Rich Man, Poor Man: The radical visions of St. Francis

“Why you?” a man asked Francesco di Bernardone, known to us now as St. Francis of Assisi. Francis (1181/2-1226) was scrawny and plain-looking. He wore a filthy tunic, with a piece of rope as a belt, and no shoes. While preaching, he often would dance, weep, make animal sounds, strip to his underwear, or play the zither. His black eyes sparkled. Many people regarded him as mad, or dangerous. They threw dirt at him. Women locked themselves in their houses.

Francis accepted all this serenely, and the qualities that at the beginning had marked him as an eccentric eventually made him seem holy. His words, one writer said, were “soothing, burning, and penetrating.” He had a way of “making his whole body a tongue.” Now, when he arrived in a town, church bells rang. People stole the water in which he had washed his feet; it was said to cure sick cows.

Years before he died, Francis was considered a saint, and in eight centuries he has lost none of his prestige. Apart from the Virgin Mary, he is the best known and the most honored of Catholic saints. In 1986, when Pope John Paul II organized a conference of world religious leaders to promote peace, he held it in Assisi. Francis is especially loved by partisans of leftist causes: the animal-rights movement, feminism, ecology, vegetarianism (though he was not a vegetarian). But you don’t have to be on the left to love Francis. He is the patron saint (with Catherine and Bernardino of Siena) of the nation of Italy.

Consequently, a vast number of books have been written about him. The first of the biographies appeared a few years after his death, and they’ve been coming ever since. Two more have recently appeared in English. One, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint (Yale), is by André Vauchez, a professor emeritus of medieval studies at the University of Paris. The book appeared in France in 2009 and has now been published in English, in a translation by Michael F. Cusato. The other volume, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Cornell), is by Augustine Thompson, a Dominican priest and professor of history at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. The two books show that the Church is still trembling from the impact of this great reformer.

Click here to read this article from the New Yorker Magazine

The medieval church’s ideological warfare

THE WAR ON HERESY
By R.I. Moore
Published by Harvard University Press, $35

 Long ago and far away, in lands now known as Southern France and Northern Italy, many people the church considered “bad” lived in small villages scattered throughout the countryside. They were known by various names -- Cathars, Waldensians, Manichees, Albigensians and Donatists. What they had in common was that their ideas were seen as wrong, a threat to the unity of Christian Europe. They therefore had to be snuffed out.

 This was in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Their offense was heresy -- to believe or express an idea contrary to what was taught by the Roman Catholic church, and to refuse to “correct” that “wrong” idea. To refuse was to be tried, convicted and killed -- usually burned alive at the stake in the town square as an example to those who might insist on having ideas of their own. All this was by order of the church. The popes, who had already sent crusaders to the Holy Land to reclaim Jerusalem, would periodically send a local crusade to Southern France.

 But that was more than 800 years ago, and nothing like that could happen today. Is that clear?

Click here to read this book review from the National Catholic Reporter

How King's College Chapel Got Its Windows

When you enter King's College Chapel in Cambridge, England, the first thing you do is look up at the magnificent vault of the ceiling. For me, looking up at the beautiful fan-like splays of the ribs always made music resound in my head, perhaps a Bach chorale that I had heard performed there or perhaps something from the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols that is broadcast from the chapel around the world at Christmastime. Then there is the light. On a summer's day, "the windows blaze into life, walls of floating light and colour that sparkle and ripple to the changing rhythm of the clouds and sun, 'flecking the vast interior with glory,' according to one former King's undergraduate, E. M. Forster." Thus Carola Hicks introduces the windows in The King's Glass: A Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art, newly reprinted by Pimlico. It was her last book published before her death in 2010; she had been, among other jobs in a varied career, the curator of the stained glass museum in nearby Ely Cathedral. Now I'd love to go back to the chapel; I had no idea that the lovely windows had such a tumultuous and fractious history, reflecting the complicated times in which they were planned and installed. Even if I never get back, though, I am, thanks to Hicks's book, seeing the windows with new clarity.

Click here to read this book review from The Columbus Dispatch

Book Review: The Pope Who Quit: A True Medieval Tale of Mystery, Death and Salvation

The Pope Who Quit: A True Medieval Tale of Mystery, Death and Salvation
By Jon M. Sweeney
Published by Image Books, 2012

Reviewed by Michael Walsh

 During the late Pope John Paul II’s long, drawn-out illness, one of the FAQs was, inevitably, can a pope resign? The answer, of course, was yes. A pope has done so, and therefore one might do so again.

Practically every commentator at the time seemed to be aware that Celestine V (1294) had given up the papal office. As the distinguished historian Maurice Powicke long ago remarked, it is a well-known story. Author Jon Sweeney takes issue with the Powicke view, but the story is known to anyone who has ever opened a history of the papacy. It is, nonetheless, a story worth retelling.

In the long sede vacante following the death of Pope Nicholas IV (1288-92), Charles II of Sicily was desperate for a pope, any pope, who would ratify his secret treaty of La Junquera. A monk, Peter Morrone, was conveniently at hand. The king did not write Morrone’s letter to the cardinals in their prolonged conclave, but he may well have inspired it. The letter precipitated Morrone’s election as Celestine V. The big question of Celestine’s pontificate is, did Peter Morrone -- as he once was and after his pontificate returned to being -- jump from the throne, or was he pushed?

Sweeney spends a good many of his 250 pages describing the spiritual milieu in which Celestine was formed. He emphasizes Morrone’s holiness and love of solitude. Sweeney’s conclusion necessarily follows: Celestine left the papal office because he judged he could not fulfill it. The only proper thing for a holy man to do, therefore, was to resign (not a scruple that seems to have worried too many Roman pontiffs).

Click here to read this review from the National Catholic Reporter

Book Review: The First Crusade: The Call From the East, by Peter Frankopan

“Deus vult!” — God wills it! — was the battle cry of the First Crusade, in which armies of Europe, at the very end of the 11th century, marched off to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem and conquer the infidel Turks, who were then sweeping all before them in Asia Minor.

 Whatever God’s actual intentions in the matter, and He is known to move in mysterious ways, His representatives on earth, Pope Urban II in Rome and the Emperor Alexios in Constantinople, quite clearly fostered this great martial enterprise for political purposes of their own. The emperor, assailed by enemies on his frontiers and by rivals within his family, was desperate for military aid, just as the pope was comparably eager for a galvanizing cause that would confirm his primacy as the leader of the Christian world.

Click here to read this review from the Washington Post

Thomas Becket by John Guy: review

Few figures in medieval history are as famous as Thomas Becket, and fewer have been subject to such utterly differing interpretations. To pious Englishmen up to the Reformation, he was a miracle-working saint, whose blood (widely available in diluted form) could heal lepers, make the blind see, and raise babies from the dead. To Henry VIII, who closed down the shrine at Canterbury and had his bones burned, he was “a rebel and traitor to his prince”.

To TS Eliot, he was a strangely modern Catholic intellectual, fortified by moral and theological principles but ravaged by self-doubt. To Lewis Warren, author of the classic modern biography of Henry II (Becket’s great adversary), he was a “theological dinosaur” whose resistance to his sovereign was based on little more than “narrow clericalism”.

While the interpretations are many and conflicting, the basic facts about Becket’s life are not in doubt. Born in London in 1120, he was the son of a Norman immigrant who had become a well-to-do merchant; there was money in Becket’s background but not high social status, and his aristocratic enemies would always enjoy reminding him of his humble origins. But with education and talent he was able to rise quite rapidly, working in the household of the then Archbishop of Canterbury. This brought him to the attention of the young King Henry II, who made him his Chancellor; by the age of 34, Becket was helping to run the country.

Click here to read this article from The Telegraph

Book Review: The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer

Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England was a surprise bestseller in 2009, introducing the reader to the customs and mores of 14th-century England without any of the history, so that even if you did not know that England was at war with France, say, you would at least know what to wear and how to act so as to blend in with the locals. It was a lovely, lively book, full of startling details and clearly the work of a thoughtful historian with a tremendous grasp of his period.

The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England is just as good, and only suffers by comparison because it does not come as such a surprise. In a sense, though, Mortimer seems even more sure of himself here, and perhaps because there are more sources available, or because he has written a couple of novels set in the period, this is even richer than his medieval guide. You can almost feel the texture of the times, and you can imagine exactly how its men and women might think.

Inevitably Mortimer addresses many of the same themes as in his earlier book – the nuts and bolts of travel: what you could expect to eat and how much you could expect to pay for it. This sort of material is a boon for historical novelists short on time for research, and I found myself hoping he had slipped in one or two deliberate errors to trip the unwary.

Click here to read this review from the Daily Telegraph

See also our interview with Ian Mortimer

Book Review: The Friar of Carcassonne

For a medieval saga of heresy, witchcraft or sedition to work really well, it requires the payoff scene where the hero or heroine gets burned at the stake. This is the template that has reaped such a rich harvest with Joan of Arc, John Hus, Thomas Cranmer, the Knights Templar and that old standby, Savonarola. In a pinch – say, in the case of William (Braveheart) Wallace – the tried-and-true technique of hanging, drawing and quartering will do, as will more traditional methods such as flaying, stoning, beheading, impalement and crucifixion.

But if an author gets to the end of his narrative and the shadowy medieval figure he is attempting to rescue from putatively undeserved oblivion fails to be set ablaze, the historian finds that he has backed himself into a real corner. Nobody remembers Custer if he doesn’t wind up dead at the Little Big Horn. Nobody remembers John Wilkes Booth if he doesn’t shoot Lincoln. And in a medieval setting, the formula for achieving immortality is unforgivingly rigid: No flame, no fame.

Stephen O’Shea recognizes that he has given himself a tough nut to crack in The Friar of Carcassonne. The book is largely the saga of Franciscan brother Bernard Délicieux, a courageous civic leader who laboured mightily to lift the yolk imposed on the people of southwestern France by the Inquisition in the late 13th and early 14th century. Délicieux is a heroic figure, to be sure, and his tale is well worth telling, but perhaps not at book length. Since his revolt against the Inquisition, which was led by the remorseless Dominicans, mostly consisted of legal squabbles, audiences with the king of France and ceaseless litigation, this book has a jarringly Jesuitical flavour.

Click here to read this review from The Globe and Mail

See also our interview with Stephen O'Shea

The First Crusade, by Peter Frankopan

The epic song cycles of the First Crusade, like Led Zeppelin’s debut album, plucked the same brash chord that was heard in Crusades Two, Three, Four and Five. They presented a Western view of the Byzantine Emperor, from which he never recovered, as a treacherous double-dealer, in sympathy with Islam, who knowingly encouraged up to nine-tenths of a Crusader force of 80,000 to their doom. This vitriolic portrait resounded through the centuries and was strummed in the 18th by a misled Edward Gibbon who claimed the Emperor’s widow inscribed on his tomb: “You die as you lived – an HYPOCRITE.”

Not true, says Peter Frankopan, an Oxford historian whose ambition is to restore Alexios I to his bold and rightful position, from which French and Italian chroniclers airbrushed him: as a figure who was crucial in galvanising a moribund 11th-century Europe to expand its horizons. “After more than 900 years in the gloom, Alexios should once again take centre stage in the history of the First Crusade.”

The First Crusade reshaped the medieval world. It restored the authority of a divided papacy set the course for the Reformation and is “one of the most written-about events in history”. And yet its narrative is one-sided, Frankopan argues, dominated by Western voices and by grossly over-promoted characters like the Frankish Prince Bohemond, a charismatic liability who failed three times to capture Ephesus and was not even present at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099.

Click here to read this review from the Daily Telegraph

Book Review: 1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half

In one of cinema’s most beloved scenes, Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator plays in his office with a beachball-sized balloon representing the globe – and his own insane pretension. The game and the sentiment were not, alas, unprecedented.

In 1493, the voluptuary Pope Alexander VI (fans of Bravo’s The Borgias know how wholly unholy His Holiness was), sat down at his desk and traced a line on a map of the Atlantic Ocean. He was carving up the world, unilaterally.

The following year, intent on tweaking the papal cartography, envoys of Spain and Portugal met in the dusty Castilian town of Tordesillas and agreed on a division of the world between them – and them alone. Thus was born the far-reaching Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, a Renaissance beachball bounced about by the squabbling ruling families of Iberia.

And when the “known” world had expanded in the generation following the treaty’s signing, the usual suspects met up again, in the Spanish border town of Badajoz, this time to divvy up the Pacific Ocean. A young boy, of a temperament worthy of Chaplin’s, is said to have greeted the haughty Portuguese delegation on a bridge by mooning them and saying, “Draw your line right through this!”

Click here to read this book review from The Globe and Mail

The Empire Strikes Back: Rome and us

Critic at large about new books on Rome. This season brings a number of new works on Roman history that focus not on the glories of Roman culture but on its notorious brutalities. What if the true meaning of Rome is not justice but injustice, not civilization but institutionalized barbarism? What if, when you look back, you find at the bottom of all its archeological strata not a forum or a palace but a corpse? In “Rome: Day One” (Princeton; $24.95), the Italian archeologist Andrea Carandini finds exactly that. Tradition assigns this to the year 753 B.C., when Romulus erected the first walls of the so-called Roma Quadrata, or “square Rome.” Carandini provocatively suggests that this might be more or less true. Romulus did not create Rome out of nothing, he grants, but it is possible that there was a single day, around the middle of the eighth century B.C., when sacred ceremonies were held to transform a collection of settlements into the city of Rome. And the culmination of these ceremonies, Carandini writes, was human sacrifice. How would it change our understanding of Rome and the Roman Empire if we could see the corpse—all the corpses—that provided its foundation?

Click here to read this article from the New Yorker Magazine

The Canterbury Tales gets reinvented as a graphic novel

In The Canterbury Tales, American illustrator Seymour Chwast reimagines Chaucer’s poetic survey of medieval England. And, true to Chaucer's vision, each character featured in the original gets a chance to tell their highly visual story, from the Cook to the Wife of Bath.

As anyone who’s had to struggle through reading the original in Middle English (how many ways do you really need to spell eye, anyways?) can attest to, slogging your way through Chaucer’s ode to the life medieval can be a chore. Thankfully, all dialogue and description here are rendered in modern-day English, although in a somewhat pared-down version.

Click here to read this book review from Straight.com

The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution by Keith Devlin – review

The story is extraordinary. Even as the world was mired in medieval darkness, with the crushing hand of religion blocking all scientific inquiry, a lone genius named Fibonacci appeared on the shores of the Mediterranean. Through magnificent creative struggles, he discovered a number with near magical properties.

It is an infinite sequence that begins 1.61803… and is sometimes known as the Golden Ratio; sometimes as the Divine Proportion. Mathematicians symbolise it by the Greek letter phi, and it can be used to produce the most beautiful rectangle humans can recognise: one that already was understood when the Parthenon was designed and, in times to come, would be incorporated by Leonardo da Vinci in his greatest works of art. It appears today in the proportions even of the humble credit card.

Or so the internet, and many popular books, would have us believe. In fact, the man referred to in so many accounts, originally Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci came long after his death, from his family's name), was not much of a genius. Nor was he living in an age of ignorance. Nor does the shape that came to be associated with his name actually appear in Greek sculpture, or Renaissance art, or our Mastercards today.

Click here to read this article from The Guardian

Book Review: The Friar of Carcassonne, by Stephen O’Shea

Providence author Stephen O’Shea is more than a writer of historical narratives. He is designing engineer and pilot of a time machine that transports readers back in time 800 years or more.

He takes us to medieval Europe, a world alien to modern sensibilities, and makes it understandable by illuminating the historical record with the storytelling techniques of new journalism: scene setting, character development, and dialogue.

I first became acquainted with O’Shea’s historical scholarship and narrative craftsmanship a decade ago when I read “The Perfect Heresy,” his engrossing account of a little-known Christian heresy that took root in southern France in the 13th century, then was savagely suppressed by Pope Innocent III and crusading knights from the north. The heretics were pacifist Christians of austere belief who followed holy men (and women) whom the Roman church labeled as “perfect,” as in fully committed to their spiritual quest. Hence it became the “perfect” heresy; otherwise known to historians as the Albigensian heresy since it was rooted in Albi in south-central France.

Click here to read this article from The Providence Journal

Book Review: Dante in Love

Yeats said no face was more familiar to Western civilisation than Dante's, apart from that of Christ. Dante Alighieri is the greatest poet of Italy and he is also the one figure of the late medieval-renaissance period who bears comparison with the greatest visual artists: Giotto, Michelangelo and Titian.

Though there is only one Dante: Petrarch, the great sonnetier, and Boccacio of The Decameron fame make up the triad but are footnotes to him. Dante, born in Florence in 1265, belongs only with Homer and Shakespeare.

In 1300, according to legend, he had the experience that is recorded in his great three-part poem The Divine Comedy: he found himself in Hell, then Purgatory, then Heaven. The opening lines are inscribed in the DNA of our culture: "Nel mezzo del cammin de nostra vita /mi rotrovai per una selva oscura, /Che la diritta via era smarrita". ("In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost".)

Click here to read this review from The Australian

Book review: Cathedral by Jon Cannon

England’s magnificent medieval cathedrals are acknowledged as one of the wonders of the world, but who built them and why?

The aptly named Jon Cannon explores these extraordinary creations from a new and fascinating angle in his beautifully illustrated historical guide.

Here he views them not just as awe-inspiring buildings but as constantly changing structures created by a rich brew of ancient rituals, beliefs, personalities and politics – a sort of living window onto the past.

Click here to read this article from the Burnley Express

Helen Castor's 'She-Wolves' taste power in medieval England

Helen Castor's very readable "She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth" is, she writes, "the kind of book I loved to read before history became my profession as well as my pleasure." It's full of beautiful, imperiled ladies; fearless knights; and remarkable, often unbelievable turns of fortune.

Pause a moment if you feel this topic is limited to the romance reader, or primarily to women. Castor's story spans four centuries of English and European history, from the 1100s to the accession of Mary Tudor. The author is a fine scholar and an equally fine storyteller.

Click here to read this review from the Cleveland.com

Book Review: Ibn Taymiyya and his times

The Wahhabi movement led by Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century Najd was inspired by Ibn Taimiyah. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab hailed Ibn Taimiya as a pioneer of Salafism which means following the salaf, the first three generations of Islam. Being a follower of the salaf, Ibn Taimiyah and his followers freed themselves from blindly following the fiqhi schools of thought which evolved in the second and third Islamic centuries.

Ahmad ibn Abd al-Halim, commonly known as "Ibn Taimiyah" (1263-1328), a jurist, philosopher, teacher and social reformer of the fourteenth century, remained for centuries an obscure figure until he was suddenly discovered some three decades ago by militant Islamic movements in the Middle East which were basically fighting against corrupt pro-West rulers in their countries. Until then, Ibn Taimiyah was popular only among the Hanbalis of the Arabian Peninsula. One reason which led to this sudden popularity may be that in the 1960s and thereafter, Saudis printed millions of copies of books by 'Salafi' scholars like Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab, Ibn Taimiyah and Ibn Al-Qayyim, in Arabic and other languages and spread them all over the Muslim World.

Click here to read this review from the Milli Gazette

'Medieval World' strong graphically, weak contextually

Book Review: "The Medieval World: An Illustrated Atlas," by John M. Thompson.

This book is beautifully and lavishly illustrated with period art, architecture, documents, maps, artifacts and sculpture, as well as photographs of specific locations.

Special articles highlight themes of medieval thought, significant people and events and important cities of each century. Additional page spreads show what was happening in the world beyond Europe during each century between the years 400 and 1500. The graphical layout and colors are gorgeous.

This book then is a feast for the eyes. If only it were a pleasure to read.

Click here to read this review from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Reviews in History publishes its 1,000th review

Reviews in History, the online journal of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), publishes its 1,000th review this month. Launched in 1996, Reviews covers books and digital resources across every area of historical interest, with all reviews being undertaken by leading experts in the field. It has always been noted for its broad scope, chronologically, geographically and thematically. It now publishes a new issue every week on its recently redesigned website (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews), each featuring four original reviews.

From the start, the journal has published reviews of greater length than those usually found in scholarly periodicals (between 2,000 and 3,000 words), and as a consequence of its digital-only format has also been able to make them available much earlier. Reviews also allows authors and editors a right of reply, stimulating discussion and providing readers with an insight into the major debates occurring at the cutting edge of historical research.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net