ResoluteReader

Sunday, July 16, 2023

The Book of Margery Kempe

Reading Janina Ramirez's excellent Femina recently I was reminded that I had a copy of The Book of Margery Kempe on my shelves. Margery Kempe's book is variously described as the first autobiography and the a "spiritual autobiography" that is crucially important for understanding the Middle Ages.

There is no doubt that the book is fascinating and important. It is an account of the life of Margery Kempe dictated to various scribes towards the end of her life. It details her extraordinary pilgrimages and journies to Rome and the Holy Land, as well as eastward from Danzig. It also tells us a little about her own life, though nothing in detail. Readers looking for an account of Middle Age life will not find it her, though you will read much about her own thoughts and ideas, framing the lives of women of the era.

Kempe was an incredible woman. She lived in Lynn in Norfolk (Now King's Lynn) and was the daughter of a wealthy and influential local merchant who was a longstanding Member of Parliament. She was born about 1373 and lived to the late 1430s. For much of her life she suffered from ill health and, what we would likely today term Mental Distress. The latter manifested itself through Kempe's belief that she was in direct personal communication with Jesus and other figures including Jesus's mother Mary and his Grandmother. Kempe engaged in extended dialogue with these figures, particularly Jesus, about her life and sin, and the lives of those around her. She was also prone to loud, distressing and extended periods of crying and wailing - often to the distress of those around her.

Modern commentators often spend time analysing what these symptoms might mean. I am not a medical or Mental Health professional and would not attempt to make those diagnoses. To me, what is most interesting is how Kempe experienced these and interpreted them. To many people around her she was seen as unwell. But not all. Many other people accepted her experiences as religious. Kempe was not seen as a prophet, but she was understood as holy by many people and her behaviour often won her friends and supporters. Frequently during her pilgrimages she was given money by others to help her, and to pray for them. Sometimes these were senior and influential members of the clergy. Often she gave that money away.

There were those who saw her behaviour as being a mark of mental distress or often that she had been possessed by the devil. Unsurprisingly, her symptoms were interpreted through the prism of religion - even by those who were critical of her.

People will read The Book of Margery Kempe, hoping for direct insights into ordinary life in her times. Finding that is not easy - though there are some fascinating bits about the role of women, and Kempe's own struggles with her sexuality and gender. The dialog with her husband about chastity, and the marital rape that takes place beforehand as he wants to continue to have sex with her, as she has decided that she would rather be chaste is often discussed. But less so are her fears of rape and assault while on her travels and the comfort she receives from her discussions with Jesus that he will protect her. These give the reader some insight into the fears of women at the time. I was also struck by the way she finds kindness - especially among "Saracens" while travelling in the Holy Land. She clearly was a woman who was able to communicate and find friendship - even though her behaviour often led some companions to decry and abandon her.

As much of the book is reported discussions between Kempe and Jesus, it is not an easy read without much religious background. Nonetheless we are left with an interesting insight into spiritual belief and behaviour.

Friday, July 14, 2023

Donella H. Meadows & others - The Limits to Growth

Growth, and its counterpart, degrowth, have become hot topics for activists and theoreticians concerned about capitalism's destruction of the world and its people. The idea that we need to move away from an economic system based on accumulation of capital toward one that has a more sustainable relationship with nature is attractive. I have dealt elsewhere with the degrowth concept, and will produce more on that. But in researching the topic I wanted to read the book that is often seen as the grandparent of these current debates. The Limits to Growth was published in 1972 and came out of a group of thinkers known as The Club of Rome. It was enormously popular, influential and has spawned a number of updates and similar books in the fifty years since its publication. It is also a theoretical mess.

The book's authors explain that "The team examined the five basic factors that determine, and therefore, ultimately limit, growth on this planet-population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production". They conclude:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.

The research is based on the then, relatively new, idea of computer modelling, something the researchers place great faith in. The computers of the era were of course much less powerful than modern technology, and this naturally limited the scope of the models themselves, nonetheless the team were proud of their achievements:

Since ours is a formal, or mathematical, model it also has two important advantages over mental models. First, every assumption we make is written in a precise form so that it is open to inspection and criticism by all. Second, after the assumptions have been scrutinized, discussed, and revised to agree with our best current knowledge, their implications for the future behavior of the world system can be traced without error by a computer, no matter how complicated they become.

With the development of Computer Science also came cautionary arguments, and one of the best known of these was GIGO - "Garbage In, Garbage Out". In other words, your model is only as good as the data and assumptions that it rests upon. In the case of The Limits to Growth, the problem with the book comes down to the assumptions made in the modelling, and in particular the authors' focus on the two biggest drivers of "growth" in their view - capital and population.

As such the models themselves are not particularly at fault, and tend to show what you might expect. Industrial economies rely on the availability of natural resources and labour, and when these are undermined by shortages or other effects (such as pollution affecting health) the system tends to go into crisis. Much of the book's diagrams consists of models that demonstrate things like this:

Thus population and capital, driven by exponential growth, not only reach their limits, but temporarily shoot beyond them before the rest of the system, with its inherent delays, reacts to stop growth. Pollution generated in exponentially increasing amounts can rise past the danger point, because the danger point is first perceived years after the offending pollution was released. A rapidly growing industrial system can build up a capital base dependent on a given resource and then discover that the exponentially shrinking resource reserves cannot support it. Because of delays in the age structure, a population will continue to grow for as long as 70 years, even after average fertility has dropped below the replacement level (an average of two children for each married couple).

Modern readers might be amused at the old-fashioned diagrams. But readers then were very impressed. The computer outputs proved that a system based on growth would go into crisis and this would have a severe impact on the world unless stringent and urgent action was taken to arrest this growth. Even then, the world hung in the balance.

The data did draw some interesting conclusions. They noted, for instance, that growth increased inequality. That technological innovation was not the answer:

it is sufficient to recognize that no new technology is spontaneous or without cost. The factories and raw materials to produce synthetic food, the equipment and energy to purify sea water must all come from the physical world system.

and the very real limits there were to the system which was "being pushed toward its limit-the depletion of the earth's nonrenewable resources."

So what's the problem? The problem is the model is based on two key drivers of growth "population and capital" (as in, for instance, "we are interested only in the broad behavior modes of the population-capital system."). The authors don't really have a concept of growth as fundamental to the capitalist system - unlike the best degrowth thinkers today. Instead they tend to see capital growth as an offshoot of the system, though their real argument is that everything is derived from population growth. In effect, this makes the book essentially a 1970s computer powered modelling of Malthusianism. There is nothing here to link the problem of (say) unsustainable resource use to an economic system based on the accumulation of capital. It is worth noting here that it is written in the 1970s so the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries also suffer from this problem. The authors' tend to see these as some form of socialist society, but they too were governed by accumulation through their competition with the capitalist west. The authors of The Limits to Growth however don't dwell on these details - rather focusing on growth as being separate to the global economic system.

So the book is essentially Malthusian:

Some pollutants are obviously directly related to population growth (or agricultural activity, which is related to population growth). Others are more closely related to the growth of industry and advances in technology. Most pollutants in the complicated world system are influenced in some way by both the population and the industrialization positive feedback loops.

The problem then is that the authors have no way to argue against growth, because they see it as arising out of the nature of people. They recognise that population growth can level off, but that it won't happen fast enough, and thus see solutions as arising out of restricting population levels and challenging the growth of capital - though how this can happen in a system where capitalists are "compelled" [Marx] to accumulate capital is not addressed at all. In fact, the writers explicitly argue that there will be no fundamental change in their models, what they call the "standard run":

Let us begin by assuming that there will be in the future no great changes in human. values nor in the functioning of the global population-capital system as it has operated for the last one hundred years.

In other words, not only is the data input into the model flawed, the model itself assumes that you cannot change the system. But the problem, as millions of people currently understand, is the system - a system that drives growth. While The Limits to Growth is striking because it identifies that serious thought was given in the 1970s to the looming ecological and resource crisis, its flawed approach failed to identify the problem. Thus a generation of people, including millions of readers, were given an incorrect explanation for the coming crisis. Neo-Malthusianism blamed the masses and diverted attention from the real issue - the accumulation of capital. Here is not the place for me to critique Malthus again, I've done that elsewhere. But while The Limits to Growth has some insights - not least in its critique of what we would now call ecomodernism, or those who put their faith in technological development, its Computer driven Malthusian arguments are of no real use. GIGO.

Thursday, July 06, 2023

Janina Ramirez - Femina

I expected Janina Ramirez's book Femina, subtitled "A new history of the Middle Ages, through the women written out of it" just to be a collection of portraits of individual women. While that would have been interesting enough in and of itself, Femina is much more than this. What Ramirez does is to look at the Middle Ages, not simply by telling the story of various women, but also by discussing issues like gender, sexuality and labour within wider contexts. It makes for a fascinating read.

In the preface Ramirez explains that she wants to "show... that there are so many more ways to approach history now". Surprisingly she begins, not in the Middle Ages, but in the 20th century and Emily Wilding Davison, the Suffragette who was killed at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Davison was an accomplished medievalist who took inspiration from individuals from history and Ramirez explains that she seeks to develop this much further: "we need a new relationship with the past, one which we can all feel a part of".

The women discussed in Femina range from some who are already well known, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Margery Kempe, to anonymous individuals such as the women who made the Bayeux Tapestry and the Birka Warrior Woman, a Viking who was found buried with arms and armour. The latter is a fascinating study, not least because it is a massive challenge to many who thought Viking warriors must surely all be male. Ramirez argues that this burial "shows us a Viking world connected across thousands of miles; a city teeming with ideas and influences; a cosmopolitan, complex and fascinating environment that challenges traditional representations of Vikings". She continues:

A ninth-century Scandinavian trading town like Birka would be home to all manner of people from all types of backgrounds. it's likely we'd find women who had faced conflicts and threats, then developed the means to defend themselves in response. There is no single narrative, and the skeleton in grave Bj581 reminds us not to look for a collective 'woman' of the past, but instead to examine individuals, and what they can tell us about the particular time and place they lived in.

It is an important point, because as Ramirez highlights, women in the Middle Ages were not all the same. Their roles, lives and experiences depended on their class, where they lived and the work they did. But we must also be wary of understanding our subjects only through the lens of our own era. Ramirez makes this point well with her discussion of Æthelflæd a powerful figure in late 9th and early 10th century Mercia. Æthelflæd's "story" was told, and retold. A twelfth century poem included the lines, "A man in valour, though a woman in your name / Your warlike hosts by nature you obeyed / Conquered over both, though born by sex a maid." The Normans saw her as a "warrior woman who deserved fame", but her reputation was lost in favour of King Alfred her father, as later generations preferred to remember his male role. As Ramirez says,

She was a victim not of medieval prejudice, but of modern attitudes towards female leadership. Seeing her as her contemporaries did shows us that women could wield influence, and their voices, now written out of the records, can still be heard.

Ramirez asks us to remember her as "Æthelflæd the Great". As the account of Æthelflæd shows, we should be wary of seeing the Middle Ages as contemporary prejudice implies. Women were often, though not always, celebrated, encouraged and supported. Ramirez makes this point about Hildegard of Bingen who "broke gender barriers, but the encouragement from the men around her suggests we should not only be reviewing our understanding of how women thought and felt in the twelfth century; we should also be turning our attention to the way we view the men of this time." It is a theme of this book that modern prejudices obscure a clear understanding of both women and the wider society they inhabited.

High class women, are more likely to make it into records that survive into modern times, or be buried, like the Viking warrior, in graves that highlight their wealth and power. Even so, picking women out in the historical and archaeological record is difficult. It means that the sections of the chapters were Ramirez explores how we know about these women are important. But this book does not neglect the lower orders. In addition, while the focus is very much on what we would now call Europe, Ramirez also explores how modern research offer insights into a Middle Age world that is significantly more connected than usually thought. For instance, we learn that of the London plague victims whose DNA was studied, 29 percent "were classified as Asian, African or dual heritage. Of these, four women and three men had black African ancestry. One woman had black African/Asian ancestry, but the evidence from her teeth and bones revealed she had grown up in Britain". In other words, Ramirez argues, if you were in medieval London "you could expect to encounter a similarly diverse range of people" as you would today.

This section of the book also looks at one example of someone who would likely call themselves transgender today, though as Ramirez points out, "retrospectively applying terms that have only recently been defined" is problematic. This woman, Eleanor Rykener, worked as a sex worker and a seamstress, and is one of the few examples we have of someone who was gender nonconformist in the era and whose trial is the only example of a trial of someone that documents "same-sex intercourse". Ramirez explains though that the records show that it was "dishonesty in trading, breaking of curfew... etc.. that were of greater concern... than their gender nonconformity". While only a short part of the book, the chapter on race and gender is perhaps the most fascinating of the whole work.

Femina takes it name from the books that were written by woman and labelled heretical by the Church. It is a profoundly interesting, insightful and readable account - that doesn't simply tells us the forgotten stories of women in the Middle Ages, but locates them in their times and explores how our own present is a "Distant Mirror" with which we can understand or misunderstand the past. It's an excellent work.

Tuesday, July 04, 2023

John Dickson Carr - The Eight of Swords

The Eight of Swords is the third of the Dr. Fell series of detective stories written by John Dickson Carr beginning in the 1930s. It begins with Fell returning from America and immediately becoming sucked into representing the Metropolitan Police at an investigation into a Country House murder. His investigation is hampered by an overly enthusiastic, and eccentric, bishop who is convinced he is an expert detective. The murder victim is an oddly named, Septimus Depping who turns out to be anything but the wealthy owner of the country house.

Unfortunately the book suffers from far too many supporting characters and an overly complicated investigation. As is his want, and tradition dictates, Fell does not reveal his insights until the end (though on occasion he does try, only to be interrupted). The story has a secret passage, midnight shootings, a tense scene in a village pub and a red herring tarot card. All these things ought to make for a cracking read, but I found myself bored and confused by the meandering story and unsatisfied by the outcomes. Why did the bishop slide down the bannisters? One for the fans.

Related Reviews

Carr - Hag's Nook
Carr - The Mad Hatter Mystery
Carr - The Hollow Man

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Bob Scribner & Gerhard Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints

This collection of essays stands out among the plethora of books to come out of the 450th anniversary of the German Peasant War in 1975. As I have noted in other reviews of books on this topic, there was very much a dividing line between historians of East and West around interpretations of events of 1524/5. This centred on the usefulness or not of the Marxist framework and in particular the interpretation of Friedrich Engels, which gave rise to the thesis that 1525 saw an "early bourgeois revolution".

At the time there was a lack of accessibility to historian's work from East of the Berlin Wall. This collection provided a small sample among work from Western historians. The editors are careful though to argue that the collection should not "be judged by the standard of whether it contributes any definitive judgements on the Peasant War... rather we wish it to stimulate discussion on its relation to wider problems of historiography." Their introduction is also a useful overview of contemporary scholarship on the Peasant War.

What of the collection itself. All of the essays in it contain useful nuggets. Some of them cover rarer aspects of the period. Heide Wunder's article on The Mentality of Rebellious Peasants takes as its case study events in Samland. Then part of Germany and now part of the greater Russia, it was the most separate part of the rebellion in time and space. Sadly the author includes little detail of the struggle in this location, preferring to focus on the interaction between Prussian peasant, German peasant and local nobles. That said it is an interesting engagement.

Several essays stand out for their discussion of specifics of the War. I was much taken by Siegfried Hoyer's account of Arms and Military organisation of the Peasants. One fascinating aspect to this was the way that the rebels organised rotations to ensure that some peasants could return home to work on the land/harvest etc, but it was in turn a weakness. As Hoyer explains:

This system was dictated by the role of each peasant in production, and so probably could not be avoided. There is no doubt that individuals could gain little military experience by this short-term rotation. This defect, grounded in the historical situation, was first overcome during the later bourgeois revolutions, when the mass of the popular armies were composed of the urban classes.

Another excellent study by Siegfried Hoyer looks in detail at a neglected (and anonymous) pamphlet that he describes as one of the "very few" from the "left wing of the movement": To the Assembly of common peasantry who have angrily and defiantly risen up in Upper Germany and many other places. Continuing the tradition of Reformation and Peasant War pamphlets having very long titles, this one is a defence of the right to rebel and an argument for the rebellion. Sadly it is not printed here, but extracts can be found in Tom Scott and Bob Scribner's collection of documents. Hoyer concludes that the pamphlet is not revolutionary as its author "polemicised against a fundamental overthrow of feudal property", but that the demands place the pamphlet close to the most radical thinkers. Peter Blickle discusses his "Common Man" thesis of revolution. Heiko Oberman offers a interesting discussion of how the War has been interpreted, even in its immediate aftermath, though he points out that the description "War" is an "overdramatisation that distorts our historical perspective and tends to isolate the events of 1525". He concludes:

The main thrust of present research is oriented towards economic and social history, hence providing an insight into a large number of elements that go into the making of history. Yet this should not tempt us to permit biblical ideas, Christian apocalyptic ferment and the horizon of religious expectation on the part of the rebels to be relegated to the background, since it is only through these means that the birth and spread of the Peasants War are to be understood.

It's a nuanced view and one that these articles taken together do justice to, even if the various authors tend to come down on one specific emphasis or the other. By including "Marxist" historians from the former Eastern bloc in the collection, those of us who class themselves as Marxists today have an opportunity to engage with how those thinkers approached historical questions. This is epitomised perhaps by Max Steinmetz's Theses on the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, which tries (only part successfully) to frame the War in Marxist terms. He quotes from Lenin, Stalin and Engels to bolster his theses, and makes some interesting points:

An increasingly sharpening of class conflict was the necessary outcome of this ever more apparent clash between the development of the material forces of production within society and the traditional relations of production, which had long since become shackles of productive forces, rather than forms of their development.

He also notes that the "second serfdom" in Germany helped enable capitalist development, despite hampering the development of a class of wage labourers as happened in England. While this can come across as dogmatic, Steinmetz does not ignore the ideological context of the Reformation, meaning that while his contribution reads somewhat stilted as a list of "theses" it can encourage further thought about the Bourgeois Revolution in the context of the 16th century. Certainly a collection of essays to be read and inspire further debate.

Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective

Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods

Bax - The Peasants War in Germany

Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

Baylor - The German Reformation & the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents

Friday, June 23, 2023

David Grann - Killers of the Flower Moon

Soon to be a major film release, Killers of the Flower Moon is a remarkable journalistic investigation into the serial killing of Native American people in the 1920s. The Osage people in Oklahoma had been given reservation lands, but the later discovery of oil made them the richest people per capita anywhere in the world.

The Osage wealth was enormous, and pictures of Osage families with cars, fancy clothing and so on, angered and bemused, in equal measure, White America. Native Americans were not supposed to be well off, never mind extraordinary rich. However their wealth was not their own. The US government ensured that Osage's were appointed Guardians who controlled whether or not the Osage could spend, and being in control of such wealth made them rich too. It is clear that a whole industry arose to leech off the Osage - shopkeepers sold goods and enormously inflated prices, a not particularly hidden criminal underground ensured that Guardianships fell into the hands of a small number of people, and, most shockingly, white people got themselves embedded into Osage families through marriage.

Chad E. Pearson's recent book Capital's Terrorists looked at the centrality of violence to ruling class attempts to maximise profits in the United States in the 19th century. This easy recourse to violence is also clear in the Osage case, because what takes place is the systematic murder of individual Osage people in order to concentrate wealth into the hands of particular family members through inheritance. These people, who happened to be married to whites, could then be stripped of their wealth.

As the number of brutal murders grew, it became clear that most law enforcement officials were too corrupt to identify the killers. Which is why the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) became involved. J.Edgar Hoover was keen to ensure that the BoI recovered from earlier problems - including corruption of its own - and threw resources and agents into solving the Oklahoma murders. There is no doubt that the agents involved were dedicated and principled individuals, particularly Tom White. Grann details the investigations and the difficulties the agents had in getting convictions.

This is not the place to discuss the convictions. Readers will likely want to learn that as they read the book. Grann writes well and the book is a compelling true life "whodunnit". But I did want to briefly note problems with it.

The book lacks context. In particular there is no real discussion of the genocidal policies of the United States government against Native American people. This is the background that enables us to understand why whole communities could treat the Osage as they did - to the brutal violent conclusion. Secondly, there is a tendency to depict the US government itself and particularly the FBI as the arbitrators of freedom, law and democracy. There's no doubt that some agents, White for instance, did their best to solve the crimes and stand up for the Osage people's rights. But the FBI, and certainly not Hoover, were and are not the defenders of freedom that they are portrayed at here. Hoover's record, for instance, in overseeing the persecution of left-wingers etc is well known and was a central part of the FBI's role.

David Grann's book essentially treats the killings as a violent detective Western. As such it is an enjoyable read. But it doesn't really get to the heart of the story that he draws out, which is about a country predicated on racism and violence. Telling this story gives an insight into another great crime, but doesn't really tell us anything about why.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
Pearson - Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen & Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Cronon - Changes in the Land
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada

Monday, June 19, 2023

Terry Pratchett - Thief of Time

Thief of Time is Terry Pratchett's 26th Discworld novel, and unfortunately I think it is one of the weaker of the books from the mid part of the stories. It is a Death novel, though Death is not in it a great deal, playing more of a side-character to the main arc. This is one of the reasons I feel the story is a little shallow and bity.

Thief of Time is the story of how the Auditors are defeated. These grey men like things simple and ordered. They like to count and tally. They're like the ultimately dangerous accountants. They heat the chaos and unpredictability of human life. Their plan to destroy life involves creating a clock that will enable the end of the universe - being built, inevitably, in Ankh Morpak.

Opposed to this is Lu-Tze and his apprentice from the History Monks, whose job is to keep history in roughly the right order. They take time from one thing to another to ensure it all balances out, as everyone is always borrowing, stealing, forgetting and wasting time. Even the lesser of Pratchett's novels have some brilliant moments and he excels himself here with one fantastic pun - the spinning devices that the monks store time on are called procrastinators.

Lu-Tze's James Bond like adventure to save the universe doesn't quite work - the best part of the story is how the Auditors sabotage themselves by becoming slightly human and indulging in a few of our quirks. Thief of Time didn't work for me this time - perhaps it has dated far more than other Discworld books, though it has its moments and if you like Pratchett's other books it shouldn't be skipped.

Related Reviews

Pratchett - Snuff
Pratchett - Moving Pictures
Pratchett - Unseen Academicals
Pratchett - Wintersmith