Medieval civilization (review)

Reviews , ™ ending in the vision and attitude of Henry VIII, which 'leaves us with no virtue higher than graceful surrender' (p. 237). Kevin Magarey Department of English Umversity of Adeldde Le Goff, J., Medieval civilization, trans. J. Barrow, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988; pp. xx, 393; 6 maps; 34 plates; 25 figures; R.R.P. A U S $49.25. Twenty-four years separate the initid publication of Jacques Le Goff s La civilisation de I'Occident medieval (Paris, 1964) from its English translation; a delay which in itself says much about the gulf separating English and French historiographical traditions in the sixties and early seventies. Times have changed since then. Monolingual history students have been able to keep up with Le Goff's more detailed studies in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (1980) and The Medieval Imagination (1988), both collections published by the University of Chicago Press three years after they had first been assembled in France. The Birth ofPurgatory (Chicago, 1984) was dso quick to be translated. Medieval Civilization provides an opportunity for English readers to become familiar with a work which when it first appeared in 1964, provoked something of an uproar in conservative circles, both journalistic and scholarly, because of its application of notions of class struggle to medieval society and its insistence on the primacy of a materialist economic basis to medieval civilization. This polemic had more to do with political debates in French intellectual circles in the mid sixties than with any strictly historicd issue. Reading Medieval Civilization in the late eighties one cannot help but be struck by the deftness of Le Goff's synthesis, in particular by his sympathetic understanding of, on the one hand the materid realities of working life, and on the other the imaginative categories which penetrated the medievd world. Le Goff writes in the tradition of Michelet. Thefirstof the book's two sections presents a pedagogicdly usefd account of the formation of Christian Europe from the barbarian settlements to the economic crisis of the later Middle Ages. The heart of Le Goff's interest, however, is the high medieval period, from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. The more original part of Medieval Civilization is the second section, concerned with the framework of time and space underlying the textud and visual artefacts of medieval culture. Le Goff makes excellent use of vivid primary sources to illustrate his argument about popular conceptions of the cosmos. Perhaps the book's most questionable aspect is the untroubled way in which Le Goff uses non-medieval abstractions such as 'feuddism' and 'the feudd system' (defined on p. 226 as 'the appropriation by the seigneurid class, ecclesiastical and lay, of all the surplus agricultural production achieved by the peasant 160 Reviews masses'), and generalizes on class conflict (as on p. 304: 'Confrontation between classes, which was a basic feature of life in the countryside, soon [date unspecified] reappeared in the towns.'). The ultimate in bathos is a comment on p. 359: 'Like gastronomy, the triumph of underwear was linked to theriseof the bourgeoisie'. There are no footnotes to help one pursue such a claim. To be fair, such lines do not illustrate what Le Goff does best, the interpenetration of material and imaginative culture in the Middle Ages. In the retrospective introduction to The Medieval Imagination (p. 13) Le Goff detaches himself from a 'reductionist' Marxist theory of base and superstructure, and says that in Medieval Civilization he described the medieval world view in terms of 'interlocking but causdly distinct spatiotemporal structures'. Whether Le Goff actudly avoided a reductionist tinge in 1964 is another matter. Since then he has become more concerned with imaginative than economic redities (a personal evolution not unlike that of Duby). Nonetheless, the book still stands as a stimulating introduction to anyone vaguely interested in how people both lived and thought in the Middle Ages, even if some assertions provoke thought rather than agreement. Julia Barrow's translation generally reads well, although the rhetorical flavour of Le Goff's language is never totally natural in an English medium. Handsomely illustrated and with many useful maps (as well as an updated bibliography), Medieval Civilization is still as readable...