My Problem with Medieval Church Reform
A Nod to the French
Ah, France. The country most visited by tourists. The home of wine, perfumes, and fashion. The only major European country the United States has never fought against. The country that played a critical role in our war of independence and whose sacrifices here helped bankrupt it and thus ushered in the French Revolution.
France is our friend, yet Americans sometimes ridicule or disdain the French—they are a safe target since relatively few French people chose to immigrate here. In 1995 an episode of “The Simpsons” called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” and in 2009, only 62 percent of Americans had a favorable view of France, compared with 77 percent for Britain.
For historians, especially economic historians, France doesn’t fare too well, either. The Industrial Revolution, which occurred roughly between 1750 and 1850, started in England, not in France. Answering the question “why” sometimes means arguing that there was something “wrong” with France.
Word Problems
Let me begin by saying that word errors (typos, grammar mistakes, misspellings) can happen to anyone. As an editor, I am still embarrassed by some of mine, including a few on this blog. I once thought I would lose my job at Business Week when I wrote an inaccurate caption (I didn’t). And then there was, “The mountain peaked through the clouds.”
That said, ever since I began studying history, I have noticed proofreading errors, more than in my past reading. I’m not talking about esoteric archival footnotes, just normal words.
After being bothered by this for awhile, I started making a list. For example, I read “shielings,” not “shirelings,” “Homan’s” not “Homans,’” “few woman,” not “few women,” “countries,” not “counties,” “sixty” not “sixth,” “Repreinted,” not “Reprinted,” “pampleteer,” not “pamphleteer,” Athansian, not Athanasian, Michael Berklin, not Michael Berlin, and “within and outwith” (unless that is a British expression I’m unfamiliar with).
A Lesson from World War I
Sunday, November 11, is the hundredth anniversary of Armistice Day, which ended the war that was “to end all wars.” Less than a year later, however, the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of the next world war, with its humiliation of Germany, its heavy reparations, and its signatories’ horror of taking early military action.
I have not formally studied the war, but my interest in its causes helped motivate me to study history in more depth. The war was pivotal in European history, so I have read several books about it. Probably the most helpful is The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark.[1]
Clark is a British historian who tries to look at big topics without letting the known outcome influence his description (in a similar vein, he also wrote The Iron Kingdom about the history of Prussia). He begins his 698-page book by saying that others’ explanations for the war include “remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilization.”[2] He takes a somewhat different tack, holding back on the “why” in favor of the “how it came about,” especially once the crisis—the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne—took place on June 28, 1914.
Hunting Witches
My class on English history this fall touched on the witch craze that spread through Europe for about a century following 1570. Six hundred “witches” were executed in England, and 1500 in Scotland (a much smaller country).[1]
What caused this persecution, which occurred in the supposedly modern century after Protestantism appeared? Typical explanations, says Derek Hirst, are patriarchal misogyny (four-fifths of those executed for witchcraft were women), feuds and disputes among neighbors, even failure to help the poor, which led to imprecations and presumed maleficia. But to Hirst, ”the role of the elite was crucial.” Bishops, divines, and other luminaries became convinced that there was an active devil unleashed in the world. “The state put machinery in the hands of local persecutors, but the impetus came from the intellectuals,” says Hirst.[2]
Hirst does not elaborate on this power-elite theory, but R. I. Moore does, in his book The Formation of a Persecuting Society.[3] Moore didn’t write about seventeenth-century witches, but about the Church’s rooting out of heretics, Jews, and lepers in the Middle Ages in Europe. Those efforts, he believes, established a machinery of persecution that operated almost automatically.