Medieval Lives: Eight Charismatic Men and Women of the Middle Ages. - book reviews

Commonweal, June 3, 1994 by Carl L. Bankston, III

Norman F. Cantor HarperCollins, $23, 197 pp.

Individual humans, out of fashion with historians for the past few decades, have recently begun to make a comeback. Armed with the quantitative techniques of the newer social sciences and inspired by a Braudelian emphasis on geography and environment, academic historians of the post-World War II period increasingly rejected social actors as too evanescent and resistant to measurement to be of interest. Narrative history, the telling of stories about individual actors, was "unscientific," an activity fit only for novelists. As a consequence, the social landscape of the past has often appeared as the earth would appear when viewed from the moon: an abstraction of outlines and contours.

Those who now attempting to repopulate this historical territory argue that human perceptions and understandings are both the objects and the sources of historical study. Human beings experience social and environmental forces, interpret their experiences, and act according to their interpretations. Historians base their own readings of the past on the social construction of knowledge of the present and try to find some commonality with the dead in order to evoke previous worlds. In such an endeavor, the imaginative and novelistic quality of narrative history becomes an actual advantage.

Norman F. Cantor, professor of sociology, history, and literature at New York University, has made significant contributions to history as the imagined dialogue of people in the present with those in the past. In Inventing the Middle Ages (William Morrow, 1991), Cantor used biographical sketches of twenty eminent twentieth-century medievalists to explore the ways in which the personal lives and concerns of scholars have shaped our perceptions of the Middle Ages. Medieval Lives takes up the biographical method once again, but this time Cantor attempts to evoke the other voices in the dialogue, those that speak from the centuries-old texts.

The eight medieval people portrayed here were all "charismatic" individuals, men and women known to us because of their special qualities of thought or leadership. The author, s goal is to act as translator, to provide dramatic vignettes from their lives that will " . . . make medieval society and culture meaningful" to modern readers. Proceeding chronologically, he moves from Helena Augusta, mother of Constantine, at the beginning of the era, to John of Bedford at the end.

Cantor places each of the eight in controversy with some opponent and uses their arguments as means of revealing the social and intellectual currents affecting them. This kind of ventriloquism is a delicate business, since speaking through the mouths of others risks reducing them to wooden dummies. Unfortunately, while he writes well, Cantor does not have the skill as a dramatist to avoid this danger. His medieval characters do not even give the illusion of independent life: when Saint Augustine or Robert Grosseteste speak in these pages, their words are transparently those of a modern historian playing with puppets.

This is not simply a dramatic failure; it is a problem of historical interpretation, since it leads the author into jarring anachronisms. Alcuin of York is presented in the early ninth century talking in Gibbonesque terms about "the fall of the Roman Empire." An opponent of the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen blasts Hildegard as an exponent of "feminist theory." In translating medieval minds into modern terms, Cantor has lost most of what is medieval about them.

The book is also marred by sloppiness with details. When Augustine is described (probably correctly) as a Berber, the author explains that the Berbers are "people today vaguely called Arab from their language." The Berbers of Northwest Africa are not called "Arabs," except by the kind of people who call Iranians or Turks "Arabs," and their language is Berber.

John W. O'Malley, professor of church history at Weston School of Theology, takes the pursuit of charismatic minds into the era following Cantor's. O'Malley's purpose is the reconstruction of the goals, motivations, and activities of the first generation of Jesuits. His work is aimed at a narrower audience than Cantor, s, and the account of the early Jesuits is occasionally a bit dry, but it shows admirable care for detail and enviable mastery of the voluminous documents produced by the early Society of Jesus.

Beginning with Ignatius's abandonment of the military life for a religious one following a convalescence from an injury received in battle in 1522 during which the founder of the Society of Jesus had nothing to read but the lives of medieval saints and meditations on the life of Christ, O'Malley traces the intentions of the early Jesuits as they flowed from Ignatius's leadership. He finds that the Society of Jesus did not begin with a definite direction and a clear plan of action, as many have maintained. They were preachers, concerned with the care of souls. One of the central concerns of their ministry was teaching people how to pray, a concern that was at the heart of the Spiritual Exercises. The Jesuits were drawn into becoming schoolmasters by the usefulness for preachers of the classical discipline of rhetoric, and it was their success at the first Jesuit college at Messina, founded in 1548, that propelled them into the position of pedagogues of Europe.