The History of Private Life

546 JOSEPH SHATZMILLF;R focuses his attention on the process of canon-formation, the status of the text, the role of the reader, and the nature and function of understanding and interpretation . Narratives, he contends, demand active interpreters: They will always invite us to plural glosses on the letter, to ingenious manipulations of the codes; it is their nature to demand that we produce rather than consume them, and that we liberate them from local and provincial restrictions, including, so far as that is possible, our own. (The Art of Telling, 70 - 1) A major adept in the art of perspective by incongruity, Kermode in these later works adopts an occult mode of reading and in The Genesis ofSecrecy compares The Gospel ofSt. Mark with such texts as Ulysses and The Crying ofLot 49. As Gorak puts it, 'Kermode does not simply write about uncertainty: he actually tries to wrap us inside it.' In his search for the 'secrets lurking in the tale-bearing text' (The Art of Telling, 31), Kermode merges criticism with creation. Concise, lucid, and articulate, Gorak's Critic ofCrisis is a superb introduction to Kermode's works and a cogent analysis and evaluation of his ideas. It contains a wealth of illuminating references to other critics and theorists, it furnishes the relevant biographical details, and it delineates the intellectual and cultural climate in which Kermode works. Both the literary scholar and the general reader will find it to be interesting, informative, and insightful. The History of Private Life JOSEPH SHATZMILLER James A. Brundage. Law, Sex, and Society in Medieval Europe University of Chicago Press 1987. 674. us $75.00 Historians nowadays are not as prudish as they used to be. It is true that it took them a long time to reach the point writers like Dostoevsky or Stendhal had attained a hundred years ago. But once there, they refuse to go backwards. The prevailing sentiment in the profession is that we all have to get closer to the men and women of the past and explore their most intimate desires and motives if we wish to obtain any valid understanding ofhuman behaviour. Taboos are therefore broken daily in seminars and university classrooms, while issues that were discussed in the past only accidentally are now very high on the scholarly agenda. This is particularly true in the field of social history. There is no real difficulty in grasping that patterns ofprivate life vary from place to place and from one period to another. Comparing conditions in today's Scandinavia with, say, Afghanistan should persuade us that privacy too depends on historical circumstances. But how do we go about describing and analysing the history of private life and where should we look for sources? Should we limit our UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SU~MER 1989 THE HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE 547 inquiry, when dealing with the medieval West, to the institution of marriage, its formation and its dissolution, or should we trace developments in Christian attitudes towards sex and sexual deviation, towards clericalcelibacy, and towards abstinence in general? In his present book James Brundage chooses the second way, the all-embracing one, focusing most of his attention on the high middle ages (1000-1350), although the introductory chapters deal with Hammurabi and the Bible and the concluding ones with Luther and Zwingli. There are good reasons for this insistence on the high middle ages. During these three hundred and fifty years, and in particular during the twelfth century, western Europe changed profoundly. Favourable climatic conditions enhanced economic activity, brought about formidable growth in population numbers, and increased and deepened all aspects of European culture and creativity. Cities arose all over the West, harbouring intensive commercial activity. People could not rely anymore on memory in order to record all the events in which they were involved; they had to enhance literacy and to discover new technologies (in particular paper) in order to universalize writing and to facilitate it. State and Church alike realized that the new pace of life required a departure from the traditional patterns of the judicial system (based on the ordeal), and that a new system, based on reason and on...