essay about the nature of medieval period

Introduction to the Middle Ages

The Lindisfarne Gospels , left: Saint Matthew, portrait page (25v); right: Saint Matthew, cross-carpet page (26v), c. 700 (Northumbria), 340 x 250 mm ( British Library , Cotton MS Nero D IV)

The dark ages?

So much of what the average person knows, or thinks they know, about the Middle Ages comes from film and tv. When I polled a group of well-educated friends on Facebook, they told me that the word “medieval” called to mind Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Blackadder, The Sword in the Stone, lusty wenches, feasting, courtly love, the plague, jousting and chain mail.

Perhaps someone who had seen (or better yet read) The Name of the Rose or Pillars of the Earth would add cathedrals, manuscripts, monasteries, feudalism, monks and friars.

Petrarch, an Italian poet and scholar of the fourteenth century, famously referred to the period of time between the fall of the Roman Empire (c. 476) and his own day (c. 1330s) as the Dark Ages. Petrarch believed that the Dark Ages was a period of intellectual darkness due to the loss of the classical learning, which he saw as light. Later historians picked up on this idea and ultimately the term Dark Ages was transformed into Middle Ages. Broadly speaking, the Middle Ages is the period of time in Europe between the end of antiquity in the fifth century and the Renaissance , or rebirth of classical learning, in the fifteenth century and sixteenth centuries.

North Transept Rose Window, c. 1235, Chartres Cathedral , France (photo: Dr. Steven Zucker , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Not so dark after all

Characterizing the Middle Ages as a period of darkness falling between two greater, more intellectually significant periods in history is misleading. The Middle Ages was not a time of ignorance and backwardness, but rather a period during which Christianity flourished in Europe. Christianity, and specifically Catholicism in the Latin West, brought with it new views of life and the world that rejected the traditions and learning of the ancient world.

During this time, the Roman Empire slowly fragmented into many smaller political entities. The geographical boundaries for European countries today were established during the Middle Ages. This was a period that heralded the formation and rise of universities, the establishment of the rule of law, numerous periods of ecclesiastical reform and the birth of the tourism industry. Many works of medieval literature, such as the Canterbury Tales, the Divine Comedy, and The Song of Roland, are widely read and studied today.

The visual arts prospered during Middles Ages, which created its own aesthetic values. The wealthiest and most influential members of society commissioned cathedrals, churches, sculpture, painting, textiles, manuscripts, jewelry and ritual items from artists. Many of these commissions were religious in nature but medieval artists also produced secular art. Few names of artists survive and fewer documents record their business dealings, but they left behind an impressive legacy of art and culture.

When I polled the same group of friends about the word “Byzantine,” many struggled to come up with answers. Among the better ones were the song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” sung by They Might Be Giants, crusades, things that are too complex (like the tax code or medical billing), Hagia Sophia, the poet Yeats, mosaics, monks, and icons. Unlike Western Europe in the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire is not romanticized in television and film.

Approximate boundaries of the Byzantine Empire, mid-6th century (underlying map © Google)

In the medieval West, the Roman Empire fragmented, but in the Byzantine East, it remained a strong, centrally-focused political entity. Byzantine emperors ruled from Constantinople, which they thought of as the New Rome. Constantinople housed Hagia Sophia , one of the world’s largest churches, and was a major center of artistic production.

Isidore of Miletus & Anthemius of Tralles for Emperor Justinian, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, 532–37 (photo: Steven Zucker , CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Byzantine Empire experienced two periods of Iconoclasm (730–787 and 814–842), when images and image-making were problematic. Iconoclasm left a visible legacy on Byzantine art because it created limits on what artists could represent and how those subjects could be represented. Byzantine Art is broken into three periods. Early Byzantine or Early Christian art begins with the earliest extant Christian works of art c. 250 and ends with the end of Iconoclasm in 842. Middle Byzantine art picks up at the end of Iconoclasm and extends to the sack of Constantinople by Latin Crusaders in 1204. Late Byzantine art was made between the sack of Constantinople and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

In the European West, Medieval art is often broken into smaller periods. These date ranges vary by location.

Additional resources:

Smarthistory’s free Guide to Byzantine Art e-book

Art and Death in the Middle Ages on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History)

Byzantium from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Icons and Iconoclasm on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Classical Antiquity in the Middle Ages, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Hagia Sophia on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:

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More Smarthistory images…

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Middle Ages

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 6, 2023 | Original: April 22, 2010

People use the phrase “Middle Ages” to describe Europe between the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century. Many scholars call the era the “medieval period” instead; “Middle Ages,” they say, incorrectly implies that the period is an insignificant blip sandwiched between two much more important epochs.

The Middle Ages: Birth of an Idea

The phrase “Middle Ages” tells us more about the Renaissance that followed it than it does about the era itself. Starting around the 14th century, European thinkers, writers and artists began to look back and celebrate the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome . Accordingly, they dismissed the period after the fall of Rome as a “Middle” or even “Dark” age in which no scientific accomplishments had been made, no great art produced, no great leaders born. The people of the Middle Ages had squandered the advancements of their predecessors, this argument went, and mired themselves instead in what 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon called “barbarism and religion.”

Did you know? Between 1347 and 1350, a mysterious disease known as the "Black Death" (the bubonic plague) killed some 20 million people in Europe—30 percent of the continent’s population. It was especially deadly in cities, where it was impossible to prevent the transmission of the disease from one person to another.

This way of thinking about the era in the “middle” of the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance prevailed until relatively recently. However, today’s scholars note that the era was as complex and vibrant as any other.

The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages

After the fall of Rome, no single state or government united the people who lived on the European continent. Instead, the Catholic Church became the most powerful institution of the medieval period. Kings, queens and other leaders derived much of their power from their alliances with and protection of the Church.

In 800 CE, for example, Pope Leo III named the Frankish king Charlemagne the “Emperor of the Romans”–the first since that empire’s fall more than 300 years before. Over time, Charlemagne’s realm became the Holy Roman Empire, one of several political entities in Europe whose interests tended to align with those of the Church.

Ordinary people across Europe had to “tithe” 10 percent of their earnings each year to the Church; at the same time, the Church was mostly exempt from taxation. These policies helped it to amass a great deal of money and power.

The Middle Ages: The Rise of Islam

Meanwhile, the Islamic world was growing larger and more powerful. After the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies conquered large parts of the Middle East, uniting them under the rule of a single caliph. At its height, the medieval Islamic world was more than three times bigger than all of Christendom.

Under the caliphs, great cities such as Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus fostered a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. Poets, scientists and philosophers wrote thousands of books (on paper, a Chinese invention that had made its way into the Islamic world by the 8th century). Scholars translated Greek, Iranian and Indian texts into Arabic. Inventors devised technologies like the pinhole camera, soap, windmills, surgical instruments, and an early flying machine. And religious scholars and mystics translated, interpreted and taught the Quran and other scriptural texts to people across the Middle East.

The Crusades

Toward the end of the 11th century, the Catholic Church began to authorize military expeditions, or Crusades , to expel Muslim “infidels” from the Holy Land. Crusaders, who wore red crosses on their coats to advertise their status, believed that their service would guarantee the remission of their sins and ensure that they could spend all eternity in Heaven. (They also received more worldly rewards, such as papal protection of their property and forgiveness of some kinds of loan payments.)

The Crusades began in 1095, when Pope Urban summoned a Christian army to fight its way to Jerusalem , and continued on and off until the end of the 15th century. In 1099, Christian armies captured Jerusalem from Muslim control, and groups of pilgrims from across Western Europe started visiting the Holy Land. Many of them, however, were robbed and killed as they crossed through Muslim-controlled territories during their journey.

Around 1118, a French knight named Hugues de Payens created a military order along with eight relatives and acquaintances that became the Knights Templar , and they won the eventual support of the pope and a reputation for being fearsome fighters. The Fall of Acre in 1291 marked the destruction of the last remaining Crusader refuge in the Holy Land, and Pope Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar in 1312.

No one “won” the Crusades; in fact, many thousands of people from both sides lost their lives. They did make ordinary Catholics across Christendom feel like they had a common purpose, and they inspired waves of religious enthusiasm among people who might otherwise have felt alienated from the official Church. They also exposed Crusaders to Islamic literature, science and technology–exposure that would have a lasting effect on European intellectual life.

The Middle Ages: Art and Architecture

Another way to show devotion to the Church was to build grand cathedrals and other ecclesiastical structures such as monasteries. Cathedrals were the largest buildings in medieval Europe, and they could be found at the center of towns and cities across the continent.

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, most European cathedrals were built in the Romanesque style. Romanesque cathedrals are solid and substantial: They have rounded masonry arches and barrel vaults supporting the roof, thick stone walls and few windows. (Examples of Romanesque architecture include the Porto Cathedral in Portugal and the Speyer Cathedral in present-day Germany.)

Around 1200, church builders began to embrace a new architectural style, known as the Gothic. Gothic structures, such as the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France and the rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral in England, have huge stained-glass windows, pointed vaults and pointed arches (a technology perfected in in the Islamic world), and spires and flying buttresses. In contrast to heavy Romanesque buildings, Gothic architecture seems to be almost weightless. Medieval religious art took other forms as well. Frescoes and mosaics decorated church interiors, and artists painted devotional images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus and the saints.

Also, before the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, even books were works of art. Craftsmen in monasteries (and later in universities) created illuminated manuscripts: handmade sacred and secular books with colored illustrations, gold and silver lettering and other adornments. Convents were one of the few places women could receive a higher education , and nuns wrote, translated, and illuminated manuscripts as well. In the 12th century, urban booksellers began to market smaller illuminated manuscripts, like books of hours, psalters and other prayer books, to wealthy individuals.

Did You Know? Juliana Morell, a 17th-century Spanish Dominican nun, is believed to be the first woman in the Western world to earn a university degree.

Chivalry and courtly love were celebrated in stories and songs spread by troubadours. Some of medieval literature’s most famous stories include “The Song of Roland” and “The Song of Hildebrand.” 

The Black Death

Between 1347 and 1350, a mysterious disease known as the " Black Death " (the bubonic plague) killed some 20 million people in Europe—30 percent of the continent’s population. It was especially deadly in cities, where it was impossible to prevent the transmission of the disease from one person to another.

The plague started in Europe in October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Most sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those who were alive were covered in black boils that oozed blood and pus. Symptoms of the Black Death included fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains – and then death. Victims could go to bed feeling healthy and be dead by morning.

The plague killed cows, pigs, goats, chickens and even sheep, leading to a wool shortage in Europe. Understandably terrified about the mysterious disease, some people of the Middle Ages believed the plague was a divine punishment for sin. To obtain forgiveness, some people became “flagellants,” traveling Europe to put on public displays of penance that could include whipping and beating one another. Others turned on their neighbors, purging people they believed to be heretics. Thousands of Jews were murdered between 1348 and 1349, while others fled to less populated areas of Eastern Europe.

Today, scientists know the plague was caused by a bacillus called Yersina pestis , which travels through the air and can also be contracted through the bite of an infected flea . 

The Middle Ages: Economics and Society

In medieval Europe, rural life was governed by a system scholars call “feudalism.” In a feudal society, the king granted large pieces of land called fiefs to noblemen and bishops. Landless peasants known as serfs did most of the work on the fiefs: They planted and harvested crops and gave most of the produce to the landowner. In exchange for their labor, they were allowed to live on the land. They were also promised protection in case of enemy invasion.

During the 11th century, however, feudal life began to change. Agricultural innovations such as the heavy plow and three-field crop rotation made farming more efficient and productive, so fewer farm workers were needed–but thanks to the expanded and improved food supply, the population grew. As a result, more and more people were drawn to towns and cities. Meanwhile, the Crusades had expanded trade routes to the East and given Europeans a taste for imported goods such as wine, olive oil and luxurious textiles. As the commercial economy developed, port cities in particular thrived. By 1300, there were some 15 cities in Europe with a population of more than 50,000.

In these cities, a new era was born: the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a time of great intellectual and economic change, but it was not a complete “rebirth”: It had its roots in the world of the Middle Ages.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Middle Ages — Life in the Medieval Times

Life in The Medieval Times

• Categories: Middle Ages Society

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Words: 965 |

Published: Jun 6, 2019

Words: 965 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited:

• Deibert, R. J., & Rohozinski, R. (2010). Control and subversion in Russian cyberspace. In Access controlled (pp. 137-155). MIT Press.
• Fung, A., Graham, M., & Weil, D. (2013). A research agenda for the civic dimensions of the digital divide. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 1427-1438).
• Gupta, A., & Kainth, A. (2019). Internet censorship: Indian scenario. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science, 10(2), 471-475.
• Karim, A., & Hasan, M. A. (2020). Censorship and freedom of expression in Bangladesh: A review of the legal framework. The Social Science Journal, 57(1), 1-12.
• Kim, H. K. (2019). An overview of internet censorship in South Korea. Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 14(1), 131-145.
• Ma, J., van der Velden, L., & Savelkauskas, S. (2020). The effects of censorship on experienced internet users in China: A qualitative study. International Journal of Communication, 14, 4656-4675.
• Qazi, W. H., & Ahmad, N. (2019). Freedom of expression and its limitations in Pakistan. Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1(1), 13-22.
• Ricketts, L. (2018). The impact of internet censorship on online activism. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 19(1), 119-129.
• Sun, J. (2018). Internet censorship and its cultural effects in China. In Handbook of Research on the Political, Economic, and Social Impacts of Chinese e-Business (pp. 1-15). IGI Global.
• Yang, G. (2019). Political implications of internet censorship: A comparative study of China, Singapore, and South Korea. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 16(2), 129-142.

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AP®︎/College Art History

Course: ap®︎/college art history   >   unit 5, introduction to the middle ages.

• Christianity, an introduction for the study of art history
• Architecture and liturgy
• The life of Christ in medieval and Renaissance art
• A New Pictorial Language: The Image in Early Medieval Art
• Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome
• Basilica of Santa Sabina, Rome
• Santa Sabina
• Jacob wrestling the angel, Vienna Genesis
• Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, Vienna Genesis
• A beginner's guide to Byzantine Art
• San Vitale, Ravenna
• Justinian Mosaic, San Vitale
• Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
• Theotokos mosaic, apse, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
• Hagia Sophia as a mosque
• Deësis mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
• Virgin (Theotokos) and Child between Saints Theodore and George
• The Lindisfarne Gospels
• The Bayeux Tapestry
• The Bayeux Tapestry - Seven Ages of Britain - BBC One
• Church and Reliquary of Sainte‐Foy, France
• Chartres Cathedral
• Bible moralisée (moralized bibles)
• Saint Louis Bible (moralized bible)
• The Golden Haggadah
• Röttgen Pietà
• Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel (part 1)
• Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel (part 2)
• Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel (part 3)
• Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel (part 4)

The dark ages?

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Pilgrimage in medieval europe.

Hexagonal Pilgrim's Jar with Jewish Symbol

Plaque with Scenes at Emmaus

Bursa Reliquary

Plaque with the Holy Women at the Sepulchre

Plaque with the Journey to Emmaus and Noli Me Tangere

Reliquary Pendant with Queen Margaret of Sicily Blessed by Bishop Reginald of Bath

Reliquary Casket with Scenes from the Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket

Arm Reliquary

Saint-Guilhem Cloister

Scenes from the Legend of Saint Vincent of Saragossa and the History of His Relics

Booklet with Scenes of the Passion

Reliquary Bust of Saint Yrieix

• The Adoration of the Magi
• Giotto di Bondone

Pilgrim's Badge of the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury

The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry

The Limbourg Brothers

Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)

Workshop of Robert Campin

The Journey of the Magi

Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni)

Saint James the Greater

• Gil de Siloe

Jean Sorabella Independent Scholar

The fundamental teachings of Christianity count no place more holy than any other: Jesus himself says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20, KJV). Throughout the Middle Ages, however, Christians sought to close the distance between themselves and God by engaging in physical travel toward a spiritual goal. Such journeys served a variety of functions: a pilgrim might set out to fulfill a vow, to expiate a crime, to seek a miraculous cure, or simply to deepen his or her faith. None of these purposes is specific to Christian pilgrimage—the idea of the sacred journey is a feature of many religions—yet by the fourth century A.D., pilgrimage had become a recognized expression of Christian piety. Persons from all walks of life made religious journeys, with far-reaching consequences for society and culture as a whole. This essay concentrates on the impact of pilgrimage on art and architecture in Western Europe from late antiquity through the fifteenth century.

The earliest Christian pilgrims wished to see the places where Jesus and the apostles had lived on earth. This meant journeying to the Holy Land, a relatively easy feat in the fourth century, when the Roman empire still unified the Mediterranean world. Major theologians of the period, including Saints Jerome and Augustine, endorsed spiritual travel as a retreat from worldly concerns. In this sense, they equated pilgrimage with the monastic way of life, which pilgrims sometimes embraced after completing their journeys. The best-documented early travelers to the Holy Land worked to achieve individual spiritual enrichment by reading and living the Bible on location. For example, Paula, a disciple of Saint Jerome, had this experience at Bethlehem: “Here, when she looked upon the inn made sacred by the virgin and the stall where the ox knew his owner and the ass his master’s crib (Isaiah 1:3), . . . she protested in my hearing that she could behold with the eyes of faith the infant Lord wrapped in swaddling clothes and crying in the manger, the wise men worshipping Him, the star shining overhead, the virgin mother , the attentive foster-father, the shepherds coming by night to see the word that had come to pass” (Jerome, Letters 108.10, translated by W. H. Fremantle et al., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 6. [Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893]). For Paula, the Biblical texts and the very spot where she stood helped her to witness sacred events and so to believe more deeply.

Sacred architecture complemented the interior meditations of visitors to the sites of Christ’s mission on earth. In the 320s and 330s, Constantine , the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, constructed sumptuous buildings on several locations that had already become popular destinations for pilgrims. These churches often incorporated a round or centrally planned element, a form associated with tombs and the shrines of martyrs. In Jerusalem, Constantine built a basilica at the place where Christ was crucified and a rotunda around the Holy Sepulcher, the site of Jesus’ burial and resurrection; in a later European ivory depicting the holy women on Easter morning ( 1993.19 ), his tomb appears as a round structure, evoking the church there. In Bethlehem, Constantine commissioned another church over the cave revered as Jesus’ birthplace—when Paula visited, she glimpsed it through an opening in the floor of a richly decorated octagonal structure probably adorned with images of the Nativity . The distinctive features of these buildings were widely copied in churches, tombs, and baptisteries throughout Europe, sometimes with specific references to the Holy Land. Octagonal glass bottles made as souvenirs for pilgrims ( 1972.118.180 ) also replicate the forms of Constantine’s buildings in the Holy Land—and demonstrate the market for such things among religious tourists of Jewish as well as Christian faith.

The city of Rome became another major destination for pilgrims. Easier of access for European pilgrims than the Holy Land, Rome had also been the home of many saintly martyrs, including the apostles Peter and Paul, and the places where they were buried attracted pious travelers from a very early date. Constantine erected great basilicas over the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul, and pilgrims visited these as well as other churches associated with miraculous events. A distinction of these sites was the presence of holy relics, material objects like the bones or clothes of the saints, the sight or touch of which was supposed to draw the faithful nearer to saintliness.

Rome was particularly rich in relics , but as the Middle Ages progressed, other places acquired important relics and became centers of pilgrimage themselves. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, huge numbers of pilgrims flocked to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, where the relics of the apostle Saint James the Greater were believed to have been discovered around 830. Canterbury was a popular destination for English pilgrims, who traveled to witness the miracle-working relics of Thomas Becket, the sainted archbishop of Canterbury who was martyred at the hands of knights of King Henry II in 1170 and canonized shortly thereafter. The relics of local saints drew visitors from closer range to sites like Saint Frideswide in Oxford, and San Nicola Peregrino in Trani.

In addition to attracting religious travelers, the veneration of relics provided a springboard for the creation of works of art. Sculptors and goldsmiths made the reliquaries required to enshrine the holy objects ( 53.19.2 ; 47.101.33 ; 17.190.352a,b ), and jewelers produced small containers for sacred material suitable for the faithful to wear ( 63.160 ). The translation of relics from one place to another, either within a church or across a great distance, was cause for celebration and often depicted in art ( 24.167a–k ). Artists made objects that allowed pilgrims to commemorate their journey, ranging from simple badges ( 2001.310 ) to elaborate miniature reliquaries ( 17.190.520 ). It was customary for pilgrims to bring offerings to the shrines they visited, and many of these, too, were works of art: costly liturgical vessels, elaborate priestly vestments, and other precious objects enriched the treasury of every pilgrimage church.

Before departing, the pilgrim normally received a blessing from the local bishop and made a full confession if the pilgrimage was to serve as a penance. To signal his special vocation, the pilgrim put on a long, coarse garment and carried a staff and small purse—Saint James is often depicted with this distinctive gear ( 69.88 ), as well as a broad-brimmed hat and the shell-shaped badge awarded to those who reached his shrine at Compostela. Serious-minded pilgrims engaged in constant devotions while en route, and some carried prayer books or portable altars ( 1982.60.399 ) to assist them. Monasteries located along the pilgrimage roads ( 25.120.1–.134 ) provided food and lodging and also offered masses and prayers. Some monastic churches also housed relics of their own, and these often incorporated an interior passageway called an ambulatory, which allowed pilgrims to circulate and venerate the relics without interrupting the monks in their regular orders of prayer . The need to accommodate larger numbers of pilgrims caused many churches to undertake major renovations, for example, Saint-Denis, which was dramatically altered under Abbott Suger in the early twelfth century.

The concept and experience of pilgrimage was so strong in medieval Europe that it fired the imagination of the age and set the tone for travel of all kinds. The Crusades , armed campaigns mounted to win control of the Holy Land, were understood as a particular kind of pilgrimage, and so were many of the quests pursued by knights in life and legend. In literature, the idea of pilgrimage lies at the heart of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which features a diverse band of pilgrims telling lively popular stories. The concept of the sacred journey also structures Dante’s Divine Comedy, which recounts the author’s own transformative course through the realms of hell and purgatory to the heights of heaven. The norms of medieval pilgrimage affected the visual arts as well. For example, an ivory carved around 1120 depicts the risen Christ with the two disciples who met him on the road to Emmaus; they are shown as contemporary pilgrims, with walking sticks, a vessel for water, and a purse marked with a cross ( 17.190.47 ). The ivory reflects the popularity of Santiago de Compostela, then at the height of its fame, and it differs markedly from another depiction of the same subject in a ninth-century ivory, where the travelers wear modified classical garb and pursue their goal less emphatically ( 1970.324.1 ). A fragment of a painting by Sassetta represents another biblical journey, that of the Magi on the way to adore the infant Jesus; the kings are fashionably dressed, mounted on horseback, and surrounded by a lively entourage, like aristocratic pilgrims traveling in state ( 43.98.1 ).

In the later Middle Ages, pilgrims often traveled in order to win indulgences, that is, the Church’s promise to intercede with God for the remission of the temporal punishment for sins confessed and forgiven, a prayer that will be heard because of the holiness of the Church. Pope Boniface VIII declared 1300 a jubilee year, when pilgrims to Rome might gain a plenary indulgence, that is, a guarantee of the Church’s prayer for dispensation from the temporal punishment due to sins forgiven over a whole lifetime. To purists and reformers, such attractions seemed less laudable than the heartfelt goals of earlier pilgrims, and preaching friars like the Franciscans and Dominicans urged a return to devotional exercises like those that Paula had practiced: whether in a place sanctified by a sacred event—and the preaching orders came to control the holy places at Bethlehem and Jerusalem—or in the quiet of one’s own home, the individual was exhorted to imagine sacred events as though witnessing them in real life, in the most vivid manner possible. The increase of humanity and naturalism in religious art of this time may be linked to this type of spiritual exercise. A work like Giotto ‘s The Adoration of the Magi ( 11.126.1 ), for example, seems to expose the reality of the event that it depicts, offering the viewer entrance into a sacred story, and in the Merode Altarpiece, the donor is actually depicted as a witness to the Annunciation, which he glimpses through an open door ( 56.70 ).

Even travels of nonreligious character might share the spirit of pilgrimage or appear so in art. The final miniature of the Belles Heures of Jean de Berry , a lavishly illustrated prayer book for a nobleman’s private use , depicts him setting out on a journey, as his responsibilities often obliged him to do ( 54.1.1 , fol. 223v). Coming as it does in a devotional book among so many religious pictures, the scene assumes an air of sanctity and is accompanied by a prayer: “O God, who granted to the sons of Israel to pass through the middle of the sea with dry steps, and who revealed thee to the three wise men through the guidance of a star, grant us, we beg thee, a prosperous path and calm weather, so that we might be worthy of arriving at the place where we are going and, finally, at the gate of eternal happiness” (Husband 2008, p. 263).

Sorabella, Jean. “Pilgrimage in Medieval Europe.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pilg/hd_pilg.htm (April 2011)

Further Reading

Ashley, Kathleen, and Marilyn Deegan. Being a Pilgrim: Art and Ritual on the Medieval Routes to Santiago . Burlington, Vt.: Lund Humphreys, 2009.

Barnes, Ruth, and Crispin Branfoot, eds. Pilgrimage: The Sacred Journey . Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2006.

Husband, Timothy B. The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry . New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. See on MetPublications

Kessler, Herbert L., and Johanna Zacharaias. Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Stalley, Roger. Early Medieval Architecture . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Sumption, Jonathan. The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God . Mahwah, N.J.: Hidden Spring, 2003.

Wilken, Robert L. "Christian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land." In The City of the Great King , edited by Nitza Rosovsky, pp. 117–35. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Additional Essays by Jean Sorabella

• Sorabella, Jean. “ Portraiture in Renaissance and Baroque Europe .” (August 2007)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Venetian Color and Florentine Design .” (October 2002)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Art of the Roman Provinces, 1–500 A.D. .” (May 2010)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Nude in Baroque and Later Art .” (January 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Nude in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance .” (January 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Nude in Western Art and Its Beginnings in Antiquity .” (January 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Monasticism in Western Medieval Europe .” (originally published October 2001, last revised March 2013)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Interior Design in England, 1600–1800 .” (October 2003)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Vikings (780–1100) .” (October 2002)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Painting the Life of Christ in Medieval and Renaissance Italy .” (June 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Birth and Infancy of Christ in Italian Painting .” (June 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Crucifixion and Passion of Christ in Italian Painting .” (June 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Carolingian Art .” (December 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Ottonian Art .” (September 2008)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Ballet .” (October 2004)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ Baroque Rome .” (October 2003)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Opera .” (October 2004)
• Sorabella, Jean. “ The Grand Tour .” (October 2003)

Related Essays

• Art for the Christian Liturgy in the Middle Ages
• The Crusades (1095–1291)
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• Romanesque Art
• Saints and Other Sacred Byzantine Figures
• Sixteenth-Century Painting in Venice and the Veneto
• Stained Glass in Medieval Europe
• Trade and Commercial Activity in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Middle East
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• Iberian Peninsula, 1000–1400 A.D.
• Iberian Peninsula, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Italian Peninsula, 1000–1400 A.D.
• Low Countries, 1000–1400 A.D.
• Low Countries, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Rome and Southern Italy, 1400–1600 A.D.
• Venice and Northern Italy, 1400–1600 A.D.
• The Annunciation
• Architecture
• Central Europe
• Christianity
• Floral Motif
• Gilt Bronze
• Gilt Copper
• Gilt Silver
• Great Britain and Ireland
• Iberian Peninsula
• International Gothic Style
• Low Countries
• Medieval Art
• Parchment / Vellum
• Personal Ornament
• Relic / Reliquary
• Relief Sculpture
• Rock Crystal
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• Stained Glass
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Artist or Maker

• Campin, Robert
• De Limbourg, Herman
• De Limbourg, Jean
• De Limbourg, Paul
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Online Features

• 82nd & Fifth: “Boy Geniuses” by Timothy B. Husband
• 82nd & Fifth: “Drama” by Peter Barnet
• Connections: “Flux” by Annie Labatt
• Connections: “Pilgrimage” by Ashira Loike
• MetBlogs: The Art of Illumination by Wendy Stein

Medieval Studies

• Background Information

Databases-- Articles and Books

Bibliographies, theses and dissertations.

• Primary Sources
• Astrik L. Gabriel History of Universities Collection
• Biblioteca Ambrosiana Collection
• Byzantine and Classics Reference Collection
• Medieval Institute General Collection
• Medieval Institute Paleography Collection
• Medieval Institute Reference Collection
• Near Eastern Reference Collection
• Citing Sources

Medieval Studies Librarian

Hesburgh Library 715B Hesburgh Library University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556

(574) 631-5724 [email protected]

Databases are multidisciplinary collections of scholarly resources. Most databases gather links to and citations for scholarly articles, although some contain full-text access to articles, books, or both types of scholarly communication. 

• JSTOR This link opens in a new window JStor includes the back archive of more than 2,000 journals, plus hundreds of e-books.With their "Advanced Search" function, you can perform full-text searches of these items by discipline (history, art, music, literature, etc.), by date range, or item type.
• Web of Science This link opens in a new window Web of Science includes the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), also known as Arts & Humanities Search, is a citation index, with abstracting and indexing for more than 1,700 arts and humanities journals, and coverage of disciplines that includes social and natural science journals.
• Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Further, accessing Google Scholar through the library website gives you access to more information than directly accessing Google Scholar via your web browser.
• MLA international bibliography (EBSCO platform) This link opens in a new window Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Proved access to citations from worldwide publications, including periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies.
• Mirabile: Digital archives for Medieval Latin culture This link opens in a new window An online content aggregator of Medieval resources. Contains Medioevo latino : a bibliographical bulletin of European culture from Boethius to Erasmus, VI to XV centuries (MEL) ; Bibliotheca scriptorum latinorum medii recentiorisque aevi (BISLAM) ; and Compendium auctorum latinorum medii aevi (500-1500) (CALMA). Includes full-text content from several related online journals.

These resources will help you find e-books and print held by Notre Dame, other local libraries, or books held at other libraries worldwide. If you can't find a book at Notre Dame or its partner libraries in the ND Catalog, try searching the catalogs of 9000 OCLC partner institutions through Worldcat. The Hathi Trust is another sizeable consortial collection of digitized books.

• Hesburgh Libraries Online Catalog (ND Catalog) ND Catalog lets you search the holdings of the Hesburgh Libraries, Kresge Law, and Holy Cross libraries' catalogs separately or together. It includes content from the University Archives, the Center for Research Libraries, and working papers from the Institute for Latino Studies.
• WorldCat This link opens in a new window A worldwide union catalog created and maintained collectively by more than 9,000 OCLC member institutions. With millions of online records built from the bibliographic and ownership information of contributing libraries, it is the largest and most comprehensive database of its kind.
• HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window A digital repository for the nation's great research libraries that brings together the immense collections of its partner institutions. It was initially conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia to establish a repository for those universities to archive and share their digitized collections, and quickly expanded to include additional partners with fast growing treasure of digitized collections.

Bibliographies gather together various resources focused around specific subjects, sub-topics, fields, etc. They are an important and efficient way to begin a review of scholarly literature.

• International Medieval Bibliography This link opens in a new window Indexes articles, notes, and similar literature on medieval subjects in journals, Festschriften, conference proceedings, and collected essays. Covers all aspects of medieval studies within the date range of 400 to 1500 for the entire continent of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for the period before the Muslim conquest and parts of those areas subsequently controlled by Christian powers. Access info: Click on "Enter databases", then select International Medieval Bibliography.
• Bibliographie de Civilisation Médiévale This link opens in a new window A comprehensive, current bibliography of monographs worldwide relating to the medieval period of the Western, Byzantine and Islamic world. Covers history, language and literature, philosophy and theology, art history, archaeology, and more. Access info: Click on "Enter databases", then select Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale
• International bibliography of humanism and the Renaissance This link opens in a new window An international reference bibliography of academic publications on the Renaissance and the early modern period. Indexed sources range from monographs, critical editions, translations, anthologies, miscellanies and exhibition catalogues to specialised dictionaries and encyclopaedias, handbooks, journal articles and reviews.
• Mirabile: Digital archives for Medieval Latin culture This link opens in a new window Medioevo Latino provides citations (many include abstracts) of research publications in medieval studies, compiled since 1980. The Mirabile database includes an electronic version of Medioevo Latino up to the previous year. The printed volume for the current year is available in the Medieval Institute's reading room 715E at call number CB 351 .M384.
• Oxford bibliographies online. Medieval studies This link opens in a new window Offers peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on European and Mediterranean civilization from the 4th to the 15th centuries. Bibliographies are browseable by subject area and keyword searchable. Contains a "My OBO" function that allows users to create personalized bibliographies of individual citations from different bibliographies.

These resources will help you find unpublished theses and dissertations, which present an author's research and findings as part of their degree candidacy or professional qualification.

• ProQuest Digital Dissertations Provides information about doctoral dissertations and master's theses, with subject, title, and author access to almost all American dissertations accepted at an accredited institution since 1861. Offers full text for most dissertations (Notre Dame and other) added since 1997. Access info: Access to full text (PDF) of Notre Dame dissertations since 1997, restricted to users with valid Notre Dame NetIDs.
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Covering books and digital resources across all fields of history

ISSN 1749-8155

An Environmental History of the Middle Ages: The Crucible of Nature

John Aberth is fascinated by plagues as disasters, as evidenced by his series of books with titles like From the Brink of the Apocalypse (2001), The Black Death (2005), and Plagues in World History (2011). (1) His latest book An Environmental History of the Middle Ages is likewise centered on the Black Death of 1348–1350 as a turning point. Aberth bases his book on the contention that ‘the unprecedented ecological crises of the late Middle Ages forced a radical rethinking of environmental attitudes, one that anticipates the “new ecology” of today’ (p. 8). As this statement indicates, Aberth wanted to write an intellectual history of ‘what medieval people thought about their natural surroundings, rather than what they did to them’ (author’s emphasis, p. 10). He argues that the Middle Ages went through four phases in attitude toward nature: eschatological in the late Antique period, adversarial in the early Middle Ages, collaborative in the high Middle Ages, and a more sophisticated nuanced view of the environment that combined the adversarial with the collaborative after the Black Death. Keeping Aberth’s own aims in mind, I will evaluate how well the book succeeds as an environmental history of the Middle Ages.

Aberth makes it clear from the preface that he believes the ‘environment’ is the ‘natural world’ excluding humans and that urban environmental history will be excluded from his story (p. xiv). To match this definition, Aberth splits the environment into three aspects – ‘Air, water, earth’, ‘Forest’ and ‘Animals’ – with each aspect organized as one long chapter. This is a perplexing choice, since the effects of plague are most acutely recorded within urban areas where people lived and Aberth wants to focus on the Black Death as turning point. With a definition of environment limited to those things outside of humans, Aberth sets up the book with ‘natural’ aspects as the focus.

The first section ‘Air, water, earth’ is the one that stays closest to Aberth’s stated aim of an intellectual history. While there are some practical details about harnessing water and wind power for milling, the majority of the chapter is dedicated to philosophical treatises about the nature of the elements. Aberth begins with a discussion of Greek understandings of how natural elements influenced human health and the lasting effects of that knowledge on Arabic and western European medical thought. According to Aberth, the early Middle Ages were characterized by an ‘adversarial view’ of nature (p. 5), which in this chapter is evidenced in attempts to control the weather in hagiographical literature. With the warming of the climate in the high Middle Ages, people became more optimistic about nature, moving into the third type of human-nature relationship, collaborative. The coming of plague in the 14th century forced a re-evaluation of that relationship, as ideas of man being able to affect the environment through pollution and poison became standard.

There are two main shortcomings of the first section. One is that by grouping air, water, and earth into 65 pages, none of these elements get the extended treatment they deserve. Medieval environmental historians have produced much scholarship on both water and land issues (2) , so there is certainly much more that could have been said about each of these. While the grouping makes sense for Aberth’s focus on the role of these elements in medicinal humor theory, it limits his ability to investigate each as environmental components. The second problem is that Aberth’s timeline as sketched leaves out documents and data that do not match the author’s phases; for example, there are medieval documents claiming that urban pollution leads to health problems through air poisoning long before the plague, but these are not discussed. If they had been, Aberth may not have been able to make a claim for a radical break and reordering of the relationship with nature that he sees with the plague.

The second section, ‘Forests’, moves away from Aberth’s history of ideas to a history of practicalities. While he starts with a section on pre-Christian tree cults, he moves quickly to woodland management practices and the legal structures of the medieval forest, which takes up the majority of the section. The administration of the English forest, particularly through the eyre courts, is discussed in great detail. After that, there is a short discussion of the idea of forest and wilderness in literary and philosophical texts followed by a conclusion about reafforestation after the Black Death.

Although the forestry section contains a wealth of information about medieval forests, I think it fails to live up to Aberth’s goals on two counts. First, unlike the previous section, which makes an extended argument about a qualitative change in the human-nature relationship because of the Black Death, this chapter mentions only the regrowth of woods in England as a result of the Black Death. This extremely brief section is not nearly enough to prove a ‘radical rethinking of environmental attitudes’ (p. 8) toward the forest. The readers do not get any sense that there was a shift toward the combined adversarial-collaborative relationship that Aberth defined in the introduction. Second, the chapter is almost exclusively based on the situation in England. The vast majority of this section, from pages 97 to 123, is devoted to the English royal forest – woodland and forests in all the other parts of Europe combined gets five pages. Considering the wealth of literature on medieval woodland and forest in other parts of Europe, including works by Chris Wickham, Peter Szabó, Richard Keyser, and Karl Appuhn, such a narrow presentation of medieval forest is inexcusable. (3)

The third section, titled ‘Beasts’, covers animals, including farm livestock, pets, and hunted game. The discussion of farm livestock does a good job of mixing philosophical treatises that dealt with questions of whether or not animals had reason and/or a soul, agricultural manuals that recommended practices, and historical data about livestock keeping. Aberth also provides a compelling juxtaposition of hunting romance versus reality. The final third of this section argues that humans became closer to their animal companions in the late medieval period after the Black Death, exchanging diseases and making animals partners in bestiality and magical practices. While Aberth’s attribution of these developments to the Black Death is not entirely convincing, the section as a whole is probably the most aligned with writing an environmental history that encompasses both ideologies and practices. Yet, even here, Aberth is very limited in what he discusses as ‘beasts’ – he ignores non-local animals, like elephants which were put into medieval menageries or killed for ivory, and only mentions sea mammals in two sentences, despite a recent environmental history book on medieval whaling by Vicki Szabo. (4)

I applaud Aberth’s attempt to write an environmental history of the Middle Ages – one is sorely needed – yet I cannot help but think that this particular approach to medieval environmental history does more harm than good. First, Aberth’s litany of facts makes the book difficult to read. The book is full of rich details about the medieval environment that scholars will be able to mine for their own works, which certainly makes it a valuable addition to scholarship; but that attention to detail has also produced an incredibly dense work that students (and many others) will find difficult to make it through.

Second, and this is the more fundamental objection, Aberth fails to engage with the discipline of environmental history. By saying he will limit his discussion to nature outside of humans and excluding the urban sphere, he ignores the rich historiography of urban environmental history in the seminal works of Christine Rosen, Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi, who have successfully argued for the inclusion of the urban space in environmental histories. (5) Aberth could, of course, have justified his decision based on arguments by Donald Worster about the focus of environmental history (6) , but he doesn’t. In fact, Aberth does not cite a single work of general environmental history theory – not Donald Hughes’s What is Environmental History? , not William Cronon’s ‘The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature’, not John McNeill’s ‘Observations on the nature and culture of environmental history’. (7) Aberth says that the late medieval mindset anticipates today’s ‘new ecology’, but he is either unaware of or uninterested in engaging with any environmental historian’s scholarship on what modern ecological thinking entails. Aberth’s own environmental ethos is laid out in the preface: Vermont as ‘forest wilderness’ is ‘one of the most heartening environmental success stories’ (p. xiii), an ethos which he carries into his analysis of the medieval environment. But if he had been familiar with the environmental history literature, he might not have limited himself to wilderness and nature protection as the only environmental successes.

Aberth defines ‘new ecology’ as the ‘mutual, two-way dialogue between humans and nature that drives historical change’ (p. 2), but in the book, either mankind or nature always has the upper hand, forcing the other to move in a particular way. In his narrative, only environmental crisis brings humans to their knees; the Crucible of Nature in the book’s subtitle is the 14th-century famine followed by plague that Aberth claims forged the modern human-nature relationship. Yet I remain unconvinced that the 14th-century events created the radical break Aberth believes in, at least not from the evidence he presents.

Aberth has gathered together many interesting glimpses into the interactions between humans and nature in the medieval period, and although these may be useful as data points, he hasn’t woven them into a tale about a reciprocal relationship. In other words, while Aberth has written a history about some aspects of the medieval environment, he hasn’t written an environmental history.

• John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages (London, 2001); The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348–1350: A Brief History with Documents (New York, NY, 2005); Plagues in World History (Lanham, MD, 2011). Back to (1)
• For water, see especially Richard Hoffmann, ‘Economic development and aquatic ecosystems in medieval Europe’, American Historical Review , 101 (1996), 631–69; essays in Working with Water in Medieval Europe , ed. Paolo Squatriti (Leiden, 2000); and Ellen Arnold, ‘Engineering miracles: water control, conversion, and the creation of a religious landscape in the medieval Ardennes’, Environment and History , 13 (2007), 477–502. For agriculture and the land, some examples include Petra van Dam, ‘Sinking peat bogs: environmental change in Holland, 1350–1550’, Environmental History , 6 (2001), 32–45; Lisa J. Kiser, ‘The garden of St. Francis: plants, landscape, and economy in thirteenth-century Italy’, Environmental History , 8 (2003), 229–45; and Verena Winiwarter, ‘Prolegomena to a history of soil knowledge in Europe’, in Soils and Societies: Perspectives from Environmental History , ed. J. R. McNeill and Verena Winiwarter (Isle of Harris, 2006), 177–­215. Back to (2)
• Chris Wickham, Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400–1200 (London, 1994); Peter Szabó, ‘Sources for the historian of medieval woodland’, in People and Nature in Historical Perspective , ed. József Laszlovszky and Peter Szabó (Budapest, 2003), 265–88; Richard Keyser, ‘The transformation of traditional woodland management: commercial sylviculture in medieval Champagne’, French Historical Studies , 32 (2009), 353–84; and Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, MD, 2009). Back to (3)
• Vicki Ellen Szabo, Monstrous Fishes and the Mead-Dark Sea: Whaling in the Medieval North Atlantic (Leiden, 2008). Back to (4)
• Christine Rosen and Joel Tarr, ‘The importance of an urban perspective in environmental history’, Journal of Urban History , 20 (1994), 299–310; Martin V. Melosi, ‘Humans, cities, and nature: how do cities fit in the material world?’ Journal of Urban History , 36 (2010), 3–21. Back to (5)
• Donald Worster, ‘Doing environmental history’, in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History , ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge, 1988), 289–307. Back to (6)
• Donald Hughes, What is Environmental History? (Cambridge, 2006); William Cronon, ‘The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature , ed. William Cronon (New York, 1995), 69–90; John McNeill, ‘Observations on the nature and culture of environmental history’, History and Theory , 42 (2003), 5–43. Back to (7)

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Review of Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Kay Etheridge , Gettysburg College Follow

Document Type

Publication date, department 1.

The seven essays comprising this collection grew out of a 2004–05 lecture series at Ohio State's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In their introduction, Hanawalt and Kiser make the case that medieval views of nature typically are not available to modern scholars as direct written expression, and that this requires an interdisciplinary interpretation of a broad range of sources on medieval life. In keeping with their opening argument the editors include essays by three scholars who explore medieval views of nature through study of accessible documents of the period, including hunting treatises, philosophical writings, and bestiaries. Susan Crane explores how the ritual form of an aristocratic hunt, detailed in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts, was used to reinforce both social hierarchy and man's place in nature. She also addresses the attitudes of hunters toward both prey and hunting dogs. This essay reminds us that historians often must rely on material left by a narrow segment of the population (e.g., the very wealthy), therefore, we are privy to a limited range of views. A fourteenth-century philosopher, Jean Buridan, is the intriguing protagonist of an essay by Joel Kaye in which he proposes that Buridan was exploring the concept of “balance” in nature long before the term was used in this sense. Kaye argues convincingly that Buridan's model of a dynamic equilibrium in the composition of the earth opened the door to conceptualizations of abstract ideas on nature. The remaining essay to use medieval sources as a window into the period is by Jeffrey Cohen. In “Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages” he draws examples from bestiaries and literature to present the idea that anthropomorphized animals served a variety of purposes such as showing human limitations or representing some races as less than human. Missing from the essay is any evidence that this was a distinctly medieval attitude toward animals.

Original version is available from the publisher at: http://www.rsa.org/?page=RQ

10.1086/647463

Recommended Citation

Etheridge, Kay. Review of Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Lisa J. Kiser. Renaissance Quarterly 62.3 (Fall 2009), 999-1000.

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Supplement to Analysis

Medieval and renaissance conceptions of analysis, 1. medieval philosophy, 2. renaissance philosophy.

In the supplementary document on Ancient Conceptions of Analysis , three particular sources of conceptions of analysis were identified—ancient Greek geometry, Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s Analytics . The interconnections between these alone are complex; but there were other influential conceptions in antiquity as well—most notably, Galen’s amalgam of previous methodologies in the context of medicine, and the Neoplatonists’ theological transformation of Plato’s method of division. Given this complexity, and the fragmentary nature of the material upon which writers in the medieval period drew, it is not surprising that making sense of medieval methodologies is an interpretive nightmare.

The interpretive intricacies can be illustrated here by taking the case of Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-74). In a recent paper (1994), Eileen Sweeney has argued that there are three notions of resolutio —to use the Latin term that translated the original Greek word ‘ analusis ’—in Aquinas’s work. The first is resolution as a kind of division , understood as a process of decomposition, modelled on the movement down a classificatory tree in Plato’s method of division, whereby a genus is ‘broken down’ into its constituent species. The second is resolution as reversion (i.e., regression), in effect understood in opposition to the first, since it is modelled on the movement up a classificatory tree towards the higher Forms. (For more on the connection between these two conceptions, see §4 of the main document.) The third is resolution as problem-solving , understood as what is prior to the systematic act of demonstration (synthesis). The first derives from Plato, and more specifically, Sweeney suggests, Calcidius’s Commentary on the Timaeus , which also owes something to Aristotle. The second shows the influence of Neoplatonism, according to which all things are to be resolved into their principles and ultimately traced back to the One (God). The third (as shown in §2 of the main document) has its roots in ancient Greek geometry, again mediated through the works of Aristotle. If this account is right, then it suggests, at the very least, that there are certain tensions in Aquinas’s discussions of methodology, tensions that reflect the different traditions which he was attempting to bring together.

However, perhaps the richest and most interesting text for exploring conceptions of analysis in medieval philosophy is the Summulae de Dialectica ( SD ) of John Buridan (c.1300-c.1360). Ostensibly a commentary on Peter of Spain’s Tractatus or Summulae Logicales , it is in fact a systematic compendium of medieval logic, going considerably beyond Peter’s work, and amounting to some 1000 pages (in its first complete English translation of 2001). Comprising nine Treatises, the key Treatise for our purposes is the eighth, entitled ‘On Demonstrations’. Buridan here distinguishes between divisions, definitions and demonstrations, which can be seen as illustrating the distinction drawn in §1 of the main document between decompositional, interpretive and regressive analysis. The bulk of the Treatise (chs. 3-12) is concerned with demonstration, explaining and elaborating on Aristotle’s account in the Posterior Analytics (as outlined in the supplement on Ancient Conceptions of Analysis, §4 ). Central to this is Aristotle’s distinction between understanding ‘the fact’ and understanding ‘the reason why’—between demonstration quia and demonstration propter quid , in medieval terms (see esp. SD , Tr. 8, chs. 8-9). Here the regressive conception of analysis is dominant. Buridan talks, for example, of ‘simple’ demonstrations being ones that are not ‘analyzable’ or ‘resolvable’ into prior demonstrations ( SD , 8.5.2), and of demonstration quia as a ‘reversion’ from effect to cause ( SD , 8.9.3). But the discussion of demonstration is prefaced by two chapters on division and definition, and here Plato’s influence is more manifest. Buridan characterises ‘division’ as the separation of a whole into its parts ( SD , 8.1.2), and distinguishes various kinds of division, one kind being the division of a genus into its species, which was Plato’s method of division. His account of definition too has its roots in Plato’s work, and in particular, the elenctic method of Socrates (cf. the supplement on Ancient Conceptions of Analysis, §3 ). But it also draws on Aristotle’s work, and most significantly of all, anticipates the interpretive conception of analysis of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

Buridan’s treatment of definition would not look out of place in a modern textbook. He offers a succinct statement of criteria of adequacy, and draws a clear distinction between four types of definition—nominal, quidditative (i.e., real), causal and descriptive. The interpretive conception of analysis comes out in his account of nominal definition. Buridan writes that “A nominal definition [ diffinitio explicans quid nominis ] is an expression convertibly explaining what thing or things the definitum [i.e., the term defined] signifies or connotes, and properly speaking it is called ‘interpretation’”, adding that “here I take ‘interpretation’ for the explicit analysis [ expositio ] of the signification of a word or expression that is being interpreted”. The term ‘philosopher’, for example, is interpreted as ‘lover of wisdom’, and the sentence ‘Only man is risible’ as the conjunction ‘Man is risible, and nothing other than man is risible’. ( SD , 8.2.3; cf. Tr. 6, ch. 3.) Further examples can be found in the ninth and final Treatise, entitled ‘Sophismata’, although here the term ‘interpretation’ is not itself used. In this Treatise, Buridan illustrates how interpretive analysis can be put to work in clarifying ‘ sophismata ’—sentences that are philosophically puzzling or instructive. He shows, for example, how ‘Some donkey every man sees’ is ambiguous, suggesting the two formulations ‘Some donkey every man sees’ and ‘Every man sees some donkey’ to bring out what we would now explain in terms of the different scope of the two quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘every’ (cf. SD , Tr. 9, ch. 3, seventh sophism and reply).

As used here, the quantifiers ‘only’, ‘some’ and ‘every’ are examples of what medieval logicians called ‘syncategorematic’ expressions (or uses of expressions)—expressions that signify nothing by themselves, but only when taken together with some other expression (in this case, ‘man’ or ‘donkey’). From the twelfth century onwards, there was much discussion of the logic of syncategoremata, and exposition ( expositio ), i.e., interpretive analysis, became one of the main tools of elucidation. From the middle of the fourteenth century, until the demise of medieval logic in the sixteenth century, exponibilia —exponible sentences, i.e., sentences requiring exposition—became a subject in itself for systematic treatment. Although its authorship is uncertain, the Tractatus exponibilium of 1489 is representative of such treatment. An exponible sentence is here defined in terms of syncategoremata: “An exponible proposition [ propositio exponibilis ] is a proposition that has an obscure sense requiring exposition in virtue of some syncategorema occurring either explicitly or included within some word.” (Tr. in Kretzmann 1982, 215.)

Kretzmann (1982) gives several examples of sophismata involving syncategoremata to illustrate the way in which their treatment developed in the later medieval period. One example involves the exceptive term ‘praeter’:

(S) Socrates twice sees every man except Plato. [ Socrates bis videt omnem hominem praeter Platonem .]

This sentence too is ambiguous, depending on the scope of the syncategoremata ‘twice’ and ‘except’. The two interpretations might be represented as follows:

(S#) With the exception of Plato (Socrates twice sees every man).

(S*) Twice (Socrates sees every man except Plato).

The difference can be appreciated by considering the case in which, on one occasion, Socrates sees everyone including Plato, and on another occasion, sees everyone excluding Plato, i.e., where Socrates sees Plato once and everyone else twice. (S#) would then be true, but (S*) false. Various diagnoses of the ambiguity can be found in the literature on syncategoremata from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. The scope distinction is recognised, for example, by Bacon in his Sincategoreumata of the early thirteenth century (cf. Kretzmann 1982, 219). But the role of exposition is perhaps best illustrated in the Sophismata of Albert of Saxony, dating from the middle of the fourteenth century. In diagnosing the ambiguity, Albert recognises that (S) implies a simpler, equally ambiguous sentence, which we might formulate as follows:

(SP) Socrates did not twice see Plato.

Here is what he then says:

Now in “Socrates did not see Plato twice” the whole predicate [“did see Plato twice”] is denied of the whole subject; but in “Socrates twice did not see Plato” not the whole predicate but a part of it is denied of the subject, because the term “twice” remains affirmed. (Tr. in Kretzmann 1982, 223.)

Here we might represent the two interpretations as follows:

(SP#) Socrates did not (see Plato twice). [ Socrates non videt bis Platonem .]

(SP*) Socrates twice (did not see Plato). [ Socrates bis non videt Platonem .]

Here the ambiguity depends on the scope of ‘twice’ (‘ bis ’) and ‘not’ (‘ non ’), which Albert recognises in the way he formulates the two alternatives. Albert may not have been able to draw on the resources of modern quantificational logic to formalise the two interpretations, but he clearly has some understanding of the idea of scope.

The medieval literature on sophismata, syncategoremata and exponibilia, then, shows that interpretive analysis had an important role to play long before it became a central tool of modern analytic philosophy. In modern analytic philosophy, interpretive analysis is used, in particular, in eliminativist or reductive projects—in minimizing our ontological commitments, or revealing what our underlying ontological commitments are (see the supplement on Conceptions of Analysis in Analytic Philosophy ). But this too is anticipated in the medieval period—most notably, in the nominalist philosophies of Ockham and Buridan. Ockham is the originator of the principle now known as Ockham’s Razor, and Buridan is often seen as having practised what Ockham preached. (On Ockham’s nominalism, see the sections on Ockham’s Razor and Exposition or Parsing Away Entities in the entry on William of Ockham, and on the similarities and differences between Ockham and Buridan, see the section on Language in the entry on John Buridan. Cf. also Klima 2001, xxvii f.) The combination of interpretive analysis and reductionism, in the context of the development of modern logic, may be what characterises one of the central strands in modern analytic philosophy, but the first two elements can also be found in medieval philosophy.

Annotated Bibliography, §3.1

During the Renaissance, with the rediscovery and translation of ancient Greek texts that had simply not been known in Christian Europe in medieval times, awareness gradually grew of the variety of methodologies in antiquity. This prompted widespread discussion of methodology, inspired by the very problem of how to deal with the ancient texts. Indeed, methodology itself became one of the hottest issues of all, as Renaissance thinkers fought to make sense of their great predecessors. Key figures in this debate are Petrus Ramus (1515-72) and Jacopo Zabarella (1533-89), who can be taken as representative of the two poles between which debate took place.

Ramus was a savage critic of Aristotle, and proposed to replace the subtleties and complexities of Aristotelian logic with the single method of humanist dialectic, conceived as the means of systematizing knowledge to facilitate learning and its practical use. Ramus saw Aristotle’s Organon (or logical works) as a confused body of doctrine, which it was his task to reorganise for pedagogical purposes, based on the simple principle that the general comes before the specific, the whole before the part. Utilizing Plato’s method of dichotomous division, Ramist works became famous (or infamous) for their elaborate tables and tree diagrams. Although Ramus drew the familiar distinction between discovery and demonstration, or as he called it, invention and disposition, the latter was clearly of greater importance to him than the former. According to Ramus, the discoveries had already been made by the ancients; the task was only to present them properly. (Cf. Gilbert 1960, ch. 5.)

This suggests that Ramus rejected the need for analysis, as understood in the Aristotelian tradition. But this is obscured somewhat by the fact that he takes ‘analysis’ in a different sense. In logic, Ramus writes, “analysis is the marshaling ( examen ) of the argument, enunciation, syllogism, method, in short of the whole art of logic, as is prescribed in the First Book of the Analytics ” (quoted by Ong 1958, 263). Something analogous holds in other fields. As Ong notes, “Analysis, for Ramus, is thus at root a way of operating didactically upon a text. It belongs not to an art, but to usus or exercise” (1958, 264). It was complemented by genesis , rather than ‘synthesis’ in the sense of ‘demonstration’. Having learnt one’s lessons through analysis, one could then apply those lessons: “Genesis is not the study of given examples as analysis is, but is rather the making of a new work” (quoted in Ong 1958, 264). For Ramus, then, ‘analysis’ was not a method of solving problems, and if it can be understood as a method of discovery, then it only involved learning what was already known. It is in this way that ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’ in the Aristotelian sense could be collapsed together into Ramus’s one simple method—the method of presenting knowledge already attained. It is the disregarding of the problem-solving or genuinely heuristic aspect of analysis, as conceived by Aristotle and the geometers, that Descartes was to condemn in the following century (see the supplementary section on Descartes and Analytic Geometry ).

If Ramus represents the Platonist, anti-Aristotelian pole in the debate over method, then Zabarella represents the Aristotelian pole. Central to Zabarella’s account of method was precisely Aristotle’s distinction between understanding ‘the fact’ and understanding ‘the reason why’, as articulated in the Posterior Analytics , a work on which Zabarella wrote a detailed commentary. According to Zabarella, the two methods involved here—the methodus resolutiva (analysis) and methodus compositiva (synthesis)—are to be combined in providing the joint method for natural philosophy, all other methods, such as Plato’s method of division, being inadequate to generate genuine knowledge. (Cf. Copenhaver and Schmitt 1992, 118-21; N. Jardine 1988, 689-93.) Zabarella may have failed to recognise the importance of mathematics, which was to play a decisive role in the forthcoming scientific revolution; but his idea of the double method was to influence Galileo in his inauguration of that revolution.

If there is one method of analysis that does lie at the root of subsequent methods, it is that utilised in ancient Greek geometry, but this was not appreciated until fairly late in the Renaissance. Pappus’s famous account of analysis was only translated into Latin by Federigo Commandino in 1589. At first, as had happened with other translations of Greek texts, the rendering of the Greek terms ‘ analusis ’ and ‘ sunthesis ’ by ‘ resolutio ’ and ‘ compositio ’ encouraged conflation of the various methods, but gradually, as the significance of geometrical analysis sunk in, the original Greek terms were reappropriated (in their transliterated form) to signal the more exact meaning. (Cf. Gilbert 1960, 81-3). The wider connotations of the terms ‘resolution’ and ‘composition’ remained, however, and these soon transferred themselves to the Greek terms too, an attachment that has persisted to the present day, causing confusion ever since.

Annotated Bibliography, §3.2

Copyright © 2014 by Michael Beaney < michael . beaney @ hu-berlin . de >

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The recent approaches to the study of early medieval Indian history

The recent approaches to the study of early medieval Indian history and how it challenged the hypothesis of Indian Feudalism. This essay will be looking at the different approaches to the study of early medieval Indian history from the 1950s to the latest by looking at the ideas and concepts put forward by historians like D.D. Kosambi, R. S. Sharma, B. N. S. Yadava, D.C. Sircar, Harbans Mukhia, D.N. Jha, Burton Stein, B.D. Chattopadhyaya, and Irfan Habib and how it changed over time.

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Pavan Tiwari

Presently, varied schemes of periodization of history are prevalent in historical studies, the most common being the tripartite scheme of ancient-medieval-modern periods. In European history, ancient, medieval and modern eras have remained the dominant standard epochal frontiers since the eighteenth century. In the wake of colonial rule, this scheme was applied by the European historians and orientalists to the colonized regions in Africa and Asia, including India, for historiographical purposes. The concept of medieval period in Indian history is not without problems and limitations. First, not only there are conceptual intricacies involved in it, the whole process of periodization has been politicized. Moreover, the chronological frontiers of medieval India have become conceptual barriers, which restrict historical imagination. Secondly, the medieval period in Indian history, as in European history, is often referred to as the 'Middle Ages'. It is understood as a post-classical age denoting a radical shift from ancient or classical period. Moreover, there seems to be an inherent bias in it, as it implies decline and degeneration in medieval times as opposed to the splendor and glory of the ancient era. Thirdly, despite its common usage, there is no consensus among historians as to what constitute medieval India, though the construction of ancient and modern India is also controversial. As for the ancient India, almost all historians begin it with an account of the prehistoric times followed by the Aryan invasion and the Vedic age, but the problem arises where to bring ancient India to a close and

The Book Review

isara solutions

International Research Journal Commerce arts science

The feudalism debate once play a major role in any medieval researchers, but now it's long gone, still then it relevant for any medieval scholars to understand, as it is the essence of every aspect as it related to urbanisation, trade, land grant and so on. The notion of an 'Indian feudalism' has predominated in the recent historiography of pre-colonial India. Early medieval India has been described by historian, largely as a dark phase of Indian history characterised only by political fragmentation and culture. Such a characterisation being assigned to it, this period remained by and large a neglected one in terms of historical research. We owe it completely in new research in the recent decades to have brought to light the many important and interesting aspects of this period. Fresh studies have contributed to the removal of the notion of 'dark age' attached to this period by offering fresh perspectives. Indeed the every absence of political unity that was considered a negative attribute by earlier scholars in now seen as a factor that had made possible the emergence of rich cultures of the medieval period.

Harbans Mukhia

Inaugural Lecture in the Jadu Nath Sarkar Memorial Lectures Series instituted by the Bangiya Itihas Samiti (Bengali History Society). Traces the evolving contours of medieval Indian history over the past six odd decades.

Bhupesh Singh Danu

An abstract to medieval indian history....

TULIIP BISWAS

THIS IS MY ARTICLE CUM ASSIGNMENT ON THE DEBATE OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIAN FEUDALISM.

Tanvir Anjum

Audrey Truschke

The medieval past matters deeply in modern India. The most prominent people, dynasties, and historical incidents from this period are common subjects of public discussion even today. This investment in the past is generally healthy for Indian society as people robustly debate how to best interpret their history and its possible lessons and meanings for the present. But there is an ugly side to modern India’s attraction to its younger self. History, especially during the medieval period of so-called Islamic rule, is often flattened and rewritten in modern India until it bears only the faintest resemblance to any reality of what actually happened. Moreover, the battle over India’s past increasingly begins and ends in the present. The truth of any given historical narrative is irrelevant to many, and medieval history is often brazenly altered to reflect modern day political agendas, some of them profoundly troubling.

Traces the evolving contours of medieval Indian history writing over the past six odd decades.

Manu V. Devadevan

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Guest Essay

Something Other Than Originalism Explains This Supreme Court

By Marc O. De Girolami

Mr. De Girolami is a law professor at the Catholic University of America. He is writing a book about traditionalism in constitutional law.

It is a sign of the polarizing nature of the current Supreme Court that even knowledgeable critics of its opinions make diametrically opposed arguments.

This week, for example, the former Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, in a new book, “Reading the Constitution,” chides the current court’s approach to the law, which he says fixates on the text of the Constitution and attaches too much significance to the meanings of its provisions at the time they were ratified. If only, Justice Breyer urges, justices would soften this “originalist” approach and take into account how “our values as a society evolve over time” — including by respecting the “longstanding practice” of the court and other organs of government.

Justice Breyer’s criticism follows on the heels of that of another judge, Kevin Newsom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. In a talk last month at Harvard Law School, Judge Newsom made the opposite argument: He criticized the Supreme Court, when considering matters such as handgun regulation and abortion rights, for being insufficiently faithful to originalism and overly attuned to social practices that occurred or continued after constitutional ratification. Such traditions, he warned, “have no demonstrable connection to the original, written text.”

The current Supreme Court is the object of considerable controversy and confusion. To understand its decisions properly, especially over the past three or four years, the key is to realize that each critic is half right. Justice Breyer is right that the Constitution should be interpreted, in part, in light of practices that persisted after its ratification, but wrong to think that the current court is not doing this. Judge Newsom is right that the current court is doing this, but wrong to think that it should not be.

This court is conventionally thought of as originalist. But it is often more usefully and accurately understood as what I call “ traditionalist ”: In areas of jurisprudence as various as abortion, gun rights, free speech, religious freedom and the right to confront witnesses at trial, the court — led in this respect by Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh — has indicated time and again that the meaning and law of the Constitution is often to be determined as much by enduring political and cultural practices as by the original meaning of its words.

The fact that the Supreme Court seems to be finding its way toward an open embrace of traditionalism should be broadly celebrated. To be sure, the court’s traditionalism has played a role in many decisions that have been popular with political conservatives, such as the Dobbs ruling in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade. But it is not a crudely partisan method. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama nominee, has used it in a decision for the court — and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump nominee, has expressed some skepticism about it.

Traditionalism may not be partisan, but it is political: It reflects a belief — one with no obvious party valence — that our government should strive to understand and foster the common life of most Americans. The Supreme Court has relied on traditionalism to good effect for many decades, though the justices have seldom explicitly acknowledged this. Traditionalism should be favored by all who believe that our legal system ought to be democratically responsive, concretely minded (rather than abstractly minded) and respectful of the shared values of Americans over time and throughout the country.

To get a better sense of what traditionalism is, it is useful to compare it with the two dominant approaches to constitutional interpretation in adjudication: originalism and what is often called “living constitutionalism.”

Sometimes the Constitution’s words are not clear and their application to a particular issue is also unclear. Consider the line “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” from the First Amendment. Judges face choices about how to determine what exactly Congress (and today, by extension, the states) is being forbidden from doing.

One option is to discern the meaning that those words would have had at the time of their adoption, using ratification-era dictionaries, contemporary documents by learned authorities, databases of usage, other linguistic and legal sources and perhaps activities closely confined to the founding period. That is originalism.

Another option is to understand those words by recourse to a high ideal or abstraction. For example, a judge might take that passage of the First Amendment to reflect a principle of separation of church and state and then apply that principle in light of the judge’s moral views or perceptions of contemporary moral standards in the case at hand. That is living constitutionalism.

Traditionalism offers a third option. Here, one would look at specific political and cultural practices — the activities of the organs of government and of individuals and groups across the country over long periods of time — to help determine constitutional meaning and law. For example, one might observe that the practice of legislative prayer (prayer that opens legislative assemblies) was pervasive long before and at the time of the First Amendment’s ratification, and that it continued for centuries afterward. For that reason, one would conclude that legislative prayer is unlikely to violate the prohibition against an “establishment of religion.”

The intuition is straightforward: It would be odd to think that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits legislative prayer if legislative prayer was widely practiced before, during and for centuries after ratification. Were we supposed to put a stop to a practice many showed no sign of wanting to stop, and indeed, that a great many people were eager to continue and did continue? Sometimes, yes, moral reflection or changed circumstance prompts a re-evaluation of our practices. But in general, we do what we mean and we mean what we do, and constitutional law takes its shape accordingly.

In its 2021-2022 term, traditionalism was the Supreme Court’s preferred method in a number of high-profile cases. Consider New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, a 2022 decision that concerned a New York law that strictly limited the carrying of guns outside the home. Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, held that New York’s requirement to demonstrate a “special need for self-protection” before the state would issue a handgun permit for self-defense outside the home violated the Second Amendment.

The “historical tradition” of handgun regulation, Justice Thomas argued, established the limits of the right to keep and bear arms. He noted that the practices of regulation “from before, during and even after the founding” of the United States indicated “no such tradition in the historical materials,” which suggested that a long, unbroken line of tradition, stretching from medieval England to early 20th century America, was at odds with New York’s law. The opinion granted the existence of scattered 19th-century regulations akin to New York’s, but argued that these were dwarfed by the dearth of analogous traditions of gun regulation over time and across state and local communities.

One can see a similar traditionalist approach in Dobbs, where Justice Alito, writing for the court, examined the government practices of abortion regulation before, during and after ratification of the 14th Amendment, concluding that there is no constitutional right to abortion in part because there is “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion” that persisted “from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

Likewise, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court decided in 2022 that a public school football coach who prayed on the field after games was not in violation of the Establishment Clause by holding, in an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, that this was not analogous to prayer practices long considered Establishment Clause violations. And in the unanimously decided case Houston Community College System v. Wilson, the court in 2022 held that “long settled and established practice” determined that elected bodies do not violate their members’ freedom of speech when they censure one of their members.

For some critics, the invocation of “tradition” sets off alarm bells. After all, our country looks very different today, demographically and otherwise, than it did hundreds of years ago, when political power was held by relatively few and denied to others for illegitimate reasons. These critics ask how well traditionalism deals with the contemporary realities of American democracy.

The answer to this legitimate question is: Compared to what? Consider again originalism and living constitutionalism. These approaches, different as they are from each other, are both suited to elite actors working at the nerve centers of legal and political power. Both depend on the preferences and findings of the legal professional class. Originalism privileges the centuries-old writings of illustrious figures of the founding or Reconstruction era as determined by today’s most brilliant legal historians and theorists. Living constitutionalism privileges the high ideals of today’s most prominent academics and judges.

Traditionalism, by contrast, looks to the ordinary practices of the American people across time and throughout the country. In democracies, people obey the law because they believe it is legitimate, and the law acquires legitimacy when the people believe they have had a hand, direct or indirect, in shaping it. True, the practices of “the people” may be repudiated or upended — no political tradition is perfect — but while they endure, their origin in popular sovereignty is a presumptive reason to preserve them.

Tradition, in the law and elsewhere, illuminates a basic fact of human life: We admire and want to unite ourselves with ways of being and of doing that have endured for centuries before we were born and that we hope will endure long after we are gone. At its core, this is what constitutional traditionalism is about: a desire for excellence, understood as human achievement over many generations and in many areas of life, that serves the common good of our society.

Not all traditions are worthy of preservation. Some are rightly jettisoned as the illegitimate vestiges of days gone by. But many, and perhaps most, deserve our solicitude and need a concerted defense.

Traditions can be fragile things. To the extent that a revitalized practice of constitutional interpretation is possible, it will depend on determining the content of the Constitution with an eye to their sustenance and restoration.

Marc O. De Girolami ( @MarcODeGirolami ) is a law professor at the Catholic University of America, where he is a co-director of the Center for Law and the Human Person.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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In Memoriam: Marjorie Perloff (1931–2024)

The University of Chicago Press mourns the passing of Marjorie Perloff, a long-time Press author and advisor. The following obituary was prepared by her family with the assistance of Charles Bernstein and the Press.

One of the most influential American literary critics and scholars of modern and contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff died at her home in Pacific Palisades (Los Angeles), California, on March 24, according to her daughters, Carey and Nancy Perloff. 

Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz in Vienna on September 28, 1931, into a prominent intellectual Jewish family. She and her family fled Vienna on March 15, 1938, two days after the Anschluss. This escape, and their journey to America, is recounted in The Vienna Paradox (2003). Perloff’s vast knowledge of European literature, not only in her native German but also French, Italian, and Russian, combined with her love of American culture and the American avant-garde, made her a seminal critic and a beacon for students of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. 

Perloff started her career relatively late in her life.  At twenty-one, she married cardiologist Joseph Perloff (1924–2014), who became a renowned physician and the Streisand and American Heart Association professor at UCLA.  She had two children, Nancy and Carey, in her mid-twenties. Her first job was at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, writing subtitles for movies. After the family moved to Washington, DC, she earned an MA in English literature at Catholic University. Perloff relished her time at Catholic University, finding it to be a rigorous and intellectually stimulating, and she returned to CU in 1965 to get her PhD with a dissertation on “Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats” (published as a book in 1970). Perloff was offered a full-time job by CU, where she taught from 1966 to 1971. She went on to teach at the University of Maryland from 1971 to 1976 and at the University of Southern California from 1979 to 1986.

Perloff’s writing career took off with the first book on the poetry of Frank O’Hara, one of the great figures of the 50s and 60s, who, along with John Ashbery, was part of the “New York School.” Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters” (1977) secured Perloff’s status as a major voice in the contemporary poetry scene and introduced her as an influential critic of the visual arts, concrete poetry, book art, conceptual art, and the intersection of language and visual culture. Her O’Hara book was followed by The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981) , which reevaluated post-war European and American poetry. Her work over the years on John Cage, Robert Smithson, Gertrude Stein, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Ashbery, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Johanna Drucker, David Antin, and numerous other artists proved groundbreaking. She also wrote trenchant criticism on Samuel Beckett. 

Perloff’s academic career culminated in her move to Stanford University in 1986 and appointment in 1990 as the Sadie Patek Dernham Professor of Humanities. At Stanford she taught classes on everything from Pinter and Beckett to the work of Language poets such as Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein to classes on Joyce and Proust, as well as mentoring students who went on to become significant critics and scholars. Perloff also organized an important conference on and celebration of the work of Merce Cunningham and John Cage.  

Perloff became an internationally sought-after speaker and scholar with a vast knowledge of post-war literature and art, and ability to see the bigger trends that have moved culture forward. In addition to her many books, Perloff wrote scores of reviews for small magazines and scholarly publications. These reviews have been collected as Circling the Canon (two volumes, 2019). She was a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement   In 2006, Perloff served as president of the Modern Language Association. In 1997, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, she was inducted into the American Philosophical Society. Several of her many interviews have been collected in Poetics in a New Key  (2014). Perloff was also active in China, where her work was widely known and translated. In 2011 she co-founded the Chinese/American Association of Poetry and Poetics; she remained president at the time of her death. Perloff frequently lectured in China. In 2021, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art and made an Austrian citizen.  

Perloff was a maverick, refusing to go along with the latest academic trends or to see herself as disadvantaged by her status as a woman, a Jew, a mother, or a scholar without an Ivy League degree. Instead, her outsider status gave her a unique lens on literary movements. She overturned views on T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other canonized artists, always returning to her close reading and textual analysis. Perloff was fascinated by Futurism and wrote the landmark study The Futurist Moment (1986), dedicated to the magical “defamiliarization” that occurred in Russia between the wars and lifted the modernist project into an experimental sphere that left naturalism and the lyric behind. That book began her long association with the University of Chicago Press, which published it and most of her subsequent books. Her exploration of poetry and technology continued with Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media  (1992).  

Toward the end of her career, Perloff returned to the literature of her childhood, exploring the writers of the Austrian diaspora in Edge of Irony (2016),a book that brought together Paul Celan, Joseph Roth, and Karl Kraus to reveal how their own outsider status within the Hapsburg Empire gave these writers a mordant wit and despairing irony.  

Throughout this later period Perloff became more and more fascinated by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular his groundbreaking idea that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Tracing Wittgenstein’s influence on artists as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Susan Howe, and Marcel Duchamp, Perloff opened readers’ eyes to the vast energy of the modernist project. During the COVID pandemic, Perloff translated into English Wittgenstein’s secret notebooks, written in code during WW I (her edition was published as Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 in 2022). This brought her into close contact with Damion Searls, whose 2024 translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus includes an introduction by Perloff.  

What distinguishes her writings is Perloff’s insatiable curiosity, roving intelligence, linguistic dexterity, and irrepressible wit. She never took given wisdom as gospel; she was forever questioning why and how certain literary movements had come to be and what would prove to be lasting. Perloff analyzed work she loved and championed artists she felt others had ignored or misunderstood.  

Perloff is survived by her daughters Carey and Nancy, their husbands Anthony Giles and Robert Lempert,   and her grandchildren Alexandra, Ben, and Nicholas. Carey, a playwright and theater director, was the long-time Artistic Director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Nancy is a curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the author of books on the Russian avant-garde, concrete poetry, and the circle of Erik Satie. Perloff was a passionate and devoted mother and grandmother.  

Perloff leaves behind friends across the globe, from China to Israel, to whom she was devoted and whom she visited often in her travels and lectures around the world. Her books have been translated into dozens of languages, and her hundreds of articles and essays continue to be reprinted and devoured by new generations of readers. Perhaps it is Frank O’Hara who summed up her life force: she was filled with “the grace to be born and live as variously as possible.”