961): pg. 23-64.
Seymour Feldman
58. “1492: A House Divided.” Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World (1997): 38-58.
Mark Meyerson
59. A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth Century Spain.
Benzion Netanyahu
60. Don Isaac Abarbanel: Statesman and Philosopher
61. Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain
62. The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources
Norman Roth
63. Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
Yosef Yerushalmi
64. The Lisbon Massacre of 1506
Perez Zagorin
65. Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe.

Early Modern: Prof. Robert Davis

Magic

Stuart Clark
66. Thinking With Demons.
Keith Thomas
67. Religion and the Decline of Magic
Carlo Ginzburg
68. Night Battles
Guido Ruggiero
69. Binding Passions
Frances Yates
70. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
71. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age
72. The Art of Memory
73. Rosicrucian Enlightenment

Religion

Elizabeth Rapley
74. The Devotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth Century France.
Anne Jacobson Schutte
75. Aspiring Saints: Pretense of holiness, inquisition and gender in the republic of Venice 1618-1750.
Marjorie Reeves
“Cadinal Egidio of Viterbo: a Prophetic Interpretation of History.”
76. Influence of prophecy in the later Middle Ages: A Study of Joachimism.

Richard Kagan
77. Lucrecia’s Dreams
Carlo Ginzburg
78. The Cheese and the Worm
Phyllis Mack (Rutgers)
79. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England
John Headley
80. Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World
B.S Capp
81. The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism
William Christian
82. Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain
Cynthia L. Polecritti
83. Preaching Peace in Renaissance Italy: Bernardino of Siena & His Audience

Violence

Steve Carroll
84. Blood and Violence in Early Modern France.
David Nirenberg
85. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages.
Pieter Spierenburg
86. The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial metropolis to the European Experience.

Renaissance

Peter Burke
87. The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy
Bruce Cole
88. The Renaissance Artist at Work
Elizabeth Eisenstein
89. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.
Lauro Martines
90. Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy
Edward Muir
91. Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice
John Najemy
92. Italy in the Age of the Renaissance
Laurie Nussdorfer
93. Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII

Jews

Robert Davis and Benjamin Ravid
94. The Jews of Early Modern Venice

Kenneth Stow (Haifa)
95. Jewish Life in Early Modern Rome: Challenge, Conversion and Private Life

Medieval: Prof. Daniel Hobbins

General

Malcolm Barber: (University of Reading) Expert on the Knights Templar.
96. The Two Cities: Medieval Europe 1050-1320.
Norman Cantor
97. The Civilization of the Middle Ages
R.W Southern (1912-2001) (Oxford)
98. The Making of the Middle Ages

Religion

Rudolph Bell
99. Holy Anorexia.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
100. Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378-1417.
Peter Brown
101. Cult of the Saints.
102. Augustine of Hippo
Caroline Walker Bynum
103. Holy Feat and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.
Nancy Caciola
104. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages.
John Coakley
105. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators
Dyan Elliott
106. Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages.
Amos Funkenstein
107. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton University Press. 1986.
Dominique Iogna-Prat
108. Order & Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism and Islam (1000-1500)
Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
109. Forgetful of their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society C.A 500-1100.
Laura Ackerman Smoller
110. History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre D’Aillly
Rosalynn Voaden
111. God’s Word’s, Women’s Voices.

Medicine

Joan Cadden
112. The Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages.
Joseph Shatzmiller
113. Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society. University of California Press. 1994
Nancy Siraisi
114. Medicine and the Italian Universities 1250-1600.

Literacy

Michael Clanchy
115. From Memory to Written Record.
Joyce Coleman
116. Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France.

Universities

Hilde de Ridder-Symoens
117. A History of the University in Europe.