It has always been hard for me to find a way to interact with art that isn’t verbal. I want to think and talk about the concepts that are artistically represented, to interpret them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems incomplete. As I go over Lit and Arts, I’m thinking about this but also realizing the course is about contextualizing art in a period period in history, to see what we can learn about history, politics, and religion through art. I’m not sure yet if I would have learned the same things without the artistic pieces, as a straight history course.
The last few classes have been about Charlemagne, and some of the manuscripts, churches, and monasteries from his reign. Artistically, there is something about I think Germanic stylized nature forms, vines and animals that aren’t meant to evoke a scene or a landscape and aren’t traditionally classic or Roman or Christian. Professor Nercessian talked about some ways that Gospel manuscripts were organized, and how the lettering was meant to set a standard for the educated classes that Charlemagne was trying to develop as an elite ruling class.
There is the prominence of the X-R (“chi-rho”) page in manuscripts, about Christ as King. It’s not entirely clear to me if the blending of earthly rule and spiritual supremacy is pretty new or a continuation of Byzantine motifs. But I think the imagery of Christ as a ruler jumped to a new level in this time, and even when there wasn’t a parallel image of the emperor, just the vibe of Christ as imperial was a contribution to imperial power.
It is interesting, thinking about my preconceptions of the early Middle Ages, that Charlemagne was trying to consolidate his rule over much of Europe through culture. I hadn’t realized just how real was the touch of a common culture at this time, as far as the islands of Scotland and Ireland – maybe not as a dominant culture but at least a palpable presence. Charlemagne and the pope seemed to use each other, since the church was the only other entity with pockets of authority and ownership of vast lands. Charlemagne coopted that, and the pope coopted Charlemagne. I don’t know if the emperor felt that Christianity was a worthwhile culture for his realm, or just a useful one. There was a special Professor Nercessian talked about the gospel codices as standards for copymaking.
There was a transition from a roaming court, which was one way to exemplify rule over a large area, to a center in Aachen with a magnificent church and other palaces and buildings. If I read the notes right, Charlemagne emulated and advanced prior Roman/Byzantine emperors in incorporating adoration for the emperor into the traditional basilica or enhanced basilica (my term, not a scholarly one).
The Book of Kells is a thing I remember.
In Gov 1170, there was a brief comparison of industrialization in Germany and Italy with Britain, and why the path of the first two set the stage for fascism. In Britain, industrialization was funded largely by economic activity itself, so that a strong state was not originally necessary and both industrialists and commercial landowners developed power. In Germany and northern Italy, the late-starting industrialization required concentration of capital in investment banks, and railroad and infrastructure building by the state, so the state drove the empowerment of groups and not vice-versa, and there was not the same multiplicity of power centers.
Which is not to say that Britain developed without massive dislocation. Eventually the requirements of capitalism drove people from the rural land toward cities, into conditions of both squalor and lack of traditional social structures. When the poor did try to organize or rise up, it tended to be in a mode of restoring old social structures, rather than pressing for revolutionary new ones, and the aristocracy could coopt that part of the agenda.
Political conflict in Britain in the 1800s was primarily between the new bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. At key points, Parliament served as an effective mediating institution – there was bargaining over tariffs and poor relief, there were strategic concessions to the new monied class and also times when the more commercial aristocracy saw an alliance with industrialists as in their interests. Professor Hall suggested that the legacy of parliamentary compromise which ended the Glorious Revolution continued to have an impact, and the most effective sources of change were by those who could organize into interest groups for concrete changes. Some of those changes were constitutional – the expansion of the franchise, reorganizing city governments, reduction of rotten boroughs. These came about through somewhat traditional parliamentary processes. The lower classes were shut out from driving these processes, unless it was in the interest of another class and in concert with them.
Professor Bartal taught that the messianism was a matrix for an early Zionism in the mid-1800s, from a couple directions. The stall of integration of Jews was accompanied by a small but significant trend in Christian millenarian circles in Britain and the U.S., which saw the development and improvement of the Holy Land as a redemptive step. Jews’ separate existence, in this light, was viewed as a positive, a way of positioning Jews for a role either as returning Jews or as new Christian converts in the Holy Land.
Some prominent wealthy British and French Jews allied with this Christian movement, to fund settlements in Palestine as initially part of the reform and education of more backward Jews, most of which was taking place in the home countries. British and American Christian authorities and philanthropists in turn green-lit these enterprises by people like Montefiore and Cremieux.
The messianic trends within Kabbalistic Sephardi and Chasidic Judaism also became a frame for a small number of Jewish religious proto-Zionists to view settlement in the Land of Israel. Some mystics looked to the year 1840 as a date for the Messiah, as some Christians did for the second coming. To these Jews, the small steps of Jewish self-improvement in the context of incomplete integration were also signs of the beginning of a messianic era. (There was a fascinating piece I hadn’t remembered about some Jews seeing Cremieux, Montefiore, and Rothschild as encoded in some messianic verses of Torah and prayer.) The stall of integration could be seen as a positive – the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness was good, and the improvement of Jews, which was driven by negative stereotypes, was also in service of making us more fit for redemption or a redemptive era.
In the secular stirrings before the 1880s, language and culture were understood as more central than religion (of course) and even land sometimes. Professor Bartal mentioned some interesting perspectives on Hebrew. One was that unlike Eastern European nationalisms, which took languages of lower status and elevated them, Ben Yehudah-style Haskalah looked at Hebrew as an originally elevated language that had been displaced by lower vernaculars like Yiddish and needed to be restored. Interestingly, Ben Yehudah looked to Arabic to generate new modern words and my notes say that 25% of modern Hebrew comes from Arabic.
Zionsim, such as it was in the middle of the 1800s, was a small movement alongside three main well-defined Jewish responses to modernity – reform of Judaism, whether religious or in a Haskalah vein; Orthodox rejection of the Reform impulse; or a passive integrationism.
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