History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person (review)

In her 1991 collection, Fragmentation and Redemption, Caroline Walker Bynum challenged historians to consider a new mode of inquiry, one that embraced the many possibilities of the past, the richness and sometimes improbability of its stories, and the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in the historical record. Arguing in favor of what she termed “history in the comic mode,” Bynum defended the writing of history as necessarily provisional and contingent, its goal not the revelation of historical “truth” but rather the celebration of the fragmentary and the intractable: what she presented as the glorious potential of the stories of the past. History in the Comic Mode, a Festschrift dedicated simply to “our teacher,” takes up Bynum’s challenge, offering what its editors describe as a “pointillist” history designed to provoke wonder and amusement, to raise many questions and suggest some answers, but above all to pay grateful tribute to the intellectual breadth, curiosity, and generosity of Caroline Walker Bynum.

This is a collection inspired by the fun of doing history. The essays, each in its way a tribute to Bynum’s teaching and intellectual influence, readily embrace the fragmentary and the improbable, weaving from such diverse sources as saints’ lives, alchemical treatises, political texts, medical compilations, illuminated manuscripts, sermons, reliquaries, charters, and the discarded scraps of merchants’ letters, stories of devotion, contagion, commerce, trauma, magic, belief, sanctity, and suffering. United neither by a single overarching question nor by a new theoretical approach, the essays share instead in a common attention to the particular and the partial. It is here, in the fractional and incomplete, that the fun can be found. History is a game, the editors aver, although its “play” does nothing to detract from the volume’s scholarly rigor. History can be fun precisely because it requires careful attention to the sources as well as critical engagement with the past. Although hard and fast conclusions ultimately prove elusive, each contribution nevertheless engages the reader in an exciting dialogue that invites response and refinement.

History in the comic mode is a risky business, in part because it refuses the security of closure. Its practitioners recognize—indeed, they celebrate—the open-endedness of their contributions. “Ultimately, we are left to wonder,” Catherine M. Mooney concludes in her own contribution concerning the textual tradition of Angela of Foligno, leaving questions concerning Angela’s family, her relationships with her husband, mother, and children, and their influence on her spiritual journey unanswered (67). Mooney’s essay, like others in the volume, confronts the fragmentary nature of the medieval sources, highlighting the ways in which historians, in the face of the partial and incomplete, have tended to fill in the blanks. In Angela’s case, the silences of the textual record (itself complicated, as Mooney shows) have given rise to multiple interpretations, which—changing over time—reflect the changing interests of historians and their changing approaches to the past. Angela, pictured variously as an adulterous, virtuous, and abused wife and mother, emerges from the historical record less as a figure in her own right than as a reflection of shifting ideas (medieval and modern) concerning female sanctity and sexuality.

As Angela’s case demonstrates, the writing of history is necessarily a process of “continuous rethinking” (280). This rethinking is essential and to be welcomed since each generation, inspired by its own questions, is automatically part of the “story”: “the only real mistake,” the editors comment, “is to imagine that . . . we can ever fully, if indeed at all, abstract ourselves from the fray” (286). Like Bynum, whose writing often assumes a narrative “we,” the contributors admit their own stake in the questions they ask: Sharon Farmer writes, noting her mounting interest in relations between East and West since September 11, 2001, “As historians we turn to those fragments of the past that speak to our own experience and concerns” (205). The risk of writing history in...