Month: September 2013

In an essay exploring the ongoing fascination with authentically reproducing the Bard’s plays, Daniel Fromson highlights our hopes at finding “some corner of civilization untarnished by modernity” where “people still speak like the Elizabethans”:

Such stories clash with the wisdom of modern linguistics, which holds that Shakespeare’s English cannot be any living person’s native tongue, if only because all spoken languages are always evolving. Even a colony of 17th-century actors, stranded on a faraway island during the reign of Elizabeth I, would speak differently hundreds of years later. Still, since the 1800s, people have reported hearing Elizabethan English, or at least an “Elizabethan accent,” not only on Tangier Island but also in Appalachia, Bermuda, Cornwall, Devonshire, Northern Ireland, the Ozarks, Panama, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, Virginia’s Roanoke Island, Newfoundland’s Fogo Island, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and the Pitcairn Islands of the South Pacific. “Though they never heard of Shakespeare,” a newspaper once reported, “the Bourabbees of Panama speak an English that sounds as if they were characters right out of his plays.”

This last example, more than most others, encapsulates the idea’s allure. In his essay “In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare,” the linguist Michael Montgomery argues that the notion that Shakespeare’s language lives on functions as “a myth of the noble savage”: it “satisfies our nostalgia for a simpler, purer past, which may never have existed but which we nevertheless long for because of the complexities and ambiguities of modern life.”

A reader keeps the thread undead:

Your fascinating series reminds me of a summer tour I took as a teenager with a youth choir from Montana, where I grew up. I’d been raised Presbyterian, and though my home church was neo-Gothic and quite beautiful, it included none of the statuary and shrines of American Catholic churches, and certainly no sign of European churches’ veneration of relics and remains. Death was kept at a prim distance; open caskets for example were considered both spiritually suspect and (though this was unspoken) in terrible taste.

One of our first stops on the trip was Salzburg, and I vividly remember stumbling on St. Sebastian’s Church and Cemetery, near our hotel, a place teeming with carved memento mori – skulls, snakes, bones, bats, and winged hourglasses [example seen to the right]. In the walled cemetery, a statue of a ragged corpse – sunken-eyed and grimacing, as if decomposed – rose out of an above-ground tomb. I’d never encountered such morbidly bracing imagery and didn’t then have the familiarity I would discover later – through works of Schubert, Freud, Hermann Broch, and many others – with the Austrian intimacy with death.

A few days later we sang in the gorgeous abbey church of Mondsee, not far from Salzburg, where five skeletons, bejeweled and richly vested, are encased in the high altar. (It’s the same church where the wedding scene from The Sound of Music was filmed; you can see the skeletons as the camera pans upward if you know to look for them but they’re hidden by the overall detail.) We usually sang in churches, and throughout the tour it was much the same – a niche of monks’ skulls in a Swiss village chapel, glass coffins displaying remains, the haunting crypts and mausoleums of Père Lachaise, silver hearts encasing saints’ organs, dimly-lit Roman catacombs. The encounters in these places cracked open the WASPish Christianity of my childhood and my sense of mortality as little else did, except subsequent encounters with death itself.

Decades later on trips to Mexico, I was struck by the the unflinchingly gruesome depictions of Christ’s torture and crucifixion in churches there, and it would bring to mind that summer as a 17-year old. It is impossible not to be moved and horrified by some of the depictions, and I would not say I could regularly worship near them. But they and their European variations have deepened my own faith, making it both more mystical and more visceral, paradoxically more alive, for which I’m very grateful.

Another reader:

I haven’t thought as much about relics as I probably should have, but they keep popping up when you read about medieval history.  People thought of relics as having supernatural power. This gave them very real economic value.

For example, there was a movement called the “peace and truce of god” that was designed to constrain noble violence, which was seen as one of the most significant societal problems at the time. Churchmen would summon nobles to a meeting, where they’d be confronted with a big display of all the relics the local churches were able to muster. The relics were used to frighten the nobles into making pledges to limit their violent conduct in certain ways.

And relics played a big role in the Crusades.  Everyone wanted relics, and everyone was aware that some of the relics floating around Europe were fakes.  People thought that the best way to get authentic relics of very old saints was go to to the source, the Holy Land. So in a sense, relics were a resource, sort of like oil, that the Holy Land possessed and that Europeans wanted.

There’s a famous incident that took place during the First Crusade, at the siege of Antioch. The crusaders were very discouraged and there was a lot of talk about packing it in and going home.  Someone claimed to have had a prophetic dream that showed him where to find a relic of the holy lance, the spear used to pierce the body of Christ during his crucifixion.  There was debate about whether the dream was valid, but when they dug in the place specified by the dream, they found a relic.  This pushed everyone toward sticking with the project, and had a big effect in keeping the siege and the crusade going.

Obviously, there were some who felt the whole thing had been staged. And at the Battle of Hattin, during the Third Crusade, Saladin was able to capture an object that was believed to be part of the true cross.  It had been brought into battle because the crusaders believed it would give them an edge.  The loss of the relic was a really big deal – it loomed large when people tallied up the losses from that crusade.  It was very significant to the Europeans.

I know that the blog has been talking about body parts, and that neither the holy lance nor the true cross were parts of anyone’s body. But in the medieval world, they were all relics, and these stories illustrate the extent to which relics were invested with power.  I don’t know enough about the subject of relics to come up with good stories about body part relics that make the same point.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the discussion in the blog about relics has been the part about how the idea of relics ties into the notion of bodily resurrection.  That’s something pretty important, I think, and I had never thought of it before.

But before I thought about that, the thing about relics that was most interesting to me was how primitive the whole thing seemed. Medievalists like CS Lewis and Tolkein present medieval Christianity in a really positive light – the Christianity that dates back from the time that Europe was Christendom seems better, in some respects, than today’s Christianity.

But when you read about the holy lance at the Siege of Antioch, it’s kind of jarring to think about where people’s headers were at.  The idea that the fate of the crusade hung on such a story seems insane, and the crusaders seem sort of childish and easily fooled.  They seem to be more superstitious than religious.  And I find the prospect of armed men of that mindset traveling great distances to conquer foreign territory to be pretty frightening.

One of the really great things about Catholicism is that there are these strange fragments of medieval thinking that have been preserved, in some form, to the present day.  I’d put relics in that category.  I don’t know what people think about them now.  I suspect that most modern Catholics don’t really think about them.

But whenever I’m in Paris (which isn’t often, lately), I always visit the cathedral at St. Denis, and walk through the crypt where the bones of all of the ancient kings and queens of France are kept.  And I’m always interested to think about how the revolutionaries felt it was worth the trouble to turn the pantheon into a reliquary for secular saints, to counter act the symbolic power of St. Denis.  That might have been the idea’s last gasp.

Think about how differently we think about the bodies exhibition at the South Street Seaport. I haven’t seen it, because I’m squeamish about such things, and there have been allegations that the bodies of criminals and perhaps political prisoners from China were used for the display.  But while the innate fascination with human body “stuff” pulls people to the exhibition, we justify and explain our fascination with science, rather than religion.  We just want to see how the ligaments are attached.

I think that this is one of those subjects that’s most interesting in an “archaeology of thought” sort of way. The idea of relics has a long, complicated, and surprisingly intense history. The shriveled stump that’s left of it today is kind of creepy and mostly interesting in a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” kind of way, but not much more.  Who would think that the idea had enough power at one time to play a significant role in the conduct of several wars?

Maybe that’s the message we ought to take from the subject on this day in 2013.  Maybe relics ought to remind us that when you go to war, there’s a pretty good chance that your reasons are actually crazy. Maybe relics can serve as a reminder that when you think you have to go and kill people in a war for moral reasons, a lot of the time you’re just being batshit crazy. Maybe the ideas that seem fighting for today will fade in the future, and they won’t seem worth dying over any more.

By the way, I just checked, and someone is selling what they claim is a piece of the true cross on Ebay. It’s only $245.

Elizabeth Weil thinks schools should dial back the focus on self-control:

[We’ve] crossed some weird Foucaultian threshold into a world in which authority figures pathologize children instead of punishing them. “Self-regulation,” “self-discipline,” and “emotional regulation” are big buzzwords in schools right now. All are aimed at producing “appropriate” behavior, at bringing children’s personal styles in line with an implicit emotional orthodoxy. That orthodoxy is embodied by a composed, conforming kid who doesn’t externalize problems or talk too much or challenge the rules too frequently or move around excessively or complain about the curriculum or have passionate outbursts. He’s a master at decoding expectations. He has a keen inner minder to bring rogue impulses into line with them.

She says the growing emphasis on self-discipline is “very convenient” in an age of slashed budgets and standardized tests:

[H]ere in 2013, even as the United States faces pressure to “win the future,” the American education system has swung in the opposite direction, toward the commodified data-driven ideas promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor, who at the turn of the century did time-motion studies of laborers carrying bricks to figure out how people worked most efficiently. Borrowing Taylor’s ideas, school was not designed then to foster free thinkers. Nor is it now, thanks to how teacher pay and job security have been tied to student performance on standardized tests. “What we’re teaching today is obedience, conformity, following orders,” says the education historian Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System. “We’re certainly not teaching kids to think outside the box.”

Nora Caplan-Bricker pushes back against the study suggesting that dating sites are reinforcing political extremes:

The biggest issue with the Standard’s article is that it implies it is shallow, even irresponsible, to use party affiliation as a filter for possible romantic partners. “The next time you see a bumper sticker that says, ‘He’s not my President,’ you may want to ask the person if they met their spouse online,” Pearson-Merkowitz warns. I wouldn’t reject someone out of hand for being a Republican, but I have no interest in making polite conversation over flat beers with a guy who doesn’t believe gay marriage should be legal, or who thinks abortion is tantamount to murder. If I’m contributing to the polarization of American politics by declining to raise kids with such a person, too bad. As long as party registration is a nearly perfect proxy for fundamental social views—and as long as OKCupid doesn’t have individual boxes for “universal health care,” “voting rights,” “gun control,” and the like—some political discrimination strikes me, not as the cause of the problem, but as a very reasonable response to it.

A reader chimes in:

Pearson-Merkowitz misses a critical point. Shared values are an important element in a happy marriage. To the extent that political views are a proxy for those values – and they surely are for me and my husband – then there is far more to be gained (and far less to be lost) from living with someone who shares your political views than from living with someone who can provide in-depth insight into an opposing view. If you think it’s important to understand other points of view, you can avail yourself of existing sources (such as the Dish). No need to marry one!

Philip Bump points out that ideological sorting isn’t strictly an online phenomenon:

Geography is almost certainly a stronger indicator of the likelihood two people will get together than having matching political views on OKCupid: A resident of Boston may find the perfect match possible on a website, but if that match [lives] in Honolulu, he’s much more likely to end up with someone from Cambridge. Geographical regions already tend to have a lot of political homogeneity. Take New York City. An April 2012 survey found that 82 percent of the city was registered Democratic…. So there’s a four-to-one chance that the person you meet randomly on the street will share your registration if you’re a Democrat. If you try to find someone who disagrees with you, it will be difficult.