Decentring Western European History … in the History of Western Europe

As many of you will know, I am (endlessly it seems) working on a book about Western Europe around 600 AD.  I work on Western Europe partly because it is what, over the years, I have become most (if far from exclusively) interested in, and partly because it is the limit of my scholarly competence.  I have little time for people who study regions or periods of history where they can’t read the sources in the original language (why yes, ‘Latin East’ Crusades studies, I am looking at you, but not exclusively).  I can get by in reading all of the western European Romance or Germanic languages, to some degree, ranging from fluent (French) to ‘basically getting the gist if it’s not too complex’ (Norwegian; Portuguese).  But my Greek is pretty basic; I have a very (very) little Turkish but not enough to call a reading knowledge (and none at all prior to Ataturk’s reforms of script and grammar); and I can’t read any Slavic languages, let alone Arabic or Parsi, or Sanskrit, or Chinese…  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the main reason why I restrict myself to the West.  The other reason is simply to put some sort of geographical limit on the projects.

Partly, though far from entirely, as a means of making a virtue of this necessity, I have developed an interest in the North-South axes of communications and connections in the West, from Scandinavia to the western Mediterranean, rather than in the East-West axis that has generally dominated the historiography.  I think that has allowed a slightly different perspective on the ‘Late Antique Paradigm’ and a slightly different way of seeing the last century or so of the Western Roman Empire.  Clearly, it’s impossible to study that period without keeping the Eastern Empire in the picture but I maintain that the disintegration of the Western Empire was chiefly attributable to entirely western imperial factors.

One of the many things that is interesting about the period between c.550 and c.650 is that in this period links with the East, the old East-West Mediterranean axis, let alone more far-flung connections, began to reduce further, and dramatically.  Now, this is not news, and not just because it’s stuff that happened 1400 years ago.  If Pirenne was right about anything, it was about the ways in which the North-West, the North Sea World, had become more important in Western Europe, than the Mediterranean world by Charemagne’s day.  That’s not to say that the Mediterranean was without any importance at all; recent studies have shown that East-West contacts were much more important than Pirenne, for instance, had thought.  But the picture, grosso modo, pertains.  In Pirenne’s narrative, the closing of the Mediterrranean by the Arabs, as he thought, led to western Europe turning inwards and creating new economic systems around the North Sea.  ‘Without Mohammed, Charlemagne is inconceivable’, in Pirenne’s famous dictum. Pirenne was wrong about almost all of the specifics of his model.  The North-Western European, North-Sea world was effectively separated from the Mediterranean at least by the fourth century, for example.(1)  Whether the Arabs are to blame for the end of the Mediterranean’s domination of the western economy is debatable; the shift comes a generation or more too early in my view but Simon Loseby, whose understanding of the Mediterranean economy is far superior to mine, thinks otherwise (or at least used to).  Nonetheless, that the shape of western European networks, c.650, differed very importantly from those of c.550 seems incontrovertible to me as does the comparative applicability of the phrase ‘inward-looking’ to those networks.

In even grander narratives, of European exceptionalism, of the Rise of the West and so on, that phase becomes yet more important.  Allegedly, it is this ‘inward-looking’ period that saw the creation of the features, and the dynamics, that enabled Europe to expand outwards, ultimately to dominate the world in the period after c.1800.  There’s a danger, perhaps, of this study of western Europe in the generations either side of 600, becoming incorporated in one of those tiresome narratives about Why the West is the Best, worse still in one of those narratives of modernity.  Rather like Simon Critchley, I don’t really believe in modernity, other than as a narrative construct, and I reject ‘modernity fundamentalism’.(2) The concept of the modern world is a rather Eurocentric one.

It has become fashionable recently to discuss Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in more global terms.  In some ways this is excellent; in other ways it’s a huge conceptual muddle.  Of course, the rest of the world had a history before European colonization and there were links that connected Europe with most of that world.  Traditional Late Antique Medieval History can be criticized for its Eurocentricity (or Mediterranean-basin-ocentricity) but I am not sure that foisting European periodization on the rest of the world is any less Eurocentric; perhaps it is more so.  I recently received a ‘reply-all’ email criticizing a proposed history general course for being divided into Medieval, Early Modern and Modern on the grounds that that periodization made no sense outside Europe.  That of course begs the question of whether it makes any sense within Europe.  It is a bit disheartening to see a history professor mistake traditional, contingent chronological divisions, which have been endlessly called into question and have never really been based upon more than convenience, for reflections of concrete, regional historical actuality.  But we are were we are, and the proposed response, to divide world history into two equal periods, before and after 1800, is (among many other absurdities) even more Eurocentric.

As signs, labels have their signifieds.  To talk of the global Middle Ages or the global Late Antiquity, implicitly confers on extra-European, or extra-Mediterranean, regions not simply a name but a place in a teleological narrative or a historiographical problematic.  Periods referred to as a ‘middle’ age in various parts of South or East Asia, for example, are so called for quite different reasons than those which led European humanists to designate the period between them and the Roman Empire as the age that lay ‘in the middle’ between them, and consequently those different Middle Ages do not map directly onto each other.  Does the history of South Asia benefit from being labelled according to a periodization devised to address the issues of continuity on either side of the political events of fifth-century Western Europe and the Mediterranean?  I am not sure it does.

That is not, by any means, to argue against the interest or importance of looking at the links that existed between western Europe, say, and China or South Asia, via the Steppe, or the sea routes around the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa.  There has been much recent work done that sees Roman history as a part of a Eurasian history that connects it with the other great Empires of the period.(3)  I am thinking about a radically revised, second edition of Barbarian Migrations and these developments definitely need to be taken into account there.  Just the other day, via a quite different process, I found myself wondering whether the collapse of the Gupta state in India had some role in kicking off the changes in East-West connections that can be seen in the period I am studying.

But connections need closer critical consideration.  There are two dangers, as I see it.  One is that the Eurasian perspective on Late Antiquity runs the risk of reintroducing the idea of the Huns as the Deus Ex Machina that ruins the Roman Empire (though of course there are some areas where that idea has never gone away).  It either kicks the explanatory can back off across the steppes, leaving us not to have to worry about conflicts, tensions and political dynamics within the Roman Empire itself, or it leads us on a goose-chase, wild or otherwise, to seek some sort of ultimate point of causation, the place where change started, where no further external factor can be adduced: an Ursache indeed.(4). 

This raises the next problem, which is that connections, like narratives, have to be deconstructed.  When we join the dots are we creating a picture that had no contemporary historical reality?  Just as the arrows on ‘migration maps’ have been correctly critiqued for joining up into what looks like a coherent process series of separate phenomena, distinct, contingent movements motivated by quite other intentions than to arrive at the next ‘stage’ on the map or the final ‘goal’, carried out by fundamentally different groups of people.  Do links that join up trading connections or cultural contacts commit the same fundamental error?  Do the people who stood at the beginning and end points of these arrows even have an awareness of each other?  What does this connectivity mean? How does it compare with other social relations, if at all?  How is each link in the chain seen, enacted and employed by the people involved?  What are the (quite possibly very different) effects of connectivity, on the various societies connected by these chains?  These questions are not at all posed to reject placing fourth- to seventh-century Europe and the Mediterranean in a wider world of connections and contacts.  They are meant to invite a more critical reflection, even if also to challenge the notion that joining the dots is a blessing in itself.

But what if, as I think is the case, the dots leading to or from Western Europe between c.550 and c.650 don’t actually go very far?  Is there a less Eurocentric way of thinking about European history of a period when Europe (if we can even talk about Europe – let’s call it Europe ‘sous rature’) had little to do with anywhere else?  Is it possible to recast the period in terms other than those of European exceptionalism: the time ‘when Europe discovered itself’ and when the foundations of modern Capitalism were laid?  Maybe there isn’t and it isn’t.  One idea that occurred to me comes out of the placing of Europe sous rature, just now.  I once referred to the area I work on as ‘far western Eurasia’.  I did so partly in jest but perhaps it is worth taking that nomenclature seriously.  It has the benefit of decentring the perspective that led westerners until recently to talk of the ‘near’ and the ‘far’ East.  It has the advantage, too, of pointing out, that in global terms, especially if you eschew the Mercator Projection, the area I work on lies at the extremity, at the edge, whether of the great Eurasian landmass, or northwards, across the sea, from the equally great landmass of Africa.  It is interesting to think not only of Britain, but of all of Eurasia west of the Upper Elbe and the Adriatic, as peripheral.  But that, it seems to me, if very much the case in the period I am currently looking at.    In many ways it won’t make much difference to the story I have to tell and the factors I want to adduce, but words matter and ‘The Isolation of Far Western Eurasia’ has a rather importantly different signified from ‘The Origins of Europe’.

Notes

[1] Indeed the preceding period, between say the Late Roman Republic and the ‘Third-Century Crisis’ when this may not have been the case, is rather more exceptional.

[2] https://www.berfrois.com/2014/06/hamlets-nothing-berfrois-interviews-simon-critchley/

[3] See Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas (ed.), Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, Ca. 250-750 (Cambridge, 2018).  Some of this thinking makes its way into Michael Kulikowski’s excellent Imperial Triumph. The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (London, 2016), which I heartily recommend.

[4] The German word die Ursache (‘cause’,‘root cause’, ‘reason’)  contains the stem ‘Ur’’, which usually denotes something primordial or original, and die Sache – ‘thing’, ‘matter’: the ultimate, primary thing. A root cause indeed.

Saints, 'Scholars' and Jacques Derrida

TL:DR Synopsis: Historians who haven’t read Derrida should STFU about Derrida 

I get increasingly worried about the comparative intellectual level of academic history. Partly it comes from seeing university history professors (professors, mind: not lecturers or readers) making the most unbelievably stupid comments about Brexit, on Facebook or elsewhere, or more generally just in the levels of critical sophistication in the arguments one sees published, or in the degree of intellectual ambition or reach. I have said before that I find academic history – in the UK at least – to be a very lazy, complacent discipline. US history seems to have different, existential, problems and challenges, but not ones that have produced better thought. 

One of the ways in which this is manifested is in some historians’ attitudes to supposedly ‘postmodern’ philosophy, attitudes which suggest that they think that the normal scholarly principles can be suspended when discussing it and, moreover, that this will somehow make the author appear clever or witty. 

Here is an example: 

‘We should not pretend that Jacques Derrida has revealed something radically new to us: that hagiography reproduces hagiography rather than some putative reality. Hippolyte Delehaye pointed this out in 1905 in his Legends of the Saints, although because he wrote in plain, comprehensible language, his message was perhaps not as clear as that of Derrida.’ (Patrick J. Geary, ‘Saints, scholars and society: the elusive goal’, in id., Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca NY, 1994), pp.7-29, at p.17) 

Take that, Derrida! Note also the barbed comment about Derrida’s language. This is the old Anglo-American trope of the French bullshitter with nothing new to say who only gets away with it because of his impenetrable prose. You can find that in too many flippant discussions to decide on a representative sample but look up Derrida in ‘Sir’ Anthony Kenney’s New History of Western Philosophy for a particularly shabby and libellous example. (1) 

I read Geary’s article in 1995 before I had read anything by JD and promptly forgot about it. Maybe I thought ‘ha ha! Good zinger there, Professor Geary!’ Who knows? The passage above has reappeared in my consciousness recently, however, quoted by another good historian whom I know and (at least currently) get on with: James T. Palmer, in his new Early Medieval Hagiography (? s’-Hertogenbosch: ARC Humanities Press, 2018, p.68), which is otherwise rather a useful little primer on the topic. Later in the same chapter, Palmer goes on (p.83): 

‘Postmodernism is not a licence to make everything up. Nevertheless, we are not far away from Derrida’s maxim ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (there is no outside-text), a claim that reality and language never truly intersect. For many medievalists this is largely unproblematic because we know that we are locked into partial views of textual discourses with no possibility of external validation (subject to the invention of time travel, of course). Indeed we have already seen Geary’s dismissal of the idea that Derrida announced something new here, because Delehaye, Graus and many more had already explored issues about textuality and truth. Geary, building on thoughts by Gabrielle Spiegel, even wondered if manuscripts could help to supply something like the “outside-text” that would lead to a better appreciation of the social logic of the text.’ 

For me, this kind of thing is nowadays like a red to rag to a bull, not least because I should get out more. It’s pretty commonplace to misunderstand the arguments made by other people – indeed Derrida would have said, I imagine, that it’s pretty much inevitable. If I were to say that Patrick Geary or James Palmer had nothing new to say, because loads of people had said what they had to say before, and took a side-swipe at the clarity of their prose-style, people might say I was being a bit rude. If my statement represented an utterly bizarre misrepresentation of their arguments anyway, I would come in for more (justifiable) stick. If, however, it turned out that I had made those remarks without even having read Geary’s or Palmer’s works in the first place, then I’d really be ruled out of court. Yet, it appears that when it comes to continental philosophers, that kind of behaviour is accepted as fair play and even cheered heartily. 

I have said, for many years now, that the degree of venom spat at Derrida stands in inverse proportion to the familiarity of the writer with Derrida’s works. Indeed, if one reads Geary’s article, there is no sign from the footnotes or text that he had, at that stage at least, read anything at all by Derrida or that, if he had, he’d made much effort to understand it. What he had read, and what is cited in the passage quoted earlier, is Gabrielle Spiegel’s well-known article ‘History, historicism and the social logic of the text in the Middle Ages’ (Speculum, 1990: reprinted in ead. The Past as Text. The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography, Baltimore, 1999). For many, perhaps most, medievalists, Spiegel’s widely-read and -cited article appears to have stood in for any first-hand acquaintance with Jacques Derrida’s writing. This is a shame because Spiegel misunderstood Derrida and deconstruction pretty badly (I will leave that for another time, perhaps). She had, however, at least read some of Derrida’s early works and made an effort to engage with his thought. 

Palmer has made the effort to look up the page reference for the phrase ‘il n’y-a pas de hors-texte’, infamously mistranslated by Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak in the first edition of the English translation of De la grammatologie as ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (Chakravorty-Spivak possibly read the phrase as something like ‘il n’y-a pas dehors texte’ but who knows?). Palmer quotes the more correct translation: there is no outside-text. 

Neither Geary nor Palmer – manifestly – had/have the faintest idea of what Derrida was talking about, however, as is abundantly clear from their comments. Abundantly clear, that is, to anyone familiar with Derridian philosophy. The gamble in statements like theirs, though, is the fairly safe one that none of their medieval historian readers will be familiar with Derridian philosophy. It is a – not untypical – rhetorical ploy to suggest familiarity with ‘postmodern’ philosophy while simultaneously dismissing it, and thus staying securely and unthreateningly within the accepted, traditional historical paradigm and its attitude to ‘postmodernism’ (see also the misuse of Derrida’s term ‘deconstruction’).(2) That is to place a bet on what look like good, safe odds. It’s actually a high scholarly stake to gamble but normally it pays off. If it doesn’t, though, you run the risk of looking pretty foolish. 

Over the past decade or so, I have read quite a lot of Derrida’s writing, and exegesis of it. Indeed I was partly drawn to Derrida precisely by the venomous reaction any citation of his name appears to excite. If people hate him that much, he must have something important to say, thought I. Over the years it became clear to me that my hunch was exactly correct. What Derrida’s thought calls into question is the very project of modern, ‘rigorous’ Anglo-American ‘analytical’ philosophy. Indeed, in my opinion, he makes it fairly clear that that project, the whole search for logical truth, is entirely pointless. (3) No wonder that, even 14 years after his death from cancer, you can still find British philosophy professors deriding Derrida (pun intended) as a French fraud. 

Derrida had nothing to say about the things that Geary mentions. ‘Hagiography reproduces only hagiography’ has nothing to do with Derrida’s thought. Contra Palmer, Derrida’s thought is absolutely not about ‘textuality and truth’ in the sense that Delehaye, Graus and the rest were discussing it. There is almost no intersection between the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and those topics. Derrida didn’t say anything that Delehaye had said before, which is no slur on Delehaye. They were discussing quite different topics. 

So, what was Derrida on about? Let’s start with ‘il n’y-a pas de hors-texte’ and work back. To understand that phrase you need to understand what Derrida meant by ‘texte’. One key point made in De la grammatologie, actually a pretty prescient point (as John D. Caputo says in his recent, excellent Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (Penguin, 2018)), is that the fundamental characteristics of writing apply to all other means of the communication or recognition of information. The features that allow a written text to convey information regardless of the presence or absence of the initial writer or the intended recipient – the idea of iterability – underlie spoken language too. Indeed, they underpin any form of the conveyance of meaning. Once a signifier of any sort has become associated with a signified it can be repeated ad nauseam. This feature of iterability brings with it all the possibilities for the slippage of meaning when the sign is deployed in new, different contexts. The sign (of any sort) has meaning only because of its place in an endless chain, or infinite network, of relationship to and difference from other signs. Even on the very first time that a specific signifier is used to relate to a particular signified it has always already acquired the feature of iterability, the capacity not just to relate to that one thing but to any other instance of that thing, and to relate to it ironically or sarcastically, and its meaning is always already conveyed in part through its difference from other things. Thus – in time – you can never get back, however hard you try, to an ‘originary’ meaning where sign and referent are entirely co-extensive. Such meaning is perpetually deferred. And – in space – you can never leave the chain or network of differences. Even to imagine such a thing you have to move into the realm of theology: in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God (John 1.1): ontotheology. This applies to speech, to writing, to pictorial representation, to mathematics, to basic cognition of the world around you. Nothing can be understood outside a network of presences and absences, beyond the play, or motion, of différance (Derrida’s neologism that conveys the combination of deferral and difference just alluded to). This was what Derrida meant when he talked about ‘texte’: the features of ‘text’ that in fact all cognition and communication are based upon. All transmission of information works using the structures and principles of writing, to describe which he coined another of his many neologisms: archi-écriture (a word that combines architecture and écriture – writing – and the word arche, meaning beginning or origin). All such systems work with ‘graphemes’, signifying-units subject to différance. 

So: there is no ‘outside-text’: no ‘neutral’ vantage-point, outwith archi-écriture, outside the features of writing and text, from which to assess absolute meaning; no point from which it would in any case be possible to convey absolute meaning, self-present to, co-extensive with, the means by which it was conveyed. If Hippolyte Delehaye or František Graus ever said anything even remotely like this I would be extremely glad of the reference as their significance within the history of continental philosophy has been entirely ignored! The other point to be made, is that the discussions of différance, texte and archi-écriture are the spring-board for, not the end-point of, Derrida’s thought about deconstruction. 

Is ‘il n’y-a pas de hors-texte’, then, ‘a claim that reality and language never truly intersect’? Clearly not. It is a claim that, insofar as it is perceived and understood, reality is ‘text’. In the Venn diagram metaphor, the sets of ‘Derridian ‘text’’ and ‘perceived reality’ do not merely intersect; they are the same set. Anything outside those sets simply cannot be perceived, understood or represented; it’s equivalent to the Lacanian Real, the Kantian ‘Ding an sich’, the reason why Speculative Realism is speculative. Once something is perceived, understood and described, it becomes iterable, subject to the potential slippage that comes with différance, caught in the features of text and archi-écriture. 

None of that, you will note, has anything – at all – to do with text reproducing other text, or discourse staying within the bounds of discourse (that’s Foucault, not Derrida: the two were very different). Geary ought to read Derrida on ‘the law of genre’, in that regard.(4) Nor does any of it have anything to do with the problems involved in dealing with the partiality of our evidence or the dangers of reconstructing the past from partial evidence. The vantage point ‘outside text’ (hors du texte) or a means of expressing reality via a supposed hors-texte can hardly be equated to going back to ‘seeing it for yourself’ via time-travel (ho ho). That (sorry, James) is a simply absurd misrepresentation. Equally absurd is the idea that manuscripts would create an ‘hors-texte’ (to be fair to Geary, I can’t find any point in his article where he claims this). No one with any familiarity with Derrida would suppose that it could. The only way that you could recognise, extract and convey information about the past from manuscripts, whether in their contents or in their physical construction, or the statistical analysis of their distribution, production, etc., would be – inescapably – through ‘text’ in Derrida’s sense. The mistake here – on both Palmer’s and Geary’s parts – has been to wrongly assume that Derrida was talking about actual texts in the most narrow, scriptural sense. That is an error of the most egregious kind.(5) These representations of Derrida’s argument in De la grammatologie are unrecognisable. The usual ‘clever’ (with a big K) cop-out response is to say ‘ah, but if text is inherently slippery, isn’t my reading as valid as anyone else’s? Is the author not dead?’ To which the answer is, firstly, that the argument that the slipperiness of text makes interpretation a free-for-all is that of Paul de Man and the ‘Yale School’ of deconstruction, not Derrida’s. Derrida distanced himself from that use of his idea. He did that not least because Derridian deconstruction is based upon the most minute, careful close-reading of the authorial text. The ‘death of the author’ is Barthe’s idea, not Derrida’s, though clearly there are points of contact. Derridian deconstruction leaves the (apparent) authorial text and intended meaning in place; it just, additionally, points out the other readings and texts that inhere within it so that the intended meaning is not the only one. Alternative texts, though, are nevertheless produced via the act of close reading. You might want to argue that there are other conflicting texts within Derrida’s writing but you still have to leave the text and argument (6) as it is. That is why Derrida’s writing is as difficult as it is. He was, ironically, attempting to make his argument as clear as is possible within language. ‘Plain, comprehensible language’ – language, in other words, predicated on accepted style – is precisely the sort that renders itself open to the presence within it of other texts. 

It’s an indefensible, disgraceful way to handle a scholar’s work and Palmer and Geary should really be ashamed of themselves. Leaving out the comments discussed here would hardly have made any difference to their works, so why are they there? If they treated their medieval texts and the ideas expressed in them, or the works of their contemporaries or near contemporaries in the historical profession, in anything like the same way – and I am pretty sure that neither of them does – they would rightly be hounded out of the academy. If one handled, say, some of Augustine’s more recondite texts like this, on the assumption that it was a safe bet that none of your audience was familiar with them, and were found out, the consequences for one’s scholarly reputation would (or ought to) be serious to say the least. Treating philosophical in such cavalier fashion should be seen as equally poor scholarship. 

Notes: 

1: I have long thought it a sorry indication of the state of play in British philosophy that Derrida gets a fairer hearing in Bluff your Way in Philosophy than in Kenney’s New History. 

2: The best place to read this is, probably, in his responses to John Searle: Limited Inc. translated by A. Bass & S. Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Pr., 2008). Charles Barbour (Derrida's Secret: Perjury, Testimony, Oath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)) describes Searle’s attempt to take on Derrida’s critique of Austin’s category of performatives as like taking a knife to a tank battle. A more balanced account can be found in Raoul Moati (trans. T. Attanucci & M. Chun), Derrida/Searle: Deconstruction and Ordinary Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) 

3: The outstanding example of this approach is Richard J. Evans’ In Defence of History, which consistently sets itself up in opposition to continental philosophers like Derrida, Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, but without giving any indication, via footnotes or text, that the author had read anything at all by any of these writers. This is an irony in a book championing empirical research. The way in which ‘deconstruction’ has acquired a wholly different meaning from that which it was coined, by Derrida, to convey is an interesting ‘scholarly’ phenomenon in itself. Misusing the word to mean ‘critically taking apart’ allows the author to sound ‘philosophically’ or ‘theoretically’ sophisticated (note how French philosophers are so often called ‘theorists’, buying into the ‘analytical’ narrative that denies them even their status as philosophers) while doing nothing new at all. 

4: English translation in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge. (New York: Routledge, 2009). 

5: Palmer also says (Hagiography, p.78), ‘This leads us, directly or indirectly, of theorists such as Derrida and Foucault who encouraged such decentring – and who in the process encouraged greater attention to narrative’. Any ‘leading’ going on here would have to be extremely indirect. Again, the frequent pairing of Foucault and his student-friend-enemy-friend Derrida (in the terrifying two-headed beast Foucaultandderrida) is problematic. I am not sure what Derrida (or Foucault) said about the sort of de-centring going on in the paragraph from which I just quoted. The paragraph is more haunted by the works of Lyotard than by either Foucault or Derrida. Palmer moves seamlessly from the dreaded mythical two-headed French monster to that rather more domesticated animal, Hayden White. White, however, was entirely dismissive of Derrida, with whom, like so many others, he barely took the trouble to engage. 

6: I originally wrote ‘his text’, but Derrida was opposed to the idea of proprietary ‘ownership’ of texts – one reason he fell out with Chakravorty-Spivak and other Marxists (see also Searle and Limited Inc.). ‘Texts to which the name Jacques Derrida has been appended’ would have been his preferred circumlocution. I have left the phrase ‘Derrida’s writings’ (or ‘Derrida’s works’) elsewhere simply because it was too much like hard work to change them all.

It was nine years ago today...

Professor Grumpy taught the band to play.  Or rather that I began this blog (on the other site).  It's become increasingly quiet over the past few years.  This is not because I consciously gave up on it.  I have many, many half-finished blog posts on my computer/s/iPad etc.  I did experiment with other forms of engagement - a Facebook Page and then a Group, neither of which turned out so well in that they brought the sorts of personal abuse that I can a: do without, and b: that I no longer have the resilience to deal with.  Partly it's been the result of a bit of a collapse in self-confidence, related to mental health issues (the old Black Dog) that have dogged me (no pun intended) for as long as I can remember but which have become quite acute since maybe 2013, especially since 2015.  I hope that such personal revelations don't make you uncomfortable, dear reader; I think it's important to be up-front about such things.  That said, I think I may be on the up again since then, not least owing to a change in my private life and a concrete 'exit strategy' with relation to academia and my 'career' and I have been meaning to start blogging more regularly again for some time.

Some of the issues with Blogger that led me effectively to close the other version of the blog down and start this parallel version seem to have waned. This makes me want to start running the 'main site' properly again, not least because it is the one with almost of all of my blog followers, though I might keep them both going in tandem, so new posts will appear here too.

I also had an interesting conversation about turning some of the blog posts into a book.  Whether or not anything comes of that remains to be seen but it is (for me) an exciting idea.

Anyway, to those who still visit this page, thanks for bearing with me.

The poetics of politics: Transformations of public space in western Europe around 600

(This is a paper I gave at Durham a few weeks ago.  I had been trying to get back up to date on the archaeology of French towns, partly for the 'never-ending Year 600' project and partly because I perhaps needed to cover a chapter on towns for a forthcoming collective volume.  As it happened that chapter got delivered, and was better than I could have done anyway, so I wasn't called upon in the end, but it was still useful for me to do the work.  I have also been interested for some time in how the focus of politics changes between the sixth and seventh century, with the civitas capital losing its former centrality: a point that - I noticed recently - Simon Loseby had noted as long ago as 1997 (and quite probably other people had too).  All this gave me the excuse to try finally to put something together on the subject.  In the end, for various reasons, it ended up being a bit of a rush job and I think the paper is a bit of a dog's dinner in many ways.  Stitching the elements (about cities and about the social use of space and the scripting of politics) together meant that some ideas got lost in the process (especially about interpellation, in the Althusserian sense).  The last section is too brief and rushed, so a lot of stuff that interests me got lost anyway.  Anyway, here it is.  I present it as a crude, rough first sketch but I think there are ideas here that might be worth developing.)

  In my first book I said that trying to reconstruct urban life from the works of Gregory of Tours was like trying to reconstruct Tudor London from the props box of the Globe Theatre.In this paper I am coming back, after a long interval, to the Merovingian city and pursuing a different, and possibly no less tortured, dramatic metaphor.

What became of classical politics, in the very literal sense of the affairs of the polis, the city? The city, after all, remained the focus of politics throughout the Roman period.  While the municipal sphere had changed dramatically by the fourth century, it can’t be denied that the very form of the town continued to reify that of the Roman political system.  The late imperial period in the West sees, wherever one looks, urban contraction and abandonment to some extent but even in the far north-western imperial provinces the smallest and – by any classical standards – least impressive towns manifest their centrality to the Empire’s political system. 

An extreme case might be Bavay just on the French side of the modern Franco-Belgian border.  At some point around 300 (probably) the town was walled, but those walls, for whatever reason, enclosed no more than the forum of the early Roman town.  By 400 Bavay had lost its status as civitas­-capital of the Nervi to the then-scarcely-more-imposing town of Cambrai, but even so, even in its reduced size, it manifested the urban nature of the politics of the Dominate: a fortified administrative redoubt within which imperial revenues were collected, converted from kind to specie or vice versa; the seat of whatever officials resided there; the focus of the political activities of the Nervian aristocracy. Those aristocrats may have been as relatively unimpressive as their city: former (or current) imperial officials occupying or living off fiscal estates on short-term leases with a smattering of not very wealthy local landowners, mostly living in wooden, thatched- or shingle-rooved farmhouses, rather than the palatial-villa-dwelling Mediterranean grandees who might more readily come to mind when considering the late imperial aristocracy.  The general point, however, remains, mutatis mutandis, whichever town we might be talking about.  Politics, or the political, focused upon imperial service and imperial service remained centred on the town.  It was true in the sticks, at Bavay, and it was true at the heart of politics.  When it mattered Emperors were to be found in towns.  Indeed, even their villas could resemble bigger and more impressive ‘towns’ than poor little Bavay. Diocletian’s palace at Split is the obvious illustration.

Late imperial towns – even in contracting from their Flavian or Aelian heyday – were possibly more political than their predecessors.  The urban readjustments of the late Roman period appear to reflect the cities’ relative economic decline, as centres of markets and production.  Lesser settlements appear by then frequently to have rivalled them in those terms, which might explain some of the perceptible readjustments to the city network: the promotion of settlements like Verdun or Châlons-en-Champagne to the status of civitas-capital with territories hived off from the civitates of Metz and Reims respectively; the transfers of capital like that mentioned from Bavay to Cambrai or (in the civitas menapiorum) from Cassel to Tournai.  In the south, and at a slightly later date, Sidonius might have waxed lyrical about his villa and those of his friends, and sometimes decried the state of some local cities, but the latter were still, clearly, where politics happened.

That continued to be the case well into the next century.  Simon Loseby has set out, in a series of remarkable articles, the continued centrality of the civitas-capital to sixth-century Merovingian politics. Much the same lesson can be drawn from Michael Kulikowski’s studies of the city in late Roman and early Visigothic Spain and the picture is possibly truest of all in Italy, at least in the northern half to two thirds of the peninsula.  The city remained the focus of politics throughout the Lombard period.  And yet, as Loseby noted twenty years ago, something changed between the sixth and the seventh centuries.  The city lost its place as the focus of politics.

Or at least it did in Gaul.  I am going to talk about a peculiarly Gallic problem.  Or what seems to be.  I need to do more work on Spain to examine the extent to which a similar pattern can be traced there; as just noted, something very different appears to be the case in Italy.  Whether an analogous transformation occurred in Britain, or at least the extent to which similar factors could be adduced in forming a hypothetical account, remains to be considered.  The problem, as always, is that we lack the kinds of evidence that would give us a better idea about the earlier periods.  Whatever the case in Spain, Britain or Italy – even if they all turned out to be variations on the same theme – there are, I contend, some specifically Gallo-Frankish features to this process.

The late Roman Gallic town differed from its early Roman precursor in various ways, none of which was unique to Gaul.  They were walled from the late third century, in a probably rather longer process than used to be thought.  There was a huge reduction in private or municipal spending on public monuments, which probably best explains the usually short length of the walled circuits and the common incorporation of existing large monuments within the defences.  They contracted, to varying extents.  The walls certainly do not give a clear guide to the size and extent of the inhabited area, as was once believed, but rare indeed are towns where hitherto-inhabited, now extra-mural, quarters flourished as before.  Public buildings were frequently given over to new uses, often involving manufacture.  None of these features is unusual or specific to Gaul.  All can be observed in Rome itself. 

The other key development, obviously, was the appearance of Christian monuments.  By 400 all the civitas-capitals that had retained their status presumably had a cathedral, even if we know little about it.  As far as we know, such structures tended to be within the walled area; I am not sure that there are any indisputably extra-mural cathedrals in Gaul.  The Christian cult centre was thus incorporated in the same, small urban space as the foci for secular politics.  The phenomenon regularly visible in Italian towns, of a spatial reorientation from a previous civic centre around the forum to a plaza in front of the cathedral cannot therefore be seen very clearly in Gaul. 

Quite how secular politics functioned in spatial terms is not always clear.  As throughout the Empire, fora were often turned over to new purposes in whole or part, or encroached upon by new buildings, and many lay outside the new walled areas. Others, like those at Bavay and Paris, were fortified.  Some sides of Amiens’ forum were incorporated into the city’s defences.  This presumably did not diminish their importance but it must have changed the way in which the space was used.  It is possible that where amphitheatres were incorporated in walled circuits, as at Tours, Périgueux, Amiens, Metz and elsewhere, their arenas were used for public assembly.  The plausibility of this suggestion is perhaps strengthened by the importance of circuses and similar buildings in late imperial palace complexes, most famously at Constantinople.  Where such arenas were now extramural, they might still have functioned in the same way, as might derelict fora now left outside the enceinte.  It may seem logical to suppose that the spatial requirements for urban political gatherings were, in any case, less than before but I would not want to stress that possibility.  One of the key features of the Gallic city is the symbiotic relationship it had with the rural components of the civitas.  Villa-dwelling aristocrats were expected to come to town to participate in public life, however distasteful they claimed the latter was.  The other major possibility, of course, is the use for such gatherings of the interior of larger buildings, such as basilicae (where these had not been partitioned and given over to metalworking or similar, or – and this is will be important – the cathedrals.

The sixth-century Merovingian town continues most of these features. Secular occupation is increasingly difficult to find archaeologically, a feature that must partly be explained by its actual absence as well as, in part, by its ephemeral nature.  There is clear evidence of the further contraction and decay of the old Roman urban centres.  One or two towns in the far north might – like their British contemporaries – have died out entirely, at least as settlements that can meaningfully be described as urban.  Metz and even Trier have proven remarkably barren in terms of early Merovingian evidence, a fact of considerable interest given their secular political importance in the first and second halves of the sixth century respectively. Town walls were evidently not always maintained in a very good state. 

The other well-known component of sixth-century Gaulish urban development was the development of the Christian town.  If the cathedral seems to have been intra-mural, the overwhelming majority of urban churches were not. As foci for burial, they tended to be located in the earlier Roman cemeteries, outside the inhabited area.  Because of the contraction of the latter, these cemeteries could now be somewhat removed from the walled urban core.  To proceed from Tours cathedral, inside the walls, to Bishop Perpetuus’ new, mid-fifth-century church of St Martin, on the fringes of the early Roman town rather than in the cemeteries, is a ten to fifteen-minute walk, across a landscape that, in the sixth century, was a mix of vineyards, derelict areas, workshops and occasional dwellings. Around St Martin’s, though, was something like a new city.  Other churches and monasteries sprang up around that holding the famous bishop’s tomb.  As well as the clerics who tended these churches, the monks and nuns who lived there, there were the staff of these establishments and the people drawn in from the countryside for cures or to receive alms.  Vignettes in Gregory of Tours’ works suggest entertainers and merchants as well.  Thus while on the one hand we can see the continued stagnation of the traditional core of almost every Gallic city, on the other we can trace a sometimes vibrant peripheral community.  Sometimes, as at Tours and elsewhere (Limoges perhaps) a ‘bifocal’ town appeared, with an unwalled Christian town, sometimes called a vicus christianorum as well as the walled redoubt of the old Roman city.  Some towns (Trier; Lyon) were multi-focal.  In others, such as Metz, we might be able to detect a drift of settlement to certain extra-mural areas (in that case around the Great Amphitheatre).

The sixth-century Gallic city was primarily a Christian city, where it could be called a city at all, in anything other than the technical sense.  Through the fifth and sixth centuries, new churches were founded around the edges of the town, and new cults discovered.  The bishops played an increasingly important role in the towns.  Most jealously guarded two key privileges: baptism and preaching (Caesarius of Arles was very much an exception), meaning that Christians had to go to town for their principal spiritual needs.  The great cults were urban; most monasticism was city-focused.  Bishops organised great processions around the various churches of the city: the rogations first instituted at Vienne, the processions from the cathedral to St Martin’s at Tours, the great (three-day) excursion from Clermont to St Julian’s at Brioude, the procession mentioned by Gregory from the walled city to the church of St Remigius outside Metz, that across the Rhône bridge from Arles to Trinquetaille and the shrine of the martyr Genesius, and so on.  These were important social gatherings of the civitas’ inhabitants.  Bishops took over many other urban functions: feeding the poor, maintaining aqueducts and so on. 

All this is pretty well known.  Equally appreciated is the continuing centrality of the civitas in secular politics.  The city-districts were the building blocks of the sixth-century Merovingian kingdoms, forming the basis for tax collection and the levying of armed forces.  Each city – it seems – had its own count responsible for the administration of justice, the imposition of the royal dues and probably leading the civitas’ military contingent.  Some other urban institutions continued, even if we know little of them: the municipal archives, various officers such as the defensor civitatis.  Political competition between civitates was well-attested: sometimes armed conflict; rivalry over saints’ cults; even competing ways of counting the years.

After this descriptive preamble, we come to the focus of my paper: the construction of space and of the political.  Space is not neutral; it is, as Lefebvre said, constructed.  This is not merely a question of the enclosure or partition of spaces, even if these can play a very large part.  They act as cues to behaviour, to the bodily inhabiting of the space, in Bourdieu’s terms to the repeated bodily dispositions – the habitus – that construct categories.  A slightly, glib, simplistic and extreme example might be the physically often barely-delineated difference between road and pavement.  Even that, to continue being flippant, is somewhat more than merely an issue of not getting squashed, as anyone will know who appreciated the recent Daily Mash quiz that began by asking ‘Can you perform the relatively simple tasking of walking down a street without making other pedestrians want to punch you?’  Architecture provides cues; the entrance to a church, to take an obvious example, marks a point at which comportment, at which your bodily occupation of space is expected to change.  There are what Gernot Böhme calls ‘atmospheric architectures’, designed to enhance the nature and use of space.

Clearly, one does not need to go far to see antique and late antique illustrations of these points.  In earlier, classic Roman urban forms, crossing the pomerium provided a cue for different social expectations; the architecture of the forum marked a traveller’s arrival at the political, social and economic heart of the city.  Annabel Wharton’s studies of late classical towns documents shifts in the importance attached to open or ‘optic’ vistas of the urban space, to what she calls a more haptic space, more enclosed, experienced more through the act of passing through it.  The latter is especially true of churches but we can see other examples of the trend as perhaps at the palace of Galerius in Thessalonica.  Analysis of the church of St Martin’s and the various verses placed on its walls is a better illustration still of the ways in which various architectural components combined to influence a visitor’s comportment as he or she approached the tomb of the saint.  As Raymond Van Dam has argued, the architecture worked to impose a sense of awe that inhibited a pilgrim in venturing too close to the shrine unless she was convinced of her worthiness to do so: a key element in Van Dam’s ‘socio-somatic’ interpretation of healing miracles.  The same would obviously be true of the imperial palace and especially the great audience chambers, where the attendees were arranged by very tightly policed rules of status and precedence, and where comportment was of notable importance.  Even the emperor’s bodily comportment was a matter of significance and expectations could change from one setting to another.  In the Merovingian countryside, entrance into the cemetery, still largely removed from the space of the living, provided further cues, essential for the functioning of ritual.

Transposed into the realm of identity, such cues emphasis the question ‘what do they want of me?’ ‘How am I meant to behave?’  The use of space is vitally important in social interaction, as a means of attempting to freeze interactions between different social categories in particular modes.  Take, for example, a large Roman villa.  A visitor enters the complex, perhaps through a gate, after approaching via routes that present the building in a particular way.  Possibly after crossing the more functional ‘rustic’ part of the villa and perhaps going through a second gate, the visitor might cross a more enclosed courtyard, again with the main house as the focus of the gaze.  On entering the main building, the visitor enters a reception chamber, decorated with mosaics and wall-paintings depicting the ideals of rural aristocratic land-owning life.  If a client, or even if a guest of equal or superior standing, the setting emphasizes the expected, formal behaviour of host and visitor: the Latin word for host and guest is the same: hospes.  Both are bound – held hostage by – the rules of hospitality.

This is where the poetics of my pretentiously mock-Aristotelian title come in: the shaping – poesis – of reality, its staging, its scripting.  This helps freeze the interaction between categories of people within a certain, formal range, where people know the correct ways to behave and where transgression can be clearly recognised.  We are all aware of the awkwardness of meeting someone only known from a particular setting in a completely different context.

It is important to consider how the state operates spatially.  The whole space of the Roman Empire was subject to the operation of imperial law.  The Antonine Constitution, making all free inhabitants citizens, considerably simplified the hitherto complex overlapping and interlocking of different legal statuses, especially in relation to towns.  Location within the nested jurisdictions of the Late Empire made certain space into place.  The seat of a provincial governor, acting in his public capacity, within a public audience hall, bestowed a certain legality on his actions, within tight rules.  The occupant of such a spot acted to some extent in the place of the Emperor, as his vice-gerens, as made clear by various cues in the building itself.  Legitimation was brought, limits to it assigned (and acceptable behaviour constrained), by the office, not by the dignity of the individual who held it, although the imperial state recognised the problems that might go with that by assigning particular status to the holders of specific offices.  An official’s jurisdiction operated broadly uniformly within a defined territory.

How might these ideas have played out in a sixth-century urban context?  A key shift concerns the nature of the state and public space.  The Roman Empire, throughout its existence, was fairly clear about the nature of public space: space in other words where politics was enacted.  Book 15 of the Theodosian Code prescribes how such spaces were – ideally – to be maintained.  Quite how such theory related to practice in the contracted and remodelled cities of Gaul is, however, an intriguing problem.  Theodosian Code 15.1 contains over 50 rescripts concerning the maintenance of public buildings, frequently forbidding any privatisation of such space and decreeing that any private structures that encroached onto such spaces or sites be torn down.  And yet, in an interesting insight into of the efficacy of imperial law, two constants of late antique urban development are the dereliction of public buildings and the encroachment of buildings into public space.

There must have been considerable fluidity. What marked urban space in the last centuries of the western Empire: the old pomerium, or the new walls?  A possibly ruined or derelict arch or the new gateway?  Burials began to intrude into formerly inhabited zones, but rarely – except in Paris – in a dramatic way in Gaul, which suggests some confusion among contemporaries too.  We might recall the problem mentioned earlier, of where the public spaces were in the new towns.  Many must have been considerably smaller than in the early Roman period.  The ‘placette’ that, it has been suggested, might have been late Roman Tours’ replacement for the now extramural forum is smaller than the cathedral. 

I referred earlier to the absence of traces of high-status Merovingian occupation in towns, whether of kings or their aristocrats and officials.  This is a conundrum as we know these buildings existed.  Earlier Merovingian palace complexes evidently maintained the same key elements of late antique palaces: an audience chamber, a more general assembly area and a cathedral.  These elements can be seen clearly at Trier but also at Metz, where the Austrasian kings transferred their seat after the mid-sixth century.  It is possible that something similar existed at Soissons.  Frankish kings were still sometimes interested in providing spectacles for their subjects.  Gregory says that Chilperic wanted to provide circuses for the people at Paris and Soissons, though quite what was meant by that (aedificere) is anyone’s guess.  When Childebert II had an otherwise unknown aristocrat called Magnovald murdered at his court in Metz it was while he was watching bear-baiting, presumably in the small amphitheatre. 

One possible reason for the lack of archaeological evidence is that such buildings remained public and in continuous use, eradicating traces of occupation.  Another is that, simply enough, the Frankish rulers or their representatives did not invest significant resources in modifying or adding to them, but just maintained them.  As Simon Loseby once said in a sadly unpublished comment on Merovingian economic policy, the twin pillars of their attitude were ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and ‘if it is broke, forget about it’.  In this, their attitude seems typical of the earlier Merovingian elite, which seems to have spent very little on high-status buildings.  In the past I have argued that this was because of a lack of secure control over surplus and, while I think that that is correct of most of the sixth-century northern Gallic aristocracy, clearly it does not apply to the kings or, probably, to their most powerful service aristocrats.  In that case I think it probably illustrates a particular sixth-century Merovingian attitude towards wealth and its display. 

Of course, the one type of public building that the sixth-century Gallic elite certainly spent money on was churches.  The royal capital at Metz certainly had twenty-three, and possibly as many as thirty-three, churches by 700; it might have had eighteen a century earlier.  By the mid-eighth there were certainly forty-three churches in existence there.  If Metz’s status as a principal urban residence of the Merovingian kings made it exceptional, it was not by very much.  Le Mans had over twenty churches by the time that its bishop Bertram drew up his will in the early seventh century.  All this must have a significant bearing on the nature of public space and its relationship with political power.

Wealth was, however, above all worn in the sixth-century West.  Costume appears to have been even more important than it usually is in marking identity.  Analysis of northern Gaulish and other burial patterns appear to show that costume was one means by which social categories were created.  The wearing of particular forms and arrangements of jewellery marked out different stages of the female life-cycle.  The carrying of weaponry played a similar role among males, where (as with female costume) it might also have had an ethnic significance (provided that we’re clear about what we mean by ‘ethnic’ in this context).  Furthermore, it seems that all social classes followed these guidelines, differing only in the lavishness of their display.  Costume and other bodily markers apparently created the behavioural cues in social interaction. 

As I have argued before, the jewellery worn by younger and married women tended to highlight the parts of the body that were, in Frankish law, not to be touched without incurring penalty.  The cues on how to behave were now worn: costume created social space.  That is, I suggest, related to the general absence of the old, clearer, architectural markers of space.  In those terms, political space was much more fluid than before; it overflowed what had been its normal boundaries as the latter broke down.  This was doubtless particularly important in the processions that were mentioned above, which flowed from the city, through formerly urban space into what had been the city of the dead: now a place where, in Peter Brown’s classic analyses, heaven touched earth and where time stood still.  The limited evidence we have suggests that on these and similar occasions the population could be divided into various sub-groups, on ethnic or other lines.  Such arrangements doubtless underscored expectations about how the different social categories were expected to interrelate with each other.

It may be that assemblies in towns were still on occasion the site of traditional classical urban political displays.  On occasion at least, wills were still read out in the public spaces of the city.  Chilperic for example says that he will – in best Roman tradition – give the citizens of Tours a slogan to chant at Gregory. 

The Magnovald incident raises the point that, whatever behavioural cues there might have been in the imperial palace, they appear to have been significantly altered in sixth-century Gaul, to judge from Gregory’s accounts of things that happened in the various chambers of the court, including murders, tantrums and slanging matches.

A number of cautionary points must be made here. I am not assuming that the socio-political boundary markers, architectural or bodily, are automatically effective; that they cannot permanently freeze a set of attitudes – the habitus – in a given mode is elementary: Bourdieu 101.  They are in a constant state of renegotiation.  Further, one might wonder whether the infractions – the, by Roman norms, bizarre behaviour – are recorded by Gregory because of their significance or unusualness.  That must in part be the case, but there do seem to be an awful lot of them, when you remember that the bulk, the last six books, of Gregory’s Histories covers only 16 years.  Part of the problem must be related to the fact of living – from the middle of the sixth century – in a post-Roman world, where the political itself, the forms of rulership and authority of all sorts, was in the process of reinvention.

When gatherings did not take place outside, it might be that another element of post-Roman confusion entered the equation.  As is well-known, much late antique ecclesiastical architecture followed the example of imperial secular building, notably the great audience chambers.  Obviously, the classic basilical church plan was based upon the great assembly halls – basilicas – of the civic forum and the imperial palace.  Most discussion of which I am aware points out how the altar in the raised apsidal end occupies the space of the imperial throne, or the portrait or statue of the emperor, in straightforward and unproblematic manner.  What I am not aware of is any discussion of the element of semiotic confusion that could be introduced at a time when both secular and ecclesiastical authorities were using the same spatial arrangements in buildings of essentially identical layout, at the same time.  One need not think that late antique people had no idea what to do when going into an imperial or royal audience hall on the one hand, or a church on the other, to wonder whether the varying hierarchies set out in identical spaces did not produce changes in the political script for which the architecture provided cues.  Sometimes the king or emperor – or his image and his representative – occupied the focal space and ecclesiastical as well as secular aristocrats were expected to approach only with deference; sometimes the altar, the image of Christ, and his representative took that position and even emperors and kings were supposed to approach with humility. 

Caesarius’ sermons to the people suggest that the inhabitants of Arles did not always read the spatial behavioural cues of church architecture as assiduously as their bishop thought they ought to: lying down, plaiting their daughters’ hair, fixing their jewellery, chattering away, making a break for the doors when Caesarius got up to give his sermon (only to find that Caesarius, in a shocking infraction of basic health and safety guidelines, had had them locked from the outside).  Was this typical?  Did Caesarius simply lift it from Augustine?  Was it a general problem or only at various points of the liturgy?  Gallican liturgy included a point where the deacon asked the people to be quiet, just before the sermon.  Did such behavior spread from the cathedral to the royal court?  What happened when the person occupying the place of the emperor in a secular court could no longer make a legitimate claim to be the emperor’s representative, or to have imperial legitimation for his position?  Was it worse when they occupied actual former imperial space like the aula palatina at Trier?

Sometimes the confusion was only emphasized by the principal actors.  In Book 7 chapter 7 of Gregory’s Histories, King Guntramn addresses the people of Paris in church.  Gregory says he did this ‘after the deacon had asked the people to be quiet’, and thus at the very point when the bishop was meant to speak.  It wasn’t the only time that Guntramn was described by Gregory as acting ‘like one of the bishops of the Lord’.  Quite what Gregory thought of this is difficult to unravel; he does not seem to me to have thought that it was a straightforwardly Good Thing.  It might be though that there was a lot of that in the air in the late sixth century, quite possibly as a result of the renegotiating of the bases of monarchical power after Justinian launched his wars of ‘reconquest’.  When Guntramn presided over a meeting of his bishops at Chalon-sur-Saône, the preamble he issued makes clear – a decade or so before Gregory the Great wrote the Pastoral Care – that he viewed kingship as a ministry.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Cathedral could be the location for dramatic confrontation.  Gregory’s account of the career of Nicetius of Trier highlights several occasions when the prelate came into conflict with the kings of Austrasia, haranguing them from the pulpit.  Gregory has Chilperic I lament “Behold how poor our fisc is! Behold how our wealth has been transferred to the churches! Really, no one rules other than the bishops. Our honour will perish; it has been transferred to the bishops of the cities.”  Whether or not Chilperic really did ‘often’ say this – or even think it – is impossible to know, but it wasn’t a bad diagnosis of the way things were going. 

Paul Fouracre has pointed out that the killing of bishops was much more common in Merovingian Gaul than anywhere else in the post-imperial West, a phenomenon for which he did not have a ready explanation.  The domination of cities by bishops might nevertheless be an important factor.  The domination of the Church by the senatorial aristocracy from the fifth century onwards is also a peculiarly Gallic phenomenon, that illustrates the importance of the bishop in local and regional politics.  In northern Gaul at least, the bishop was also generally the winner in power-struggles with the local comes civitatis. 

As if this weren’t enough, and possibly also explaining the greater tendency to kill bishops in the regnum Francorum, the Gallic episcopate appears to have taken up with more relish than most the tradition of speaking truth to their secular overlords.  Nicetius of Trier is a particular example, drawing on strong local, Treverian traditions going back to the fourth century, but he was far from alone.  Gregory of Tours himself thought that the duty of bishops to speak out against the actions of kings and keep them on the straight and narrow was especially important.  There are plenty of other examples: Germanus of Paris; Salvius of Albi.  In the early sixth century the entire Burgundian episcopacy went on strike to protest one of King Sigismund’s actions.  It may be significant in these regards that the Anglo-Saxon bishop with the most awkward reputation, Wilfred of Ripon was educated, and chose to be consecrated, in Gaul, and that the only time (surprisingly enough) anyone actually tried to kill him was also in Gaul (though they got the wrong man).

For all of the reasons that I have just set out, I have suggested that the Merovingian kings of Austrasia abandoned their attempts to take over the former imperial capital at Trier and moved to Metz.  Metz had the correct architectural furnishings for a palace complex, but it was not overburdened either by a ghostly imperial presence or by an awkward episcopal tradition.  Unsurprisingly, the kings appear to have kept a tight rein on appointments to the see of Metz throughout the period.  The bishops we know about, even Saint Arnulf, were all former palatine officials whom the kings felt they could trust.  On occasion they might even have been their relatives.

Nonetheless there remained some crucial features.  The count governed the territory of the civitas and exacted taxation and other dues from it, moderated by some exemptions concerning certain duties, and administered the law throughout it, either personally or via his officers, such as the centenarii or hundredsmen.  The title remained an office, appointed by the king, which could be withdrawn: it was neither a job for life nor a hereditary title.  Thus, wherever the count was, in a sense, the authority of the king – the presence of the state – was too.  The count’s court and the hundred mallus might move around but they retained their place, within the nested jurisdictions of the sixth-century state.  This surely remained important even in the fluid and somewhat ambiguous political space of the day. 

Taken together, these factors go a long way towards explaining why the city had lost its place at the centre of Gallic politics from the second decade of the seventh century.  This is an especially peculiar phenomenon given that it was at this time that a more general urban recovery appears to have begun in northern Gaul, and the decline of southern towns does not appear to have really begun until much later in the century at least.

The city lost out to two other territorial units during the seventh century.  On the one hand civitas-identity appears to be replaced by a broader regional, kingdom-based identity.  Changes in ethnic identity might also have had an effect.  At a lower level, the sub-division of the civitas, the pagus became much more important.  Individuals are identified by their pagus of origin, for example, and the pagi acquire their own counts.  The direction in which things were moving is perhaps very clearly indicated by Fredegar’s account of the territorial straits to which Chlothar II was reduced by his cousins, Theudebert II and Theuderic II.  He says that his authority was confined to twelve pagi, rather than three civitates as one assumes Gregory would have said.

The secular political decline of the civitas might be linked to the demise of the royal dues that had been extracted on the basis of the city network.  Frankish taxation certainly went into terminal decline in the early seventh century, with – in my reading – salaries hitherto paid via the delegation of tax-revenues from specific tax-payers extended to ownership of the lands from which those taxes were collected, as well as by increasing grants of immunity. Military organisation by civitas also ended.  The last mention of a civitas contingent in battle is the account of the treachery of the men of Mainz in Sigibert III’s 636 Thuringian campaign.  That same account, however, also refers to a contingent from the Saintois, one of the pagi of the civitas of Toul.  In any case, the army appears to have been made up much more of aristocratic households or retinues rather than raised by general levies of Franks, commanded by royal officers.  Immunities were also exempted from the usual levying of military service.  Counties proliferated and, even if not technically inheritable, seem much more to have passed down within families.

The increasing numbers of charters show that public legal gatherings could took place in local churches and at or in the villae of particular landowners. They do not suggest that the city retained its importance in that sense, in the north at least.  Charters signed at gatherings in old Roman cities tend unsurprisingly to be those involving the bishop.  The great rural monasteries founded in the seventh century also drew from attention away from the cities as central places and the foci of political action, not least because many were the centres of immunities, from episcopal as well as royal control. 

In the seventh century, the Frankish kings are much more likely to found on their rural estates than in the old cities.  The majority of royal assemblies took place there, including church assemblies, as at Clichy in the 620s.  Another location was the great royal abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris.  The kings still held gatherings at cities especially in Burgundy, just as they had held important gatherings at their villas in the sixth century, but the ratio seems to me to have shifted dramatically in the direction of the countryside.

The city had lost its place.  Urban Politics were now very much scripted by the bishops.  The space of the state was increasingly perforated and fragmented as the early Merovingian state broke down so that the town’s administrative role was greatly reduced anyway.  The stage for politics passed to various places in the countryside: royal and aristocratic villas, monasteries, and the elite spent their now more secure resources on these centres, especially from the middle of the seventh century.  How the immunity impacts upon the space of the political, as an interstice within the areas of operation of royal and episcopal power, a zone of exception, is an interesting issue, but one which alas I have no time to discuss.  How did cues for behaviour change in this different seventh-century world.  To what extent did the private permeate the public?  Some of the incidents that took place at royal gatherings in the seventh century certainly suggest a different scripting from before.  Paying more attention to that constitute the other half of this project (not, fortunately, this paper) and perhaps we can discuss that.

Public space and its use had evolved significantly through the Roman and immediately post-imperial period.  But in many ways the rules of the dramas that unfolded there remained within a Roman tradition – even if an observer who teleported from the second century to the early sixth might have had no idea whether he was watching a tragedy or a comedy.  As in so many things, though, the crisis of the mid-sixth century and especially Justinian’s wars and their attendant ideology brought abut a radical rescripting.  Kings and their officers were no longer able to play the parts that they had hitherto known off by heart.  They needed to ad lib and to find new theatres in new locations.  Unsurprisingly, as the one character whose part in urban dramas remained unchanged from the late Roman period, the bishop remained alone on the stage.