That is clearly of somewhat limited interest (others might be moved to substitute ‘no interest’); except for the fact that I sometimes feel moved to write about what I have been reading. As when, a few days ago, I commended Derek Jarman’s wonderful Modern Nature. At some point soon I will also be compelled to heap praise on Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.
Before that, however, I need to discuss a far more annoying book. The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the 14th Century (2009) by Ian Mortimer has received some very good reviews. On the front cover the critic Alison Weir calls it ‘Amazing’ while the back bristles with longer puffs from the Literary Review, the Telegraph and the Guardian – including one from the otherwise-marvellous Kathryn Hughes.
So why did I find it so annoying? Well, a little of my niggledness is caused by the extreme claims being made for his method. It is “(a) radical new approach (which) turns our entire understanding of history upside-down” according, again to the blurb. Well, no it isn’t. What the book does is perfectly OK – he tries to use historical materials (Mortimer is a professional historian) – to show what it would have been like to live in 14th Century England. His conceit is that you have travelled back in time to the period, so he can concentrate on those elements that seem truly different – those which would strike you most strongly (and which might get you into trouble if you got them wrong). He is happy to share the most unpleasant details (he begins with the idea that the stream near every village is called the Shitbrook), and some of his descriptions do seem quite vivid. But nothing more than that.
And every so often, despite quite a large apparatus of references and bibliography, he drops in a passage where his claims seem to be based on the purely imaginary.
For example, on p.247 while discussing how much quieter the medieval period is, he writes:
As a result of this comparative quiet, people listen differently. They hear with greater clarity. When a dog barks, they can recognize whose dog it is. They are more sensitive to voices. And above all else, they listen intently to music.No supporting material, no evidence. Just pure assertion. Elsewhere he seems to me to mishandle his evidence. On p.91, in a section called “Greeting People” he provides a longish quotation from a French-English dialogue book containing a number of phrases to be used in greeting people. Here is some of it:
Sire, God give you good day
….
Fellow or friend, ye be welcome
What do ye? How is it with you? Where have ye been so long?
I have been long out of the country.
In what country?
Sire that should be overmuch for to tell, but if you please, anything that I may do, command it me as to him that gladly shall I do it.
Sire, grammercy of your courteous words and of your good will.
God reward you.
For Mortimer, this is taken as true and accurate and obvious. He seems to have little sense that this dialogue:
- might be an exhortation for people to do more than they normally do on meeting,
- that if true it may be notably class-based, or
- would not be used by those who knew each other well - who would not speak like this.
All of which to me seem possibilities. He takes it at face-value, and, I think, incorrectly as a result.
But the biggest problem I have with the book is that he neglects to mention an earlier attempt to put a modern-day reader ‘into’ the medieval mindset. C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature – his last published book.
Admittedly, Lewis is attempting something subtly different: he is attempting to capture the medieval ‘Model’ – the ideas, beliefs and cast of mind – that seem a given to medieval writers of all kinds – and by extension to the early modern period also. Mortimer’s focus is more on lived experience and the vernacular. But they are related, I feel, and Mortimer gives no indication that he knows the Lewis. A lacunae at the very least.
Lewis’s book is also unquestionably the better. Oh, it certainly has its own weaknesses. For Lewis, it is not necessary to describe Ptolemy’s Almagest “because a French translation exists”. He can write:
Plato’s Republic, as everyone knows, ends with an account of the after-life, put into the mouth of one Er the Armenion who had returned from the dead.
As everyone knows? His ideal elite imagined audience is not the same as Mortimer’s – and it may I think have dwindled somewhat since the early sixties. But although I don’t know my Plato, I still enjoy him.
And he can be truly marvelous. Speaking of the medieval picture of the heavens he writes:
These facts are in themselves curiosities of mediocre interest. They become valuable only in so far as they enable us to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realizing how such a universe must have affected those who believed in it. The recipe for such realisation is not the study of books. You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place: movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this…. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest – trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building.
(p.98-99)
And as we find out later, one that is very much inhabited.
OK, so Lewis also makes the bold unsupported assertion; his references are scanty; he’s writing for an elite. I disagree with some of his claims. And later on in the book, towards the end, he name checks Tolkien and science fiction, I think just because he can. But he is so much more fun than Mortimer, and he really does make his period come alive.
So if you've been reading the Mortimer book with anything like pleasure, fine. But do have a look at the Discarded Image - it truly is smashing.
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