"Everyone else is going global, and we don't want to be left behind!" said Catherine Holmes, speaking about the Global Middle Ages project, a worldwide research collaboration to talk about the swath of time that makes up the 'Middle Ages' across the world, from Rome to Kerala. She spoke at length about "why a global Middle Ages makes sense" and what the project means.
Dr. Holmes explained that as scholars, we have a responsibility to find roots, parallels, and differences between medieval and modern phenomena; specialization is a recent development in academia rather than an inherent feature, and Europe wasn't always the centre of things. G-MAP uncovers different histories and moves away from traditional ideas about what the 'Middle Ages' included. Communities in the Middle Ages had porous boundaries: people, goods, and ideas moved back and forth more than we previously imagined, shedding new light on religious activity and state formation.
Dr. Holmes said that G-MAP focuses on things like plural burials: for example, a grave found on the Swedish island of Helgo containing a Buddha probably made in Kashmir, a North African ladle, and an Irish crozier.
She discussed a synagogue 'library' in old Cairo whose contents indicated the Jewish community was widespread and communicated with one another to some degree; the distribution of Chinese pottery across the Indian Ocean area and the Islamic world, particularly showing up on the Swahili coast in the 9th and 10th centuries, used to decorate houses. She did offer a caveat, however: we cannot claim intense interaction between all parts of the globe during all parts of the Middle Ages. The scholarly study of the 'Global Middle Ages' requires experimentation to decide which "tools and toys" are most productive, and whether our current periodization is accurate or too Western-centred.
She then offered a case study: six copper plates dated to 849 CE and discovered in Kerala, in southwestern India. One plate describes a set of trading privileges given to merchant associations; another sets up a grant for a church. They include four languages, five scripts, and five world faiths. The plates are proof of the significant scale of the vibrant early medieval Indian Ocean trade. What we don't know, and maybe can't know? Whether the plates reflect a world where people felt they were 'encountering' each other; whether those encounters were collective. Dr. Holmes warned us against applying our modern sense of the word 'global' onto these interactions. The presence of large empires operating at the time is missing from the Kerala plates - the focus is instead on the local chieftain, who is able to grant these rights.
Dr. Holmes talked more broadly about the need to collaborate with other scholars in other fields on global history projects: we may need new tools to deal with the period between 500 and 1500 CE. The use of Chinese pottery to decorate a Swahili house indicates that we may need to develop new ideas about the relationship between local and global forces, about change, rupture, and movement in medieval communities. Some of this global interaction may have lead to the intensifying of connections, but also foreclosed certain options – an increase in religious identity politics, for example. She concluded, in the question session, by acknowledging that 'medieval' is a Eurocentric word and possibly problematic – but it is used for convenience to designate a vast and varied time period.
Dr. Conrad Leyser then spoke about the Middle Ages as an era of 'faith': faith in terms of religion, certainly, but also faith in terms of allegiance, to family or empire. Dr. Leyser explained how the idea of faith and allegiance changed in western Europe during the rise of Latin Christendom.
We were told that, in the ancient Mediterranean, the family was a legal and religious unit devoted to ancestor worship; adoptions were made when biology failed. By the thirteenth century, however, a distinction was made between nature and culture in the Latin west: family was defined by blood descent – while the Church was a group of celibate men whose genealogy was ritual and metaphorical, i.e. the priesthood. This split may be due to religious reforms in the eleventh century which officially prohibited priestly marriage and simony. Property was divided by blood or institution, but not both. The idea of the priesthood as men without blood families was unusual across Eurasia at that point in history – priests are essentially those who conduct sacrifice, as a remedy for being born of woman, for having a blood genealogy. Priests were imagined as family men well into the late Carolingian Empire; they were considered to be different from monks and nuns, and a rivalry existed between the two modes of religious commitment.
The religious reforms of the eleventh century were essentially answering in the affirmative the question of whether priests were going to make themselves invulnerable to the charge of having family interests, and become a purely sacrificial order. 'Faith' became a relationship to an institution, rather than an individual relationship with the divine –– unlike in medieval Islamic communities, Dr. Leyser pointed out, where faith rests on a personal bond with God without a sacrificial system, and the question of blood versus culture manifests instead in the struggle between Sunni and Shi'a over the caliphate, or in early medieval China, in the rivalry between Daoist priests and Buddhist monks. The rise of Confucianism moved China towards culture and away from blood as the defining principle of family, whereas the Latin West moved increasingly towards defining family purely by blood.
Dr. Leyser concluded by pointing out that there is great value in thinking comparatively, across cultures and across time spans. This is also not, he points out, a story of 'modernization', of how we came to the 'modern' way of viewing things, as the act of balancing blood ties with other kinds of social bonds is a question that we still address.
Our year concluded on an excellent note! Keep watching the blog this summer for updates on OMS activities next year, and our usual drinks party will take place in Week 1 of Michaelmas Term to kick everything off for the academic year 2016/17. If there are topics you would like to see addressed at an OMS Term Meeting, email your webmaster at caroline.batten@new.ox.ac.uk and your ideas will be brought before the committee!
