Trawling through nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions of texts has made me realise just how indebted my generation is to the labour of our not so distant forebears. Bernard of Angers, master of the cathedral school of Chartres, springs to mind. In c. 1159, John of Salisbury, one of his former students, attributed to Bernard the saying that his contemporaries were like dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. That is, modern scholars, while dwarves in comparison to the intellectual giants of yore, were able to see further because, sitting on their proverbial shoulders, they could draw on the accomplishments of the ancients.
For sure, the writings of once eminent scholars like Karl Hampe, August Fliché, Kate Norgate or William Stubbs have become historical sources in their own right, read not for their interpretation of the medieval past, but for what they reveal about the intellectual culture of Europe in the later nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. They tell us what people thought about the past and how they sought to make sense of it, but we no longer share many of their assumptions or agree with their interpretations. New materials have come to light, the toolkit of history has been refined (well, in some ways), and questions that they had not thought of, which they did not know how to answer, or which they deemed irrelevant are being asked or can now be answered (or can at least be discussed). And some of the stuff they came up with (about Jews, non-Caucasians, foreigners, or non-western cultures) makes one’s hair stand on edge.
What further struck me was the range of actors involved in that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century project. There were some veritable crooks. Jacques Paul Migne (1800-75) was in some ways typical of the scene. A Catholic priest of views so rampantly right-wing that his own bishop disowned him, he ended up founding an immensely successful publishing house. He made his money mostly by plagiarising texts, reprinting them cheaply, and pricing them so low that a wide circulation was ensured. His activities soon extended to hiring painters who could fake church decorations in the style of famous classical and contemporary painters. In the end, his – to put it mildly – unorthodox business practices were called out even by the pope, and he died a wealthy but disgraced man. There is a rather splendid biography of Migne by Howard Bloch, which is short, readable, very funny, and highly recommended.
Yet the reason Migne matters is because he put all business skills and plagiarism to good use. Between 1844 and 1855 he published the Patrologia Latina in 221 volumes. It promised to reprint the best editions of all important Latin religious texts written between the third century and 1215. It is full of typos and misprints, and let’s not ask about issues of copyright. But it was based on an immense and rather thorough trawl through the available published editions of medieval texts, and remains an absolutely essential tool. All too often the choice is between using the faulty PL (or PatLat) and either finding that book printed in Venice in 1564 or collating half a dozen manuscripts (some of them destroyed or lost) from which to construct a readable text of the one sentence one needs to check. The PatLat it is, any time. It was quickly followed by the Patrologia Graeca, in 165 volumes in 1857-8, this time, as the name implies printing Greek texts. That was on top over several hundred volumes of religious treatises, pamphlets and handbooks.
The PL, in turn, provided the antecedent from which subsequent editorial projects both sought to distance themselves, and which they aimed to surpass: such as the CSEL (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum), which is still going, having just published volume 105, or the Corpus Christianorum, with over 500 books published so far. One of Migne’s aims had been to make early Christian and medieval texts accessible – hence the plagiarism, the many typos, quick production rate and often quite cheap paper. That intention has been taken up by series like the Sources Chretiennes, which offers scholarly editions of Latin and Greek texts with facing-page French translations (over 500 volumes), or the Fontes Christiani (90+ volumes), which does the same in German. There is no English equivalent.
In some ways, Migne was also representative of the type of the independent scholar-entrepreneur, Indiana Jones but without the academic pretensions. The ‘discovery’ of the Cairo Geniza provides another example. The Geniza (or storeroom) was a kind of archive kept by the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Kind of, because it was not so much an ordered store of useful information, as a place in which pieces of parchment and paper were kept until they would naturally turn to dust. There were similar store rooms in other Jewish communities, but the Cairo one is important because its holdings were so huge (over 400,000 individual items), because its holdings stretch back so far back in time (the synagogue had been established in 882 CE), and because of the sheer variety of materials collated (which include administrative sources, shopping lists, poems, religious treatises, etc,. etc., in a variety of languages). The Princeton Geniza Lab, while only covering a tenth of the total, still gives a good sense of just how valuable a treasure trove this turns out to be for modern historians. For a specific case study, one can’t do much better than Marina Rustow’s recent and immensely readable account of the tenth- to twelfth-century Arabic materials preserved in the Cairo Geniza. For an example of what the Geniza means for our understanding of Jewish life in the southern Mediterranean, Jessica Goldberg and the selections translated by S.D. Goitein and published as A Mediterranean Society (6 vols.) provide excellent guides.
While all this is intriguing, the story of discovery is even more so. It once again takes us to the fringes of academic life. The existence of the Cairo Geniza had been known outside Egypt since at least the eighteenth century, but it was in 1896 that it firmly entered the horizons of western scholars. The key figures in bringing about this moment of realisation were the twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis (1843-1926) and Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843-1920). Exceptionally gifted linguists, fervent Presbyterians, part-time writers of romance-novels, and inspired by recent finds of early Christian texts in Sinai, as well as independently wealthy, they learned Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic in order to fund and to participate in successive expeditions to Greece and Egypt searching for early Christian texts. Scholars of increasing international renown, and even though they were resident in Cambridge, the university nonetheless refused to honour them because they were women. In 1896, they showed some of the manuscripts they had acquired to Solomon Schechter (1847x50-1915), a formidable intellect in his own right. A lecturer in Talmudic Hebrew at Cambridge, Schechter was also close friends with the anthropologist James George Frazer, whose Golden Bough remains one of the most bizarre but culturally influential books of the early twentieth century. Originally from Romania, but forced into exile first to Germany, and then England, Schechter had established himself as an expert on manuscripts and Talmudic theology. He eventually moved on to the US, where he became president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a leading figure in Conservative Judaism.
But to return to Cambridge in 1896. Realising the value of what the sisters had found, Schechter managed to secure funding from his college for another expedition. In their – highly recommended – book on the Cairo Geniza, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole provide a wonderfully rich account of the secretive nature of Schechter’s visit – so as not to alert rivals and competitors to the treasures he expected to find. They retrace the complex negotiations that were required in Cairo, the urgency of the endeavour – Schechter even abandoned a long-planned pilgrimage to Jerusalem – and the mixture of sheer elation and exhaustion on Schechter’s part as he climbed up a ladder to the attic that held the Geniza. It took him four weeks – pestered, as his letters lamented, by bugs, beadles and demands for bribes – to get a sense of the Geniza’s holdings. He retrieved as much as he could – the foundation of one of the largest collections of Geniza documents, now in Cambridge. On returning to England, it took Schechter several years to sift through what he had retrieved (the picture below shows him trying to sort his finds).
Agnes Smith Lewis, Margaret Dunlop Gibson and Solomon Schechter certainly were more reputable actors than Migne. But they also had rather a lot in common with him. They had been alerted to what could be found in the Genizah by a local Talmud scholar and manuscript dealer. Only loosely affiliated to academic institutions (if at all), they were independently wealthy private individuals, frequently driven by rather different motivations from their academic peers. For Migne, his efforts were about propagating a particular, deeply conservative understanding of Catholicism, a desire to return the Church to the unity and authority of a patristic and high medieval Golden Age. For the sisters, this was about establishing the earliest possible version of Christianity, the ideal status quo ante to which they hoped inevitably Protestant Christianity could be returned. For Schechter, this was about shedding light onto a period often labelled the ‘Dark Age’ of Judaism, and was intrinsically linked to his disenchantment with liberal Judaism. There were others like them. John Allan Giles (1808-1884), a private tutor and Anglican clergyman, who in 1855 had been sentenced to prison for arranging a clandestine marriage, published over 200 books of editions and translations of medieval texts in an attempt to trace a specifically English form of Christianity, indebted neither to Catholicism nor Calvinist or Lutheran Protestantism. The pursuit of history was a religious enterprise. That they had in common with many a medieval chronicler and scholar.
Collectively, these nineteenth-century figures point to an aspect in the development of history as a discipline that is sometimes rather neglected. There remains a master narrative that views the nineteenth century as the birth ground of a modern academic discipline of history. That is certainly true (as the next blog post will discuss), but it also postulates a degree of difference from earlier periods that is not justified by the evidence at our disposal. There is a long continuum that links the sisters, the abbot and the Talmud scholar to Theodoric of Echternach, to Bede, Livy, and so on. The scholars who drew on the work of Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, but who denied them access to their institutions, were also part of this environment. They cannot be viewed in isolation from it. They, too, were but dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants.
In that sense, they have even more in common with their twelfth-century forebears. John of Salisbury recorded Bernard’s remarks in the Metalogicon, and until recently it has generally been accepted that Bernard had been the first to employ this particular image, and to have done so at some point between 1119 and 1126. Yet it was not Bernard who popularised the expression, but his contemporary William of Conches, in a text probably written in 1123. William was something of a high medieval bestseller, who wrote immensely popular and widely copied works on logic and natural philosophy. Like Bernard, he was also a teacher at Chartres. Just the kind of person who might come up with this kind of metaphor. But, Brian Stock has suggested (and my account of Bernard’s bon mot follows his), he may have used an image that either already circulated widely or that had at least developed independently.
It was, for instance, used by the Norman monk and chronicler Orderic Vitalis (1075-c. 1142), who was no scholar, who was no teacher, but who, in his spare time, wrote one of the most wide-ranging and, to modern historians, foundational histories of England and Normandy from the Creation to 1140, a text that has a far wider modern audience than either John of Salisbury or William of Conches. That Orderic used the dwarves & giant image in a passage that, as Stock suggested, satirised contemporary intellectuals as fat-headed midgets, lends his account particular poignancy. This was an outsider taking aim at the insiders. Or so it would seem. Yet Orderic also drew on many of the same texts, discussed many of the same problems, and reached many of the same conclusions as Bernard and William. He formed part of an intellectual environment that cannot be easily categorised as pitching elite against popular, insiders against outsiders. The nineteenth century, as we will see next week, was no different.
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