Coronations, installations and Inszenierung by minions

Last year, a few weeks after the Coronation of Charles III, I attended an installation service at our church, when our new vicar formally took up her post. It was led by our local bishop, Jane, Bishop of Hertford, and I also attended her, serving as the bishop’s chaplain for the occasion. This didn’t involve any theological duties, as with a permanent bishop’s chaplain, though I did get to wear a cassock..

Instead, I was responsible for the liturgical objects that Jane needed: bringing and taking away her mitre and crosier and the anointing chrism, holding her service sheet when she needed both hands for blessing, and that sort of thing.

I’ve taken part in many different types of church service over the years and I’ve even led a few of them. But this was a different experience, concentrating less on the service itself or even my specific part in it, than on a single person. For that evening I was the Bishop of Hertford’s minion, coming back repeatedly to the question: what does the bishop need to do? What does she need me to do?

It was nowhere near as complicated a service as a royal coronation or funeral, but it was still a complicated and unfamiliar service, with dozens of people needing to play their specific role within it. Seeing such a service from the inside, as it were, got me thinking in a different way about medieval rituals.

There’s a German term, of course, for organizing such rituals: Inszenierung. It means staging, but it’s more than that, involving the whole organizing and putting on of a ceremonial event. I’ve always tended to understand it in terms of negotiations between the key players: who is going to sit where? Who is going to submit ritually to whom and with what words/gestures? It’s being part of the installation service that has got me thinking in a new way about the role of subordinates in such ceremonies.

The point about coronations, installations and similar ceremonies is that they’re not familiar rituals, but occasional ones, often adapted from previous models for a particular set of circumstances. We had a rehearsal for our installation the previous day and I’m sure there were many for the Coronation, (although there was only a single chaotic rehearsal for Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral). But it’s very hard to get everyone together at one time: we didn’t have Bishop Jane present for the rehearsal or many of the civic dignitaries involved.

We share these problems, I’m sure with those planning medieval ceremonies, but we also had the great advantage of printed orders of service, containing the whole of the service. Medieval liturgical books, even for ordinary services, don’t normally work like that: they contain only the words for your particular role in the service and little detail about liturgical routine. I find it hard to imagine that detailed overall orders for one-off ceremonies would have been widely available. So how did participants in medieval rituals bridge those gaps and deal with under rehearsed dignitaries, and the lack of detailed service orders? I suspect they dealt with it via a whole array of minions like me.

Minions, after all, can be rehearsed, can be expected to practice and memorise series of actions and words. I was unused to concentrating on the needs of a single person, but courts have always been full of people to whom this was second nature: servants. They were trained to observe what their superiors were doing and needed, to respond rapidly to unexpected situations and to take orders verbally or by gestures from a master of ceremonies or the like. Whenever there was a ritual of deditio (submission) or similar, they would have been the ones nudging the submitter to the correct spot and helping them up afterwards if necessary or wiping the excess oil off someone who’s just been anointed and handing them their surplice/cloak to put back on. Such servants are unlikely to have been mentioned by medieval sources, or highlighted in footage of modern rituals, but if we’re thinking of Inszenierung in its full sense, we probably do need to remember the key role of all the minions involved.

Carolingian reform: charismatic bureaucracy and instrumental rationality

This is my third post (here are the first and second) in a series looking at Carolingian reform and church institutions, inspired by the Brides of Christ conference I attended earlier in 2023 and also by several recent books I’ve read

Rethinking the Carolingian Reforms/Rethinking Authority in the Carolingian Empire/A Sacred Kingdom

The conference reminded me of the existence of a late antique and early medieval world in which the overwhelming need for “reform”, for changing long-established Christian practices, wasn’t felt.  There were some limited institutional innovations, and churchmen thought about mission and about how to ensure correct faith and practice, but there wasn’t the same drive for change that can be seen under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, which I discussed in my second post.

In my paper at the Brides conference discussing Carolingian reform, I used the term “charismatic bureaucracy” to express something of what I’m trying to get at about the nature of that reform, but that now strikes me as insufficient. In this post I want to explain in more depth what I think is so weird about the changes in the church under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious

Carolingian liquid modernity

Following the Brides of Christ conference I attended this spring, I’m still trying to think about the Carolingian church in terms of institutional change. I’ve just been reading Rethinking the Carolingian Reforms (edited by Arthur Westwell, Ingrid Rembold and Carine van Rhijn), which provides a number of fresh angles on “reform” and a very handy introduction by Carine in which she points out that the paradigms reflected by the terms “renaissance”,  “reform” and even “correctio” may cause us to miss aspects of changes made to the Carolingian church.

But I was brought up short by a couple of sentences Carine wrote (p. 27):

One does not need anachronistic concepts of reform to understand what moved authors to write, preachers to preach or, for that matter, kings to rule: trying to improve, to change for the better, was part and parcel of the kind of responsibility just outlined. Whether running a school, managing a diocese or ruling over a kingdom, ‘making things better’ was – and is! – part of the responsibilities that come with the office.

This sparked an immediate connection with something else I’ve been reading recently: Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity talking about how late twentieth-century post-industrial society involves constant changes to institutions and thus requires constant self-reinvention and improvement by individuals. There is no longer the idea that a final utopia can be built on this earth (though I’m not convinced that the Carolingians really believed the City of God could be established on earth, either).

Is there a dignity shortage in the modern world?

A lot of modern political discussions, especially about cultural matters, include discussions of dignity and respect, without really pinning down what they mean. One interesting approach to look at this is via a wider framework of moral philosophy, because such discussions often involve claims that some people ought to be respected more than they currently are.

Charles Taylor

I’ve just finished reading Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity and am feeling rather like Huck Finn on Pilgrim’s Progress (“The statements was interesting, but tough”). It’s really two books in one: first setting up how his model of moral frameworks works and then a historical-philosophical discussion of how different moral frameworks have developed over time in the West. There are points where I feel I don’t understand properly the philosophical background (in his first part) or his cultural references (in the second part), And although his argument makes broad sense to me, professional philosophers have picked holes in it (see e.g. the collection of articles discussing it in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1))

An institutional approach to late antique church connections

Introduction

I recently took part in a very interesting conference: Brides of Christ: Keeping Order in the Early Christian Churches (300-900 CE). It was organised by David Natal Villazala of Royal Holloway, as part of his Connected Clerics project. I was speaking about the Carolingian church and reform of mediocre men, but one of the comments I made in the discussion at the end of the conference about institutions as holy relics wasn’t sufficiently clear in my mind and so wasn’t well expressed.

This post is therefore a second attempt by me to think about one of the key questions in the project: why in a time of political fragmentation in Europe and the Mediterranean did church institutions in different successor states still end up connected and looking quite similar? This is the ecclesiastical government strand of the project and I want to approach it in this blog post via the economist Avner Greif and his definition and examples of institutions.

Repost: The Secular University?

I’m very busy with writing papers at the moment, so not able to blog. But I wanted to repost some of the posts I did previously for another blog: Charles West‘s Turbulent Priests blog. This is from 27 July 2015

Following a recent article for the Times Higher Education Supplement calling on university to consider religion as a diversity issue, a furious response from one reader has prompted some discussion.

The response read as follows:

In my view a university is a secular place of learning. If you want attention paid to your religion you should go to a theological college. It is not a university’s job to pander to superstition. Religion, unlike race, gender, sexual orientation and disability, is a choice and if you can’t modify your choice to cater for the university’s rules you should go elsewhere.

The comment interprets “secular” in the sense of excluding religion, rather than of a religiously neutral arena. It also displays little historical awareness: The university as a “secular” space is a relatively new phenomenon. In England, only after more than 600 years of universities did the first religiously neutral university appear, with the foundation of University College London. But rather than trace the overall history of the secular university, I instead want to use my own personal history to illustrate the difficulties of the concept.

In 1983, aged 18, I went to St Anne’s College, Oxford to study mathematics. During term-time, I spent substantial portions of the week in the lecture theatres at the old Mathematical Institute. Lectures were the main form of teaching mathematics and regular attendance at them was expected and required in order to do well.

But my time at Oxford was also expanding my experience in other ways. For the first time, I was exploring my Christian faith independently, away from the limits of attending the churches where my father was rector. I came to follow a regular routine on Sundays; the college Christian union met for breakfast and then parties of us walked down to the main student churches. In my case, I went to St Aldate’s, and after a long service (the morning service averaged about 90 minutes), walked back to St Anne’s in time for lunch.

I was aware that religious commitment was out of fashion, so I was interested when I read an article in one of the student newspapers which quoted a mathematics student, Danielle, whom I knew slightly. She was a religious Jew (something that in my naivety, I hadn’t realised) and she talked about observing the Sabbath, for example by not using her bicycle on that day. Later in the year, when we received the thick booklet with Oxford’s examination decrees and regulations, I noticed that there were provisions for Jewish students who felt unable to take examinations on the Sabbath to sit them at another time and presumed that such measures acknowledged the existence of students such as Danielle.

Fifteen years later, in 1998, I was off to Cambridge, this time to study for a master’s degree in medieval history. But as I looked at the general lecture lists, I noticed something odd about the mathematics lectures: Some of them were held on Saturdays. Cambridge, like Oxford, also holds some exams on Saturdays. On their website, I can find information on special arrangements for examinations for disabled students, but not Jewish ones. A mathematics student like Danielle might have to make difficult choices if she went to Cambridge rather than Oxford.

So is Oxford “pandering to superstition”, while Cambridge is not? The question is misleading, unless you bring into the equation not only Danielle’s experience, but mine. As a Christian, every British university I’ve ever been to is set up to observe my main holy days. If they hadn’t been and I’d been expected to attend lectures on Sundays, I don’t know what I would have decided to do. Either my beliefs or my mathematical training would have had to suffer, and the suggestion that I should simply “go to a theological college” would also have excluded me from the highest level of academic education. Unlike Danielle, however, I didn’t have to make such choices, since I belong to the historically dominant religion of Britain.

The university that excludes religion then, is finally a myth, since it is inevitably embedded within wider systems that have already determined religious or non-religious parameters of acceptable behaviour. Making a university secular in the sense of religiously neutral, meanwhile, remains a difficult proposition; an awareness of the historical background is likely to be essential to doing so successfully.

The Fall of the Meritocracy, 1958-2023

There are multiple levels of irony involved when reading Michael Young’s book, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033. It’s a satire written in 1958, but supposedly looking back from 2033 at a future that’s now only a few years ahead of us. It tells of a failed utopia (the supposed “author” of this history is revealed as having been killed by a lower-class mob by a note at the end of the book), but Young later claimed that it had been misunderstood, and that “meritocracy” is not a positive concept.

Young’s book is fascinating just as futurology, although he has two big blind spots. One is technological: there’s barely any mention of computers, although in 1958 that’s forgivable. The other big blind spot, however, is women’s roles. The imagined author can’t see why women object to having to give up work on marriage (p. 172) and adds (p. 173):

Infants need the love of a mother; they also need her intellectual stimulation, her tender introduction to a high culture, her diligent preparation for a dedicated life. She will neglect her motherly duties only at the peril of her children, not to speak of the displeasure of her husband.

I have the sense behind this satire of complacency that Young himself hasn’t really thought seriously about women’s work and aspirations. On the other hand, there’s something terribly poignant in 2023 in the statement (p. 46):

Thanks in part to atomic power which released Britain from dependence on oil and coal, in part to the economic advantages of European unification; but thanks mainly to the scientific management of talent, in productivity little Britain began to leave the giants behind.

Or indeed (pp. 160-161):

Since 2005 the annual productivity increment has been ploughed back, primarily in human resources, that is spent upon higher education and upon the maintenance at concert pitch of the people who are its products; and secondarily, upon mechanical equipment of all kinds.

That seems to me the central irony of the book: that the failed utopia Young imagined still looks a lot better than what we’ve ended up with in Britain instead.

Meritocratic policies

It’s worth analysing, therefore, how Young imagined this supposed utopia being implemented. There’s a lot of detail in the book, but the central idea is quite simple (p. 94):

Intelligence and effort together make up merit (I+E=M)

Intelligence here is measured by IQ tests, which are implicitly assumed to be both accurate and unbiased. But Young also talks (p. 178) of “generous allowance for borderline cases” and, as mentioned below, these aren’t one off-tests, but repeated.

The book then describes four main policy areas intended to ensure that the more meritorious take their rightful place at the top of society:

1) removing the barriers to the rise of intelligent men from the lower classes

2) destroying nepotism and promoting the downward mobility of stupid men from the upper classes

3) resisting the ideas of egalitarian educators who want to have the same education for all

4) providing dignity and material comfort to the unintelligent lower classes

The detailed policies that Young imagines for these aims have some interesting twists. For no. 1, although grammar schools are one of the main means of ensuring the upward mobility of bright lower-class boys, there’s also payment of pupils (to stop them being tempted away to manual work) and IQ test centres and adult education that allow late developers to be recognised and be able to go to university. The salaries of grammar teachers are also substantially increased to make their pay comparable to industry (p. 62) and attract the intelligent into teaching.

On no. 2, Young presumes high taxes on all unearned income, as well as death duties (to limit inherited wealth severely), but also the existence of campaigns against nepotism: “Parents had to be educated to understand it was a sin to seek high positions for stupid children” (p. 130). He imagines a situation in which private education, rather than being abolished, withers away with competition from grammar schools. In the meritocracy wealthy parents send their bright children to (free) grammar schools, since the education there is so good, with only the dull sent to fee-paying public schools, which thus lose their social status. Other public schools convert to grammar schools (like a more complete version of the direct grant grammar schools).

What about no. 3: resistance to meritocracy by egalitarians? One of the hindrances the imagined author sees in achieving his meritocratic society is the “sentimental egalitarianism” (p. 41) which “urged that everyone, those with talent as well as those without, should attend the same schools and receive the same basic education”, i.e. that there should be unstreamed comprehensive schools. (In this version of Britain, no-one apparently proposed the comprehensive university).

In the meritocracy, however, the egalitarians lose out through sheer reality, since “in the long run ambitious parents always brought to grief the best-laid schemes of egalitarian reformers” (p. 52). Young’s author also points out that meritocrats were able to defeat opposition to IQ tests, because (p. 73):

research demonstrated conclusively that teachers’ reports and ordinary examinations were less fair to lower-class children. Teachers unconsciously favoured children from their own class; old-fashioned exams were kinder to the more cultured homes.

Instead, “Intelligence tests, less biased, were the very instrument of social justice” (p. 73).

Young’s final sense of policies (no.4) are those intended to console the losers in a meritocratic system. Whereas in nepotistic and class-based systems, those at the bottom of the heap can console themselves by claims of essential human equality, and that they were denied opportunity to shine, in this world (p. 108): “for the first time in human history the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard”.

The meritocracy had plans for this as well: “The lower classes needed a Mythos, and they got what they needed, the Mythos of Muscularity” (p. 109). The core of the secondary modern schools’ curriculum (aside from the three Rs), became handicrafts, gymnastics and games. Education for leisure was emphasised, with the best pupils encouraged to continue sports in adult life and the others provided with ample opportunities for watching sports.

The author also describes the development (p. 113) of “a permanent peace-time Pioneer Corps, men with large muscles and small brains…who were not only good at emptying dustbins and heaving loads, but liked doing it.” Young’s imaginary bureaucrat admits, however, that automation is a threat to unskilled workers and that despite the development of the Home Help Corps of domestic live-in servants (their conditions of service strictly regulated by the government), male unemployment is still substantially higher than female (p. 123).

There are ironic reminders in this policy area specifically of a more egalitarian real past in the 1950s. Even as Trade Unions’ real power ebbed away (because the ablest working-class men were no longer part of them), “the trade unions, have, like the monarchy, been given an ever more honourable place in the social order (p. 149)”, with representation on all national bodies and awards of honour given to workmen.

There’s also a revealing passage discussing the material fate of the downwardly mobile stupid boy from an upper-class family (pp. 99-100):

Reared in a house with an entertainment centre at its core, bespoke cooking and open wood fires, the poor boy may find it hard indeed to get used to an ordinary council house with heat pump but no open fires, with three-dimensional tape-recorders instead of an entertainment centre, with pre-packaged meals instead of bespoke cooking.

In Young’s meritocracy, even the lower classes have adequate housing, heating and food. In a particularly bravado piece of imagination by Young, these classes also have the same basic wages as the elites (p. 159):

Every employee of whatever rank has received the Equal (as emoluments are officially called) simply by virtue of being a citizen, and the differences between grades have been recognised not any longer by salaries but by the payment of such varying expenses as could be justified by the needs of efficiency.

In the meritocracy, the intellectual elite get chauffeurs, domestic help, company cars and ample paid-for holidays (so they have more thinking time), but they do not actually get more freely disposable income.

Their problems and ours

It’s slightly unfair to call Young’s meritocratic Britain a utopia because his narrator admits there are still problems within his society. What’s striking is how many of the problems it mentions are those we already have in our society, including:

• • The withering away of the House of Commons

• • The Labour party turning middle-class

• • The lower classes no longer having high quality leaders

• • Assortative mating of the intelligent, meaning that they begin to form a hereditary class

• • Earlier and earlier accurate recognition of the cognitive elite

• • The development of feelings of hopelessness, inferiority and lack of respect among those in unskilled work

How have we got those problems without the benefits of a meritocracy? What it seems to me we have in the real 2023 Britain is an unplanned partial meritocracy, which has implemented some of the upward mobility of the cognitive elite without dealing properly with the issues of nepotism, egalitarianism and the dignity of the lower classes.

Removing of barriers to the rise of the cognitive elite (no. 1) is actually the simplest of the tasks, because it’s easier to get support. British Socialist/Labour governments have been willing to implement specific policies (as in the Young’s meritocracy version of Britain), but market forces (which are underplayed by Young) have also had a major impact. Competing universities want to get the brightest students; competing firms want to get the brightest and most energetic workers.

In contrast when you look at complaints about meritocracy,  like those by Michael Sandel, for example, they’re often at least partially that systems aren’t actually meritocratic and that nepotism and inherited wealth in particular skew the system. Because of vested interests from the current elites, policies like those of no. 2 haven’t been implemented.

Similarly, it’s clear that greater egalitarianism in education in the UK than Young expected (no. 3)  has had some unfortunate side effects. I’m a supporter of comprehensive schools and against a grammar school system, like Young. But his idealised version of the selective school system in meritocratic Britain, with its opportunities for later bloomers, less biased tests and wider generosity towards marginal candidates is quite attractive compared to the actual existing mostly comprehensive system in the UK.

That’s because the comprehensive system we have currently hasn’t solved the problem of selection by postcode/house price (so that only the well-off can afford to live in the catchment areas of good schools). It also hasn’t led to the withering away of the fee-paying school system, which some parents use to buy advantage for their child (as Young predicts).

And while I don’t think GCSEs as a whole are “dumbed-down” (I tried some GCSE further maths exam papers a few years ago and they were hard work), I think some GCSE courses, especially in modern languages, are of substantially lower quality than the O levels I took. If able students are not getting the “stretching” they need in school, it’s harder for those from the lower classes to develop than those who can get tuition or parental support outside school.

Finally, there’s the question of the dignity and material comfort of the lower classes/unskilled workers (no. 4). I’m not sure to what extent government policies can really affect people’s dignity (I want to say more about that in a separate post), but increasingly unfettered capitalism has certainly been corrosive for those at the bottom of the heap. On the other hand, there’s also been a fair amount of undervaluing and denigrating the lower classes by liberal/left-wing politicians and commentators, as seen in the Brexit debate , for example.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and social justice initiatives, a current focus of left-wing thought, also have an uneasy fit with meritocracy. There are some aspects that are straightforwardly meritocratic: removing barriers to universities and jobs for disadvantaged children and encouraging their success. But there’s also a strand of social justice that is strongly egalitarian in the levelling-down sense, for example, regarding punctuality as white supremacy. Some forms of DEI may inadvertently reinforce nepotism, such as when there’s a strong emphasis on linguistic rules that advantage those from cultured backgrounds, or when standardised testing for university entrance is replaced with essays, for which assistance can be brought in. Social justice enthusiasts also tend to have little respect for uneducated white men, even if they are near the bottom of the social heap.

Caring for the Young

There are lot of ironies, then, in reading Young’s book now, but there are also several additional ones that come from my limited knowledge of his life outside the book. For example, both in his serious and satirical work he uses the example of Ernest Bevin, the influential Labour politician, who left school at the age of 11. Real world Young commented in 2001:

Quite a few other members of the Attlee cabinet, like Bevan and Griffiths (miners both), had similar lowly origins and so were also a source of pride for many ordinary people who could identify with them. It is a sharp contrast with the Blair cabinet, largely filled as it is with members of the meritocracy. 

The (unstated) implication is that men like Bevin need to be left uneducated, despite their potential, to produce future politicians who will help benefit the “ordinary people” as a whole. It’s worth pointing out, therefore, that Young himself went to the fee-paying Dartington Hall School and from there to the London School of Economics, so it was never going to be someone like him who was going to have to leave school early. And as Young the satirist pointed out in 1958 (p. 166), when it was proposed that a “proportion of the more able children should leave work at the minimum age” to work in menial jobs, all that could be suggested was that they be chosen by ballot, since “most clever people want to get on in the world”. I can’t help feeling that’s one-nil to the satirist here.

But the biggest irony concern Michael Young’s own family. In the 1980s, an act of nepotism by him helped his own son gain a place at Oxford University, an act so notorious that it’s still being referenced by writers forty years on. (There was a mix-up over whether his son had been offered a place or not and Michael Young phoned the admission tutor, who subsequently decided to admit the teenager. It’s hard to imagine that when the life peer Baron Young of Dartington, a noted politician and academic, phones you up, it has zero influence on your decision).

The irony of that nepotism is even greater because the son in question was Toby Young, a right-wing commentator who has made controversial remarks about eugenics and is an advocate of free schools, state-funded schools that have more independence from government than traditional comprehensives. He’s shown a particular interest in the connection between polygenic scores and educational achievement, potentially a real-life version of the at-birth IQ prediction techniques that his father discusses in his satire (p. 180). Would he have been so influential if his father hadn’t intervened for him and he hadn’t got to Oxford?

Conclusion

So where do all this levels of irony and contradiction leave meritocracy as a principle for societies? My tentative conclusion is that like capitalism and democracy, it’s the worst possible institution except all the alternatives. As Michael Young deliberately and accidentally shows, however, it’s hard to believe, given human nature, that a full meritocracy could ever be implemented.

But I think you can see one extra very important lesson from this satire, both for the meritocratic “author” looking back and for the real-life meritocratic sceptic Michael Young: that the biggest weakness of being intelligent is thinking that you know exactly what you’re doing and that there will be no unexpected outcomes to your plans. 

Polygamy, female labour and cultural evolution

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about a Substack post on Extractive polygyny and ‘evolved psychological’ mate preferences by the anthropologist William Buckner. Buckner uses anthropological studies to argue that polygyny in traditional societies is often preferred by successful men not just because it allows sexual access to more women, but also because it allows access to the labour of more wives and children in agriculture and food preparation.

The importance of female and child labour in traditional societies, as well as the enhanced sexual opportunities polygamy offers makes it even more surprising that both classical Greek and Roman culture developed socially-imposed universal monogamy, i.e. even the elite who could afford to support multiple women could have only one legitimate wife. Walter Scheidel points out in “A peculiar institution? Greco–Roman monogamy in global context” (2009) (DOI 10.1016/j.hisfam.2009.06.001) and “Monogamy and polygyny” (2011) (DOI 10.1002/9781444390766.ch6) how historically unusual such monogamy was and that its establishment went against the interests of elite men.

Greek amphora with image of woman from British Museum

Scheidel also stresses the key role of chattel slavery in allowing continuing resource inequality even in these now universally monogamous societies (Peculiar institution pp. 288-289). Elite Greek and Roman men might no longer have been able to have multiple wives, but they could still sleep with their slaves at will. Scheidel doesn’t specifically discuss it, but such men could also divorce their wives unilaterally, and remarry and so carry out serial monogamy. This is how we end up with the boiling monogamous frog of medieval and later European SIUM: monogamy was still culturally mandated for men, even though their opportunities for sleeping with their slaves and for remarriage had subsequently been severely restricted.

Demanding and supplying conduct literature

Richard II dines with dukes – Chronique d’ Angleterre (Volume III) (late 15th C), f.265v

I’m starting to think about the long durée of medieval nobles again, and have gone back to David Crouch’s The Chivalric Turn. As when I read any books on the high medieval aristocracy (male or female), I’m struck by the thorny question of whether there is something new about courtliness in the post-Carolingian world. Indeed, as I can see from the archives of this blog, I was already wondering about the question back in 2007. Crouch argues for the development of conduct literature aimed at would-be lay courtiers (rather than purely moral literature) as starting from around 1100, although with a brief nod to Dhuoda’s Manual. Crouch doesn’t therefore accept Stephen Jaeger’s derivation of courtliness from Ottonian clerical learning, but he does understand the genre as definitely post-Carolingian.

I want, therefore, to go back to the question I’ve been asking on and off for years: if the Carolingian empire has courts and courtiers, why doesn’t it have courtly conduct literature? But I want to approach it this time from a different angle, starting with a strange story from a much earlier court. Carlin Barton, Roman Honor (p. 249) refers to a chilling anecdote from Seneca about the emperor Gaius (Caligula):

Having just executed the knight Pastor’s son on a trifling charge, the emperor Gaius invited the father to celebrate with him. He set guards to scrutinize the latter’s every reaction. Gaius’s cruellest instrument of torture was the smile carved on the bereaved father’s face with the sharp edge of the emperor’s gaze (Seneca, De ira 2.33.3-5).

You would hardly call Pastor’s behaviour courtly in the modern sense of the word, and yet it’s the act of a consummate courtier, behaving exactly as his prince demands, at whatever personal price.

Thirty years after the End of History

It’s an odd sensation reading Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the First Man for the first time thirty years after it was written in 1992. The temptation is just to focus on which of his predictions did or did not come right. But it’s worth first outlining what Fukuyama’s thesis was.

His basic argument about liberal democracy as the “end” of history is teleological: polities and states tend, though not inevitably, towards liberal democracy because it’s the best ideological system (Parts 2 and 3), in the sense of most completely satisfying man’s needs. (Fukuyama regularly uses the term “man” for humanity and shows little awareness of women’s issues, but since historically feminism has mainly been about women gaining equal rights to men, his lack of discussion of it doesn’t influence his main argument much). By “liberal” he means both respect for basic human rights and also a market-based economy. He includes among liberal democracies the US, Japan and the Scandinavian social democracies, so he’s allowing for cultural/economic differences within such liberal democracies.