The rain drizzles against the other side of my window, and it is one of those dark nights that take me back - that atmosphere that never fails to take me back to one specific, dark night in late autumn; one December 5th, to be precise.
I remember one Sinterklaas in particular because it was the year in which my little brother grew skeptical, and his suspicion made it impossible for Sinterklaas to deposit his bag in our home unnoticed. Our mother desperately/cunningly (both, I think) took us out for a walk, through a dark and damp Sinterklaasavond, while my father staid behind because he had forgotten to switch off the computer... Never in my life had I been out on the streets on this mysterious night that seperates the 5th from the 6th, in which strange things happen on roof tops and in chimneys and computer rooms...
It is exactly that feeling, that sometimes comes over me again when I walk through a drizzly autumn night. "
Was 't maar vast Sint Nicolaas". But I'm afraid I'll have to wait another year to be able to celebrate it properly (or more, because I have no idea where I will be next year).
Which takes me to our next topic:
This morning I was experiencing a small mental crisis. Nothing to worry about, apparently, because I'm back to normal already, but it was still very unpleasant. It had to do with many related things that are too private to relate even here, in the intimacy of our not-so-private-because-every-damn-idiot-can-read-it tea-party. But partly it had to do with what I have to do with my life and my studies. Suddenly I felt pressured, because the deadlines for many master programs are in mid-January, and if I would like to apply there's still many things to arrange (not to mention taking a silly TOEFL-test). But before I can arrange them, I would have to make up my mind first. Should I be ambitious and go for a MPhil program in modern history at Oxford (or UCL!)? Should I be modest (and perhaps a bit lazy) and apply in Utrecht, where they have marvellous programs as well of course, but where I would have some level of guarantee that I get into the program I like. Or should I return to Amsterdam, just to be there, and not really care about my studies (I don't mean that Amsterdam doesn't offer good education, but I haven't found any research degree that particularly attracts me, there)? Or should I delay my decision and work for another year? Would I find an interesting job with my meagre "classifications"? Would I not loose contact with Academia? More importantly: would I not loose contact with all my friends who are way ahead of me in their studies? Would I find a room in Amsterdam, and be able to pay for it, or would it involve moving back to my parents'? Should I go travelling again? But actually - and this was one of my conclusions - I am a bit weary of travelling. This summer was the craziest and frenziest of my life, running from Utrecht to Amsterdam to Apeldoorn to Woerden to Sweden to Utrecht to Amsterdam to Klimburg (sorry) to Amsterdam to Utrecht to Bremen to Amsterdam to Utrecht to Amsterdam to Zevenaar to Amsterdam to Exeter (I didn't mention them all yet, did I?)... and I am really fine now in Exeter, having the feeling that I have finally settled down a bit, gaining some routine... but you understand that the thought of arranging yet another two-year departure from Amsterdam/Utrecht for upcoming summer, so short after my return there, is not very attractive. So, to answer O's question: I often feel the wish to
be in the Netherlands for a while, but I definitely don't have the inclination to
travel there. So, unfortunately, no impulsive visits from my part...
While I was getting myself together again from this little crisis (which, as said, involved other issues as well), listening to some soothing music (I believe it was the Who), I read M's blog on Trafalgar Square. At first, I wanted to comment that I do not think it very appropriate to quote Owen's horror at World War I in connection with a battle, fought by different people, in a different time, with different numbers of casualties and, consequently, received by the general public as a completely different issue ("who are we to condemn another culture's symbolic acts of self-reassurance/complacency?) - but on second thought I can very well see what you mean, because I, too, feel the hairs in my neck rise whenever I hear an American boy on the news declare that it is a nasty war but one must be happy to be able to give four years of one's life in return for the liberties one has received(and for free university education); whenever I see a 15" naval shell dedicated to the People of Widcombe for their efforts gathering sphagnum moss; whenever I see Buckingham Palace and two rows of fools on horses hopping along carefully designed hopping paths in a road that might otherwise have been a vital traffic artery; or whenever I hear the jingle of the eight o'olock news on channel four.
The better part of the rest of the day was spent on my first essay for HIH1240 The Making of Christian Europe 1000-1200. Just to give you an inkling (because I should really be going to bed now):
This is a first year's module, and it takes only one one-hour lecture per week and one one-hour seminar every fortnight. We discuss themes like family structure (e.g. the increased importance of the castle for a family's/lord's indentity, or the introduction of the condition of mutual consent in marriages in the twelfth centry); the tendency to symbolically order society (e.g. in the categories of knights, monks and peasants: but of course reality is much more complex); the twelfth-century cultural renaissance; the crusades (e.g. the conquest and destruction of a splendid Byzantium by a bunch of badly organised, half-wit Western Europeans); the Gregorian revolution (the Church became deeply involved in the lives of most Europeans only from the twelfth century onwards: before that, most people even never went to church; Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) was one of the persons to accomplish this marvellous improvement); et cetera.
For the seminars we only have to read one article each, and present it in class. The lectures are given in a large lecture room for about a hundred people (without a microphone) that miraculously keep turning up each week, even at the lack of an attendance list. However, as you can imagine, interaction is zero, to my deep regret. There is even no opportunity to ask questions at the end! So I just bother my teachers in private. The rest of the module consists of self-study: we have received a list of approx. 200 books and articles, and by the end of the course we are expected to have read enough to be able to pass the exam. Only, I don't have to pass the exam - bless them - because I am foreign and will be absent at the time of the exam (June), so I'll just write two esays instead of one. Which makes me very happy, because you know how I hate exams.
So, at the moment I am working on my first essay. For those interested: here will follow its tentative introduction:
Instrument or Agent? - the lady in twelfth-century trouvère poetry
1. Historians, perspectives, sources
In her Short history of the Middle Ages, Barbara Rosenwein evaluates the love poetry of the trouvères as follows: “The real theme of these poems was not courtly love; it was the power of women” (151). Georges Duby, in his collection of essays Mâle moyen âge (translated as Love and marriage in the Middle Ages) fourteen years earlier, took a diametrically opposed standpoint: “I have no hesitation in contradicting those commentators who saw in courtly love a female invention. It was a man’s game, and amongst all the writings which encouraged individuals to give themselves over to it, there are few which are not deeply misogynist” (58).
Which of the two historians is right? To investigate this it is important first to have look at what their ideas are based upon: what sources have they used, and what convictions acquired in earlier research do they bring with them?
Immediately in the beginning of his essay “On courtly love”, Duby acknowledges the difficulty of determining “what kinds of relationship exist between this type of literature, a vicarious literature of dream and escape, and actual behaviour”(56). Still, this is what he endeavours: “compare the content of these works with what he already knows from other accounts of the structures and development of feudal society” (56-7). In order to render the large body of (early twelfth-century) courtly poetry suitable for analysis, the first thing Duby does is reduce it to a scheme, an underlying theme of which the individual poems are variations; unfortunately, he does not mention which works by which authors form the foundation of this scheme. In summary, the scheme consists of a young, unmarried knight wooing a lady, inaccessible to him because she is married to his lord. Introducing his ideas about the marginality of women in Medieval society and about the importance of feudal structure feeding the motivation of those in power, Duby ultimately concludes that, instead of being a praise of women or an acknowledgement of their power over the knights that serve them, the youthful knight is actually trying to win the favour of his lord, while the lord himself merely puts his wife to use in moulding his knight’s loyalty. “All the evidence – one need only reread the poems and the romances to be persuaded of this - shows that the model of the amorous relationship was friendship, male friendship”(62). The question is whether a comparison “between what is revealed in these songs and romances and the real organisation of power and social relationships”(56) is indeed possible, if the choice of the songs and romances under study were partly determined by the historian’s existing ideas about social reality.
In her overview of responses to Duby’s notion of the “mâle Moyen Age”, Amy Livingstone identifies how some historians have attained a different view: by not only reading literary and religious texts written by the powerful and idealising existing power structures, but also searching for the voices of these noblewomen themselves. If we do, we discover powerful and self-conscious women (5 and 16).
I suspect that not only do we find that in reality women had much more power than is expressed in the ideologies of many religious and literary texts, but that these texts themselves are more heterogeneous as well. As Rosenwein argues, Duby’s schema of courtly poetry applies to a minority of the trouveres’ texts only: “some boasted of sexual conquests; others played with the notion of equality between lovers; still others preached that love was the source of virtue”(151).
Although Duby’s analysis is no doubt important and inspiring, I wonder whether it is not possible, as Rosenwein and Livingstone argue, to interpret the poems of the trouvères differently – if we choose different sources and look at them from a different perspective. In this essay I would like to consider a text, one such courtly poem, to see whether this could express an ideology that differs from the one proposed by Duby: an ideology that does not consider ladies and their youthful venerators as political tools in securing the vassal’s loyalty to his lord. A likely place to find alternative views is in the poetry of one such lady deemed a mere instrument by Duby (Mortimer J. Donovan, qtd. in Sanderson 1): a women, living in the time and place Duby situates his account in, writing courtly poems: de Lais of Marie de France.
