The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture) - Hardcover

Haidu, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804747431 ISBN 13: 9780804747431

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2003

Synopsis

This ambitious book presents the most thorough historicist account to date of the development of subjectivity in the medieval period, as traced in medieval literature and historical documentation . Presenting the essence of the modern subject as resting in its subjection to specific historical forms of state power, the author examines literary texts from the Middle Ages that participate in the cultural invention of the subject. Overall, The Subject Medieval/Modern makes a remarkable case for the relevance of studying the Middle Ages to today's world.

The book examines the constitution of subjects in literary texts as the result of the interplay of violence, ideology, and political structures as an integral part of the process of state-formation between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. Each text is considered a singular event, a unique, self-reflexive structure modifying conventions in ideological exploration to offer performative models of subjectivity. Some texts line up with political evolution, others take a critical distance.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Haidu taught medieval literature and critical theory at Columbia, Yale, Virginia, and Illinois, before retiring from UCLA. He now lives in Paris. He is the author of Subject of Violence: The Song of Roland and the Birth of the State.

From the Back Cover

"Haidu's prose is as elegant as it is electrifying, his interpretations as intricate as they are intriguing, and no resume could hope to do them justice. A must read."--Speculum
"This book revolutionizes contemporary understandings of medieval culture, demonstrates the applicability of medieval texts to modernity, and expands the ways in which literary theory may be applied to texts and contextually criticized."--PEER English: The Journal of New Critical Thinking

From the Inside Flap

This ambitious book presents the most thorough historicist account to date of the development of subjectivity in the medieval period, as traced in medieval literature and historical documentation . Presenting the essence of the modern subject as resting in its subjection to specific historical forms of state power, the author examines literary texts from the Middle Ages that participate in the cultural invention of the subject. Overall, The Subject Medieval/Modern makes a remarkable case for the relevance of studying the Middle Ages to today's world.
The book examines the constitution of subjects in literary texts as the result of the interplay of violence, ideology, and political structures as an integral part of the process of state-formation between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. Each text is considered a singular event, a unique, self-reflexive structure modifying conventions in ideological exploration to offer performative models of subjectivity. Some texts line up with political evolution, others take a critical distance.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE SUBJECT MEDIEVAL/MODERN

TEXT AND GOVERNANCE IN THE MIDDLE AGESBy Peter Haidu

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4743-1

Contents

Introduction...............................................................................1PART I. BEFORE THE STATE1. The Peace Movement: A Crisis in Ideology................................................92. War, Peasant Revolt, and the Saint Alexis...............................................393. Epic and the King's Peace: The Song of Roland and Louis' Coronation.....................574. The Love-Lyric as Political Technology..................................................795. Chrtien de Troyes: The Perspectival Novel..............................................956. "Marie de France": The Postcolonial lais................................................1217. Raoul de Cambrai: Haunting Violence.....................................................142PART II. GOVERNANCE8. Representation in State Governance I: Literacy..........................................1559. Representation in State Governance II: Agency...........................................180PART III. IN STATE10. Problematizing the Subject: Rose I.....................................................21511. Problematizing Identity: Silence.......................................................23912. Subject and Community: Adam's "Congs".................................................26613. The Subject on the Subject: Philippe de Beaumanoir.....................................28114. Ideologies of Subjectivity: Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier......................30315. "Love for Sale": Franois Villon's Textament of Solidarity.............................328Conclusion: The Medieval Crucible..........................................................341Notes......................................................................................365Index......................................................................................437

Chapter One

The Peace Movement

A Crisis in Ideology

Two Models of Subjectivity

ABJECTION: BENEDICT OF NURSIA (SIXTH CENTURY)

Two models of subjectivity appear early in the Middle Ages. One indexes what is often designated as the "medieval" subject, committed to the subjection of complete abnegation. For the monk living under the rule of Benedict of Nursia, founder of the Benedictine order, submission to the Rule was absolute:

No one in the monastery should follow the will of his own heart, and neither inside nor outside the walls should anyone presume to argue with the abbot.

In this world, none under his rule (regula: a straight-edge, measuring stick, a staff to whip inattentive schoolboys, a pattern or model for behavior: the means and symbol of "discipline"). Under a regula, the subjectus is an inferior, thrown under the authority and command of another, reduced to "passive ... reflex-type conduct."

The medieval church and theology knew the modern subject, however. Ideological campaigns, the persecutorial machines of the Inquisition, were constructed against it. Correct belief and submission was seen as granting freedom: "To have liberty is to be led by the spirit of the Lord; not to have liberty is not to be led by the spirit of the Lord." Wrong beliefs and practices, the absence of belief, arrogance toward established authority, the conviction or fear that the universe offered a void filled with independent desire, judgment, and self-assertion, rather than a plenitude of closure, were what had to be repressed, excluded, exorcised. In its effort to enclose and limit the damages of this potential of self-assertion as always already culpable desire, the medieval Christian imaginary constructed a theological diegesis which possessed a kind of objective reality but lacked an outside: the other side of nonbeing was God, its sustaining center, allowing only a flat, depthless surface of existence to thirsty humanity. The church knew the subject: it was the antagonist, the Devil incarnate.

AGENCY: THE OATHS OF STRASBOURG (842)

Charlemagne's surviving son, Louis the Pious, leaves three sons, who engage in repeated, violent conflicts. Two-Louis the Germanic and Charles the Bald-unite against the third, Lothaire. His defeat allows a negotiated division of the empire in three parts. Charles will rule Western Francia, to become France itself; Louis gets Eastern France, to become Germany; Lothaire's intermediary zone runs from the Netherlands to northern Italy: "Lotharingia." The Oaths of Strasbourg divide the Carolingian empire in 842, establishing the ancestor-states of modern France and Germany. They mark the linguistic division between Latin and the vernaculars, and between French and German.

The Oaths, on February 14, 842, are political performatives. Each brother concedes to the other his territory. Each swears not to ally himself with Lothaire against the third. Each swears aid and protection to the other. The reporter is one Nithard, warrior, court diplomat, historian. Along with the official Latin text, he includes the oath in early forms of French and German. The oaths actually pronounced were not the official Latin: the Germanic king swears in Romance, the French king in German. The oaths' effectivity depends on their being understood and trusted, not only by the kings, the enunciator's other, but by their men: their own, and their brothers.' Their content is quite extraordinary. Each king has his men swear that if he, their prince, betrays his brother, they, his own men, will not follow him, their own lord, against the brother: if the king betrays his brother, his men are to break their loyalty to him. Vernaculars were essential for the success of the diplomacy. Adherence presumes the investment of speakers in their language, and their belief in its performative value. This social contract links, in its initiating historicity, issues that modern modes of thinking separate: polity, language, and textuality. Each implies the others.

Nithard documents a calculated recognition of a new and complex reality: multiple cultures, multiple languages, work in the same political space, calling on subjects in different languages-a necessitated multiculturalism. A new order reigns: new power, political and military, resides in the vernacular. Latin long survives, among monks and clergy who "died to the world" and retired from overt competitions for power and wealth. It also remains an administrative and legal language, even in secular domains. Decisions, bureaucratically recorded in Latin, must have been argued and decided in the vernacular. Henceforth, power in the world belongs to men who speak, think, and live the vernaculars. Among speakers of Latin, popes, bishops, abbots, retain power. Governance operates across a linguistic discrepancy. Bilingualism was the order of centuries.

That the Oaths mark a crucial moment in the development of the vernacular as political discourse is incidental to their role in a calculus of political forces. Not only the kings swear: their men swear and commit themselves to a course of future action that could pit them directly against the king who claims their loyalty. The kings' underlings are placed in the position of having to judge their lord and leader: if they judge him to have betrayed his word, they are mandated to rebel against him. Under prescribed circumstances, the subject is to judge the Subject, in spite of ordinary bonds of loyalty. The subject is bound between two ideologemes, loyalty and truth, a double bind whose name is "freedom": he is expelled from ordinary codes of submission into the unaccustomed autonomy of ideological choice. That is the model of the "modern" subject: a specifically political subject, negotiating the fundamental loyalty to the governor and his rule, is defined in the ninth century.

The Oaths of Strasbourg designated territories that grew into modern nations. It is an error, however, to consider the event constitutive of those modern nation-states: state-formation requires more than words, even vernacular. In fact, history flowed in the contrary direction. The Oaths, confirmed by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, signal the beginning of a long devolutionary process. The division of the empire into three parts reveals centralized governance disintegrating: effective power devolves to successively lower rungs of the hierarchical order, in three stages. Men appointed as agents of central power increasingly act in their own name, assuming the prerogatives and profits of power. Great, independent principalities develop as hereditary states around the turn of the tenth century: Flanders, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Normandy, and Britanny. Then, counts assigned as administrators of a single pagus (> pays) set themselves up as autonomous chieftains in regions like Anjou, the Mconnais, Auxerrois, Nivernais, becoming "princes" (principates) in their own name. Finally, a yet lower level of authority intrudes: the castlemaster of one or a group of fortresses in turn assumes the chieftain's role in a small, autonomous cell of political and military power: individual castles become "power containers." Some degree of public order might survive, but the decried expression of "feudal anarchy" signals that a substantial number of contemporaries judged the fragmentation of power "exorbitant and calamitous." Political devolution continues until what is now called France is covered by multitudinous cells of local force, vying with neighbors and superiors for power and profits: "feudal society."

The Social Paradigm

Producers and masters occupy opposed subject positions. Society depends on peasants for the production of its food and surplus value. Consumers of the latter are divided into two subclasses: the nobility and the clergy. The latter, especially their leaders-abbots, bishops, popes-generally come from noble families, often destined as younger sons to religion by the inheritance system of primogeniture. While clergy and nobility both live by capturing the fruits of peasant labor, the value-systems of their ideologies are sufficiently antagonistic to make of them different social agencies. From the perspective of an exploited peasantry, would the difference have been that marked?

The answer is not easy to come by. Reconstructing the daily lives or opinions of ordinary peasants is difficult: archives do not resound with their voices. The microphysics of power leaves occasional, indirect, and scattered traces. Peasant history is also produced, like peasant labor itself, as the slow, patient accumulation of detail of an archaeological assemblage. The peasant village itself is a historical product. It begins with survivors' reverence for the dead: first the cemetery, as a town coalesced around its interred dead, who continue as an integral part of the town. Centuries later, servicing the dead still preoccupies a major institution in thriving Arras. After the cemetery, right next to it in metonymic colonization, a church is built, the physical anchor for the developing fabric of parishes, covering the continent in religious cells. Robert Fossier calls this the "cellularization" of the peasantry, ironizing on the neologism's carceral associations. The underground is possessed; then earthen surface is colonized; at a third stage, "gothic" integrates the light of sky. The social unit is elaborated around its dead: peasants as well as nobles venerate their dead. A spectral dimension persists through the Middle Ages. "Ghosts" have effects in material life: they connect to money, violence, and domination. Death weighs on the living, even revolutionaries: its spectral density burdens the living with taxation, debt, accusation, and summons of all sorts.

A curious unifying thread is a widely traveled peasant song, surfacing in Latin, French, and English. Adalberon of Laon, an opponent of the Peace Movement, ridicules the Peace Movement with it: "Naked bishops need only follow endlessly the plow, Goad in hand, singing our first parents' song." In the vernaculars, it associates with insurrections. In France, it is heard during the fourteenth century:

Lorsqu'Adam bchait et lorsqu'Eve filait, O alors tait le chevalier?

It is already commonplace in English by 1381, when John Ball used it as text of a sermon:

Whan Adam dalf and Eve span, wo was thanne a gentilman?

As against the functionalist ideology of the three orders-laboring peasants, praying religious, and fighting nobles-who needs a knight or a noble? sings a peasant in the fields or a woman at the spinning wheel. The text may have signaled equality in death; others sought equality in life. Traces of peasant culture survive mainly in hostile citations of clerics or noble documents, suggesting that cultural systems of value, independent of clerical and aristocratic codes, capable of nurturing claims of equality, freedom, and human dignity, operated in villages and small towns.

As power coalesced in local cells, warriors residing permanently or in rotation at their leader's fortification, they rode forth in regular cavalcades: the chevauche, showing the flag of domination to the peasantry in the surrounding countryside, guaranteeing its continued exploitation. This was governance reduced to its simplest terms: the overt use of force, or its threat, to guarantee the extraction of surplus value, in a binary division of society into the laboring plebe as against the specialists of mounted force, milites, chevaliers, or knights. Between the two, a central, constitutive, relationship: production, force, and terror as policy, with the aristocracy as ultimate beneficiaries.

Class interdependence was perfectly well understood. Relations of the nobility with peasants form the seigneury in French: lordship, or in the more pastoral vocabulary of English medievalism, "manorialism." Both designate the relationship between dominance and submission, nobility and peasantry. Social dependency on peasant labor is universally recognized, even by a conservative theologian. Adalberon of Laon outlines society's functioning. Human law imposes two conditions, nobility and serfdom. The serf's innumerable labors provide food, wealth, and clothing for all:

No free man can live without serfs. When work is needed and they choose to pay for it, Kings and bishops submit to their serfs. The lord who hopes to eat feeds off his servant.

The anticipation of Hegel's discourse on the Master and the Slave is laced with ironic references to food and the nourishment that nobles ideologically claim as their social function, but that peasants actually provide to all society. Adalberon's formulation also anticipates modern experts in taxation: the income of all feudal magnates derived from labor services on their holdings of land, and payments in kind. Differences were simply a matter of scale, "under the political economy of feudalism a man's wealth and authority were directly related to the size of his holding."

The term feudalism has been criticized. Its broad use for the totality of the socius labels an agricultural society of peasants working the land under brutal oppression for the very small part of that society-less than 1 percent of the population according to one calculation-which lived off their labor, a class that dubbed itself "noble." That is a disproportionate metonym. A more specific sense may be salvaged, centered on the fief: a revenue-producing grant by a lord, most frequently of land, in exchange for a vassal's mounted military service. Feudalism names the economic and political relationship among members of the ruling class, its internal relations of dominance organized around the structure of fief-holding. It is a recursive relation of superiors and inferiors, lords and vassals, ideologically melded around the turn of the eleventh century into a single class. Its internal organization unifies two sharply distinguished strata, or a continuum with two extreme points. As a complex class, ideologically unified in spite of internal contradictions, the warrior-nobility faced the two other classes of society-the religious and the peasants-from the vantage point of the fief.

After cemetery and church comes the castle, not the imposing stone constructions of modern tourism, but the earlier, primitive "motte and bailey," an earthen mound typically fifteen meters high, topped by a platform 100 meters square, a construction of forty days' labor by fifty men. On the platform, a tower surrounded by a palisade, both of wood. By persuasion or terror, the lord obtains not only the construction of fortifications but also the agglomeration of service trades at their foot. This was the castling of the countryside (incastallamento) in successive waves: defensive works against foreign attackers under central government followed by a proliferation of "private" fortifications in the "first shock of the castellans," a new regime of fragmented rule by local force. The strong were linked by "lineages," a molecular rhizomatic of noble linkages. This political dislocation produced a scattering of hundreds of power containers: called a "castlemasters' revolution" by some, a "mutation" by others, it is denied by yet others. The seigneury was based on territory or the power of the ban: the power of command, taxation, and punishment. Exactions were ideologized as counterparts of the lord's "protection." To what degree was this a "protection racket"? This "exchange" can seem to have gone tacitly unquestioned by the peasants themselves, as an early form of the social contract, but docility was not universal. Nevertheless, the seigneury becomes the definitive framework of social life in the hundred years after 1075, according to the varied chronologies of different regions.

Extraction of surplus value in monetary form initially took the form of a bewildering variety of taxes, touching every aspect of ordinary life. Even at the local level, intermediaries harvest the profits: subalterns do the dirty work of collection, deflecting hate, fear, and resentment from the master, preserving the social contract by disguising its reality. Pressure to increase the profits of lordship was permanent, the means of extortion multiple and varied: direct and indirect taxation on land, the harvest, on necessary services like the communal oven, the flour mill, and the wine press, on social relations like marrying outside the village, etc. A euphemistic vocabulary develops: terms like entreaty, custom, and quest double the more precise and harsher register of exaction, cut, and takings. Most taxes eventually are annualized, but the taille remains: a sudden demand for emergency payments, in amounts and at times determined by the lord at his will. The "cut" remained a mark of servitude. The size and rate of flow into coffers of dominance was related to the efficacy of the lord's henchmen, the knights, acting as enforcers of the collection process: the functional equivalent of the IRS.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE SUBJECT MEDIEVAL/MODERNby Peter Haidu Copyright © 2004 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0804747431
• ISBN 13: 9780804747431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 464