Flying and nesting

This week’s episode of the Great Books podcast covers The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, which I read early last year and made my year-end best-of list. During their discussion, host John J Miller and guest Andrew Hui tease out of a lot of the seemingly endless riches of this novel but give special attention to Eco’s allegorical presentation of two kinds of learning, or two visions of the purpose of books: the closed and the open.

The closed vision is exemplified by the blind old monk Jorge of Burgos (a play on Jorge Luis Borges) and by the Aedificium, the monastery’s labyrinthine “closed stacks” library, which locks knowledge away. In this vision, books and learning are for preservation and understanding, a project of continuity. The open vision presents books and knowledge as a tool of continuous inquiry and is represented by the novel’s hero, William of Baskerville, who pursues a project of constant revision.

I don’t think I could have articulated this without Miller and Hui’s discussion. This is a major theme of the book and brilliantly brought to life in the plot. But what is frustrating in Eco’s exploration of this theme is that—in addition to coming down in William of Ockham’s nominalist camp, a gross error that must stem from Eco’s postmodernisms—he presents these two visions as fundamentally opposed: closed or open; preservation or inquiry; continuity or revision. Eco is too subtle to get preachy about it, but he constantly nudges our sympathies toward the latter in each pair.

But learning—or, worse, an entire society—built only on openness, inquiry, and revision will become unstable, something that should be obvious these 45 years on from Eco’s book.

I’ve had a few friends and acquaintances over the years who operated like this to a fault. I remember one saying many times that the goal of reading and research was to be able “to ask more interesting questions,” never to get answers or to know anything. (It occurs to me now that he actually used a picture of Sean Connery as William of Baskerville as a social media avatar for a long time.) Others, especially in grad school, never treated any topic as settled—except the need to keep every topic unsettled. They were the “Question everything” crowd, who followed through on questioning everything—except the command to question.

An endless recursion to questioning might be enjoyable to some people—and, indeed, this type is usually impossible to pin down on any topic, a trait they seem to think is puckish but quickly becomes annoying—but our minds aren’t designed for that. Even Socrates was always driving at some kind of final answer.

When the open and closed are set in opposition, as in Eco’s story, we get a demand that birds either only fly or only nest when the two actions are complementary. Birds have to fly out to explore, if only to find food, but they also have to land somewhere. Birds that never leave the nest will die—a fact that’s become proverbial—but likewise birds that never land and never build will never rest, never lay eggs, and never send forth a new generation to fly.

Ties that could never be chosen

Yesterday Alan Jacobs shared a thought-provoking short post on “the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen,” a deep cultural shift that has made all of us more autonomous and less human. Jacobs mentions family ties specifically, which we all receive rather than select, and includes the following quotation from the late Sir Roger Scruton’s final book, a study of Wagner’s Parsifal:

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

As it happens, I’ve just finished reading a new edition of Waltharius, an early medieval Latin epic about Walter of Aquitaine. The poem is set in the mid-fifth century world of the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, and Huns. The action begins in the court of Attila somewhere in central Europe. There, we meet:

• Walthari, heir to a Visigothic kingdom in the west

• Hildigunda, daughter of the Burgundian king

• Hagano, a Frankish nobleman

All three are hostages to Attila, collateral in a peace deal between Attila and their respective kingdoms. Further, Walthari and Hildigunda have been pledged to each other in marriage since childhood, and Walthari and Hagano, through the trials of combat in the ranks of Attila’s allied fighters, have become fast friends.

But then the peace treaty between Attila and the Franks ends and Hagano flees before he can be killed, and when Attila, as a reward for Walthari’s brave and loyal service (being a medieval hostage involved a lot more collaboration with one’s host than the word suggests now, and could be quite cushy), announces his plan to marry Walthari into his family and keep him on permanently, Walthari decides to flee, too, and to take Hildigunda with him. They love each other and don’t want their childhood betrothal undone.

One might expect a frantic pursuit across Europe but Walthari and Hildigunda’s flight goes smoothly until they reach Frankish territory. There, Gundahari attempts to stop them and confiscate not only Walthari’s horse and treasure but Hildigunda herself. He calls on Hagano’s aid, but Hagano refuses to fight his old friend until ten other men—including, crucially, some of his own kinsmen—have been killed. The climactic action is akin to that six-minute brawl in the alley in They Live, a brutal knock-down drag-out that ends with renewed friendship.

Much of the tension in Waltharius therefore comes from the attempts by the characters to honor unchosen obligations. Namely:

• Walthari, Hildigunda, and Hagano’s hostage relationship with Attila, which was chosen for them by their families (and is threatened by events back home and Attila himself)

• Walthari and Hildigunda’s betrothal, which was chosen for them by their parents (and is threatened first by Attila and then by Gundahari)

• Walthari and Hagano’s friendship, which was chosen for them, in a sense, by Attila and their families (and is threatened by Gundahari)

• Hagano and Gundahari’s lord-vassal relationship, which was chosen for them by Gundahari’s succession (and is threatened by Gundahari’s presumption and Walthari’s skill with a sword)

Per Scruton, these are conflicts that cannot easily be resolved, if at all, and medieval people were acutely aware of that. The conflict of obligations is hardly unique to Waltharius. Think of the Volsungsaga, in which Signy must not under any circumstances fail to avenge her father, but can only do so by killing her husband Siggeir, whom she must not under any circumstances fail to protect. No happy ending there.

In each case above, the characters must choose which obligation is prior, and honor that. One suspects that a modern person in similar circumstances would nope out of there, as the kids say. Medieval people had a word for that.

That “we cannot always rectify” such “predicaments” does not make them absurd, however. The unchosen is prior to and deeper than any transactional alternative that the world of what Jacobs calls “metaphysical capitalism” can offer. But one wonders, given the inescapable success of the commodifying, transactional vision of the world, whether a story like Waltharius is even intelligible to modern people.

All the more reason to read, study, and share it.

Take a minute to read all of Jacobs’s post, as well as the handful of earlier posts he links to at the top. The edition of Waltharius I read is an updated version of Brian Murdoch’s translation published by Uppsala Books. It’s a delight. Check it out here or at Uppsala’s website here.

Which is it?

One of the peculiar annoyances of medieval history is the license even good historians seem to give themselves to make sweeping generalizations, only to qualify them to the point of contradiction later.

Here’s Tore Skeie in his otherwise excellent book The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Battle for the North Sea Empire, in the middle of a discussion of the remarriage of Æthelred Unræd’s widow Emma of Normandy to his conqueror, Cnut the Great:

But despite her status and central position in this drama, it is more difficult to obtain a clear picture of Emma than of the men around her, for the simple reason that she was a woman. The men who recorded the course of history—mostly monks—almost never mentioned women other than when they were married off or acted on behalf of their husbands or sons. The kings’ wives, sisters, mothers and daughters—all of them remain almost invisible to us, even though they were often deeply involved in everything that went on and could be accomplished and independent political players in their own right.

And in the next paragraph we read:

Emma of Normandy (c. 1984-1052) in her Encomium receiving the manuscript from its authors

One of the most important sources from this period is the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a tribute to Emma and the people around her written at her request later in life, probably by a Flemish monk.

Typical! Nasty old patriarchy-loving sexist monks ignoring a powerful woman, erasing her from history... Right up until they write a dedicated biography of her at her command.

The truth is that it is “difficult to obtain a clear picture” of anyone for most of history, men and women, high and low. Even the more heavily documented men in this story seldom reveal much of a personality or motives behind what they do or the particular courses they take, and even the most important of them simply disappear from the record for years at a time. In his short biography of Cnut for the Penguin Monarchs series, Ryan Lavelle records the king’s death thus:

Cnut died in Shaftesbury in November 1035 at about forty years of age. We don’t know why he died there or what he was doing at the time.

That’s two short sentences, but go back over them and really consider just how much they indicate we cannot know about the most powerful man in northern Europe at the time of his death. Even his age is approximate. The rest of the book is full of such passages beginning with “maybe,” “probably,” “possibly,” and “we don’t know.” The “invisibility” of people in historical sources, especially the Early Middle Ages, has more to do with the purpose and built-in limitations of the sources than sexism.

The generalization in that first paragraph from The Wolf Age does not so much inform the reader about medieval culture and historiography than affirm a dearly held modern prejudice. And this prejudice, much like that passage’s imaginary chauvinist monks, renders the close-following contradiction invisible to the right-thinking modern person.

For two other examples of modern preconceptions blinding the historian and the reader to medieval minds, see here—an example coincidentally also involving Cnut—and here. Like the imputations of sexism in the example above, these faults—cynicism and a reductive “seeing through”—warp our perception of the past. For a better approach, Tolkien is always a good place to start, as here.

Spring reading 2024

As I hinted at last month, this has been a tough semester, with a lot of illness in the middle and plenty of simple busyness throughout. For a good part of it my reading felt almost as lifeless as I did. Being wrung out by work, the babies, my commute, and many, many trips to the doctor (all good problems to have), I read more fiction than history or other non-fiction this spring, and much of that I didn’t feel too strongly about. Even the disappointing books were only disappointing, not outright bad. Everything felt grey. But looking back several weeks after final grades were in and I could rest for a moment—mentally if not physically—there was actually quite a lot of good reading packed in with the mediocre stuff.

Here are the highlights: my favorite fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books as well as the handful of books I revisited. For the purposes of this blog, “spring” is defined as everything from New Year’s Day to the end of my first week of summer classes, which was last Friday.

Favorite fiction

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver—Two monks, a widely-read Franciscan scholar and his young Benedictine assistant, investigate a series of strange, seemingly symbolic murders in a remote Italian monastery ahead of a conference of monastic leaders. This is one of the great literary historical novels even if Eco takes the wrong side in the medieval disputes over Ockham’s Nominalist theories and perpetuates some medieval stereotypes along the way, which is frustrating given how well he knows the era. But those a niggles. Erudite and richly detailed but fun, engrossing, and, above all, atmospheric, I greatly enjoyed it.

Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers—A wide-ranging collection of more than twenty stories that deal with ghosts, vampires, used books, time travel, custom-edited Bibles, revenge in the afterlife, the sacrament of confession, tomato plants under siege by pests, the grave of HP Lovecraft, and, yes, Purgatory. As with any 700-page collection of short fiction, these are of mixed quality, but all range from good to excellent, with plenty of the creativity, surprises, and wry humor of Powers’s novels. Personal favorites included “The Better Boy,” “The Bible Repair Man,” “Through and Through,” “Fifty Cents,” “A Time to Cast Away Stones,” and the title story, “Down and Out in Purgatory.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler—An English writer in Istanbul, his curiosity piqued by the discovery of the body of a notorious gangster, investigates the gangster’s life and discovers there’s no bottom to interwar Europe’s dark underworld. Evocative and atmospheric, this is a detective story and crime thriller wrapped up in the globetrotting of a spy novel. Full review here.

Medusa’s Web, by Tim Powers—An intriguing supernatural tale of the last remaining members of a cursed family living in their ramshackle old mansion, ominously named Caveat, in the Hollywood Hills. Scott and sister Madeline return to the family manse following the death of their aunt but their cousins, wheelchair-bound Claimayne and angry, standoffish Ariel, make it clear to Scott and Madeline that the siblings are unwelcome and the house rightly belongs to them. We soon learn that the members of this family can travel through time by staring at eerie, abstract, spider-like illustrations on slips of paper. The downside is that using the spiders is addictive and can cause permanent physical and mental damage. In the course of the family drama, trips into the past involve the characters in unsolved mysteries from Hollywood’s silent era, and an unexpected love story blossoms between one of them and a long-dead film star. It also becomes clear that a fabled über-spider, a drawing that contains the visions of all the others and guarantees lethal insanity if even glanced at, may not only still exist but be much nearer Caveat and the warring cousins than Scott would like. And on top of the visions and body-jumping and Old Hollywood gossip and Lovecraftian threat of world-ending madness there are overtones of Poe’s House of Usher, ancient myth, and more. Medusa’s Web has a lot going on and it’s hard to explain without giving too much away, but I greatly enjoyed it and read the entire book in just a few days. Worth checking out if you’re looking for something completely different.

The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson, illustrated by John Kascht—A simple but haunting “fable for grownups” from the creator of “Calvin & Hobbes.” A story of the disenchantment of the world, human hubris, and the inevitable consequences of both. One of my favorite books this spring. Full review here.

Favorite non-fiction

Great Uncle Harry, by Michael Palin—A biography of Palin’s great uncle, a man who was killed in action at the Somme and whom Palin never knew, this is a remarkable piece of detective work, archival research, and familial pietas that also commemorates a lost world and a generation destroyed. A continuously engaging and moving book. Full review here.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor—An excellent short introduction to Orwell’s life and work, ranging from his childhood to his death and posthumous reputation—indeed, the book begins with the birth of his legend almost the moment he died—and covering everything from his personal character, novels, journalism, and his evolving political ideas to his attempts at farming, his friendships with other writers, his love of England, and his hatred of pigs. I strongly recommend this book to any and everyone. Taylor is also the author of two (two!) full-length biographies of Orwell. I have his Orwell: The New Life on standby for future reading. I blogged about Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four twice based on observations made in Taylor’s book. You can read those posts here and here.

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Mark Brotherton—A solid examination of the psychology of conspiracy theories and conspiracist thinking. Brotherton does not make a case that conspiracy nuts are, well, nuts, but rather that they let run unchecked natural and useful thought processes that simply need discipline. Some of this will be old hat to anyone who has studied conspiracy theories seriously, but this may be the best and fairest one-volume assemblage of this material that I’ve come across. Full review here.

Campaldino 1289: The Battle that Made Dante, by Kelly DeVries and Niccolò Capponi—A thorough and thoroughly-illustrated guide to the bloody battle between Guelf Florence and her allies and Ghibelline Arezzo and her allies, in which a young Dante Alighieri participated. I wrote a paper about Campaldino in a graduate seminar on medieval and renaissance Florence at Clemson and the available material was thin back then. This book would have been a godsend. Worth looking at for anyone interested in Dante, medieval Italy, or military history.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak—This briskly written book tells two stories in alternating chapters. The first is an overview of Poe’s life, with all of its hardships and all-too-brief victories, up to 1849. The second is the story of Poe’s final months, in which he both behaved erratically (telling friends in Philadelphia that pursuers were trying to kill him and had, in fact, murdered and dismembered his beloved mother-in-law, who was alive and well in New York at the time) and also seemed to be on the cusp of overdue success (having reached an understanding with a childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, and working on soliciting support for his long-dreamed-of literary journal) before dying under unexplained circumstances in Baltimore. Dawidziak offers a good capsule life story of Poe in the one half and a thorough examination of Poe in the weeks before his death in the other, and follows these up with a good explanation of the evidence and competing theories about what exactly happened to Poe on that final trip. Had Poe had an alcoholic relapse? Was he the victim of cooping? Some kind of brain swelling? Cholera? Syphilis? Rabies? The theory Dawidziak offers is one of the more convincing that I’ve come across, and he makes a good case for it. I would have liked a slightly more scholarly and well-sourced treatment of this subject but this is a good book and a worthwhile read for any fan of Poe. I wrote a short post about one offhand comment by an interviewee in this book. You can read that here.

Rereads

As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Inferno and Purgatorio, by Dante, trans. Stanley Lombardo

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy*

• Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton*

• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

A strong set of books to revisit, especially Wise Blood, which I last read in college and hardly remembered. I’m enjoying but not loving Lombardo’s translation of the Comedy. I hope to read his Paradiso this summer.

Kids’ books

The Mysterious Goblet, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The third in a series set in the Rome of Diocletian and the Great Persecution, in which the emperor is all-powerful and Christians are despised and suppressed as threats to order. This wasn’t my favorite of the series so far but it has an engaging, multi-thread plot and was enjoyable both to read aloud and, for my kids, to listen to.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl—Somehow I’ve made it to the age of 39 having never read anything by Roald Dahl. I read this on my daughter’s recommendation and loved it. (And what a joy to take a book recommendation from one of your children!) Clever, briskly paced, darkly and wryly funny, and most of all really fun to read. Looking forward to James and the Giant Peach soon.

Flight for Freedom: The Wetzel Family’s Daring Escape from East Germany, by Kristen Fulton, illustrated by Torben Kuhlmann—A short, simple, but nicely illustrated retelling of the story of two East German families who flew over the wall to West Germany and freedom in a homemade hot air balloon. A fascinating story that my kids really enjoyed, and a good opportunity to talk about why Germany was divided and what Communism is (as opposed to what some people would like it to be). This also prompted us to check out the 1982 film Night Crossing, which we enjoyed.

Saint Patrick the Forgiver, by Ned Bustard—A delightful picture book with a rhyming story and beautiful woodcut illustrations by the author. Bustard also has books on St Valentine and St Nicholas of Myra—the real Santa Claus—but this Patrick book is far and away his best of the three. Going to add this to my list of recommended St Patrick’s Day reads soon.

Looking ahead

That’s it! I’m already reading some good stuff—a Viking adventure by the author of King Solomon’s Mines, a study of Dante by Charles Williams, a short book on Old Testament wisdom literature by a favorite philosopher, and my first novel for this year’s John Buchan June—and I’m looking forward to more in the relatively more relaxed days of summer. I hope y’all found a book or two above that sound enticing and that you’ll check them out. Thanks as always for reading!

Sandbrook, Anglo-Saxons, and mad Americans

I think I’ve said all that I want to say (here and here) about the academic controversy surrounding the term Anglo-Saxon, but I wanted to acknowledge one more news item about it and an appropriate response from a favorite historian.

Earlier this month Cambridge announced that Anglo-Saxon England, the preeminent academic journal in the field, was changing its name to Early Medieval England and its Neighbors. This comes, as Samuel Rubinstein noted at The Critic, during a seeming lull in the Anglo-Saxon wars, one that had suggested to Rubinstein that the controversy had finally petered out.

But after Grendel comes Grendel’s mother, and between institutional inertia and the unsleeping restlessness of intersectional ideology, such a name-change—even if too late to please the activists originally fulminating against the term—was probably inevitable. Perhaps we can look forward to academic presses changing the titles of the thousands of old studies, monographs, and histories using Anglo-Saxon on their covers.

But as Luther said, in a line used by Lewis as an epigraph to The Screwtape Letters, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” And so Rubinstein linked to this great response to Cambridge’s Twitter announcement from Dominic Sandbrook:

Hear hear.

“A handful of mad Americans” is exactly right. As I noted in my original post on this subject, the chief activity of the small, insular, pettifogging, puritanical, ruthlessly status seeking, and ideologically captive American academy today seems to be to export American neuroses to the rest of the world—ideologically colonizing foreigners and demanding conformity and obedience. This observation isn’t original to me, but it aptly describes the situation. It’s embarrassing. More mockery and an occasional firm “no” to the tiny number of activist scholars who push this kind of thing could help tremendously.

I remarked recently on the irony of mentioning Sandbrook and The Rest is History here only when I had a problem with him, which is rarely, so I wanted to make sure I noted this model reaction to academic nonsense. May his tribe increase.

Read Rubinstein’s latest on the controversy here. And get yourself a good book about the Anglo-Saxons that doesn’t dither over the term Anglo-Saxon. Here’s a good recent one, and here’s a great old one.

Eisensteinian historical montage

Today Medievalists.net shared a good summary of a 2006 article by Donald Ostrowski in which he examines the actual historical evidence for the Battle of Lake Peipus and finds that the one fact everyone “knows” about the battle is almost certainly made up.

The Battle of Lake Peipus was fought in April 1242 between a Crusader coalition led by a suborder of the Teutonic Knights and a Russian force from Novgorod led by Prince Alexander Nevsky. After an initial cavalry assault by the Knights, Alexander drove them back, winning the battle and thwarting the attempt to conquer Novgorod and bring the Orthodox Christians there under the authority of the Latin or Catholic Church.

The “one fact everyone ‘knows’” that I mentioned above concerns the way Alexander was able to win and the fate of the Teutonic Knights. Look the Battle of Lake Peipus up and you’ll certainly find descriptions of the way the Knights, charging across and even fighting on the frozen lake, drowned in large numbers when the overstressed late spring ice broke up beneath them in the latter stages of the battle. Hence the battle’s better-known name: “The Battle on the Ice.”

But it turns out that most of the details related to the frozen lake date from much later than the battle itself, with—in a process that will be familiar to anyone who has had to work with medieval chronicles—more and more detailed and elaborate accounts being recorded later, often much later. And the breaking up of the ice specifically originates not in any historical source but in a movie: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 propaganda epic Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein was a Russian filmmaker who worked for decades making historical dramas for the Stalinist Soviet state. He was also a film theorist, experimenting with intellectual montage techniques to convey story and meaning and—most importantly for a propagandist—evoke emotional reactions. He had a good eye for an exciting sequence, and Alexander Nevsky’s battle on a frozen lake and the wicked Germans’ plunge into the icy depths is among his best. But not his most famous.

That Eisenstein invented this vision of the battle is isn’t exactly news, at least to anyone who has studied this region and period. Note that Ostrowski’s Russian History article dates from 2006. William Urban, in The Teutonic Knights: A Military History, first published in 2003, is also circumspect about anything ice-related, and quotes part of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle which describes the dead and dying lying “on the grass” after the battle. No frozen sinking corpses here.

But there’s another dimension of the gradual elaboration and fabrication of the story. Urban:

The battle has become undeservedly famous, having been endowed—for twentieth-century political considerations—with much more significance than it merited in itself, through Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, and the stirring music of Sergei Prokofiev. Indeed, although this movie is a reasonably accurate portrayal of some aspects of the battle, especially the costumes and tactics, and gives us an impressive sense of the drama of medieval combat, other aspects are pure propaganda. Certainly the ancestors of today’s Estonians and Latvians were not dwarfs, as the movie suggests, nor were they serfs. Master Andreas was in Riga, and thus could not have been taken prisoner by Alexander himself and ransomed for soap. The Russian forces were mainly professionals, not pre-Lenin Communist peasants and workers facing the equivalent of German armoured columns; the Germans were not proto-Nazis, blonde giants who burned babies alive. In short, many scenes in Alexander Nevsky tell us much more about the Soviet Union just before Hitler’s invasion than about medieval history.

Alexander Nevsky is a great movie, though, and, as Urban notes, Prokofiev’s score is fantastic. I have it on CD. Here’s a sample from the scene in question.

But this isn’t the only historical myth created by Eisenstein and spread with the imprimatur of the Comintern. By far his most famous film, the silent propaganda classic Battleship Potemkin, which depicts a 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors in the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a proto-Soviet uprising crushed by the cold-blooded Tsarists, features as its climactic sequence a massacre of newly liberated and class-conscious proles on a long elegant staircase. “The Odessa Steps” is one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, a continuous series of stunning, unforgettable images, and has been imitated and alluded to many, many times.

But the massacre never happened. Per Roger Ebert, in a “Great Movies” essay on Battleship Potemkin:

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.

Both of these myths—the breakup of the ice under the Teutonic Knights and the massacre on the Odessa Steps—illustrate the unique power and danger of historical cinema. These are inventions by a director following the rule of cool which, as Ebert notes, is a director’s job. But as Urban suggests above there is plenty of shady ideology working alongside those artistic considerations. More importantly, these made up stories are now the entire story for many people. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve shared here before, “A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”

Medievalists.net’s summary post caught my eye not only because I love the subject and period as well as Eisenstein, but because matters of historical truth in filmmaking are always on my mind. After all, think about the Battle on the Ice sequence in Alexander Nevsky and how influential it was, then watch—or perhaps rewatch—this scene from last year’s Napoleon.

Falsehood, if introduced through film, can have a very long life.

Poetry of reinforcement

From Tom Shippey’s preface to his new translation of Beowulf, in which he notes some of the strange poetic artifacts of the poem’s alliterative form and explores their deeper implications—both for the poem’s original audience and for us:

King David as Anglo-Saxon bard in the Vespasian Psalter

One may sum up by saying that, rather oddly, the words in the poem which receive the greatest sonic emphasis are sometimes the ones which carry the least information. They are there to help the poet with the first of his major aims: which is, one might say, to maintain the beat and the meter of his poetic lines.

This seems a rather humble aim to us, for our idea of poetry is that its wording should be exact, unexpected, provocative—to paraphrase the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, who has just been introduced to Shakespeare—words which make you feel like you'd sat on a pin. But we emphasize novelty, originality, surprise: and accordingly we fail to feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition. And it is this which satisfied the poet's second major aim: to express the ethos of a social group.

The modern vision of the poet as an outsider speaking truth to power and challenging norms is not only historically recent but a sadly narrow and limiting vision of what poetry does. It requires a posture of continuous antagonism to everything that grows both tedious and phony. The stereotype of the tiresome and hypocritical modernist poet and his or her predictably transgressive free verse exists for a reason.

But worse, this vision of poetry and the poet warps the interpretation of the great poetry of the past. People go galloping off in search of the hidden subversion in Homer or Beowulf and, having searched long enough and screwed their jeweler’s loupe of critical theory tightly enough into their eye, find it. Turns out these poets were just like the longhairs at the campus poetry slam. But, satisfied with presentist political interpretations, they miss what’s actually going on—and the chance to encounter people radically unlike themselves.

Good poetry can challenge, certainly. But I’d argue that the most effective and lasting prophetic verse challenges from within a culture—thus the entire power of the Old Testament prophets—rather than from some self-congratulatory political margin. But just as often, if not more so, good poetry reminds its audience of who they are. Remember, it says, This is us. This is what we love. This is what we must protect. And, with striking frequency, This is what we have lost. Consider the worlds in which the Iliad and Beowulf were composed and the poetry of reinforcement and shared love and loss makes much more sense.

Recovering the ability to “feel the power of reinforcement, familiarity, recognition” may prove a crucial part of the modern man’s great spiritual task.

Shippey has an online Beowulf “masterclass” coming up at the beginning of December. I’ve already signed up. It should be well worth your while if you’re interested in this period and its poetry. You can find information about the class here.

The Lost King

Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) with Richard III (Harry Lloyd) at Bosworth Field

Over the weekend I watched two movies that, though quite different in nearly every respect, where both about kings in crisis. My aim is to review both this week. Here’s the first.

Few kings have a worse reputation than Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. His death at the Battle of Bosworth Field after a reign of just two years marked the end of the Plantagenet line, the end of the Wars of the Roses, and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty. And lest you think death in battle would at least leave Richard to rest in peace, a little over a century later Shakespeare came along and made him the central villain in one of his most intricate and celebrated tragedies, a play that cemented the popular image of Richard right down to the present—a cunning, hunchbacked usurper, coldblooded murderer of kin, and failure on the battlefield.

It’s one thing to have a bad reputation. Pray you never have someone of Shakespeare’s talents turn that gossip into entertainment.

But not everyone has been content with the Richard provided by Tudor drama. The Lost King tells the story of one person whose suspicion that there’s more to Richard than the legend bore unexpected fruit.

The film begins with Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), a divorced mother of two and weary Edinburgh office drone, taking one of her sons to a school performance of the play. Langley, who suffers from ME or chronic fatigue syndrome, finds herself intrigued by the disabled man at the center of all the conniving and bloodshed. Surely he is not evil just because he has a hunchback? Glib assurances of the “everybody knows” variety that Richard was evil—everybody knows he murdered his nephews!—and the potted image of Richard from schoolbooks and Shakespeare don’t convince her. An obsession is born.

Langley buys every book she can find on Richard and pores over them on breaks at work or while waiting up for her ex-husband (Steve Coogan) to bring their sons home. She contacts experts and enthusiasts online and attends meetings of the Edinburgh chapter of the Richard III Society, a group dedicated to rescuing the “real” Richard from his popular image. Not only was Richard not a usurper, she learns, he (probably) didn’t murder his nephews and had used his brief time on the throne to enact serious legal reforms. Far from being a villain, he was admirable.

As Langley’s obsession deepens, she neglects her work, spends all her spare time on studying Richard’s life… and begins seeing Richard everywhere she goes. He takes the form of the actor who had played him onstage (Harry Lloyd) and appears, glum and silent and with soulful eyes, sitting on park benches or standing in alleyways. Langley comes to believe she has a purpose to serve for him.

She finds that purpose when she decides to visit Richard’s grave and learns that he has none. No one knows what became of his body after he was cut down at Bosworth Field. If his body wasn’t disposed of in a river, he was likely buried somewhere in nearby Leicester. She learns that the leading candidate for his burial place is Greyfriars, a Franciscan house—which was dissolved by Henry VIII and demolished. No one even knows where it used to be. But, after a visit to the Leicester neighborhood where it once stood, she has a feeling.

Langley’s mission to find Greyfriars and, possibly, Richard’s grave takes her out of the world of cranks and amateur researchers and bewigged reenactors into that of tenured historians, underfunded archaeologists, and university administrators. The rest of the film chronicles her effort to fund a dig, to convince the powers that be that her feelings are born of solid research and intuition and not wishful thinking. Along the way she wins skeptical allies like the archaeologist in charge of the dig (Mark Addy) and battles dismissive obstructionists in high places, like a University of Leicester registrar (Lee Ingleby) who mocks her feelings, tries to block her project and, later, steals the glory when, against all expert predictions, the dig turns up Richard’s bones.

The Lost King is a fun film that tells its story briskly and engagingly. It boasts an excellent cast, with Hawkins and Coogan bringing a real poignancy to their strange, separated-but-cooperative relationship, and I especially liked Mark Addy as the put-upon archaeologist. The film also does a good job presenting the essentials of the debate over Richard III and his legacy, covering several of its sprawling sub-controversies on the way to focusing on the search for his body. If you like historiography, the art of juggling and judging disparate historical sources, or just a good historical mystery, The Lost King will introduce you to a perennially interesting topic.

But while the object of Langley’s quest is Richard’s bones, the movie is really about Langley. Suffering from ill-health and the misunderstanding or outright hostility of others, she sees herself in Richard, and to find and restore him to a royal tomb is also to find and redeem herself. Once she has done this, her apparition of Richard—clothed, at last, in the royal arms—can depart, and she can accept a humble life of telling others her story.

Despite what could have been a silly conceit—a ghost king following the protagonist around—this is all wonderfully written and movingly executed. As a movie, The Lost King offers wonderful light drama. But I couldn’t avoid asking some questions about its own treatment of the past.

The filmmakers use most of the standard based-on-a-true-story techniques to fit Langley’s story into a movie-shaped narrative. The timeline, for instance, is heavily compressed. Not every step in Langley’s search is dramatized and she was not the first person to posit Greyfriars as Richard’s resting place. I remember my undergrad British History professor suggesting a parking lot as Richard’s grave years before Langley and the team uncovered it. And you might be forgiven for thinking these the events of one busy autumn in Langley’s life when the real Langley’s interest in Richard began fourteen years before the discovery of his grave. Again—these are standard techniques.

But when the movie premiered in the UK last year the University of Leicester protested the way it was misrepresented in the film. Particularly, the administrator played by Lee Ingleby, who helped fund the dig and is thanked by the real Langley in her book, is depicted as a flippant mansplainer who elbows Langley out of the limelight when it comes time to take the credit—and the filmmakers use the man’s real name for this character. The University and the administrator justifiably argue that the filmmakers, in the way they chose to simplify and massage the story for dramatic effect, have streamlined the story into falsehood, crafting a narrative about one plucky outsider woman against a host of stodgy establishment men.

This kicked off a predictable he-said, she-said, with the filmmakers standing by their dramatization, the University countering with documentary and film evidence, and Langley falling back on her “experience.”

None of which necessarily detracts from the film as a film, but it is good for the viewer to be aware of. I’ve been concerned with filmic character assassination for a long time because, as Chesterton once noted, a film’s version of events could “be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had . . . only seen the film.” For a movie about rescuing not only the body but the reputation of a man unfairly maligned and mischaracterized by his enemies to have unfairly maligned and mischaracterized others in its turn is an almost Shakespearean irony.

The Lost King is well worth your time, and Langley’s efforts to exonerate Richard and see him properly buried are laudable, but watch the film remembering more than usual that it is entertainment, and that both feelings and facts matter.

More if you’re interested

You can get the basics of the controversy over the film from this BBC News article. If you’re interested in the investigation into Richard’s life and purported crimes, check out The Daughter of Time, a mystery novel by Josephine Tey about a bedridden detective’s quest to uncover the truth about Richard. Its trajectory of interest and obsession matches Langley’s quite closely. I reviewed it here last year.

The Vinland Sagas on City of Man Podcast

It’s a been a somewhat slow month here on the blog. Work, travel, illness, and some exciting personal developments have conspired to keep me from blogging much apart from announcing the publication of The Snipers and my commitment to John Buchan June. Fortunately there is plenty of that, and I hope y’all have enjoyed that as much as I have my reading and writing for it.

But mercifully I did find time last week to record another episode of City of Man’s ongoing Medieval Times series with my friends Coyle and David. The subject: the Vinland Sagas, concerning the family of Eirik the Red and their discovery and brief, violent settlement of North America around the year 1000.

In the episode we cover the background, including a refresher on just what exactly sagas are as a genre of literature, the Norwegian and Icelandic antecedents to the continuous westward sailing of the Norse, the personalities involved, the events of The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga, what to make of the sagas in historiographical terms, and geography, outlawry, ghosts, polygamy, religious conversion, sword-wielding pregnant women, and much, much more.

We conclude by asking why it was that the Norse settlements on Iceland lasted while those in Vinland didn’t. We also make plenty of recommendations for further reading and viewing, both good and bad.

Listen to the episode on iTunes, Google, Spotify, Sticher, and other fine podcasting platforms, or by listening in the embedded player in this post. You can find the episode’s page at the Christian Humanist Radio Network site, including links to our viewing recommendations, here.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy.

Further notes on the term Anglo-Saxon

The first page of a 16th-century manuscript copy of the Welsh priest Asser’s 9th-century Life of King Alfred in the British Library. The term “King of the Anglo-Saxons” is visible in two places on this leaf.

Late last year I finally got a long-gestating post on the term “Anglo-Saxon” into writing. For several years now, a cadre of leftwing academics has striven to purge the disciplines of medieval history and literature of the term on the specious grounds that it is either racially loaded or straightforwardly racist. I disagree strongly, and set out my reasons why—with an assist from Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook—in that post. You can read that here.

Earlier today the cover story The Critic’s June issue went up on the magazine’s website. Titled “Anglo-Saxon extremists,” it’s an essay by Samuel Rubinstein that covers some of the same ground and makes similar arguments as mine from last year, including the intellectual sleight of hand required to make anti-Anglo-Saxon arguments plausible and even some points regarding the intense racial neuroses that seem to be my country’s chief export nowadays. Rubinstein also helpfully digs into the genesis of the controversy, which has mostly been stirred up kept going by a small number of academics with ulterior motives. A few choice excerpts:

On the cultural chasm separating British perceptions of the term from those of the rare American who has even heard it:

“What are you studying at the moment?”, an American student asked me once, as we ambled back from a seminar. “The Anglo-Saxon paper.” She gave me a disapproving look, told me she was more into “global history”, and mumbled something about “WASPs”. I wondered what St Boniface or St Dunstan might have made of the “P” in that acronym.

From this interaction I learned of an important cultural divide. Insofar as Americans encounter “Anglo-Saxons” at all, it is in this “WASP” formulation. When Britons encounter “Anglo-Saxon”, meanwhile, it is in Horrible Histories, Bernard Cornwell, or Michael Wood on the BBC. The Anglo-Saxons appear to us as a benign link in the chain of Our Island Story: they come after The Romans, coincide with The Vikings, and abruptly transform into The Normans at Hastings in 1066. Peopled with colourful characters, it is an exciting, murky part of the story.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the trans-Atlantic house of “Anglo-Saxon studies” cannot stand. Americans laugh at “it’s chewsday, innit”, and, in a similarly imperious vein, they judge us when we use language which, though anodyne to us, seems “problematic” to them.

A deeply unfortunate state of affairs, and one, for reasons of background and a somewhat eccentric education, I only recently became aware of.

On the use of the term among 19th-century scientific racists, whose definition was and should still be regarded as a secondary or even tertiary usage:

It is doubtless true that “Anglo-Saxon” abounds in the lexicon of nineteenth-century scientific racism, and it seems that these resonances reverberate more in North America than here. It is not true, however, that this is the only value-laden use of the term, or that “whiteness” is the only political meaning that its users have historically wished to conjure up. Again, such “misuses” of the term are by the bye, and historians should be permitted to use it in their correct way regardless. But although terms such as “Anglo-Saxons” have been invoked in support of this or that agenda, it is worth pointing out that this has not been the sole preserve of racists and bigots.

Further, on the fact that, despite the prevalence of the term WASP and the abuses of scientific racism, the modern use of Anglo-Saxon still mostly reflects its technical meaning:

Like plenty of terms which have a specialist definition, “Anglo-Saxon” has been deployed over the centuries to convey all manner of different things. Since none of this is inherent to it, it would be perverse for historians to cede ground altogether to any of these disparate groups. Indeed, Anglo-Saxonists should feel fortunate that the specialist sense is the dominant one, at least in British English. They are luckier in this respect than their colleagues who study the Goths or the Vandals.

A great line with which to end that paragraph. I’ve always taken great pains, when teaching late antiquity or the Early Middle Ages, to be clear about what Goth and Vandal mean. As one long ago student helpfully put it, Goths are are people group, not “a phase.”

In Rubinstein’s conclusion, he returns from the sound arguments in favor of keeping and using the term to point out that, in this contest, these scholars are not actually engaged in scholarship: “[Rambaran-Olm] and Wade’s arguments are the stuff not of academic history but political activism. And for all the veneer of scholarship, it seems to me that they know this and are proud of it.” Very clearly, if you have ever read their stuff. And, the conclusion of the whole matter: “The moral of the story is this. Don’t let American idiosyncrasies disrupt sound history. Don’t let scholarship give way to activism.”

Hear hear.

An excellent essay, much more detailed and elegantly put together than my own post about it last year, and worth taking the time to check out. I encourage y’all to read the whole thing at The Critic here.

Room to swing a cat

This week Law & Liberty published an ambivalently positive review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis, a book I enjoyed when it first came out. The reviewer, James M Patterson, takes Davis to task for romanticizing the Middle Ages, in the course of which Patterson writes this:

[Davis’s] criticisms of journalism and technology are good, though a little naïve. For example, he says, “It was the peasants, in their simplicity, piety, and common sense who saw through all the made theories” of their day. These same peasants also massacred cats because of their association with evil and witchcraft.

Okay, but what this blog presupposes is… maybe they didn’t?

This is a story I’ve been meaning to dig into for years now. It doesn’t pass the smell test for me, especially because it is always brought up to denigrate medieval people or illustrate their credulity and primitive violence. Like the term “Dark Ages,” if a story, factoid, or anecdote is always brought up to achieve the same effect, and if that effect is always to cut the subject down, double and triple check it, starting with primary sources. So consider this post a set of notes toward a deep dive sometime in the future.

Patterson, above, is making an offhand allusion. Again, the flippancy should arouse suspicion. If it’s this easy to demonstrate the stupidity and superstition of the medieval peasant why is there any difference of opinion? But the broad outline of the story in its various forms usually falls back on these points:

• In the Middle Ages, cats were closely associated with the Devil and devil worship

• The association was so strong that in June 1233 Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) issued a bull titled Vox in Rama condemning cats as servants of the devil

• As a result, medieval people across Europe massacred cats

• The lack of cats caused growth in the rat populations of Europe, leading to the Black Death

That last point is usually the Paul Harvey twist to story, really driving home the consequences of such brute stupidity and violence toward cats. That’s what you dummies get! seems to be the implied moral. Cat people twitch their whiskers and purr.

If you want the most elaborate and self-congratulatory version of this that I’ve run across, see this World History Encyclopedia article on “Cats in the Middle Ages.” The author is not an historian but a “freelance writer and former part-time Professor of Philosophy” and lards his treatment of the subject with a lot of stuff about the position of respect and honor accorded cats in the ancient world (supported by a Victorian classicist painting of Egyptian cat worship), the way medieval “religious bigots” attempted to undermine that position, and—on the other side of Middle Ages chronologically—how the Protestant Reformation “broke the power-hold of the Church over people's lives and allowed for greater freedom of thought.” Citation needed.

That article is a pile of bad research (seriously, look through the bibliography at the bottom), whiggish clichés, and Dark Ages mythology, but it is just about the Platonic ideal of the medieval cat massacre story.

Now, a fair-minded person, one not content to accept any old slander of medieval people that comes his way, should be able to see problems with this story or at least points that are open to question. A few that have occurred to me every time I’ve heard some version of this:

• Were cats really that closely associated with the Devil? Why?

• A papal bull condemning cats? Why would a pope bother with an official pronouncement on something like this?

• How did the pope’s condemnation result in popular massacres of cats? Are there not several steps missing between an official letter from the pope and peasants programmatically butchering animals?

• Vox in Rama was written in 1233. The Black Death, so-called, arrived in Europe from Central Asia in the late 1340s. Was there really a lack of cats in Europe for that long? Are these events related at all?

Accepting a story that leaves itself open to questions like these is predicated on uncritically believing that medieval people were stupid. (It also relies on a Tom & Jerry-level understanding of zoology.) But our hypothetical fair-minded person, having asked the questions above, might be tempted to ask one more:

• Did this even happen?

The answer seems to be No, not really. At least not in the way laid out above and as popularly regurgitated over and over and over.

A few good places to start picking apart this story:

• Here’s a Medium article that accepts rather more of the myth of medieval cat hatred than I prefer but does a good job of demolishing the proposed connection between purported cat massacres with the arrival of the plague.

• Here’s a broad look at cats in medieval society. Though regurgitating the Gregory IX papal bull/Black Death myth as a side note, the article does a good job showing the recognizable role cats played as pets and ratters in medieval communities, from common farming families to abbeys and royal households.

• Here’s a Medievalists.net gallery of medieval depictions of cats ranging from 8th-century manuscript illuminations and marginalia to 16th-century paintings. Note that most of them are either purely naturalistic or playful in that genuinely sweet medieval manner, showing cats doing human things.

• Also from Medievalists.net, here’s a short review of a scholarly journal article on cats’ bad reputations in medieval Europe. Note the chronological range of sources it draws from and the distance it has to reach for examples of medieval “hatred.”

• Here’s a Quora answer to a question about Vox in Rama provided by someone who has actually read and understood medieval literature, understands what a papal bull is and how it worked, gives attention to the bull’s context, and quotes it at length.

• Finally, here’s a 2020 article from Museum Hack on the specific question of Vox in Rama.

The last two items above are the strongest, so if you look at any of these, look at those two. A few of the things Tim O’Neill on Quora and Alex Johnson at Museum Hack do well in rebutting the story of the cat massacres:

• Both present the actual passages of Vox in Rama that deal with cats. If you’re expecting a rabid churchman’s spittle-flecked denunciations, prepare to be underwhelmed, as cats are only incidental and are featured alongside toads and zombie-like specters as part of a rite of initiation. The “animals” in the rite are also clearly shape-shifters—demons taking on physical form—rather than actual toads and cats. This points to the bull’s broader context.

• Both explain well what a papal bull is, its specific function as official papal correspondence, and its reach and effects. Vox in Rama was written and delivered to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Archbishop of Mainz, inquisitor Konrad von Marburg and others for a specific purpose and was not a universally applicable diktat. Misunderstandings of this kind point to the limits of the modern imagination, shaped as it is by centralized government and totalitarianism, and to the bull’s original broader context.

• Both note that Vox in Rama does not at any point call for the killing of cats and that, even if it did, the plague arrived far later than the bull, so a connection between the two is nonexistent, and that even with cats around the plague would still be able to spread among humans because it was fleas rather than rats that spread it. And, as Johnson notes specifically, fleas don’t mind living on cats. In fact, a flea living on cat might have a better chance of biting a human.

• Finally but most importantly, the context. Both point out that Vox in Rama was written to warn about and combat a supposed satanic cult then operating in central Germany and that the bull is narrowly focused on this.

Knowing this and reading the actual text of the bull should be enough to scuttle the myth of the pope-ordered cat massacres. Why, then, does it persist? O’Neill sums it up well:

Despite there being no evidence to support any of these claims, they are repeated uncritically because they have found their way into a couple of badly researched books and because they appeal to people's prejudices about the Middle Ages.

Emphasis mine.

Again, consider these notes toward a deeper dive. (I’m especially intrigued by parallels between the satanic rites described in Vox in Rama and those cooked up by Philip the Fair as an excuse to liquidate the Templars a decade earlier.) I’m most grateful to O’Neill and Johnson for quoting the actual text of Vox in Rama, as its lack of availability foiled my attempts to look into the primary sources behind this story some years ago. I aim to look deeper still and write all this up in a more presentable form someday, though the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the source at the root of the story seems to settle the question pretty conclusively.

If I am to end this post with any peroration or call to action, let me simply repeat this: If you run across any story repeated context-free purely as a cudgel to denigrate a past period and its people, look into it. Deeply. Whatever you do, don’t accept it because it confirms your prior impressions or prejudices, and definitely don’t breezily repeat it to dismiss someone else’s arguments. Real history is done on purpose.

On ancient and medieval “propaganda”

It is commonplace among certain kinds of historians to refer to some ancient and medieval sources, especially anything produced at the behest or under the patronage of a king or nobleman, as “propaganda.” Among those that come to mind from my reading in the last couple years are Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the anonymous Life of King Edward (the Confessor), and Augustus’s Res Gestae Divi Augusti. And this is without taking into account the purely literary works that critics occasionally label propaganda, like the Aeneid.

Calling these sources “propaganda” seems to me wrongheaded and misleading for several reasons, foremost among them the anachronistic connotations embedded in the word itself.

While the word has innocent origins (and a quite interesting and revealing evolution) and it can, technically, still mean only “official information,” its technical sense, as with “Dark Ages,” has been almost entirely swamped by negative connotations. Labeling something “propaganda” immediately freights it with insinuation as to its origins and the ulterior motives of its creators. To me, the word propaganda suggests:

1—the direct involvement or oversight of a state or ruling power,
2—a carefully crafted and controlled programmatic message,
3—ideological motivation and rationalization for either distorting the truth or outright lying,

and, in terms of material conditions,

4—a means of mass production or at least mass dissemination, and
5—a corresponding mass readership.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of where propaganda comes from, what it’s for, and what it needs to do its work, and yet by these standards most ancient and medieval texts offhandedly labeled “propaganda” by modern historians would fall far short.

Just the culture of widespread literacy required by 4 and 5 would eliminate almost all sources before Gutenberg and from most of the following two or three centuries, and 1 and 2 are seldom as obvious from a face-value reading of such sources as some historians would like you to believe.

To take the examples I gave at the beginning of this post:

• In Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Asser himself asserts authorship, openly acknowledges his personal connection to his subject, and explains why he wanted to write about him. What is not clear is that Alfred was directing Asser (1) or dictating how he was to be presented (2). And what certainly is clear, given how books were produced during the 9th century, was that Asser could not publish or widely disseminate his version of Alfred’s life (4) and that only a small number of people like Asser—clergy, religious, and a small number of educated laymen like Alfred himself—would ever read it, nixing (5).

• Ditto the Life of King Edward, with the added uncertainties of who precisely commissioned the book and who wrote it, so that it is even more speculative to argue for (1) and (2). Further, the Life survives in one manuscript, which is empirical proof that even if whoever commissioned the book aimed at (4) and (5), they did not achieve it.

• Of the unscientific sample I referred to at the top, the one that comes closest to fitting the definition of propaganda suggested by the term is Augustus’s Res Gestae or The Deeds of Augustus. Here you have the emperor himself dictating the text (1), much of which is political in nature (2), and widely reproduced as a monumental inscription (4). But even here it is not clear how many people could read the Res Gestae even when it was available inscribed in a public place.

So much for the anachronistic implications of the term. But there is a deeper level of error to which calling an ancient or medieval source “propaganda” leads.

What is missing from all of the sources I worked through above but fundamental to all modern propaganda is (3), an ideological framework that either allows or requires lying. This is not to say that these sources are 100% truthful, but flattery, omitting awkward or controversial topics, or simply not knowing things and not recording them are not the same thing as ideologically motivated suppression or fabrication of facts.

Assuming ancient and medieval sources to have the same pragmatic relationship to the truth as modern propagandists (or, increasingly, historians) is a clear case of projection. Their ways were not our ways. As Orwell wrote on this topic in a passage I posted last year:

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. . . . A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. . . . Some of the facts . . . were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

Further—and this is especially the case for sources like the Life of King Alfred and Life of King Edward—the dearth of alternative or parallel sources for many of the events they describe means that even the forms of non-propaganda bias listed above can only be inferred. Guessed at. Speculated.

Which I think gets at what’s really going on with accusations that such sources are “propaganda.” Calling a source propaganda grants the historian permission to read between the lines and construct alternate histories purely negatively, with a kind of kindergarten “opposite day” hermeneutic that ends up as a license to fabricate. And the problem is only more pronounced in those periods when we have precisely the lack of sources that requires us to rely on those commissioned by kings or abbots or emperors.

By all means, approach sources produced through some connection to or the patronage of a king or ruler or other authority with caution, and always, always look for bias. (It’ll be there, though that doesn’t mean anyone is lying.) But avoid dragging in words with such strongly modern associations and implications, and certainly don’t use that as an excuse to concoct the “real” story behind the sources we actually have. That way lies bad history.

If only we had a word for that kind of untruthful, selective, ideologically motivated storytelling.