ADVICE AND DISSENT

The Middle Ages weren’t just a time of religious delirium, hysteria

Was that time in history called the “Middle Ages” mainly a period of long religious delirium, a time of “societies of flagellants and periodic bursts of mass hysteria” from which the Renaissance proved to be a long-overdue and much-welcome return to reason or sanity? This is the central idea in Stephen Greenblatt’s widely acclaimed and best-selling book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (“A recovered ancient manuscript changes the course of human thought”), but Adam Kirsch, editor at the New Republic and columnist for the online magazine Tablet, thinks that this familiar stereotype about the Middle Ages doesn’t square entirely with the truth because of the limitations of its narrative.

In “Mysteries and Masterpieces,” an essay he wrote for the January-February 2012 issue of Harvard Magazine, Kirsch says that clarifying that stereotype is a work cut out for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML), which was launched in 2011 by the Harvard University Press to fill the knowledge gap between the ancient world and the Renaissance. The DOML, under the general editorship of Porter professor of Medieval Latin Jan Ziolkowski, aims to provide scholars and lay readers alike with both the well-known classics and the lesser-known mysteries and masterpieces of the Middle Ages, thus giving the modern world the opportunity to recognize the wide variety and distinctive merits of Latin literature.

Kirsch says that the DOML, which has so far published 11 volumes of classic texts in Latin or Anglo-Saxon, offers the best introduction the general reader has ever had to the “mother” of Western Christian civilization. He explains: “It is true that religion is omnipresent in these texts: they reveal a civilization completely permeated by Christian belief and practice, a faith that could be both sublimely ardent and cruelly intolerant. At the same time, DOML shows how medieval Christianity remained in a fertile tension with other strands of European culture: the pagan inheritance of the Teutonic world and the polytheism of Greece and Rome. The combination of these worldviews produced some strange syntheses—pagan, erotic poetry written by priests, Biblical stories retold as Homeric epics. After exploring these volumes, the Middle Ages are sure to strike the reader as more familiarly human, and more exotically remote, than ever before.”

Read Adam Kirsch’s “Mysteries and Masterpieces” in HarvardMagazine.com now!

ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:
In “Urban-Development Legends: Grand theories do little to revive cities,” an article that came out in the quarterly City Journal, Prof. Mario Polèse of the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société at Montreal’s Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique argues that “Cities, like people, are too diverse to allow anything but fairly commonsense prescriptions. A lot of grand theories have been advanced…but they have proven of little practical use.” He says that it’s not that cities can do nothing to promote economic development: “It’s that they should avoid academic fads and quick fixes, which are no substitute for obvious policy goals like competently providing mandated services at reasonable cost, keeping streets safe, and not taxing and regulating away businesses—good governance, in sum, and even that comes with no guarantee to work.”

Read Mario Polèse’s “Urban-Development Legends” in the City Journal now!

Click to read responses or post a response

View the complete list of postings in this section
(requires registration to view & post)